Fathers and sons -- Fiction; People with disabilities -- Fiction; Princes -- Fiction; Refugees -- Fiction
He wanted to see Marco again, but he wanted more to see the tall man
with the soft dark eyes and that queer look of being a swell in spite of
his shabby clothes and the dingy place he lived in. There was something
about him which made you keep on looking at him, and wanting to know
what he was thinking of, and why you felt as if you'd take orders from
him as you'd take orders from your general, if you were a soldier. He
looked, somehow, like a soldier, but as if he were something more--as
if people had taken orders from him all his life, and always would take
orders from him. And yet he had that quiet voice and those fine, easy
movements, and he was not a soldier at all, but only a poor man who
wrote things for papers which did not pay him well enough to give him
and his son a comfortable living. Through all the time of his seclusion
with the battered bath and the soap and water, The Rat thought of him,
and longed to have another look at him and hear him speak again. He did
not see any reason why he should have let him sleep on his sofa or why
he should give him a breakfast before he turned him out to face the
world. It was first-rate of him to do it. The Rat felt that when he was
turned out, after he had had the coffee, he should want to hang about
the neighborhood just on the chance of seeing him pass by sometimes. He
did not know what he was going to do. The parish officials would by this
time have taken his dead father, and he would not see him again. He did
not want to see him again. He had never seemed like a father. They had
never cared anything for each other. He had only been a wretched outcast
whose best hours had been when he had drunk too much to be violent and
brutal. Perhaps, The Rat thought, he would be driven to going about on
his platform on the pavements and begging, as his father had tried to
force him to do. Could he sell newspapers? What could a crippled lad do
unless he begged or sold papers?
Lazarus was waiting for him in the passage. The Rat held back a little.
"Perhaps they'd rather not eat their breakfast with me," he hesitated.
"I'm not--I'm not the kind they are. I could swallow the coffee out here
and carry the bread away with me. And you could thank him for me. I'd
want him to know I thanked him."
Lazarus also had a steady eye. The Rat realized that he was looking him
over as if he were summing him up.
"You may not be the kind they are, but you may be of a kind the Master
sees good in. If he did not see something, he would not ask you to sit
at his table. You are to come with me."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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