Fathers and sons -- Fiction; People with disabilities -- Fiction; Princes -- Fiction; Refugees -- Fiction
"They do look like something or other," he answered, "but no one knows
anything about them. Everybody's safe in Buckingham Palace and
Marlborough House this week. No one either going or coming."
No observer, it is true, could have mistaken Lazarus for an ordinary
attendant escorting an ordinary charge. If silence had not still been
strictly the order, he could not have restrained himself. As it was, he
bore himself like a grenadier, and stood by Marco as if across his dead
body alone could any one approach the lad.
"Until we reach Melzarr," he had said with passion to the two
gentlemen,--"until I can stand before my Master and behold him embrace
his son--_behold_ him--I implore that I may not lose sight of him night or
day. On my knees, I implore that I may travel, armed, at his side. I am
but his servant, and have no right to occupy a place in the same
carriage. But put me anywhere. I will be deaf, dumb, blind to all but
himself. Only permit me to be near enough to give my life if it is
needed. Let me say to my Master, 'I never left him.'"
"We will find a place for you," the elder man said, "and if you are so
anxious, you may sleep across his threshold when we spend the night at a
hotel."
"I will not sleep!" said Lazarus. "I will watch. Suppose there should be
demons of Maranovitch loose and infuriated in Europe? Who knows!"
"The Maranovitch and Iarovitch who have not already sworn allegiance to
King Ivor are dead on battlefields. The remainder are now Fedorovitch
and praising God for their King," was the answer Baron Rastka made him.
But Lazarus kept his guard unbroken. When he occupied the next
compartment to the one in which Marco traveled, he stood in the corridor
throughout the journey. When they descended at any point to change
trains, he followed close at the boy's heels, his fierce eyes on every
side at once and his hand on the weapon hidden in his broad leather
belt. When they stopped to rest in some city, he planted himself in a
chair by the bedroom door of his charge, and if he slept he was not
aware that nature had betrayed him into doing so.
If the journey made by the young Bearers of the Sign had been a strange
one, this was strange by its very contrast. Throughout that pilgrimage,
two uncared-for waifs in worn clothes had traveled from one place to
another, sometimes in third- or fourth-class continental railroad
carriages, sometimes in jolting diligences, sometimes in peasants'
carts, sometimes on foot by side roads and mountain paths, and forest
ways. Now, two well-dressed boys in the charge of two men of the class
whose orders are obeyed, journeyed in compartments reserved for them,
their traveling appurtenances supplying every comfort that luxury could
provide.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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