Fathers and sons -- Fiction; People with disabilities -- Fiction; Princes -- Fiction; Refugees -- Fiction
Perhaps the whole story would fill too many
volumes to admit of it ever being told fully.
But history makes the growing of the Secret Party clear,--though it
seems almost to cease to be history, in spite of its efforts to be brief
and speak only of dull facts, when it is forced to deal with the Bearing
of the Sign by two mere boys, who, being blown as unremarked as any two
grains of dust across Europe, lit the Lamp whose flame so flared up to
the high heavens that as if from the earth itself there sprang forth
Samavians by the thousands ready to feed it--Iarovitch and Maranovitch
swept aside forever and only Samavians remaining to cry aloud in ardent
praise and worship of the God who had brought back to them their Lost
Prince. The battle-cry of his name had ended every battle. Swords fell
from hands because swords were not needed. The Iarovitch fled in terror
and dismay; the Maranovitch were nowhere to be found. Between night and
morning, as the newsboy had said, the standard of Ivor was raised and
waved from palace and citadel alike. From mountain, forest and plain,
from city, village and town, its followers flocked to swear allegiance;
broken and wounded legions staggered along the roads to join and kneel
to it; women and children followed, weeping with joy and chanting songs
of praise. The Powers held out their scepters to the lately prostrate
and ignored country. Train-loads of food and supplies of all things
needed began to cross the frontier; the aid of nations was bestowed.
Samavia, at peace to till its land, to raise its flocks, to mine its
ores, would be able to pay all back. Samavia in past centuries had been
rich enough to make great loans, and had stored such harvests as warring
countries had been glad to call upon. The story of the crowning of the
King had been the wildest of all--the multitude of ecstatic people,
famished, in rags, and many of them weak with wounds, kneeling at his
feet, praying, as their one salvation and security, that he would go
attended by them to their bombarded and broken cathedral, and at its
high altar let the crown be placed upon his head, so that even those who
perhaps must die of their past sufferings would at least have paid their
poor homage to the King Ivor who would rule their children and bring
back to Samavia her honor and her peace.
"Ivor! Ivor!" they chanted like a prayer,--"Ivor! Ivor!" in their
houses, by the roadside, in the streets.
"The story of the Coronation in the shattered Cathedral, whose roof had
been torn to fragments by bombs," said an important London paper, "reads
like a legend of the Middle Ages. But, upon the whole, there is in
Samavia's national character, something of the mediaeval, still."
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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