There was once a Prince, etc

Front matter

THERE WAS ONXE A PRINCE H Book for 3Bogs. "THE TYRANTS OF KOOLSIM." BV JAMES MACLAREN COBBAN. Illustrated. Price a JBook for JBobs ani> ©iris. "STORIES FROM THE BIBLE." BY EVELYN FARRAR. With an Introductory Chapter by Dean Farrar. Illustrated in colour. Price 5.S. "'I ain't skulking'" [p. 3). Frontispiea THERE WAS ONCE A PRINCE BY M A R Y E. M A N N AUTHOR OF "SUSANNAH," "THE LOST ESTATE," " IN SUMMER SHADE," ETC, ETC. " My life is little : Only a cup of water, But pure and limpid. Take it, O my prince ! WITH SIX ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARY BERTIE MANN LONDON H. HENRY AND Co., Ld. 93, ST. MARTIN'S LANE, W.C. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE 'I AIN'T skulking'" Frontispiece ALONE IN THE RUIN OF HER WORLD " . . facing 160 SHE STOOD, A FORLORN LITTLE FIGURE" . ,, 176 'THERE WAS ONCE A PRINCE,' HE SAID" .... 235 'HE DON'T LIKE THAT, YOU KNOW,' SHE SAID SPITEFULLY" facing 256 TAN'S KENNEL STOOD BY THE BACK-DOOR — EMPTY" 3°4

Chapter I

" Eyes of some men travel far, For the finding of a star ; Up and down the heavens they go, Men that keep a mighty row ! I'm as great as they I trow, Since the day I found thee out, Little Flower ! " THAT he was not an ardent angler was very apparent. He held his rod in a listless hand which rested on his thigh as if too weary to bear the light weight unsupported. He sat in a slouching attitude, with bent back and hanging head. Presently he tired of that position ; laid his rod beside him in the coarse grass of the river-side, threw himself on his back, pulled his cap forward to shade his eyes, and, with arms folded beneath his head, looked up into the bright blue of the May sky. A lark was singing there above his head ; he watched its quivering upward flight till swiftly it dropped in the meadow at his back and was silent.

A dragon-fly, magnifical in its shimmer of blue and green and gold, with fairy, gossamer wings, shot athwart his line of vision, darted hither and thither across his body, but did not distract his absorbed gaze. About his float, gracefully curtseying to thc light rippling of the river, the gnats flew busily. So still he lay that a water-rat, peeping forth with eager, listening face, took courage, and, emerging from her hole in the river bank beneath his feet, swam out on a matter of business of her own, and disappeared among the forget-me-nots, the yellow irises and the long grasses of the farther shore. The harsh cry of the lapwing, discordant amid the music of murmuring river, hum of insect, song of bird, startled now and again the warm air. But the man looked up into the blue immensity and was conscious only of the monotonous, sorrowful refrain of his own thoughts.

A few yards from where he lay a thorn hedge, straggling, broken, splashed here and there with white of the " darling may-buds," ran from meadow gate to river-edge. Although none of the sights and sounds of nature had disturbed the man, at a very slight sound— the mere cracking of a twig — indicating a human presence, his head turned swiftly, his eyes fixed themselves resentfully on a certain point in the hedge. He raised himself slowly into a sitting position, pushed his cap from his brow to the back of his head. " Come out of that ! " he said. To this short and sharp invitation there was no response other than the swaying back into their places of a couple of branches which had been displaced. " Come out of that, whoever you are ! " the young man proceeded, authoritative and incensed. " Are you afraid, that you are skulking there ?

" At that speech the straggling branches parted again, and a head looked through. A girl's head, with straight-hanging, rough brown hair, with brown, sun-baked face, with brown eyes, deep and dark and threatening, with a frowning brow and a pugnacious jaw. " I ain't skulking," the owner of the face said, scowling defiance at the young man. He repressed the smile that flickered at his lip, stretched his long arms the length of his long legs, in order to grasp his two thin ankles, and continued to look at the girl. " You are skulking," he repeated steadily. " I ain't ! " she fired at him. " This here's my father's midder. So's the one you're on." " You mean to assert that I'm trespassing? ' " Yes." " And what are you doing, hiding behind the hedge in your father's ' midder ' ? " " Lookin' at you."

" Come and do it openly, then." The white-blossomed branches of the thorn hedge swung-to behind the child as she issued sullenly forth. She came within a couple of yards of the young man and stopped short there, furtively contemplative of him. He unloosed one of his ankles, and patted with his hand the grass beside him. " Come closer. Sit down," he commanded ; and, grudgingly, she obeyed. " Now you can look at me to your heart's content," he said urbanely. " I don't want to look at you," she told him, and slowly turned away her head. His eyes were fixed upon that part of the river to be seen between his own up-turned toes. " I have only enjoyed thc pleasure of your acquaintance for two minutes, and that is the second — enormous one— you have told me," he said meditatively. " I ha'n't told you none," fiercely.

" I never tell 'em." "You said, to begin with, you weren't skulking." And I weren't." " You go home and take down your father's dictionary and look out the verb ' to skulk.' You'll find this definition : ' To hide behind a hedge in order to look at a man who don't know you're there.' " " Father ha'n't got a dictionary, then. So there ! " A glimmer of amusement shot across the pre vailing sadness of the face he turned to her. " Who is this father, may I ask, who has ' midders,' but has no dictionary ? " No answer : the rough brown head turned away. " What's your father's name ? " No answer. " Then, what is your own name ? But you need not tell me. I know it." " What, then ? " turning upon him with a light ning flash of inquiry. " Sybil." " No, and isn't." " Ah, never mind. That is what it should have been, all the same."

" Why? " " Never mind why. You mustn't ask questions. Where's your hat ? " " At home." " Why not on your head ? " " Because I spoil it when I climb trees and get through th' hidges ; and because it's a bother." He seemed to have done with her after that, for he turned his attention from her face to the river again. It was blue as the blue sky above it to-day, and full of most musical low songs and gurglings and hurryings. The child was at liberty to leave him now, but she took no advantage of her opportunity. It was soon evident that the silence which had fallen between them was not to her taste. A sly smile came creeping round her mouth and she flashed a challenge at him out of the corners of her deep dark eyes. " You don't know me," she said. She had not told her name, but she had no objection to be compelled to do so.

"Indeed I do," he answered calmly. "You're the daughter of Mr. — who lives in the farm over there." He threw a hand vaguely over his shoulder with one of the listless motions peculiar to him. " Moreover, it's getting for five o'clock, and you ought to be going home for your tea." She laughed contemptuously. " ' Mr.-who-lives-in the-farm ! ' That isn't a name at all. And we don't have tea till seven. So you don't know nothin', you see," she said. He made no reply, seeming curiously unmoved by her scorn. " I know who you are," she announced presently. " You're Brownjohn's nephew up to the Rectory. Come down to stop along of him because you ha'n't been well." " Go on. Any one might know that much. What's my name?" She was silent, averting her head, not seeming to wish to hear. " Your knowledge amounts to nothing, you see.

But observe the difference. I am not ashamed of my name. I give it without even being asked. Richmond — Edward Rupert Richmond. There. You haven't got such a pretty name as that." " It ain't a bit pretty. It's a silly name." " It isn't half so silly as I am," he said ; finished his laugh with a sigh, and was back with his own thoughts again. In a few minutes, wearied of the silence and resenting his abstraction, she returned to the attack. " I'll tell you what my name is, if you like," she volunteered. " Laura Rolfe. I haven't got three names like you, because three is silly. I've only got two. And gen'rally they call me ' Lolly' My father's name's Straker — only he ain't my real father. My real father's dead — only I live along with this father. And I've got a brother named ' Herbert.' Mother, she used to be well off when she was married to my father — he used to ride a-horseback my father did — but now she's married to this father she ain't very well off.

Nor yet she ain't very well, neither. But she've got to work hard." " Don't you go to school ? " he asked her. " I've finished," she informed him. The ice of her reserve being once broken, she was anxious to flood him with the details of her history. " Father, he couldn't afford only the parish school, and I'm through the sixth standard. They can't teach me no more. That's why I've left. But mother, she didn't want me to be friends with the boys and girls there — nor yet I didn't want, nayther. They don't know how to play like Herbert and me. And they don't like reading." " And do you like reading ? " She nodded, shortly and emphatically, by way of reply. " What have you read ? " " David Copperfield. That's the one I like best. All about Dora and Agnes and Steerforth." The eyes that were fixed upon his face deepened and darkened with eager interest.

" I like Davy ; only I don't like him to like Agnes. Steerforth's my one ! So he is Herbert's. Herbert don't read much. I tell him about 'em all." A pause ; then a sly momentary glance : a half shamed whisper. I can act 'em, too." "Really? And does Herbert act them with you ? " " No. I do 'em all. I like the men's parts best. I make believe the others are there and I talk to 'em. There ! Look there ! " she cried, suddenly breaking off. " You've got a bite. Can't you see you've got a bite ? " He was not at all excited. " I do sincerely trust it will stop at that, and that I have not also got a fish," he said. But he had. WThen, with a total absence of science, he jerked his line out of water, a silver roach was curling and writhing at the end of it ; was presently leaping and struggling upon the grass, regarded with a remorseful eye by the successful angler.

" This never happened to me before," he said, in accents of contrition. " I have often fished, but I have always been successful in not catching anything till now." " Unhook it ; throw it in," the child cried im periously. " Don't you know it's in pain ? Be quick, before it dies." But the roach had taken its bait greedily, and this was sooner said than done. When at length the young man threw the victim of his idle sport back to its native element, the unhappy fish, after a misleading departure to the cool depths, made a quick and melancholy re-appearance upon the surface of the water, and floated slowly out of sight, lying upon its side. " Dead ! " said the child, following the little corpse with dark eyes full of ruth. " A truly heroic achievement ! " the young man said. He got upon his feet, re-wound his line, disjointed his rod.

" There is one less of God's beautiful and harmless creatures in the world — thanks to me ! I had better have stayed at home, Miss Lolly." His face was so gloomy as he put his belongings away, it was evident that thc killing of the fish had indeed disturbed him. The child watched him with her deep eyes. " There ain't many fish in our river ; p'r'aps you 'ont catch another," she said encouragingly. " If you was to come down to-morrow afternoon, p'r'aps you wouldn't catch one." This innocent attempt at an assignation passed unheeded. The young man was no longer socially inclined. Having stowed away his tackle in the pocket of his blue serge coat, and returned his rod to its case, he nodded a good-bye to the child, lifted his cap, and walked away across the meadows. Lolly Rolfe, her eyes upon the tall, loose-jointed figure making its slow way through the buttercups and the ox-eyed daisies, stood motionless- This had been an era in her monotonous little life —a red-letter one among the sombre-hued pro cession of her days.

And, contrary to the general rule which forbids us to recognise while it is with us the hour which will be the one for ever treasured in our memory — which allows us, indeed, to live through it with indifference, to hear its death-knell without regret — she knew it. Every day, winter as well as summer, she wandered about the lanes and fields of Harlingford, every day came down and looked at the river, of which she was fond. She would listen to the hurried babble of the little stream, thinking her own confused, hardly conscious thoughts, the while. Imagining new experiences for David and " little Em'ly " in that delightful house that wasn't a house after all, but a boat by the sea ; new adven tures for the splendid Steerforth. Making new heroes and heroines of her own — the latter always rich, and beautiful exceedingly, with sunlit locks, and skin of alabaster ; of appearance and cir cumstance as far as possible removed from those of the poor farmer's little neglected child, with the rough hair blown by the wind and burnt by the sun, with the tanned skin and the torn pink pinafore.

Yet in all these wanderings of mind and body, never had she encountered a stranger so beautiful, so condescending, so kind, before. Who had let her sit at his side and talk to him ! Who had lifted his cap to her when he had left ! As she watched the widening acres which separated her from the hero of this great episode, a shadow fell upon the child's heart as well as upon her face. She grew desperate to think that, the next meadow gained, the hedge would hide him from her sight. Looking back as he closed the gate, young Richmond saw that the child was following him. When he stopped she also stopped and gathered the cowslips, the cuckoo-flowers, the long-stalked buttercups around her. But, arrived at the next gate, he found her following still. At the next and the next, the same. Standing on the Rectory doorstep he saw her peering in upon him from the Rectory gate.

The distance was too great for him to read the expression of her face, but there was a suggestion of forlornness in the pose of the solitary little figure, as she leant there, the hand that held the flowers hanging listlessly within the rails of the gate. And certain griefs and dis appointments of his own had made Eddy Rich mond very susceptible of such impressions. A lady with a kind red face, with black hair parted over a high forehead and surmounted by a white muslin cap, met the returning angler in the hall, took his rod from him, hung up his cap for him, led him, his arm pulled through her own, into the study. The Rector, reading there, flung down his paper, got up, pushed forward his own chair, pushed his nephew into it ; while the Rector's wife — she of the red face and the shining black hair — snatching the cosy from the teapot, sat down to her table and made the young man a cup of tea.

" Push down a cushion at his back, John," she said. " There ! It is so comfortable to have that little hollow filled. Now this round, soft one for his head " " You will certainly kill me with kindness," young Richmond said. There was a tone of sadness, almost of hopelessness, in thc slow and listless utterance, strangely out of keeping with the youthfulness of his appearance and his apparent circumstances and surroundings. " I shall write to my sister Bessie that I am being ruined by an unscrupulous aunt and uncle, bent on the deterioration of my character." " It isn't your character about which your dear sister Bessie is anxious," Mrs. Brownjohn reminded him seriously ; " it's your health, Eddy. How have you been feeling, dear ? No pain in the shoulders or the chest ? Any return of the cough ?

" He shook his head, lying back in his chair. " Wonderfully well. Had an awfully good time." " What did you catch, my dear boy ? " the Rector inquired, beaming upon the young man over the pages of the Times upon his knee. The worthy pair had never had a child of their own. It seemed to both that a new life had opened to them when this young man had been given into their care. Thc kind, mild eyes of the handsome old clergyman, and the bright black ones of his wife, dwelt lovingly upon their new treasure. " I have been told that there are trout in that stream, Eddy. What did you catch ? " " Never mind the fish. Let us be sure he did not catch a chill ! " the aunt said. She left her tea-table and went to him. It was an excuse to touch his forehead with her fingers, to take one of his hands in hers.

" He feels a little feverish," she said, looking with anxious eyes at her husband. Eddy gave an impatient laugh. " I'm as right as a trivet — whatever that may be," he said. " Go and sit down, Aunt Mary. I won't be a coddle. I hadn't much sport, uncle, but I was very jolly," he continued. " There was a rather nice child who made acquaintance with me. I was tres passing, she informed me, on her father's ' midder.' " " Why, my dear boy, you must have been on Straker's land," his Aunt Mary said with dismay. " Not at all a nice person ! A person to avoid. I think I may say as much without transgressing the laws of charity, John ? " " But Straker isn't his name," objected Eddy. "The child said his name was Rope or Roof " " Rolfe. That's it " — nodding her head trium phantly. " Straker's the step-father : a bearish, ill mannered person."

" Hush, my dear, hush ! " from a deprecating Rector, shaking his head. " Well, you will admit he never comes to church, John ? That his wife and her children — she had a boy and girl, poor soul, when she married him — live in constant fear of him ? That he is most disrespectful to you " " There are doubtless excuses. If we only knew them, Mary, there are always excuses. The man has been embittered through loss and misfortune. I believe him, however, to be straightforward in his dealings, and a man of strict honour. People may not come to church, and yet may be good Christians, remember." " The child seemed a funny little rascal," Eddy said, in his weary way. " A character, I should think. Clever, perhaps." " My dear," Mrs. Brownjohn cried, " one of the most troublesome girls in the school !

The mistress was thankful when she left. Not a favourite anywhere, I fear." Eddy laughed, unmoved. " She is a reader," he said. She talks broad Norfolk — but she reads Dickens. Acts him too," he added, with a sudden vivid remembrance of her queer, sidelong look at him as she announced the fact. " I call her a jolly little soul." " She seems to have favoured you with many particulars," Mrs. Brownjohn said. She was not quite pleased. There were in the parish two or three such dear, good girls : pets of her own. Why could it not have happened that Eddy should have become interested in one of these, instead of in this little black sheep ? Eddy laughed his languid, low laugh again. " She took an interest in me," he said. " I thought it so nice of her. She followed me to the gate. I left her looking through.

No doubt she is watch ing there still. Paradise and the Peri, Aunt Mary." " You should have brought the poor child in, my boy," the Rector said. " This may be our opportunity, Mary." He got up and walked to the window. " The Strakers are people who have held aloof a good deal. The child may be the means of getting us into touch with them. If she is still at the gate we will send, my dear, and fetch her in."

Chapter II

" He moved among the vales and streams, In the green wood and hollow dell : They were his dwellings night and day. But Nature ne'er could find the way Into the heart of Peter Bell ! " But Lolly was no longer at the gate. She had turned away as her new acquaintance vanished beneath the Rectory portal and wandered discon solately homeward. She took her way by the road, being in no hurry to reach her destination, rather than by the shorter path across the fields. The nearer she drew to the White House Farm, the slower grew her footsteps. Arrived within sight of it, she stopped. The hedge on one side of the road was of lilac bushes, full in bloom now ; the warm air burdened with their sweetness. Lolly's hands were filled with flowers, but she must have some of the lilac flowers too ! She laid down her spoils from the riverside meadow, and pulled down a branch, cluster-laden.

A stone came spinning down the road and struck her ankle sharply. "That's Herbie," said Lolly to herself. "He's always hurting." She did not deign to turn her head even when another stone went whizzing past her ear, but con tinued with apparent unconcern to gather her flowers ; and while she did so the missiles did not cease to fly past her head or to fall about her feet. A tree, fallen in a recent gale, was lying along the grassy wayside a few yards farther down the road. " I know you're there, Herbie," she said, when presently she reached this tree. " I knew you was hidden th'other side o' th' log all along. I weren't a bit frightened." She climbed over the fallen trunk, and sat down by the side of the boy, lying on his back in the grass. A handsome boy, with a richly complex ioned face of red and brown, with curling dark hair, and shining dark eyes, roving here and there, and seeming to observe nothing.

The girl glanced from him to the axe leaning against the tree. You was sent to lop the branches, agin," she said. " And I ha'n't lopped 'em," he made reply. " Father licked you 'cause you didn't yesterday," she reminded him. " He'll ha' to lick me agin to-night," the boy returned. " He's always a-lickin' of me for some thin'." " What you got in y'r mouth, Herbie ? " " Clo'-balls." " Give us one, then." " I give you six. I threw 'em at ye along o' the stones. A nice lot o' thanks I got ! " " How should I know they wasn't all stones, then ? They was all precious hard." She got up and went back to the spot beneath the lilac hedge, and after much hunting retrieved two of the clove-balls. One of these she at once proceeded to suck without inspection, but turned critical attention upon the gritty condition of the other.

" A lot of sense in messin' of 'em up like this ! " she grumbled. " Where'd you get 'em, Herbie ? " Bought 'em," he replied laconically. Yes. But where'd you get the money ? " Find out ! " " That's what you said last week, when you bought the pink Persian sherbet, but I never did find out. I wish you'd lop th' branches, Herbie." " Lop 'em yourself," said Herbie. " I will if you tell me where the money for the sherbet and the clo'-balls come from." " You 'ont tell ? " " Promise." " Give us hold of y'r little finger." Lolly advanced the small brown member with evident reluctance. The ordeal was, she well knew, a painful one, yet one from which, wishing to prove herself to be a trustworthy person, she was ashamed to shrink. The boy seized the small brown tip between his own finger and thumb, and, inserting his thumb-nail beneath the quick, succeeded in putting his sister to actual torture for the space of half a minute.

The tears came into her eyes, but she did not scream, nor utter a sound, — could be trusted, therefore, according to the rite in which the pair entirely believed to keep a secret. " Now ! " as he released her fingers. " Mother give me the money." " You said that before, and mother didn't ; 'cause I asked her. You're tellin' lies agin, Herbie. You stole it out o' th' milU-money." " Go down on y'r knees, miss, and ask my pardon for sayin' I stole." She regarded him defiantly, standing at his side. " I 'ont ! " she said. She flung the clove-ball she held in his face ; she spat out the half-sucked one upon the grass. " I 'ont ! You stole it— stole it — stole it ! You're a thief ! " The next instant he had pulled one of her ankles from under her and she was sprawling upon the grass. " Ask my pardon," he commanded, as she scrambled to her knees.

" I 'ont ! And you can't make me." " Oh, can't I ? " he retorted. But either he knew he could not or was too lazy and indifferent to try, for he made no effort to stop her when she rose to her feet and walked away. When she reached the white gate which opened upon the grass-grown drive leading to the back of the house, she looked round. Herbert was sitting upon the tree-trunk now, his hands in his pockets, looking down upon the bits of turf he was digging up with the heels of his heavy boots. How lonely he looked, sitting there ! Lolly's heart filled with tenderness as she watched him. He had been beaten last night, and to-night he would be certainly beaten again if his work was not done. And he was such a pretty, dear boy ! And she loved him so ! She had called her brother a thief; she knew he told lies and was a tyrant to her who would have worshipped him.

But Lolly loved in true woman fashion, undeterred by the blemishes of her idol — nay, loving the more fervently because of her per ception of that idol's desperate need of devotion. And he had given her six of his clo'-balls ! A sob rose in the little brown throat — and another, and another. To think that he could be so wicked and yet so infinitely dear ! She leant upon the white gate until the grief was all swallowed back and she had brushed away thc tears with the palm of a hot, flower-scented hand. Then she went slowly back to her brother and took up the axe. " I'll help you, then," she said. She was not a novice at the work, having helped him many a time before. Several of the smaller branches fell beneath her strokes. It was his desire to extinguish her probable pride in her exploits which impelled him at length to take the axe from her hands.

" You set along of me and see me do it," he commanded. " I 'ont do a stroke if you don't watch." When the boy was tired, Lolly again took the axe, so that in an hour's time they had a respect able load of branches to drag home. They left them in the yard by the back door, where already a goodly pile of wood was stacked. A sickly-looking woman, with dark, restless eyes looking out of a sallow face, joined the boy and girl there, and began to break some of the drier branches across her knee. " Herbie and I can get your sticks riddy for the mornin', mother," the girl said. " And pick out green ones, as you did last time, so that I was smuddered in smoke and the kettle wouldn't boil when your father wanted his breakfast ! " the mother said. " Let be, Lolly. I'll do them myself. A stroke more or less don't make much differs in the day's work.