Fathers and sons -- Fiction; People with disabilities -- Fiction; Princes -- Fiction; Refugees -- Fiction
Marco went up-stairs to his room and went to bed as he was told, but
it was hard to go to sleep. The rattle and roaring of the road did not
usually keep him awake, because he had lived in the poorer quarter of
too many big capital cities not to be accustomed to noise. But to-night
it seemed to him that, as he lay and looked out at the lamplight, he
heard every bus and cab which went past. He could not help thinking of
the people who were in them, and on top of them, and of the people who
were hurrying along on the pavement outside the broken iron railings. He
was wondering what they would think if they knew that things connected
with the battles they read of in the daily papers were going on in one
of the shabby houses they scarcely gave a glance to as they went by
them. It must be something connected with the war, if a man who was a
great diplomat and the companion of kings came in secret to talk alone
with a patriot who was a Samavian. Whatever his father was doing was for
the good of Samavia, and perhaps the Secret Party knew he was doing it.
His heart almost beat aloud under his shirt as he lay on the lumpy
mattress thinking it over. He must indeed look well at the stranger
before he even moved toward him. He must be sure he was the right man.
The game he had amused himself with so long--the game of trying to
remember pictures and people and places clearly and in detail--had been
a wonderful training. If he could draw, he knew he could have made a
sketch of the keen-eyed, clever, aquiline face with the well-cut and
delicately close mouth, which looked as if it had been shut upon secrets
always--always. If he could draw, he found himself saying again. He
_could_ draw, though perhaps only roughly. He had often amused himself by
making sketches of things he wanted to ask questions about. He had even
drawn people's faces in his untrained way, and his father had said that
he had a crude gift for catching a likeness. Perhaps he could make a
sketch of this face which would show his father that he knew and would
recognize it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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