← catalogue

The Princess and Curdie

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #709 · 319,053 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Princess and Curdie
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Princess and Curdie

Author: George MacDonald


        
Release date: November 1, 1996 [eBook #709]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/709

Credits: Produced by Jo Churcher.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE ***




Produced by Jo Churcher.  HTML version by Al Haines.









The Princess and Curdie


by

George MacDonald




CONTENTS


   1 The Mountain
   2 The White Pigeon
   3 The Mistress of the Silver Moon
   4 Curdie's Father and Mother
   5 The Miners
   6 The Emerald
   7 What Is in a Name?
   8 Curdie's Mission
   9 Hands
  10 The Heath
  11 Lina
  12 More Creatures
  13 The Baker's Wife
  14 The Dogs of Gwyntystorm
  15 Derba and Barbara
  16 The Mattock
  17 The Wine Cellar
  18 The King's Kitchen
  19 The King's Chamber
  20 Counterplotting
  21 The Loaf
  22 The Lord Chamberlain
  23 Dr Kelman
  24 The Prophecy
  25 The Avengers
  26 The Vengeance
  27 More Vengeance
  28 The Preacher
  29 Barbara
  30 Peter
  31 The Sacrifice
  32 The King's Army
  33 The Battle
  34 Judgement
  35 The End




CHAPTER 1

The Mountain

Curdie was the son of Peter the miner.  He lived with his father and
mother in a cottage built on a mountain, and he worked with his father
inside the mountain.

A mountain is a strange and awful thing.  In old times, without knowing
so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people were yet
more afraid of mountains.  But then somehow they had not come to see
how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them--and what
people hate they must fear.  Now that we have learned to look at them
with admiration, perhaps we do not feel quite awe enough of them.  To
me they are beautiful terrors.

I will try to tell you what they are.  They are portions of the heart
of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed
up and out.  For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not
of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot,
melted metals and stones.  And as our hearts keep us alive, so that
great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried
sunlight--that is what it is.

Now think: out of that cauldron, where all the bubbles would be as big
as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have
bubbled out and escaped--up and away, and there they stand in the cool,
cold sky--mountains.  Think of the change, and you will no more wonder
that there should be something awful about the very look of a mountain:
from the darkness--for where the light has nothing to shine upon, much
the same as darkness--from the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling
unrest--up, with a sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the
cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine
above the blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their
grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt, the
moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and everlasting
stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and caverns into a
roaring organ for the young archangels that are studying how to let out
the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the molten music of the
streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the glaciers fresh born.

Think, too, of the change in their own substance--no longer molten and
soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and cold. Think of the
creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and the birds building
their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of its sides, like hair
to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the valleys, and the gracious
flowers even at the very edge of its armour of ice, like the rich
embroidery of the garment below, and the rivers galloping down the
valleys in a tumult of white and green!  And along with all these,
think of the terrible precipices down which the traveller may fall and
be lost, and the frightful gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers,
and the dark profound lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with
floating lumps of ice.

All this outside the mountain!  But the inside, who shall tell what
lies there?  Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles thick,
sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin or mercury,
studded perhaps with precious stones--perhaps a brook, with eyeless
fish in it, running, running ceaselessly, cold and babbling, through
banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes, or over a gravel of
which some of the stones arc rubies and emeralds, perhaps diamonds and
sapphires--who can tell?--and whoever can't tell is free to think--all
waiting to flash, waiting for millions of ages--ever since the earth
flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire, and began to cool.

Then there are caverns full of water, numbingly cold, fiercely
hot--hotter than any boiling water.  From some of these the water
cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood in the
body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the great
caverns of the mountain's heart, whence the arteries let it out again,
gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and kinds, through
and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to the light, and rushes
down the Mountainside in torrents, and down the valleys in
rivers--down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs of the world, that
is the sea, where it is tossed in storms and cyclones, heaved up in
billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to mist upon rocks, beaten by
millions of tails, and breathed by millions of gills, whence at last,
melted into vapour by the sun, it is lifted up pure into the air, and
borne by the servant winds back to the mountaintops and the snow, the
solid ice, and the molten stream.

Well, when the heart of the earth has thus come rushing up among her
children, bringing with it gifts of all that she possesses, then
straightway into it rush her children to see what they can find there.
With pickaxe and spade and crowbar, with boring chisel and blasting
powder, they force their way back: is it to search for what toys they
may have left in their long-forgotten nurseries? Hence the mountains
that lift their heads into the clear air, and are dotted over with the
dwellings of men, are tunnelled and bored in the darkness of their
bosoms by the dwellers in the houses which they hold up to the sun and
air.

Curdie and his father were of these: their business was to bring to
light hidden things; they sought silver in the rock and found it, and
carried it out.  Of the many other precious things in their mountain
they knew little or nothing.  Silver ore was what they were sent to
find, and in darkness and danger they found it.  But oh, how sweet was
the air on the mountain face when they came out at sunset to go home to
wife and mother!  They did breathe deep then!

The mines belonged to the king of the country, and the miners were his
servants, working under his overseers and officers.  He was a real
king--that is, one who ruled for the good of his people and not to
please himself, and he wanted the silver not to buy rich things for
himself, but to help him to govern the country, and pay the ones that
defended it from certain troublesome neighbours, and the judges whom he
set to portion out righteousness among the people, that so they might
learn it themselves, and come to do without judges at all.  Nothing
that could be got from the heart of the earth could have been put to
better purposes than the silver the king's miners got for him.  There
were people in the country who, when it came into their hands, degraded
it by locking it up in a chest, and then it grew diseased and was
called mammon, and bred all sorts of quarrels; but when first it left
the king's hands it never made any but friends, and the air of the
world kept it clean.

About a year before this story began, a series of very remarkable
events had just ended.  I will narrate as much of them as will serve to
show the tops of the roots of my tree.

Upon the mountain, on one of its many claws, stood a grand old house,
half farmhouse, half castle, belonging to the king; and there his only
child, the Princess Irene, had been brought up till she was nearly nine
years old, and would doubtless have continued much longer, but for the
strange events to which I have referred.

At that time the hollow places of the mountain were inhabited by
creatures called goblins, who for various reasons and in various ways
made themselves troublesome to all, but to the little princess
dangerous.  Mainly by the watchful devotion and energy of Curdie,
however, their designs had been utterly defeated, and made to recoil
upon themselves to their own destruction, so that now there were very
few of them left alive, and the miners did not believe there was a
single goblin remaining in the whole inside of the mountain.

The king had been so pleased with the boy--then approaching thirteen
years of age--that when he carried away his daughter he asked him to
accompany them; but he was still better pleased with him when he found
that he preferred staying with his father and mother.  He was a right
good king and knew that the love of a boy who would not leave his
father and mother to be made a great man was worth ten thousand offers
to die for his sake, and would prove so when the right time came.  As
for his father and mother, they would have given him up without a
grumble, for they were just as good as the king, and he and they
understood each other perfectly; but in this matter, not seeing that he
could do anything for the king which one of his numerous attendants
could not do as well, Curdie felt that it was for him to decide.  So
the king took a kind farewell of them all and rode away, with his
daughter on his horse before him.

A gloom fell upon the mountain and the miners when she was gone, and
Curdie did not whistle for a whole week.  As for his verses, there was
no occasion to make any now.  He had made them only to drive away the
goblins, and they were all gone--a good riddance--only the princess was
gone too!  He would rather have had things as they were, except for the
princess's sake.  But whoever is diligent will soon be cheerful, and
though the miners missed the household of the castle, they yet managed
to get on without them. Peter and his wife, however, were troubled with
the fancy that they had stood in the way of their boy's good fortune.
It would have been such a fine thing for him and them, too, they
thought, if he had ridden with the good king's train.  How beautiful he
looked, they said, when he rode the king's own horse through the river
that the goblins had sent out of the hill!  He might soon have been a
captain, they did believe!  The good, kind people did not reflect that
the road to the next duty is the only straight one, or that, for their
fancied good, we should never wish our children or friends to do what
we would not do ourselves if we were in their position.  We must accept
righteous sacrifices as well as make them.



CHAPTER 2

The White Pigeon

When in the winter they had had their supper and sat about the fire, or
when in the summer they lay on the border of the rock-margined stream
that ran through their little meadow close by the door of their
cottage, issuing from the far-up whiteness often folded in clouds,
Curdie's mother would not seldom lead the conversation to one peculiar
personage said and believed to have been much concerned in the late
issue of events.

That personage was the great-great-grandmother of the princess, of whom
the princess had often talked, but whom neither Curdie nor his mother
had ever seen.  Curdie could indeed remember, although already it
looked more like a dream than he could account for if it had really
taken place, how the princess had once led him up many stairs to what
she called a beautiful room in the top of the tower, where she went
through all the--what should he call it?--the behaviour of presenting
him to her grandmother, talking now to her and now to him, while all
the time he saw nothing but a bare garret, a heap of musty straw, a
sunbeam, and a withered apple. Lady, he would have declared before the
king himself, young or old, there was none, except the princess
herself, who was certainly vexed that he could not see what she at
least believed she saw.

As for his mother, she had once seen, long before Curdie was born, a
certain mysterious light of the same description as one Irene spoke of,
calling it her grandmother's moon; and Curdie himself had seen this
same light, shining from above the castle, just as the king and
princess were taking their leave.  Since that time neither had seen or
heard anything that could be supposed connected with her.  Strangely
enough, however, nobody had seen her go away.  If she was such an old
lady, she could hardly be supposed to have set out alone and on foot
when all the house was asleep.  Still, away she must have gone, for, of
course, if she was so powerful, she would always be about the princess
to take care of her.

But as Curdie grew older, he doubted more and more whether Irene had
not been talking of some dream she had taken for reality: he had heard
it said that children could not always distinguish betwixt dreams and
actual events.  At the same time there was his mother's testimony: what
was he to do with that?  His mother, through whom he had learned
everything, could hardly be imagined by her own dutiful son to have
mistaken a dream for a fact of the waking world.

So he rather shrank from thinking about it, and the less he thought
about it, the less he was inclined to believe it when he did think
about it, and therefore, of course, the less inclined to talk about it
to his father and mother; for although his father was one of those men
who for one word they say think twenty thoughts, Curdie was well
assured that he would rather doubt his own eyes than his wife's
testimony.

There were no others to whom he could have talked about it.  The miners
were a mingled company--some good, some not so good, some rather
bad--none of them so bad or so good as they might have been; Curdie
liked most of them, and was a favourite with all; but they knew very
little about the upper world, and what might or might not take place
there.  They knew silver from copper ore; they understood the
underground ways of things, and they could look very wise with their
lanterns in their hands searching after this or that sign of ore, or
for some mark to guide their way in the hollows of the earth; but as to
great-great-grandmothers, they would have mocked Curdie all the rest of
his life for the absurdity of not being absolutely certain that the
solemn belief of his father and mother was nothing but ridiculous
nonsense.  Why, to them the very word 'great-great-grandmother' would
have been a week's laughter!  I am not sure that they were able quite
to believe there were such persons as great-great-grandmothers; they
had never seen one.  They were not companions to give the best of help
toward progress, and as Curdie grew, he grew at this time faster in
body than in mind--with the usual consequence, that he was getting
rather stupid--one of the chief signs of which was that he believed
less and less in things he had never seen.  At the same time I do not
think he was ever so stupid as to imagine that this was a sign of
superior faculty and strength of mind.  Still, he was becoming more and
more a miner, and less and less a man of the upper world where the wind
blew.  On his way to and from the mine he took less and less notice of
bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks
and the clouds.  He was gradually changing into a commonplace man.

There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and
that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other
a continuous resurrection.  One of the latter sort comes at length to
know at once whether a thing is true the moment it comes before him;
one of the former class grows more and more afraid of being taken in,
so afraid of it that he takes himself in altogether, and comes at
length to believe in nothing but his dinner: to be sure of a thing with
him is to have it between his teeth.

Curdie was not in a very good way, then, at that time.  His father and
mother had, it is true, no fault to find with him and yet--and
yet--neither of them was ready to sing when the thought of him came up.
There must be something wrong when a mother catches herself sighing
over the time when her boy was in petticoats, or a father looks sad
when he thinks how he used to carry him on his shoulder.  The boy
should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of
him, and never let it go.  He must still, to be a right man, be his
mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more.  The child is
not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.

Curdie had made himself a bow and some arrows, and was teaching himself
to shoot with them.  One evening in the early summer, as he was walking
home from the mine with them in his hand, a light flashed across his
eyes.  He looked, and there was a snow-white pigeon settling on a rock
in front of him, in the red light of the level sun.  There it fell at
once to work with one of its wings, in which a feather or two had got
some sprays twisted, causing a certain roughness unpleasant to the
fastidious creature of the air.

It was indeed a lovely being, and Curdie thought how happy it must be
flitting through the air with a flash--a live bolt of light. For a
moment he became so one with the bird that he seemed to feel both its
bill and its feathers, as the one adjusted the other to fly again, and
his heart swelled with the pleasure of its involuntary sympathy.
Another moment and it would have been aloft in the waves of rosy
light--it was just bending its little legs to spring: that moment it
fell on the path broken-winged and bleeding from Curdie's cruel arrow.

With a gush of pride at his skill, and pleasure at his success, he ran
to pick up his prey.  I must say for him he picked it up
gently--perhaps it was the beginning of his repentance.  But when he
had the white thing in his hands its whiteness stained with another red
than that of the sunset flood in which it had been revelling--ah God!
who knows the joy of a bird, the ecstasy of a creature that has neither
storehouse nor barn!--when he held it, I say, in his victorious hands,
the winged thing looked up in his face--and with such eyes!--asking
what was the matter, and where the red sun had gone, and the clouds,
and the wind of its flight.  Then they closed, but to open again
presently, with the same questions in them.

And as they closed and opened, their look was fixed on his.  It did not
once flutter or try to get away; it only throbbed and bled and looked
at him.  Curdie's heart began to grow very large in his bosom.  What
could it mean?  It was nothing but a pigeon, and why should he not kill
a pigeon?  But the fact was that not till this very moment had he ever
known what a pigeon was.  A good many discoveries of a similar kind
have to be made by most of us.  Once more it opened its eyes--then
closed them again, and its throbbing ceased.  Curdie gave a sob: its
last look reminded him of the princess--he did not know why.  He
remembered how hard he had laboured to set her beyond danger, and yet
what dangers she had had to encounter for his sake: they had been
saviours to each other--and what had he done now?  He had stopped
saving, and had begun killing!  What had he been sent into the world
for?  Surely not to be a death to its joy and loveliness.  He had done
the thing that was contrary to gladness; he was a destroyer!  He was
not the Curdie he had been meant to be!

Then the underground waters gushed from the boy's heart.  And with the
tears came the remembrance that a white pigeon, just before the
princess went away with her father, came from somewhere--yes, from the
grandmother's lamp, and flew round the king and Irene and himself, and
then flew away: this might be that very pigeon! Horrible to think!  And
if it wasn't, yet it was a white pigeon, the same as this.  And if she
kept a great Many pigeons--and white ones, as Irene had told him, then
whose pigeon could he have killed but the grand old princess's?

Suddenly everything round about him seemed against him.  The red sunset
stung him; the rocks frowned at him; the sweet wind that had been
laving his face as he walked up the hill dropped--as if he wasn't fit
to be kissed any more.  Was the whole world going to cast him out?
Would he have to stand there forever, not knowing what to do, with the
dead pigeon in his hand?  Things looked bad indeed.  Was the whole
world going to make a work about a pigeon--a white pigeon?  The sun
went down.  Great clouds gathered over the west, and shortened the
twilight.  The wind gave a howl, and then lay down again.  The clouds
gathered thicker.  Then came a rumbling.  He thought it was thunder.
It was a rock that fell inside the mountain.  A goat ran past him down
the hill, followed by a dog sent to fetch him home.  He thought they
were goblin creatures, and trembled.  He used to despise them.  And
still he held the dead pigeon tenderly in his hand.

It grew darker and darker.  An evil something began to move in his
heart.  'What a fool I am!' he said to himself.  Then he grew angry,
and was just going to throw the bird from him and whistle, when a
brightness shone all round him.  He lifted his eyes, and saw a great
globe of light--like silver at the hottest heat: he had once seen
silver run from the furnace.  It shone from somewhere above the roofs
of the castle: it must be the great old princess's moon!  How could she
be there?  Of course she was not there!  He had asked the whole
household, and nobody knew anything about her or her globe either.  It
couldn't be!  And yet what did that signify, when there was the white
globe shining, and here was the dead white bird in his hand?  That
moment the pigeon gave a little flutter.  'It's not dead!' cried
Curdie, almost with a shriek.  The same instant he was running full
speed toward the castle, never letting his heels down, lest he should
shake the poor, wounded bird.



CHAPTER 3

The Mistress of the Silver Moon

When Curdie reached the castle, and ran into the little garden in front
of it, there stood the door wide open.  This was as he had hoped, for
what could he have said if he had had to knock at it? Those whose
business it is to open doors, so often mistake and shut them!  But the
woman now in charge often puzzled herself greatly to account for the
strange fact that however often she shut the door, which, like the
rest, she took a great deal of unnecessary trouble to do, she was
certain, the next time she went to it, to find it open.  I speak now of
the great front door, of course: the back door she as persistently kept
wide: if people could only go in by that, she said, she would then know
what sort they were, and what they wanted.  But she would neither have
known what sort Curdie was, nor what he wanted, and would assuredly
have denied him admittance, for she knew nothing of who was in the
tower.  So the front door was left open for him, and in he walked.

But where to go next he could not tell.  It was not quite dark: a dull,
shineless twilight filled the place.  All he knew was that he must go
up, and that proved enough for the present, for there he saw the great
staircase rising before him.  When he reached the top of it, he knew
there must be more stairs yet, for he could not be near the top of the
tower.  Indeed by the situation of the stairs, he must be a good way
from the tower itself.  But those who work well in the depths more
easily understand the heights, for indeed in their true nature they are
one and the same; miners are in mountains; and Curdie, from knowing the
ways of the king's mines, and being able to calculate his whereabouts
in them, was now able to find his way about the king's house.  He knew
its outside perfectly, and now his business was to get his notion of
the inside right with the outside.

So he shut his eyes and made a picture of the outside of it in his
mind.  Then he came in at the door of the picture, and yet kept the
picture before him all the time--for you can do that kind of thing in
your mind--and took every turn of the stair over again, always watching
to remember, every time he turned his face, how the tower lay, and then
when he came to himself at the top where he stood, he knew exactly
where it was, and walked at once in the right direction.

On his way, however, he came to another stair, and up that he went, of
course, watching still at every turn how the tower must lie.  At the
top of this stair was yet another--they were the stairs up which the
princess ran when first, without knowing it, she was on her way to find
her great-great-grandmother.  At the top of the second stair he could
go no farther, and must therefore set out again to find the tower,
which, as it rose far above the rest of the house, must have the last
of its stairs inside itself.

Having watched every turn to the very last, he still knew quite well in
what direction he must go to find it, so he left the stair and went
down a passage that led, if not exactly toward it, yet nearer it.  This
passage was rather dark, for it was very long, with only one window at
the end, and although there were doors on both sides of it, they were
all shut.  At the distant window glimmered the chill east, with a few
feeble stars in it, and its like was dreary and old, growing brown, and
looking as if it were thinking about the day that was just gone.
Presently he turned into another passage, which also had a window at
the end of it; and in at that window shone all that was left of the
sunset, just a few ashes, with here and there a little touch of warmth:
it was nearly as sad as the east, only there was one difference--it was
very plainly thinking of tomorrow.

But at present Curdie had nothing to do with today or tomorrow; his
business was with the bird, and the tower where dwelt the grand old
princess to whom it belonged.  So he kept on his way, still eastward,
and came to yet another passage, which brought him to a door.  He was
afraid to open it without first knocking.  He knocked, but heard no
answer.  He was answered nevertheless; for the door gently opened, and
there was a narrow stair--and so steep that, big lad as he was, he,
too, like the Princess Irene before him, found his hands needful for
the climbing.  And it was a long climb, but he reached the top at
last--a little landing, with a door in front and one on each side.
Which should he knock at?

As he hesitated, he heard the noise of a spinning wheel.  He knew it at
once, because his mother's spinning wheel had been his governess long
ago, and still taught him things.  It was the spinning wheel that first
taught him to make verses, and to sing, and to think whether all was
right inside him; or at least it had helped him in all these things.
Hence it was no wonder he should know a spinning wheel when he heard it
sing--even although as the bird of paradise to other birds was the song
of that wheel to the song of his mother's.

He stood listening, so entranced that he forgot to knock, and the wheel
went on and on, spinning in his brain songs and tales and rhymes, till
he was almost asleep as well as dreaming, for sleep does not always
come first.  But suddenly came the thought of the poor bird, which had
been lying motionless in his hand all the time, and that woke him up,
and at once he knocked.

'Come in, Curdie,' said a voice.

Curdie shook.  It was getting rather awful.  The heart that had never
much heeded an army of goblins trembled at the soft word of invitation.
But then there was the red-spotted white thing in his hand!  He dared
not hesitate, though.  Gently he opened the door through which the
sound came, and what did he see?  Nothing at first--except indeed a
great sloping shaft of moonlight that came in at a high window, and
rested on the floor.  He stood and stared at it, forgetting to shut the
door.

'Why don't you come in, Curdie?' said the voice.  'Did you never see
moonlight before?'

'Never without a moon,' answered Curdie, in a trembling tone, but
gathering courage.

'Certainly not,' returned the voice, which was thin and quavering: 'I
never saw moonlight without a moon.'

'But there's no moon outside,' said Curdie.

'Ah! but you're inside now,' said the voice.

The answer did not satisfy Curdie; but the voice went on.

'There are more moons than you know of, Curdie.  Where there is one sun
there are many moons--and of many sorts.  Come in and look out of my
window, and you will soon satisfy yourself that there is a moon looking
in at it.'

The gentleness of the voice made Curdie remember his manners.  He shut
the door, and drew a step or two nearer to the moonlight.

All the time the sound of the spinning had been going on and on, and
Curdie now caught sight of the wheel.  Oh, it was such a thin, delicate
thing--reminding him of a spider's web in a hedge.  It stood in the
middle of the moonlight, and it seemed as if the moonlight had nearly
melted it away.  A step nearer, he saw, with a start, two little hands
at work with it.  And then at last, in the shadow on the other side of
the moonlight which came like silver between, he saw the form to which
the hands belonged: a small withered creature, so old that no age would
have seemed too great to write under her picture, seated on a stool
beyond the spinning wheel, which looked very large beside her, but, as
I said, very thin, like a long-legged spider holding up its own web,
which was the round wheel itself She sat crumpled together, a filmy
thing that it seemed a puff would blow away, more like the body of a
fly the big spider had sucked empty and left hanging in his web, than
anything else I can think of.

When Curdie saw her, he stood still again, a good deal in wonder, a
very little in reverence, a little in doubt, and, I must add, a little
in amusement at the odd look of the old marvel.  Her grey hair mixed
with the moonlight so that he could not tell where the one began and
the other ended.  Her crooked back bent forward over her chest, her
shoulders nearly swallowed up her head between them, and her two little
hands were just like the grey claws of a hen, scratching at the thread,
which to Curdie was of course invisible across the moonlight.  Indeed
Curdie laughed within himself, just a little, at the sight; and when he
thought of how the princess used to talk about her huge, great, old
grandmother, he laughed more.  But that moment the little lady leaned
forward into the moonlight, and Curdie caught a glimpse of her eyes,
and all the laugh went out of him.

'What do you come here for, Curdie?' she said, as gently as before.

Then Curdie remembered that he stood there as a culprit, and worst of
all, as one who had his confession yet to make.  There was no time to
hesitate over it.

'Oh, ma'am!  See here,' he said, and advanced a step or two, holding
out the pigeon.

'What have you got there?' she asked.

Again Curdie advanced a few steps, and held out his hand with the
pigeon, that she might see what it was, into the moonlight.  The moment
the rays fell upon it the pigeon gave a faint flutter.  The old lady
put out her old hands and took it, and held it to her bosom, and rocked
it, murmuring over it as if it were a sick baby.

When Curdie saw how distressed she was he grew sorrier still, and said:

'I didn't mean to do any harm, ma'am.  I didn't think of its being
yours.'

'Ah, Curdie!  If it weren't mine, what would become of it now?' she
returned.  'You say you didn't mean any harm: did you mean any good,
Curdie?'

'No,' answered Curdie.

'Remember, then, that whoever does not mean good is always in danger of
harm.  But I try to give everybody fair play; and those that are in the
wrong are in far more need of it always than those who are in the
right: they can afford to do without it.  Therefore I say for you that
when you shot that arrow you did not know what a pigeon is.  Now that
you do know, you are sorry.  It is very dangerous to do things you
don't know about.'

'But, please, ma'am--I don't mean to be rude or to contradict you,'
said Curdie, 'but if a body was never to do anything but what he knew
to be good, he would have to live half his time doing nothing.'

'There you are much mistaken,' said the old quavering voice.  'How
little you must have thought!  Why, you don't seem even to know the
good of the things you are constantly doing.  Now don't mistake me. I
don't mean you are good for doing them.  It is a good thing to eat your
breakfast, but you don't fancy it's very good of you to do it.  The
thing is good, not you.'

Curdie laughed.

'There are a great many more good things than bad things to do. Now
tell me what bad thing you have done today besides this sore hurt to my
little white friend.'

While she talked Curdie had sunk into a sort of reverie, in which he
hardly knew whether it was the old lady or his own heart that spoke.
And when she asked him that question, he was at first much inclined to
consider himself a very good fellow on the whole.  'I really don't
think I did anything else that was very bad all day,' he said to
himself.  But at the same time he could not honestly feel that he was
worth standing up for.  All at once a light seemed to break in upon his
mind, and he woke up and there was the withered little atomy of the old
lady on the other side of the moonlight, and there was the spinning
wheel singing on and on in the middle of it!

'I know now, ma'am; I understand now,' he said.  'Thank you, ma'am, for
spinning it into me with your wheel.  I see now that I have been doing
wrong the whole day, and such a many days besides! Indeed, I don't know
when I ever did right, and yet it seems as if I had done right some
time and had forgotten how.  When I killed your bird I did not know I
was doing wrong, just because I was always doing wrong, and the wrong
had soaked all through me.'

'What wrong were you doing all day, Curdie?  It is better to come to
the point, you know,' said the old lady, and her voice was gentler even
than before.

'I was doing the wrong of never wanting or trying to be better. And now
I see that I have been letting things go as they would for a long time.
Whatever came into my head I did, and whatever didn't come into my head
I didn't do.  I never sent anything away, and never looked out for
anything to come.  I haven't been attending to my mother--or my father
either.  And now I think of it, I know I have often seen them looking
troubled, and I have never asked them what was the matter.  And now I
see, too, that I did not ask because I suspected it had something to do
with me and my behaviour, and didn't want to hear the truth.  And I
know I have been grumbling at my work, and doing a hundred other things
that are wrong.'

'You have got it, Curdie,' said the old lady, in a voice that sounded
almost as if she had been crying.  'When people don't care to be better
they must be doing everything wrong.  I am so glad you shot my bird!'

'Ma'am!' exclaimed Curdie.  'How can you be?'

'Because it has brought you to see what sort you were when you did it,
and what sort you will grow to be again, only worse, if you don't mind.
Now that you are sorry, my poor bird will be better. Look up, my dovey.'

The pigeon gave a flutter, and spread out one of its red-spotted wings
across the old woman's bosom.

'I will mend the little angel,' she said, 'and in a week or two it will
be flying again.  So you may ease your heart about the pigeon.'

'Oh, thank you!  Thank you!' cried Curdie.  'I don't know how to thank
you.'

'Then I will tell you.  There is only one way I care for.  Do better,
and grow better, and be better.  And never kill anything without a good
reason for it.'

'Ma'am, I will go and fetch my bow and arrows, and you shall burn them
yourself.'

'I have no fire that would burn your bow and arrows, Curdie.'

'Then I promise you to burn them all under my mother's porridge pot
tomorrow morning.'

'No, no, Curdie.  Keep them, and practice with them every day, and grow
a good shot.  There are plenty of bad things that want killing, and a
day will come when they will prove useful.  But I must see first
whether you will do as I tell you.'

'That I will!' said Curdie.  'What is it, ma'am?'

'Only something not to do,' answered the old lady; 'if you should hear
anyone speak about me, never to laugh or make fun of me.'

'Oh, ma'am!' exclaimed Curdie, shocked that she should think such a
request needful.

'Stop, stop,' she went on.  'People hereabout sometimes tell very odd
and in fact ridiculous stories of an old woman who watches what is
going on, and occasionally interferes.  They mean me, though what they
say is often great nonsense.  Now what I want of you is not to laugh,
or side with them in any way; because they will take that to mean that
you don't believe there is any such person a bit more than they do.
Now that would not be the case--would it, Curdie?'

'No, indeed, ma'am.  I've seen you.'

The old woman smiled very oddly.

'Yes, you've seen me,' she said.  'But mind,' she continued, 'I don't
want you to say anything--only to hold your tongue, and not seem to
side with them.'

'That will be easy,'said Curdie,'now that I've seen you with my very
own eyes, ma'am.'

'Not so easy as you think, perhaps,' said the old lady, with another
curious smile.  'I want to be your friend,' she added after a little
pause, 'but I don't quite know yet whether you will let me.'

'Indeed I will, ma'am,' said Curdie.

'That is for me to find out,' she rejoined, with yet another strange
smile.  'In the meantime all I can say is, come to me again when you
find yourself in any trouble, and I will see what I can do for
you--only the canning depends on yourself.  I am greatly pleased with
you for bringing me my pigeon, doing your best to set right what you
had set wrong.'

As she spoke she held out her hand to him, and when he took it she made
use of his to help herself up from her stool, and--when or how it came
about, Curdie could not tell--the same instant she stood before him a
tall, strong woman--plainly very old, but as grand as she was old, and
only rather severe-looking.  Every trace of the decrepitude and
witheredness she showed as she hovered like a film about her wheel, had
vanished.  Her hair was very white, but it hung about her head in great
plenty, and shone like silver in the moonlight.  Straight as a pillar
she stood before the astonished boy, and the wounded bird had now
spread out both its wings across her bosom, like some great mystical
ornament of frosted silver.

'Oh, now I can never forget you!' cried Curdie.  'I see now what you
really are!'

'Did I not tell you the truth when I sat at my wheel?' said the old
lady.

'Yes, ma'am,' answered Curdie.

'I can do no more than tell you the truth now,' she rejoined.  'It is a
bad thing indeed to forget one who has told us the truth.  Now go.'

Curdie obeyed, and took a few steps toward the door.  'Please,
ma'am--what am I to call you?' he was going to say; but when he turned
to speak, he saw nobody.  Whether she was there or not he could not
tell, however, for the moonlight had vanished, and the room was utterly
dark.  A great fear, such as he had never before known, came upon him,
and almost overwhelmed him.  He groped his way to the door, and crawled
down the stair--in doubt and anxiety as to how he should find his way
out of the house in the dark.  And the stair seemed ever so much longer
than when he came up.  Nor was that any wonder, for down and down he
went, until at length his foot struck a door, and when he rose and
opened it, he found himself under the starry, moonless sky at the foot
of the tower.

He soon discovered the way out of the garden, with which he had some
acquaintance already, and in a few minutes was climbing the mountain
with a solemn and cheerful heart.  It was rather dark, but he knew the
way well.  As he passed the rock from which the poor pigeon fell
wounded with his arrow, a great joy filled his heart at the thought
that he was delivered from the blood of the little bird, and he ran the
next hundred yards at full speed up the hill. Some dark shadows passed
him: he did not even care to think what they were, but let them run.
When he reached home, he found his father and mother waiting supper for
him.



CHAPTER 4

Curdie's Father and Mother

The eyes of the fathers and mothers are quick to read their children's
looks, and when Curdie entered the cottage, his parents saw at once
that something unusual had taken place.  When he said to his mother, 'I
beg your pardon for being so late,' there was something in the tone
beyond the politeness that went to her heart, for it seemed to come
from the place where all lovely things were born before they began to
grow in this world.  When he set his father's chair to the table, an
attention he had not shown him for a long time, Peter thanked him with
more gratitude than the boy had ever yet felt in all his life.  It was
a small thing to do for the man who had been serving him since ever he
was born, but I suspect there is nothing a man can be so grateful for
as that to which he has the most right.

There was a change upon Curdie, and father and mother felt there must
be something to account for it, and therefore were pretty sure he had
something to tell them.  For when a child's heart is all right, it is
not likely he will want to keep anything from his parents.  But the
story of the evening was too solemn for Curdie to come out with all at
once.  He must wait until they had had their porridge, and the affairs
of this world were over for the day.

But when they were seated on the grassy bank of the brook that went so
sweetly blundering over the great stones of its rocky channel, for the
whole meadow lay on the top of a huge rock, then he felt that the right
hour had come for sharing with them the wonderful things that had come
to him.  It was perhaps the loveliest of all hours in the year.  The
summer was young and soft, and this was the warmest evening they had
yet had--dusky, dark even below, while above, the stars were bright and
large and sharp in the blackest blue sky.  The night came close around
them, clasping them in one universal arm of love, and although it
neither spoke nor smiled, seemed all eye and ear, seemed to see and
hear and know everything they said and did.  It is a way the night has
sometimes, and there is a reason for it.  The only sound was that of
the brook, for there was no wind, and no trees for it to make its music
upon if there had been, for the cottage was high up on the mountain, on
a great shoulder of stone where trees would not grow.

There, to the accompaniment of the water, as it hurried down to the
valley and the sea, talking busily of a thousand true things which it
could not understand, Curdie told his tale, outside and in, to his
father and mother.  What a world had slipped in between the mouth of
the mine and his mother's cottage!  Neither of them said a word until
he had ended.

'Now what am I to make of it, Mother? it's so strange!' he said, and
stopped.

'It's easy enough to see what Curdie has got to make of it, isn't it,
Peter?' said the good woman, turning her face toward all she could see
of her husband's.

'It seems so to me,' answered Peter, with a smile which only the night
saw, but his wife felt in the tone of his words.  They were the
happiest couple in that country, because they always understood each
other, and that was because they always meant the same thing, and that
was because they always loved what was fair and true and right better,
not than anything else, but than everything else put together.

'Then will you tell Curdie?' said she.

'You can talk best, Joan,' said he.  'You tell him, and I will
listen--and learn how to say what I think,' he added.

'I,' said Curdie, 'don't know what to think.'

'It does not matter so much,' said his mother.  'If only you know what
to make of a thing, you'll know soon enough what to think of it.  Now I
needn't tell you, surely, Curdie, what you've got to do with this?'

'I suppose you mean, Mother,' answered Curdie, 'that I must do as the
old lady told me?'

'That is what I mean: what else could it be?  Am I not right, Peter?'

'Quite right, Joan,' answered Peter, 'so far as my judgement goes. It
is a very strange story, but you see the question is not about
believing it, for Curdie knows what came to him.'

'And you remember, Curdie,' said his mother, 'that when the princess
took you up that tower once before, and there talked to her
great-great-grandmother, you came home quite angry with her, and said
there was nothing in the place but an old tub, a heap of straw--oh, I
remember your inventory quite well!--an old tub, a heap of straw, a
withered apple, and a sunbeam.  According to your eyes, that was all
there was in the great, old, musty garret.  But now you have had a
glimpse of the old princess herself!'

'Yes, Mother, I did see her--or if I didn't--' said Curdie very
thoughtfully--then began again.  'The hardest thing to believe, though
I saw it with my own eyes, was when the thin, filmy creature that
seemed almost to float about in the moonlight like a bit of the silver
paper they put over pictures, or like a handkerchief made of spider
threads, took my hand, and rose up.  She was taller and stronger than
you, Mother, ever so much!--at least, she looked so.'

'And most certainly was so, Curdie, if she looked so,' said Mrs
Peterson.

'Well, I confess,' returned her son, 'that one thing, if there were no
other, would make me doubt whether I was not dreaming, after all, wide
awake though I fancied myself to be.'

'Of course,' answered his mother, 'it is not for me to say whether you
were dreaming or not if you are doubtful of it yourself; but it doesn't
make me think I am dreaming when in the summer I hold in my hand the
bunch of sweet peas that make my heart glad with their colour and
scent, and remember the dry, withered-looking little thing I dibbled
into the hole in the same spot in the spring.  I only think how
wonderful and lovely it all is.  It seems just as full of reason as it
is of wonder.  How it is done I can't tell, only there it is!  And
there is this in it, too, Curdie--of which you would not be so ready to
think--that when you come home to your father and mother, and they find
you behaving more like a dear, good son than you have behaved for a
long time, they at least are not likely to think you were only
dreaming.'

'Still,' said Curdie, looking a little ashamed, 'I might have dreamed
my duty.'

'Then dream often, my son; for there must then be more truth in your
dreams than in your waking thoughts.  But however any of these things
may be, this one point remains certain: there can be no harm in doing
as she told you.  And, indeed, until you are sure there is no such
person, you are bound to do it, for you promised.'

'It seems to me,' said his father, 'that if a lady comes to you in a
dream, Curdie, and tells you not to talk about her when you wake, the
least you can do is to hold your tongue.'

'True, Father!  Yes, Mother, I'll do it,' said Curdie.

Then they went to bed, and sleep, which is the night of the soul, next
took them in its arms and made them well.



CHAPTER 5

The Miners

It much increased Curdie's feeling of the strangeness of the whole
affair, that, the next morning, when they were at work in the mine, the
party of which he and his father were two, just as if they had known
what had happened to him the night before, began talking about all
manner of wonderful tales that were abroad in the country, chiefly, of
course, those connected with the mines, and the mountains in which they
lay.  Their wives and mothers and grandmothers were their chief
authorities.  For when they sat by their firesides they heard their
wives telling their children the selfsame tales, with little
differences, and here and there one they had not heard before, which
they had heard their mothers and grandmothers tell in one or other of
the same cottages.

At length they came to speak of a certain strange being they called Old
Mother Wotherwop.  Some said their wives had seen her.  It appeared as
they talked that not one had seen her more than once. Some of their
mothers and grandmothers, however, had seen her also, and they all had
told them tales about her when they were children. They said she could
take any shape she liked, but that in reality she was a withered old
woman, so old and so withered that she was as thin as a sieve with a
lamp behind it; that she was never seen except at night, and when
something terrible had taken place, or was going to take place--such as
the falling in of the roof of a mine, or the breaking out of water in
it.

She had more than once been seen--it was always at night--beside some
well, sitting on the brink of it, and leaning over and stirring it with
her forefinger, which was six times as long as any of the rest.  And
whoever for months after drank of that well was sure to be ill.  To
this, one of them, however, added that he remembered his mother saying
that whoever in bad health drank of the well was sure to get better.
But the majority agreed that the former was the right version of the
story--for was she not a witch, an old hating witch, whose delight was
to do mischief?  One said he had heard that she took the shape of a
young woman sometimes, as beautiful as an angel, and then was most
dangerous of all, for she struck every man who looked upon her
stone-blind.

Peter ventured the question whether she might not as likely be an angel
that took the form of an old woman, as an old woman that took the form
of an angel.  But nobody except Curdie, who was holding his peace with
all his might, saw any sense in the question.  They said an old woman
might be very glad to make herself look like a young one, but who ever
heard of a young and beautiful one making herself look old and ugly?

Peter asked why they were so much more ready to believe the bad that
was said of her than the good.  They answered, because she was bad.  He
asked why they believed her to be bad, and they answered, because she
did bad things.  When he asked how they knew that, they said, because
she was a bad creature.  Even if they didn't know it, they said, a
woman like that was so much more likely to be bad than good.  Why did
she go about at night?  Why did she appear only now and then, and on
such occasions?  One went on to tell how one night when his grandfather
had been having a jolly time of it with his friends in the market town,
she had served him so upon his way home that the poor man never drank a
drop of anything stronger than water after it to the day of his death.
She dragged him into a bog, and tumbled him up and down in it till he
was nearly dead.

'I suppose that was her way of teaching him what a good thing water
was,' said Peter; but the man, who liked strong drink, did not see the
joke.

'They do say,' said another, 'that she has lived in the old house over
there ever since the little princess left it.  They say too that the
housekeeper knows all about it, and is hand and glove with the old
witch.  I don't doubt they have many a nice airing together on
broomsticks.  But I don't doubt either it's all nonsense, and there's
no such person at all.'

'When our cow died,' said another, 'she was seen going round and round
the cowhouse the same night.  To be sure she left a fine calf behind
her--I mean the cow did, not the witch.  I wonder she didn't kill that,
too, for she'll be a far finer cow than ever her mother was.'

'My old woman came upon her one night, not long before the water broke
out in the mine, sitting on a stone on the hillside with a whole
congregation of cobs about her.  When they saw my wife they all
scampered off as fast as they could run, and where the witch was
sitting there was nothing to be seen but a withered bracken bush.  I
made no doubt myself she was putting them up to it.'

And so they went on with one foolish tale after another, while Peter
put in a word now and then, and Curdie diligently held his peace.  But
his silence at last drew attention upon it, and one of them said:

'Come, young Curdie, what are you thinking of?'

'How do you know I'm thinking of anything?' asked Curdie.

'Because you're not saying anything.'

'Does it follow then that, as you are saying so much, you're not
thinking at all?' said Curdie.

'I know what he's thinking,' said one who had not yet spoken; 'he's
thinking what a set of fools you are to talk such rubbish; as if ever
there was or could be such an old woman as you say!  I'm sure Curdie
knows better than all that comes to.'

'I think,' said Curdie, 'it would be better that he who says anything
about her should be quite sure it is true, lest she should hear him,
and not like to be slandered.'

'But would she like it any better if it were true?' said the same man.
'If she is What they say--I don't know--but I never knew a man that
wouldn't go in a rage to be called the very thing he was.'

'If bad things were true of her, and I knew it,' said Curdie, 'I would
not hesitate to say them, for I will never give in to being afraid of
anything that's bad.  I suspect that the things they tell, however, if
we knew all about them, would turn out to have nothing but good in
them; and I won't say a word more for fear I should say something that
mightn't be to her mind.'

They all burst into a loud laugh.

'Hear the parson!' they cried.  'He believes in the witch!  Ha! ha!'

'He's afraid of her!'

'And says all she does is good!'

'He wants to make friends with her, that she may help him to find the
silver ore.'

'Give me my own eyes and a good divining rod before all the witches in
the world!  And so I'd advise you too, Master Curdie; that is, when
your eyes have grown to be worth anything, and you have learned to cut
the hazel fork.'

Thus they all mocked and jeered at him, but he did his best to keep his
temper and go quietly on with his work.  He got as close to his father
as he could, however, for that helped him to bear it.  As soon as they
were tired of laughing and mocking, Curdie was friendly with them, and
long before their midday meal all between them was as it had been.

But when the evening came, Peter and Curdie felt that they would rather
walk home together without other company, and therefore lingered behind
when the rest of the men left the mine.



CHAPTER 6

The Emerald

Father and son had seated themselves on a projecting piece of rock at a
corner where three galleries met--the one they had come along from
their work, one to the right leading out of the mountain, and the other
to the left leading far into a portion of it which had been long
disused.  Since the inundation caused by the goblins, it had indeed
been rendered impassable by the settlement of a quantity of the water,
forming a small but very deep lake, in a part where there was a
considerable descent.

They had just risen and were turning to the right, when a gleam caught
their eyes, and made them look along the whole gallery.  Far up they
saw a pale green light, whence issuing they could not tell, about
halfway between floor and roof of the passage.  They saw nothing but
the light, which was like a large star, with a point of darker colour
yet brighter radiance in the heart of it, whence the rest of the light
shot out in rays that faded toward the ends until they vanished.  It
shed hardly any light around it, although in itself it was so bright as
to sting the eyes that beheld it. Wonderful stories had from ages gone
been current in the mines about certain magic gems which gave out light
of themselves, and this light looked just like what might be supposed
to shoot from the heart of such a gem.

They went up the old gallery to find out what it could be.  To their
surprise they found, however, that, after going some distance, they
were no nearer to it, so far as they could judge, than when they
started.  It did not seem to move, and yet they moving did not approach
it.  Still they persevered, for it was far too wonderful a thing to
lose sight of, so long as they could keep it.  At length they drew near
the hollow where the water lay, and still were no nearer the light.
Where they expected to be stopped by the water, however, water was
none: something had taken place in some part of the mine that had
drained it off, and the gallery lay open as in former times.

And now, to their surprise, the light, instead of being in front of
them, was shining at the same distance to the right, where they did not
know there was any passage at all.  Then they discovered, by the light
of the lanterns they carried, that there the water had broken through,
and made an entrance to a part of the mountain of which Peter knew
nothing.  But they were hardly well into it, still following the light,
before Curdie thought he recognized some of the passages he had so
often gone through when he was watching the goblins.

After they had advanced a long way, with many turnings, now to the
right, now to the left, all at once their eyes seemed to come suddenly
to themselves, and they became aware that the light which they had
taken to be a great way from them was in reality almost within reach of
their hands.

The same instant it began to grow larger and thinner, the point of
light grew dim as it spread, the greenness melted away, and in a moment
or two, instead of the star, a dark, dark and yet luminous face was
looking at them with living eyes.  And Curdie felt a great awe swell up
in his heart, for he thought he had seen those eyes before.

'I see you know me, Curdie,' said a voice.

'If your eyes are you, ma'am, then I know you,' said Curdie.  'But I
never saw your face before.'

'Yes, you have seen it, Curdie,' said the voice.  And with that the
darkness of its complexion melted away, and down from the face dawned
out the form that belonged to it, until at last Curdie and his father
beheld a lady, beautiful exceedingly, dressed in something pale green,
like velvet, over which her hair fell in cataracts of a rich golden
colour.  It looked as if it were pouring down from her head, and, like
the water of the Dustbrook, vanishing in a golden vapour ere it reached
the floor.  It came flowing from under the edge of a coronet of gold,
set with alternated pearls and emeralds.  In front of the crown was a
great emerald, which looked somehow as if out of it had come the light
they had followed. There was no ornament else about her, except on her
slippers, which were one mass of gleaming emeralds, of various shades
of green, all mingling lovelily like the waving of grass in the wind
and sun. She looked about five-and-twenty years old.  And for all the
difference, Curdie knew somehow or other, he could not have told how,
that the face before him was that of the old princess, Irene's
great-great-grandmother.

By this time all around them had grown light, and now first they could
see where they were.  They stood in a great splendid cavern, which
Curdie recognized as that in which the goblins held their state
assemblies.  But, strange to tell, the light by which they saw came
streaming, sparkling, and shooting from stones of many colours in the
sides and roof and floor of the cavern--stones of all the colours of
the rainbow, and many more.  It was a glorious sight--the whole rugged
place flashing with colours--in one spot a great light of deep
carbuncular red, in another of sapphirine blue, in another of topaz
yellow; while here and there were groups of stones of all hues and
sizes, and again nebulous spaces of thousands of tiniest spots of
brilliancy of every conceivable shade.  Sometimes the colours ran
together, and made a little river or lake of lambent, interfusing, and
changing tints, which, by their variegation, seemed to imitate the
flowing of water, or waves made by the wind.

Curdie would have gazed entranced, but that all the beauty of the
cavern, yes, of all he knew of the whole creation, seemed gathered in
one centre of harmony and loveliness in the person of the ancient lady
who stood before him in the very summer of beauty and strength.
Turning from the first glance at the circuadjacent splendour, it
dwindled into nothing as he looked again at the lady. Nothing flashed
or glowed or shone about her, and yet it was with a prevision of the
truth that he said,

'I was here once before, ma'am.'

'I know that, Curdie,' she replied.

'The place was full of torches, and the walls gleamed, but nothing as
they do now, and there is no light in the place.'

'You want to know where the light comes from?' she said, smiling.

'Yes, ma'am.'

'Then see: I will go out of the cavern.  Do not be afraid, but watch.'

She went slowly out.  The moment she turned her back to go, the light
began to pale and fade; the moment she was out of their sight the place
was black as night, save that now the smoky yellow-red of their lamps,
which they thought had gone out long ago, cast a dusky glimmer around
them.



CHAPTER 7

What Is in a Name?

For a time that seemed to them long, the two men stood waiting, while
still the Mother of Light did not return.  So long was she absent that
they began to grow anxious: how were they to find their way from the
natural hollows of the mountain crossed by goblin paths, if their lamps
should go out?  To spend the night there would mean to sit and wait
until an earthquake rent the mountain, or the earth herself fell back
into the smelting furnace of the sun whence she had issued--for it was
all night and no faintest dawn in the bosom of the world.

So long did they wait unrevisited, that, had there not been two of
them, either would at length have concluded the vision a home-born
product of his own seething brain.  And their lamps were going out, for
they grew redder and smokier!  But they did not lose courage, for there
is a kind of capillary attraction in the facing of two souls, that
lifts faith quite beyond the level to which either could raise it
alone: they knew that they had seen the lady of emeralds, and it was to
give them their own desire that she had gone from them, and neither
would yield for a moment to the half doubts and half dreads that awoke
in his heart.

And still she who with her absence darkened their air did not return.
They grew weary, and sat down on the rocky floor, for wait they
would--indeed, wait they must.  Each set his lamp by his knee, and
watched it die.  Slowly it sank, dulled, looked lazy and stupid.  But
ever as it sank and dulled, the image in his mind of the Lady of Light
grew stronger and clearer.  Together the two lamps panted and
shuddered.  First one, then the other went out, leaving for a moment a
great, red, evil-smelling snuff.  Then all was the blackness of
darkness up to their very hearts and everywhere around them.  Was it?
No.  Far away--it looked miles away--shone one minute faint point of
green light--where, who could tell?  They only knew that it shone.  It
grew larger, and seemed to draw nearer, until at last, as they watched
with speechless delight and expectation, it seemed once more within
reach of an outstretched hand.  Then it spread and melted away as
before, and there were eyes--and a face--and a lovely form--and lo! the
whole cavern blazing with lights innumerable, and gorgeous, yet soft
and interfused--so blended, indeed, that the eye had to search and see
in order to separate distinct spots of special colour.

The moment they saw the speck in the vast distance they had risen and
stood on their feet.  When it came nearer they bowed their heads.  Yet
now they looked with fearless eyes, for the woman that was old yet
young was a joy to see, and filled their hearts with reverent delight.
She turned first to Peter.

'I have known you long,' she said.  'I have met you going to and from
the mine, and seen you working in it for the last forty years.'

'How should it be, madam, that a grand lady like you should take notice
of a poor man like me?' said Peter, humbly, but more foolishly than he
could then have understood.

'I am poor as well as rich,' said she.  'I, too, work for my bread, and
I show myself no favour when I pay myself my own wages.  Last night
when you sat by the brook, and Curdie told you about my pigeon, and my
spinning, and wondered whether he could believe that he had actually
seen me, I heard what you said to each other.  I am always about, as
the miners said the other night when they talked of me as Old Mother
Wotherwop.'

The lovely lady laughed, and her laugh was a lightning of delight in
their souls.

'Yes,' she went on, 'you have got to thank me that you are so poor,
Peter.  I have seen to that, and it has done well for both you and me,
my friend.  Things come to the poor that can't get in at the door of
the rich.  Their money somehow blocks it up.  It is a great privilege
to be poor, Peter--one that no man ever coveted, and but a very few
have sought to retain, but one that yet many have learned to prize.
You must not mistake, however, and imagine it a virtue; it is but a
privilege, and one also that, like other privileges, may be terribly
misused.  Had you been rich, my Peter, you would not have been so good
as some rich men I know.  And now I am going to tell you what no one
knows but myself: you, Peter, and your wife both have the blood of the
royal family in your veins.  I have been trying to cultivate your
family tree, every branch of which is known to me, and I expect Curdie
to turn out a blossom on it.  Therefore I have been training him for a
work that must soon be done.  I was near losing him, and had to send my
pigeon.  Had he not shot it, that would have been better; but he
repented, and that shall be as good in the end.'

She turned to Curdie and smiled.

'Ma'am,' said Curdie, 'may I ask questions?'

'Why not, Curdie?'

'Because I have been told, ma'am, that nobody must ask the king
questions.'

'The king never made that law,' she answered, with some displeasure.
'You may ask me as many as you please--that is, so long as they are
sensible.  Only I may take a few thousand years to answer some of them.
But that's nothing.  Of all things time is the cheapest.'

'Then would you mind telling me now, ma'am, for I feel very confused
about it--are you the Lady of the Silver Moon?'

'Yes, Curdie; you may call me that if you like.  What it means is true.'

'And now I see you dark, and clothed in green, and the mother of all
the light that dwells in the stones of the earth!  And up there they
call you Old Mother Wotherwop!  And the Princess Irene told me you were
her great-great-grandmother!  And you spin the spider threads, and take
care of a whole people of pigeons; and you are worn to a pale shadow
with old age; and are as young as anybody can be, not to be too young;
and as strong, I do believe, as I am.'

The lady stooped toward a large green stone bedded in the rock of the
floor, and looking like a well of grassy light in it.  She laid hold of
it with her fingers, broke it out, and gave it to Peter. 'There!' cried
Curdie.  'I told you so.  Twenty men could not have done that.  And
your fingers are white and smooth as any lady's in the land.  I don't
know what to make of it.'

'I could give you twenty names more to call me, Curdie, and not one of
them would be a false one.  What does it matter how many names if the
person is one?'

'Ah!  But it is not names only, ma'am.  Look at what you were like last
night, and what I see you now!'

'Shapes are only dresses, Curdie, and dresses are only names.  That
which is inside is the same all the time.'

'But then how can all the shapes speak the truth?'

'It would want thousands more to speak the truth, Curdie; and then they
could not.  But there is a point I must not let you mistake about.  It
is one thing the shape I choose to put on, and quite another the shape
that foolish talk and nursery tale may please to put upon me.  Also, it
is one thing what you or your father may think about me, and quite
another what a foolish or bad man may see in me.  For instance, if a
thief were to come in here just now, he would think he saw the demon of
the mine, all in green flames, come to protect her treasure, and would
run like a hunted wild goat.  I should be all the same, but his evil
eyes would see me as I was not.'

'I think I understand,' said Curdie.

'Peter,' said the lady, turning then to him, 'you will have to give up
Curdie for a little while.'

'So long as he loves us, ma'am, that will not matter--much.'

'Ah! you are right there, my friend,' said the beautiful princess. And
as she said it she put out her hand, and took the hard, horny hand of
the miner in it, and held it for a moment lovingly.

'I need say no more,' she added, 'for we understand each other--you and
I, Peter.'

The tears came into Peter's eyes.  He bowed his head in thankfulness,
and his heart was much too full to speak.

Then the great old, young, beautiful princess turned to Curdie.

'Now, Curdie, are you ready?' she said.

'Yes, ma'am,' answered Curdie.

'You do not know what for.'

'You do, ma'am.  That is enough.'

'You could not have given me a better answer, or done more to prepare
yourself, Curdie,' she returned, with one of her radiant smiles.  'Do
you think you will know me again?'

'I think so.  But how can I tell what you may look like next?'

'Ah, that indeed!  How can you tell?  Or how could I expect you should?
But those who know me well, know me whatever new dress or shape or name
I may be in; and by and by you will have learned to do so too.'

'But if you want me to know you again, ma'am, for certain sure,' said
Curdie, 'could you not give me some sign, or tell me something about
you that never changes--or some other way to know you, or thing to know
you by?'

'No, Curdie; that would be to keep you from knowing me.  You must know
me in quite another way from that.  It would not be the least use to
you or me either if I were to make you know me in that way. It would be
but to know the sign of Me--not to know me myself.  It would be no
better than if I were to take this emerald out of my crown and give it
to you to take home with you, and you were to call it me, and talk to
it as if it heard and saw and loved you. Much good that would do you,
Curdie!  No; you must do what you can to know me, and if you do, you
will.  You shall see me again in very different circumstances from
these, and, I will tell you so much, it may be in a very different
shape.  But come now, I will lead you out of this cavern; my good Joan
will be getting too anxious about you.  One word more: you will allow
that the men knew little what they were talking about this morning,
when they told all those tales of Old Mother Wotherwop; but did it
occur to you to think how it was they fell to talking about me at all?
It was because I came to them; I was beside them all the time they were
talking about me, though they were far enough from knowing it, and had
very little besides foolishness to say.'

As she spoke she turned and led the way from the cavern, which, as if a
door had been closed, sank into absolute blackness behind them.  And
now they saw nothing more of the lady except the green star, which
again seemed a good distance in front of them, and to which they came
no nearer, although following it at a quick pace through the mountain.
Such was their confidence in her guidance, however, and so fearless
were they in consequence, that they felt their way neither with hand
nor foot, but walked straight on through the pitch-dark galleries.
When at length the night of the upper world looked in at the mouth of
the mine, the green light seemed to lose its way among the stars, and
they saw it no more.

Out they came into the cool, blessed night.  It was very late, and only
starlight.  To their surprise, three paces away they saw, seated upon a
stone, an old country-woman, in a cloak which they took for black.
When they came close up to it, they saw it was red.

'Good evening!' said Peter.

'Good evening!' returned the old woman, in a voice as old as herself.

But Curdie took off his cap and said:

'I am your servant, Princess.'

The old woman replied:

'Come to me in the dove tower tomorrow night, Curdie--alone.'

'I will, ma'am,' said Curdie.

So they parted, and father and son went home to wife and mother--two
persons in one rich, happy woman.



CHAPTER 8

Curdie's Mission

The next night Curdie went home from the mine a little earlier than
usual, to make himself tidy before going to the dove tower.  The
princess had not appointed an exact time for him to be there; he would
go as near the time he had gone first as he could.  On his way to the
bottom of the hill, he met his father coming up.  The sun was then
down, and the warm first of the twilight filled the evening.  He came
rather wearily up the hill: the road, he thought, must have grown
steeper in parts since he was Curdie's age.  His back was to the light
of the sunset, which closed him all round in a beautiful setting, and
Curdie thought what a grand-looking man his father was, even when he
was tired.  It is greed and laziness and selfishness, not hunger or
weariness or cold, that take the dignity out of a man, and make him
look mean.

'Ah, Curdie!  There you are!' he said, seeing his son come bounding
along as if it were morning with him and not evening.

'You look tired, Father,' said Curdie.

'Yes, my boy.  I'm not so young as you.'

'Nor so old as the princess,' said Curdie.

'Tell me this,' said Peter, 'why do people talk about going downhill
when they begin to get old?  It seems to me that then first they begin
to go uphill.'

'You looked to me, Father, when I caught sight of you, as if you had
been climbing the hill all your life, and were soon to get to the top.'

'Nobody can tell when that will be,' returned Peter.  'We're so ready
to think we're just at the top when it lies miles away.  But I must not
keep you, my boy, for you are wanted; and we shall be anxious to know
what the princess says to you--that is, if she will allow you to tell
us.'

'I think she will, for she knows there is nobody more to be trusted
than my father and mother,' said Curdie, with pride.

And away he shot, and ran, and jumped, and seemed almost to fly down
the long, winding, steep path, until he came to the gate of the king's
house.

There he met an unexpected obstruction: in the open door stood the
housekeeper, and she seemed to broaden herself out until she almost
filled the doorway.

'So!' she said, 'it's you, is it, young man?  You are the person that
comes in and goes out when he pleases, and keeps running up and down my
stairs without ever saying by your leave, or even wiping his shoes, and
always leaves the door open!  Don't you know this is my house?'

'No, I do not,' returned Curdie respectfully.  'You forget, ma'am, that
it is the king's house.'

'That is all the same.  The king left it to me to take care of--and
that you shall know!'

'Is the king dead, ma'am, that he has left it to you?' asked Curdie,
half in doubt from the self-assertion of the woman.

'Insolent fellow!' exclaimed the housekeeper.  'Don't you see by my
dress that I am in the king's service?'

'And am I not one of his miners?'

'Ah! that goes for nothing.  I am one of his household.  You are an
out-of-doors labourer.  You are a nobody.  You carry a pickaxe.  I
carry the keys at my girdle.  See!'

'But you must not call one a nobody to whom the king has spoken,' said
Curdie.

'Go along with you!' cried the housekeeper, and would have shut the
door in his face, had she not been afraid that when she stepped back he
would step in ere she could get it in motion, for it was very heavy and
always seemed unwilling to shut.  Curdie came a pace nearer.  She
lifted the great house key from her side, and threatened to strike him
down with it, calling aloud on Mar and Whelk and Plout, the menservants
under her, to come and help her. Ere one of them could answer, however,
she gave a great shriek and turned and fled, leaving the door wide open.

Curdie looked behind him, and saw an animal whose gruesome oddity even
he, who knew so many of the strange creatures, two of which were never
the same, that used to live inside the mountain with their masters the
goblins, had never seen equalled.  Its eyes were flaming with anger,
but it seemed to be at the housekeeper, for it came cowering and
creeping up and laid its head on the ground at Curdie's feet.  Curdie
hardly waited to look at it, however, but ran into the house, eager to
get up the stairs before any of the men should come to annoy--he had no
fear of their preventing him. Without halt or hindrance, though the
passages were nearly dark, he reached the door of the princess's
workroom, and knocked.

'Come in,' said the voice of the princess.

Curdie opened the door--but, to his astonishment, saw no room there.
Could he have opened a wrong door?  There was the great sky, and the
stars, and beneath he could see nothing only darkness! But what was
that in the sky, straight in front of him?  A great wheel of fire,
turning and turning, and flashing out blue lights!

'Come in, Curdie,' said the voice again.

'I would at once, ma'am,' said Curdie, 'if I were sure I was standing
at your door.'

'Why should you doubt it, Curdie?'

'Because I see neither walls nor floor, only darkness and the great
sky.'

'That is all right, Curdie.  Come in.'

Curdie stepped forward at once.  He was indeed, for the very crumb of a
moment, tempted to feel before him with his foot; but he saw that would
be to distrust the princess, and a greater rudeness he could not offer
her.  So he stepped straight in--I will not say without a little
tremble at the thought of finding no floor beneath his foot.  But that
which had need of the floor found it, and his foot was satisfied.

No sooner was he in than he saw that the great revolving wheel in the
sky was the princess's spinning wheel, near the other end of the room,
turning very fast.  He could see no sky or stars any more, but the
wheel was flashing out blue--oh, such lovely sky-blue light!--and
behind it of course sat the princess, but whether an old woman as thin
as a skeleton leaf, or a glorious lady as young as perfection, he could
not tell for the turning and flashing of the wheel.

'Listen to the wheel,' said the voice which had already grown dear to
Curdie: its very tone was precious like a jewel, not as a jewel, for no
jewel could compare with it in preciousness.

And Curdie listened and listened.

'What is it saying?' asked the voice.

'It is singing,' answered Curdie.

'What is it singing?'

Curdie tried to make out, but thought he could not; for no sooner had
he got hold of something than it vanished again.

Yet he listened, and listened, entranced with delight.

'Thank you, Curdie, said the voice.

'Ma'am,' said Curdie, 'I did try hard for a while, but I could not make
anything of it.'

'Oh yes, you did, and you have been telling it to me!  Shall I tell you
again what I told my wheel, and my wheel told you, and you have just
told me without knowing it?'

'Please, ma'am.'

Then the lady began to sing, and her wheel spun an accompaniment to her
song, and the music of the wheel was like the music of an Aeolian harp
blown upon by the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Oh, the sweet
sounds of that spinning wheel!  Now they were gold, now silver, now
grass, now palm trees, now ancient cities, now rubies, now mountain
brooks, now peacock's feathers, now clouds, now snowdrops, and now
mid-sea islands.  But for the voice that sang through it all, about
that I have no words to tell.  It would make you weep if I were able to
tell you what that was like, it was so beautiful and true and lovely.
But this is something like the words of its song:


  The stars are spinning their threads,
  And the clouds are the dust that flies,
  And the suns are weaving them up
  For the time when the sleepers shall rise.

  The ocean in music rolls,
  And gems are turning to eyes,
  And the trees are gathering souls
  For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

  The weepers are learning to smile,
  And laughter to glean the sighs;
  Burn and bury the care and guile,
  For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

  Oh, the dews and the moths and the daisy red,
  The larks and the glimmers and flows!
  The lilies and sparrows and daily bread,
  And the something that nobody knows!


The princess stopped, her wheel stopped, and she laughed.  And her
laugh was sweeter than song and wheel; sweeter than running brook and
silver bell; sweeter than joy itself, for the heart of the laugh was
love.

'Come now, Curdie, to this side of my wheel, and you will find me,' she
said; and her laugh seemed sounding on still in the words, as if they
were made of breath that had laughed.

Curdie obeyed, and passed the wheel, and there she stood to receive
him!--fairer than when he saw her last, a little younger still, and
dressed not in green and emeralds, but in pale blue, with a coronet of
silver set with pearls, and slippers covered with opals that gleamed
every colour of the rainbow.  It was some time before Curdie could take
his eyes from the marvel of her loveliness. Fearing at last that he was
rude, he turned them away; and, behold, he was in a room that was for
beauty marvellous!  The lofty ceiling was all a golden vine, Whose
great clusters of carbuncles, rubies, and chrysoberyls hung down like
the bosses of groined arches, and in its centre hung the most glorious
lamp that human eyes ever saw--the Silver Moon itself, a globe of
silver, as it seemed, with a heart of light so wondrous potent that it
rendered the mass translucent, and altogether radiant.

The room was so large that, looking back, he could scarcely see the end
at which he entered; but the other was only a few yards from him--and
there he saw another wonder: on a huge hearth a great fire was burning,
and the fire was a huge heap of roses, and yet it was fire.  The smell
of the roses filled the air, and the heat of the flames of them glowed
upon his face.  He turned an inquiring look upon the lady, and saw that
she was now seated in an ancient chair, the legs of which were crusted
with gems, but the upper part like a nest of daisies and moss and green
grass.

'Curdie,' she said in answer to his eyes, 'you have stood more than one
trial already, and have stood them well: now I am going to put you to a
harder.  Do you think you are prepared for it?'

'How can I tell, ma'am,' he returned, 'seeing I do not know what it is,
or what preparation it needs?  Judge me yourself, ma'am.'

'It needs only trust and obedience,' answered the lady.

'I dare not say anything, ma'am.  If you think me fit, command me.'

'It will hurt you terribly, Curdie, but that will be all; no real hurt
but much good will come to you from it.'

Curdie made no answer but stood gazing with parted lips in the lady's
face.

'Go and thrust both your hands into that fire,' she said quickly,
almost hurriedly.

Curdie dared not stop to think.  It was much too terrible to think
about.  He rushed to the fire, and thrust both of his hands right into
the middle of the heap of flaming roses, and his arms halfway up to the
elbows.  And it did hurt!  But he did not draw them back. He held the
pain as if it were a thing that would kill him if he let it go--as
indeed it would have done.  He was in terrible fear lest it should
conquer him.

But when it had risen to the pitch that he thought he could bear it no
longer, it began to fall again, and went on growing less and less until
by contrast with its former severity it had become rather pleasant.  At
last it ceased altogether, and Curdie thought his hands must be burned
to cinders if not ashes, for he did not feel them at all.  The princess
told him to take them out and look at them.  He did so, and found that
all that was gone of them was the rough, hard skin; they were white and
smooth like the princess's.

'Come to me,' she said.

He obeyed and saw, to his surprise, that her face looked as if she had
been weeping.

'Oh, Princess!  What is the matter?' he cried.  'Did I make a noise and
vex you?'

'No, Curdie, she answered; 'but it was very bad.'

'Did you feel it too then?'

'Of course I did.  But now it is over, and all is well.  Would you like
to know why I made You put your hands in the fire?' Curdie looked at
them again--then said:

'To take the marks of the work off them and make them fit for the
king's court, I suppose.'

'No, Curdie,' answered the princess, shaking her head, for she was not
pleased with the answer.  'It would be a poor way of making your hands
fit for the king's court to take off them signs of his service.  There
is a far greater difference on them than that.  Do you feel none?'

'No, ma'am.'

'You will, though, by and by, when the time comes.  But perhaps even
then you might not know what had been given you, therefore I will tell
you.  Have you ever heard what some philosophers say--that men were all
animals once?'

'No, ma'am.'

'It is of no consequence.  But there is another thing that is of the
greatest consequence--this: that all men, if they do not take care, go
down the hill to the animals' country; that many men are actually, all
their lives, going to be beasts.  People knew it once, but it is long
since they forgot it.'

'I am not surprised to hear it, ma'am, when I think of some of our
miners.'

'Ah!  But you must beware, Curdie, how you say of this man or that man
that he is travelling beastward.  There are not nearly so many going
that way as at first sight you might think.  When you met your father
on the hill tonight, you stood and spoke together on the same spot; and
although one of you was going up and the other coming down, at a little
distance no one could have told which was bound in the one direction
and which in the other.  Just so two people may be at the same spot in
manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better and the other
worse, which is just the greatest of all differences that could
possibly exist between them.'

'But ma'am,' said Curdie, 'where is the good of knowing that there is
such a difference, if you can never know where it is?'

'Now, Curdie, you must mind exactly what words I use, because although
the right words cannot do exactly what I want them to do, the wrong
words will certainly do what I do not want them to do. I did not say
you can never know.  When there is a necessity for your knowing, when
you have to do important business with this or that man, there is
always a way of knowing enough to keep you from any great blunder.  And
as you will have important business to do by and by, and that with
people of whom you yet know nothing, it will be necessary that you
should have some better means than usual of learning the nature of them.

'Now listen.  Since it is always what they do, whether in their minds
or their bodies, that makes men go down to be less than men, that is,
beasts, the change always comes first in their hands--and first of all
in the inside hands, to which the outside ones are but as the gloves.
They do not know it of course; for a beast does not know that he is a
beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast the less he knows it.
Neither can their best friends, or their worst enemies indeed, see any
difference in their hands, for they see only the living gloves of them.
But there are not a few who feel a vague something repulsive in the
hand of a man who is growing a beast.

'Now here is what the rose-fire has done for you: it has made your
hands so knowing and wise, it has brought your real hands so near the
outside of your flesh gloves, that you will henceforth be able to know
at once the hand of a man who is growing into a beast; nay, more--you
will at once feel the foot of the beast he is growing, just as if there
were no glove made like a man's hand between you and it.

'Hence of course it follows that you will be able often, and with
further education in zoology, will be able always to tell, not only
when a man is growing a beast, but what beast he is growing to, for you
will know the foot--what it is and what beast's it is. According, then,
to your knowledge of that beast will be your knowledge of the man you
have to do with.  Only there is one beautiful and awful thing about it,
that if any one gifted with this perception once uses it for his own
ends, it is taken from him, and then, not knowing that it is gone, he
is in a far worse condition than before, for he trusts to what he has
not got.'

'How dreadful!' Said Curdie.  'I must mind what I am about.'

'Yes, indeed, Curdie.'

'But may not one sometimes make a mistake without being able to help
it?'

'Yes.  But so long as he is not after his own ends, he will never make
a serious mistake.'

'I suppose you want me, ma'am, to warn every one whose hand tells me
that he is growing a beast--because, as you say, he does not know it
himself.'

The princess smiled.

'Much good that would do, Curdie!  I don't say there are no cases in
which it would be of use, but they are very rare and peculiar cases,
and if such come you will know them.  To such a person there is in
general no insult like the truth.  He cannot endure it, not because he
is growing a beast, but because he is ceasing to be a man.  It is the
dying man in him that it makes uncomfortable, and he trots, or creeps,
or swims, or flutters out of its way--calls it a foolish feeling, a
whim, an old wives' fable, a bit of priests' humbug, an effete
superstition, and so on.'

'And is there no hope for him?  Can nothing be done?  It's so awful to
think of going down, down, down like that!'

'Even when it's with his own will?'

'That's what seems to me to make it worst of all,' said Curdie.

'You are right,' answered the princess, nodding her head; 'but there is
this amount of excuse to make for all such, remember--that they do not
know what or how horrid their coming fate is. Many a lady, so delicate
and nice that she can bear nothing coarser than the finest linen to
touch her body, if she had a mirror that could show her the animal she
is growing to, as it lies waiting within the fair skin and the fine
linen and the silk and the jewels, would receive a shock that might
possibly wake her up.'

'Why then, ma'am, shouldn't she have it?'

The princess held her peace.

'Come here, Lina,' she said after a long pause.

From somewhere behind Curdie, crept forward the same hideous animal
which had fawned at his feet at the door, and which, without his
knowing it, had followed him every step up the dove tower.  She ran to
the princess, and lay down flat at her feet, looking up at her with an
expression so pitiful that in Curdie's heart it overcame all the
ludicrousness of her horrible mass of incongruities.  She had a very
short body, and very long legs made like an elephant's, so that in
lying down she kneeled with both pairs.  Her tail, which dragged on the
floor behind her, was twice as long and quite as thick as her body.
Her head was something between that of a polar bear and a snake.  Her
eyes were dark green, with a yellow light in them.  Her under teeth
came up like a fringe of icicles, only very white, outside of her upper
lip.  Her throat looked as if the hair had been plucked off.  It showed
a skin white and smooth.

'Give Curdie a paw, Lina,' said the princess.

The creature rose, and, lifting a long foreleg, held up a great doglike
paw to Curdie.  He took it gently.  But what a shudder, as of terrified
delight, ran through him, when, instead of the paw of a dog, such as it
seemed to his eyes, he clasped in his great mining fist the soft, neat
little hand of a child!  He took it in both of his, and held it as if
he could not let it go.  The green eyes stared at him with their yellow
light, and the mouth was turned up toward him with its constant half
grin; but here was the child's hand!  If he could but pull the child
out of the beast! His eyes sought the princess.  She was watching him
with evident satisfaction.

'Ma'am, here is a child's hand!' said Curdie.

'Your gift does more for you than it promised.  It is yet better to
perceive a hidden good than a hidden evil.'

'But,' began Curdie.

'I am not going to answer any more questions this evening,' interrupted
the princess.  'You have not half got to the bottom of the answers I
have already given you.  That paw in your hand now might almost teach
you the whole science of natural history--the heavenly sort, I mean.'

'I will think,' said Curdie.  'But oh! please! one word more: may I
tell my father and mother all about it?'

'Certainly--though perhaps now it may be their turn to find it a little
difficult to believe that things went just as you must tell them.'

'They shall see that I believe it all this time,' said Curdie.

'Tell them that tomorrow morning you must set out for the court--not
like a great man, but just as poor as you are.  They had better not
speak about it.  Tell them also that it will be a long time before they
hear of you again, but they must not lose heart.  And tell your father
to lay that stone I gave him at night in a safe place--not because of
the greatness of its price, although it is such an emerald as no prince
has in his crown, but because it will be a news-bearer between you and
him.  As often as he gets at all anxious about you, he must take it and
lay it in the fire, and leave it there when he goes to bed.  In the
morning he must find it in the ashes, and if it be as green as ever,
then all goes well with you; if it have lost colour, things go ill with
you; but if it be very pale indeed, then you are in great danger, and
he must come to me.'

'Yes, ma'am,' said Curdie.  'Please, am I to go now?'

'Yes,' answered the princess, and held out her hand to him.

Curdie took it, trembling with joy.  It was a very beautiful hand--not
small, very smooth, but not very soft--and just the same to his
fire-taught touch that it was to his eyes.  He would have stood there
all night holding it if she had not gently withdrawn it.

'I will provide you a servant,' she said, 'for your journey and to wait
upon you afterward.'

'But where am I to go, ma'am, and what am I to do?  You have given me
no message to carry, neither have you said what I am wanted for. I go
without a notion whether I am to walk this way or that, or what I am to
do when I get I don't know where.'

'Curdie!' said the princess, and there was a tone of reminder in his
own name as she spoke it, 'did I not tell you to tell your father and
mother that you were to set out for the court?  And you know that lies
to the north.  You must learn to use far less direct directions than
that.  You must not be like a dull servant that needs to be told again
and again before he will understand.  You have orders enough to start
with, and you will find, as you go on, and as you need to know, what
you have to do.  But I warn you that perhaps it will not look the least
like what you may have been fancying I should require of you.  I have
one idea of you and your work, and you have another.  I do not blame
you for that--you cannot help it yet; but you must be ready to let my
idea, which sets you working, set your idea right.  Be true and honest
and fearless, and all shall go well with you and your work, and all
with whom your work lies, and so with your parents--and me too,
Curdie,' she added after a little pause.

The young miner bowed his head low, patted the strange head that lay at
the princess's feet, and turned away.  As soon as he passed the
spinning wheel, which looked, in the midst of the glorious room, just
like any wheel you might find in a country cottage--old and worn and
dingy and dusty--the splendour of the place vanished, and he saw but
the big bare room he seemed at first to have entered, with the
moon--the princess's moon no doubt--shining in at one of the windows
upon the spinning wheel.



CHAPTER 9

Hands

Curdie went home, pondering much, and told everything to his father and
mother.  As the old princess had said, it was now their turn to find
what they heard hard to believe.  If they had not been able to trust
Curdie himself, they would have refused to believe more than the half
of what he reported, then they would have refused that half too, and at
last would most likely for a time have disbelieved in the very
existence of the princess, what evidence their own senses had given
them notwithstanding.

For he had nothing conclusive to show in proof of what he told them.
When he held out his hands to them, his mother said they looked as if
he had been washing them with soft soap, only they did smell of
something nicer than that, and she must allow it was more like roses
than anything else she knew.  His father could not see any difference
upon his hands, but then it was night, he said, and their poor little
lamp was not enough for his old eyes.  As to the feel of them, each of
his own hands, he said, was hard and horny enough for two, and it must
be the fault of the dullness of his own thick skin that he felt no
change on Curdie's palms.

'Here, Curdie,' said his mother, 'try my hand, and see what beast's paw
lies inside it.'

'No, Mother,' answered Curdie, half beseeching, half indignant, 'I will
not insult my new gift by making pretence to try it.  That would be
mockery.  There is no hand within yours but the hand of a true woman,
my mother.'

'I should like you just to take hold of my hand though,' said his
mother.  'You are my son, and may know all the bad there is in me.'

Then at once Curdie took her hand in his.  And when he had it, he kept
it, stroking it gently with his other hand.

'Mother,' he said at length, 'your hand feels just like that of the
princess.'

'What!  My horny, cracked, rheumatic old hand, with its big joints, and
its short nails all worn down to the quick with hard work--like the
hand of the beautiful princess!  Why, my child, you will make me fancy
your fingers have grown very dull indeed, instead of sharp and
delicate, if you talk such nonsense.  Mine is such an ugly hand I
should be ashamed to show it to any but one that loved me.  But love
makes all safe--doesn't it, Curdie?'

'Well, Mother, all I can say is that I don't feel a roughness, or a
crack, or a big joint, or a short nail.  Your hand feels just and
exactly, as near as I can recollect, and it's not more than two hours
since I had it in mine--well, I will say, very like indeed to that of
the old princess.'

'Go away, you flatterer,' said his mother, with a smile that showed how
she prized the love that lay beneath what she took for its hyperbole.
The praise even which one cannot accept is sweet from a true mouth.
'If that is all your new gift can do, it won't make a warlock of you,'
she added.

'Mother, it tells me nothing but the truth,' insisted Curdie, 'however
unlike the truth it may seem.  It wants no gift to tell what anybody's
outside hands are like.  But by it I know your inside hands are like
the princess's.'

'And I am sure the boy speaks true,' said Peter.  'He only says about
your hand what I have known ever so long about yourself, Joan.  Curdie,
your mother's foot is as pretty a foot as any lady's in the land, and
where her hand is not so pretty it comes of killing its beauty for you
and me, my boy.  And I can tell you more, Curdie.  I don't know much
about ladies and gentlemen, but I am sure your inside mother must be a
lady, as her hand tells you, and I will try to say how I know it.  This
is how: when I forget myself looking at her as she goes about her
work--and that happens often as I grow older--I fancy for a moment or
two that I am a gentleman; and when I wake up from my little dream, it
is only to feel the more strongly that I must do everything as a
gentleman should.  I will try to tell you what I mean, Curdie.  If a
gentleman--I mean a real gentleman, not a pretended one, of which sort
they say there are a many above ground--if a real gentleman were to
lose all his money and come down to work in the mines to get bread for
his family--do you think, Curdie, he would work like the lazy ones?
Would he try to do as little as he could for his wages?  I know the
sort of the true gentleman pretty near as well as he does himself.  And
my wife, that's your mother, Curdie, she's a true lady, you may take my
word for it, for it's she that makes me want to be a true gentleman.
Wife, the boy is in the right about your hand.'

'Now, Father, let me feel yours,' said Curdie, daring a little more.

'No, no, my boy,' answered Peter.  'I don't want to hear anything about
my hand or my head or my heart.  I am what I am, and I hope growing
better, and that's enough.  No, you shan't feel my hand. You must go to
bed, for you must start with the sun.'

It was not as if Curdie had been leaving them to go to prison, or to
make a fortune, and although they were sorry enough to lose him, they
were not in the least heartbroken or even troubled at his going.

As the princess had said he was to go like the poor man he was, Curdie
came down in the morning from his little loft dressed in his working
clothes.  His mother, who was busy getting his breakfast for him, while
his father sat reading to her out of an old book, would have had him
put on his holiday garments, which, she said, would look poor enough
among the fine ladies and gentlemen he was going to.  But Curdie said
he did not know that he was going among ladies and gentlemen, and that
as work was better than play, his workday clothes must on the whole be
better than his playday Clothes; and as his father accepted the
argument, his mother gave in.  When he had eaten his breakfast, she
took a pouch made of goatskin, with the long hair on it, filled it with
bread and cheese, and hung it over his shoulder.  Then his father gave
him a stick he had cut for him in the wood, and he bade them good-bye
rather hurriedly, for he was afraid of breaking down.  As he went out
he caught up his mattock and took it with him.  It had on the one side
a pointed curve of strong steel for loosening the earth and the ore,
and on the other a steel hammer for breaking the stones and rocks.
Just as he crossed the threshold the sun showed the first segment of
his disc above the horizon.



CHAPTER 10

The Heath

He had to go to the bottom of the hill to get into a country he could
cross, for the mountains to the north were full of precipices, and it
would have been losing time to go that way.  Not until he had reached
the king's house was it any use to turn northwards.  Many a look did he
raise, as he passed it, to the dove tower, and as long as it was in
sight, but he saw nothing of the lady of the pigeons.

On and on he fared, and came in a few hours to a country where there
were no mountains more--only hills, with great stretches of desolate
heath.  Here and there was a village, but that brought him little
pleasure, for the people were rougher and worse mannered than those in
the mountains, and as he passed through, the children came behind and
mocked him.

'There's a monkey running away from the mines!' they cried. Sometimes
their parents came out and encouraged them.

'He doesn't want to find gold for the king any longer--the lazybones!'
they would say.  'He'll be well taxed down here though, and he won't
like that either.'

But it was little to Curdie that men who did not know what he was about
should not approve of his proceedings.  He gave them a merry answer now
and then, and held diligently on his way.  When they got so rude as
nearly to make him angry, he would treat them as he used to treat the
goblins, and sing his own songs to keep out their foolish noises.  Once
a child fell as he turned to run away after throwing a stone at him.
He picked him up, kissed him, and carried him to his mother.  The woman
had run out in terror when she saw the strange miner about, as she
thought, to take vengeance on her boy.  When he put him in her arms,
she blessed him, and Curdie went on his way rejoicing.

And so the day went on, and the evening came, and in the middle of a
great desolate heath he began to feel tired, and sat down under an
ancient hawthorn, through which every now and then a lone wind that
seemed to come from nowhere and to go nowhither sighed and hissed.  It
was very old and distorted.  There was not another tree for miles all
around.  It seemed to have lived so long, and to have been so torn and
tossed by the tempests on that moor, that it had at last gathered a
wind of its own, which got up now and then, tumbled itself about, and
lay down again.

Curdie had been so eager to get on that he had eaten nothing since his
breakfast.  But he had had plenty of water, for Many little streams had
crossed his path.  He now opened the wallet his mother had given him,
and began to eat his supper.  The sun was setting. A few clouds had
gathered about the west, but there was not a single cloud anywhere else
to be seen.

Now Curdie did not know that this was a part of the country very hard
to get through.  Nobody lived there, though many had tried to build in
it.  Some died very soon.  Some rushed out of it.  Those who stayed
longest went raving mad, and died a terrible death. Such as walked
straight on, and did not spend a night there, got through well and were
nothing the worse.  But those who slept even a single night in it were
sure to meet with something they could never forget, and which often
left a mark everybody could read. And that old hawthorn Might have been
enough for a warning--it looked so like a human being dried up and
distorted with age and suffering, with cares instead of loves, and
things instead of thoughts.  Both it and the heath around it, which
stretched on all sides as far as he could see, were so withered that it
was impossible to say whether they were alive or not.

And while Curdie ate there came a change.  Clouds had gathered over his
head, and seemed drifting about in every direction, as if not
'shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind,' but hunted in all directions
by wolfish flaws across the plains of the sky.  The sun was going down
in a storm of lurid crimson, and out of the west came a wind that felt
red and hot the one moment, and cold and pale the other.  And very
strangely it sang in the dreary old hawthorn tree, and very cheerily it
blew about Curdie, now making him creep close up to the tree for
shelter from its shivery cold, now fan himself with his cap, it was so
sultry and stifling.  It seemed to come from the deathbed of the sun,
dying in fever and ague.

And as he gazed at the sun, now on the verge of the horizon, very large
and very red and very dull--for though the clouds had broken away a
dusty fog was spread all over the disc--Curdie saw something strange
appear against it, moving about like a fly over its burning face.  This
looked as if it were coming out of the sun's furnace heart, and was a
living creature of some kind surely; but its shape was very uncertain,
because the dazzle of the light all around melted the outlines.

It was growing larger, it must be approaching!  It grew so rapidly that
by the time the sun was half down its head reached the top of the arch,
and presently nothing but its legs were to be seen, crossing and
recrossing the face of the vanishing disc.

When the sun was down he could see nothing of it more, but in a moment
he heard its feet galloping over the dry crackling heather, and seeming
to come straight for him.  He stood up, lifted his pickaxes and threw
the hammer end over his shoulder: he was going to have a fight for his
life!  And now it appeared again, vague, yet very awful, in the dim
twilight the sun had left behind.  But just before it reached him, down
from its four long legs it dropped flat on the ground, and came
crawling towards him, wagging a huge tail as it came.



CHAPTER 11

Lina

It was Lina.  All at once Curdie recognized her--the frightful creature
he had seen at the princess's.  He dropped his pickaxes and held out
his hand.  She crept nearer and nearer, and laid her chin in his palm,
and he patted her ugly head.  Then she crept away behind the tree, and
lay down, panting hard.

Curdie did not much like the idea of her being behind him. Horrible as
she was to look at, she seemed to his mind more horrible when he was
not looking at her.  But he remembered the child's hand, and never
thought of driving her away.  Now and then he gave a glance behind him,
and there she lay flat, with her eyes closed and her terrible teeth
gleaming between her two huge forepaws.

After his supper and his long day's journey it was no wonder Curdie
should now be sleepy.  Since the sun set the air had been warm and
pleasant.  He lay down under the tree, closed his eyes, and thought to
sleep.  He found himself mistaken, however.  But although he could not
sleep, he was yet aware of resting delightfully.

Presently he heard a sweet sound of singing somewhere, such as he had
never heard before--a singing as of curious birds far off, which drew
nearer and nearer.  At length he heard their wings, and, opening his
eyes, saw a number of very large birds, as it seemed, alighting around
him, still singing.  It was strange to hear song from the throats of
such big birds.

And still singing, with large and round but not the less birdlike
voices, they began to weave a strange dance about him, moving their
wings in time with their legs.  But the dance seemed somehow to be
troubled and broken, and to return upon itself in an eddy, in place of
sweeping smoothly on.

And he soon learned, in the low short growls behind him, the cause of
the imperfection: they wanted to dance all round the tree, but Lina
would not permit them to come on her side.

Now curdie liked the birds, and did not altogether like Lina.  But
neither, nor both together, made a reason for driving away the
princess's creature.  Doubtless she had been the goblins' creature, but
the last time he saw her was in the king's house and the dove tower,
and at the old princess's feet.  So he left her to do as she would, and
the dance of the birds continued only a semicircle, troubled at the
edges, and returning upon itself.

But their song and their motions, nevertheless, and the waving of their
wings, began at length to make him very sleepy.  All the time he had
kept doubting whether they could really be birds, and the sleepier he
got, the more he imagined them something else, but he suspected no harm.

Suddenly, just as he was sinking beneath the waves of slumber, he awoke
in fierce pain.  The birds were upon him--all over him--and had begun
to tear him with beaks and claws.  He had but time, however, to feel
that he could not move under their weight, when they set up a hideous
screaming, and scattered like a cloud.  Lina was among them, snapping
and striking with her paws, while her tail knocked them over and over.
But they flew up, gathered, and descended on her in a swarm, perching
upon every part of her body, so that he could see only a huge misshapen
mass, which seemed to go rolling away into the darkness.  He got up and
tried to follow, but could see nothing, and after wandering about
hither and thither for some time, found himself again beside the
hawthorn.  He feared greatly that the birds had been too much for Lina,
and had torn her to pieces.  In a little while, however, she came
limping back, and lay down in her old place.  Curdie also lay down,
but, from the pain of his wounds, there was no sleep for him.  When the
light came he found his clothes a good deal torn and his skin as well,
but gladly wondered why the wicked birds had not at once attacked his
eyes.  Then he turned, looking for Lina.  She rose and crept to him.
But she was in far worse plight than he--plucked and gashed and torn
with the beaks and claws of the birds, especially about the bare part
of her neck, so that she was pitiful to see.  And those worst wounds
she could not reach to lick.

'Poor Lina!' said Curdie, 'you got all those helping me.'

She wagged her tail, and made it clear she understood him.  Then it
flashed upon Curdie's mind that perhaps this was the companion the
princess had promised him.  For the princess did so many things
differently from what anybody looked for!  Lina was no beauty
certainly, but already, the first night, she had saved his life.

'Come along, Lina,' he said, 'we want water.'

She put her nose to the earth, and after snuffing for a moment, darted
off in a straight line.  Curdie followed.  The ground was so uneven,
that after losing sight of her many times, at last he seemed to have
lost her altogether.  In a few minutes, however, he came upon her
waiting for him.  Instantly she darted off again. After he had lost and
found her again many times, he found her the last time lying beside a
great stone.  As soon as he came up she began scratching at it with her
paws.  When he had raised it an inch or two, she shoved in first her
nose and then her teeth, and lifted with all the might of her neck.

When at length between them they got it up, there was a beautiful
little well.  He filled his cap with the clearest and sweetest water,
and drank.  Then he gave to Lina, and she drank plentifully. Next he
washed her wounds very carefully.  And as he did so, he noted how much
the bareness of her neck added to the strange repulsiveness of her
appearance.  Then he bethought him of the goatskin wallet his mother
had given him, and taking it from his shoulders, tried whether it would
do to make a collar of for the poor animal.  He found there was just
enough, and the hair so similar in colour to Lina's, that no one could
suspect it of having grown somewhere else.

He took his knife, ripped up the seams of the wallet, and began trying
the skin to her neck.  It was plain she understood perfectly what he
wished, for she endeavoured to hold her neck conveniently, turning it
this way and that while he contrived, with his rather scanty material,
to make the collar fit.  As his mother had taken care to provide him
with needles and thread, he soon had a nice gorget ready for her.  He
laced it on with one of his boot laces, which its long hair covered.
Poor Lina looked much better in it. Nor could any one have called it a
piece of finery.  If ever green eyes with a yellow light in them looked
grateful, hers did.

As they had no longer any bag to carry them in, Curdie and Lina now ate
what was left of the provisions.  Then they set out again upon their
journey.  For seven days it lasted.  They met with various adventures,
and in all of them Lina proved so helpful, and so ready to risk her
life for the sake of her companion, that Curdie grew not merely very
fond but very trustful of her; and her ugliness, which at first only
moved his pity, now actually increased his affection for her.  One day,
looking at her stretched on the grass before him, he said:

'Oh, Lina!  If the princess would but burn you in her fire of roses!'

She looked up at him, gave a mournful whine like a dog, and laid her
head on his feet.  What or how much he could not tell, but clearly she
had gathered something from his words.



CHAPTER 12

More Creatures

One day from morning till night they had been passing through a forest.
As soon as the sun was down Curdie began to be aware that there were
more in it than themselves.  First he saw only the swift rush of a
figure across the trees at some distance.  Then he saw another and then
another at shorter intervals.  Then he saw others both farther off and
nearer.  At last, missing Lina and looking about after her, he saw an
appearance as marvellous as herself steal up to her, and begin
conversing with her after some beast fashion which evidently she
understood.

Presently what seemed a quarrel arose between them, and stranger noises
followed, mingled with growling.  At length it came to a fight, which
had not lasted long, however, before the creature of the wood threw
itself upon its back, and held up its paws to Lina. She instantly
walked on, and the creature got up and followed her. They had not gone
far before another strange animal appeared, approaching Lina, when
precisely the same thing was repeated, the vanquished animal rising and
following with the former.  Again, and yet again, and again, a fresh
animal came up, seemed to be reasoned and certainly was fought with and
overcome by Lina, until at last, before they were out of the wood, she
was followed by forty-nine of the most grotesquely ugly, the most
extravagantly abnormal animals imagination can conceive.  To describe
them were a hopeless task.

I knew a boy who used to make animals out of heather roots. Wherever he
could find four legs, he was pretty sure to find a head and a tail.
His beasts were a most comic menagerie, and right fruitful of laughter.
But they were not so grotesque and extravagant as Lina and her
followers.  One of them, for instance, was like a boa constrictor
walking on four little stumpy legs near its tail.  About the same
distance from its head were two little wings, which it was forever
fluttering as if trying to fly with them.  Curdie thought it fancied it
did fly with them, when it was merely plodding on busily with its four
little stumps.  How it managed to keep up he could not think, till once
when he missed it from the group: the same moment he caught sight of
something at a distance plunging at an awful serpentine rate through
the trees, and presently, from behind a huge ash, this same creature
fell again into the group, quietly waddling along on its four stumps.

Watching it after this, he saw that, when it was not able to keep up
any longer, and they had all got a little space ahead, it shot into the
wood away from the route, and made a great round, serpentine alone in
huge billows of motion, devouring the ground, undulating awfully,
galloping as if it were all legs together, and its four stumps nowhere.
In this mad fashion it shot ahead, and, a few minutes after, toddled in
again among the rest, walking peacefully and somewhat painfully on its
few fours.

From the time it takes to describe one of them it will be readily seen
that it would hardly do to attempt a description of each of the
forty-nine.  They were not a goodly company, but well worth
contemplating, nevertheless; and Curdie had been too long used to the
goblins' creatures in the mines and on the mountain, to feel the least
uncomfortable at being followed by such a herd.  On the contrary, the
marvellous vagaries of shape they manifested amused him greatly, and
shortened the journey much.

Before they were all gathered, however, it had got so dark that he
could see some of them only a part at a time, and every now and then,
as the company wandered on, he would be startled by some extraordinary
limb or feature, undreamed of by him before, thrusting itself out of
the darkness into the range of his ken. Probably there were some of his
old acquaintances among them, although such had been the conditions of
semi-darkness, in which alone he had ever seen any of them, that it was
not like he would be able to identify any of them.

On they marched solemnly, almost in silence, for either with feet or
voice the creatures seldom made any noise.  By the time they reached
the outside of the wood it was morning twilight.  Into the open trooped
the strange torrent of deformity, each one following Lina.  Suddenly
she stopped, turned towards them, and said something which they
understood, although to Curdie's ear the sounds she made seemed to have
no articulation.  Instantly they all turned, and vanished in the
forest, and Lina alone came trotting lithely and clumsily after her
master.



CHAPTER 13

The Baker's Wife

They were now passing through a lovely country of hill and dale and
rushing stream.  The hills were abrupt, with broken chasms for
watercourses, and deep little valleys full of trees.  But now and then
they came to a larger valley, with a fine river, whose level banks and
the adjacent meadows were dotted all over with red and white kine,
while on the fields above, that sloped a little to the foot of the
hills, grew oats and barley and wheat, and on the sides of the hills
themselves vines hung and chestnuts rose.

They came at last to a broad, beautiful river, up which they must go to
arrive at the city of Gwyntystorm, where the king had his court.  As
they went the valley narrowed, and then the river, but still it was
wide enough for large boats.  After this, while the river kept its
size, the banks narrowed, until there was only room for a road between
the river and the great Cliffs that overhung it. At last river and road
took a sudden turn, and lo! a great rock in the river, which dividing
flowed around it, and on the top of the rock the city, with lofty walls
and towers and battlements, and above the city the palace of the king,
built like a strong castle. But the fortifications had long been
neglected, for the whole country was now under one king, and all men
said there was no more need for weapons or walls.  No man pretended to
love his neighbour, but every one said he knew that peace and quiet
behaviour was the best thing for himself, and that, he said, was quite
as useful, and a great deal more reasonable.  The city was prosperous
and rich, and if everybody was not comfortable, everybody else said he
ought to be.

When Curdie got up opposite the mighty rock, which sparkled all over
with crystals, he found a narrow bridge, defended by gates and
portcullis and towers with loopholes.  But the gates stood wide open,
and were dropping from their great hinges; the portcullis was eaten
away with rust, and clung to the grooves evidently immovable; while the
loopholed towers had neither floor nor roof, and their tops were fast
filling up their interiors.  Curdie thought it a pity, if only for
their old story, that they should be thus neglected.  But everybody in
the city regarded these signs of decay as the best proof of the
prosperity of the place.  Commerce and self-interest, they said, had
got the better of violence, and the troubles of the past were whelmed
in the riches that flowed in at their open gates.

Indeed, there was one sect of philosophers in it which taught that it
would be better to forget all the past history of the city, were it not
that its former imperfections taught its present inhabitants how
superior they and their times were, and enabled them to glory over
their ancestors.  There were even certain quacks in the city who
advertised pills for enabling people to think well of themselves, and
some few bought of them, but most laughed, and said, with evident
truth, that they did not require them.  Indeed, the general theme of
discourse when they met was, how much wiser they were than their
fathers.

Curdie crossed the river, and began to ascend the winding road that led
up to the city.  They met a good many idlers, and all stared at them.
It was no wonder they should stare, but there was an unfriendliness in
their looks which Curdie did not like.  No one, however, offered them
any molestation: Lina did not invite liberties.  After a long ascent,
they reached the principal gate of the city and entered.

The street was very steep, ascending toward the palace, which rose in
great strength above all the houses.  Just as they entered, a baker,
whose shop was a few doors inside the gate, came out in his white
apron, and ran to the shop of his friend, the barber, on the opposite
side of the way.  But as he ran he stumbled and fell heavily.  Curdie
hastened to help him up, and found he had bruised his forehead badly.
He swore grievously at the stone for tripping him up, declaring it was
the third time he had fallen over it within the last month; and saying
what was the king about that he allowed such a stone to stick up
forever on the main street of his royal residence of Gwyntystorm!  What
was a king for if he would not take care of his people's heads!  And he
stroked his forehead tenderly.

'Was it your head or your feet that ought to bear the blame of your
fall?' asked Curdie.

'Why, you booby of a miner!  My feet, of course,' answered the baker.

'Nay, then,' said Curdie, 'the king can't be to blame.'

'Oh, I see!' said the baker.  'You're laying a trap for me.  Of course,
if you come to that, it was my head that ought to have looked after my
feet.  But it is the king's part to look after us all, and have his
streets smooth.'

'Well, I don't see, said Curdie, 'why the king should take care of the
baker, when the baker's head won't take care of the baker's feet.'

'Who are you to make game of the king's baker?' cried the man in a rage.

But, instead of answering, Curdie went up to the bump on the street
which had repeated itself on the baker's head, and turning the hammer
end of his mattock, struck it such a blow that it flew wide in pieces.
Blow after blow he struck until he had levelled it with the street.

But out flew the barber upon him in a rage. 'What do you break my
window for, you rascal, with your pickaxe?'

'I am very sorry,' said Curdie.  'It must have been a bit of stone that
flew from my mattock.  I couldn't help it, you know.'

'Couldn't help it!  A fine story!  What do you go breaking the rock
for--the very rock upon which the city stands?'

'Look at your friend's forehead,' said Curdie.  'See what a lump he has
got on it with falling over that same stone.'

'What's that to my window?' cried the barber.  'His forehead can mend
itself; my poor window can't.'

'But he's the king's baker,' said Curdie, more and more surprised at
the man's anger.

'What's that to me?  This is a free city.  Every man here takes care of
himself, and the king takes care of us all.  I'll have the price of my
window out of you, or the exchequer shall pay for it.'

Something caught Curdie's eye.  He stooped, picked up a piece of the
stone he had just broken, and put it in his pocket.

'I suppose you are going to break another of my windows with that
stone!' said the barber.

'Oh no,' said Curdie.  'I didn't mean to break your window, and I
certainly won't break another.'

'Give me that stone,' said the barber.

Curdie gave it him, and the barber threw it over the city wall.

'I thought you wanted the stone,' said Curdie.

'No, you fool!' answered the barber.  'What should I want with a stone?'

Curdie stooped and picked up another.

'Give me that stone,' said the barber.

'No,' answered Curdie.  'You have just told me YOU don't want a stone,
and I do.'

The barber took Curdie by the collar.

'Come, now!  You pay me for that window.'

'How much?' asked Curdie.

The barber said, 'A crown.'  But the baker, annoyed at the
heartlessness of the barber, in thinking more of his broken window than
the bump on his friend's forehead, interfered.

'No, no,' he said to Curdie; 'don't you pay any such sum.  A little
pane like that cost only a quarter.'

'Well, to be certain,' said Curdie, 'I'll give a half.'  For he doubted
the baker as well as the barber.  'Perhaps one day, if he finds he has
asked too much, he will bring me the difference.'

'Ha! ha!' laughed the barber.  'A fool and his money are soon parted.'

But as he took the coin from Curdie's hand he grasped it in affected
reconciliation and real satisfaction.  In Curdie's, his was the cold
smooth leathery palm of a monkey.  He looked up, almost expecting to
see him pop the money in his cheek; but he had not yet got so far as
that, though he was well on the road to it: then he would have no other
pocket.

'I'm glad that stone is gone, anyhow,' said the baker.  'It was the
bane of my life.  I had no idea how easy it was to remove it.  Give me
your pickaxes young miner, and I will show you how a baker can make the
stones fly.'

He caught the tool out of Curdie's hand, and flew at one of the
foundation stones of the gateway.  But he jarred his arm terribly,
scarcely chipped the stone, dropped the mattock with a cry of pain, and
ran into his own shop.  Curdie picked up his implement, and, looking
after the baker, saw bread in the window, and followed him in.  But the
baker, ashamed of himself, and thinking he was coming to laugh at him,
popped out of the back door, and when Curdie entered, the baker's wife
came from the bakehouse to serve him. Curdie requested to know the
price of a certain good-sized loaf.

Now the baker's wife had been watching what had passed since first her
husband ran out of the shop, and she liked the look of Curdie. Also she
was more honest than her husband.  Casting a glance to the back door,
she replied:

'That is not the best bread.  I will sell you a loaf of what we bake
for ourselves.'  And when she had spoken she laid a finger on her lips.
'Take care of yourself in this place, MY son,' she added.  'They do not
love strangers.  I was once a stranger here, and I know what I say.'
Then fancying she heard her husband, 'That is a strange animal you
have,' she said, in a louder voice.

'Yes,' answered Curdie.  'She is no beauty, but she is very good, and
we love each other.  Don't we, Lina?'

Lina looked up and whined.  Curdie threw her the half of his loaf,
which she ate, while her master and the baker's wife talked a little.
Then the baker's wife gave them some water, and Curdie having paid for
his loaf, he and Lina went up the street together.



CHAPTER 14

The Dogs of Gwyntystorm

The steep street led them straight up to a large market place with
butchers' shops, about which were many dogs.  The moment they caught
sight of Lina, one and all they came rushing down upon her, giving her
no chance of explaining herself.  When Curdie saw the dogs coming he
heaved up his mattock over his shoulder, and was ready, if they would
have it so.  Seeing him thus prepared to defend his follower, a great
ugly bulldog flew at him.  With the first blow Curdie struck him
through the brain and the brute fell dead at his feet.  But he could
not at once recover his weapon, which stuck in the skull of his foe,
and a huge mastiff, seeing him thus hampered, flew at him next.

Now Lina, who had shown herself so brave upon the road thither, had
grown shy upon entering the city, and kept always at Curdie's heel. But
it was her turn now.  The moment she saw her master in danger she
seemed to go mad with rage.  As the mastiff jumped at Curdie's throat,
Lina flew at him, seized him with her tremendous jaws, gave one roaring
grind, and he lay beside the bulldog with his neck broken.  They were
the best dogs in the market, after the judgement of the butchers of
Gwyntystorm.  Down came their masters, knives in hand.

Curdie drew himself up fearlessly, mattock on shoulder, and awaited
their coming, while at his heel his awful attendant showed not only her
outside fringe of icicle teeth, but a double row of right serviceable
fangs she wore inside her mouth, and her green eyes flashed yellow as
gold.  The butchers, not liking the look of either of them or of the
dogs at their feet, drew back, and began to remonstrate in the manner
of outraged men.

'Stranger,' said the first, 'that bulldog is mine.'

'Take him, then,' said Curdie, indignant.

'You've killed him!'

'Yes--else he would have killed me.'

'That's no business of mine.'

'No?'

'No.'

'That makes it the more mine, then.'

'This sort of thing won't do, you know,' said the other butcher.

'That's true,' said Curdie. 'That's my mastiff,' said the butcher.

'And as he ought to be,' said Curdie.

'Your brute shall be burned alive for it,' said the butcher.

'Not yet,' answered Curdie.  'We have done no wrong.  We were walking
quietly up your street when your dogs flew at us.  If you don't teach
your dogs how to treat strangers, you must take the consequences.'

'They treat them quite properly,' said the butcher.  'What right has
any one to bring an abomination like that into our city?  The horror is
enough to make an idiot of every child in the place.'

'We are both subjects of the king, and my poor animal can't help her
looks.  How would you like to be served like that because you were
ugly?  She's not a bit fonder of her looks than you are--only what can
she do to change them?'

'I'll do to change them,' said the fellow.

Thereupon the butchers brandished their long knives and advanced,
keeping their eyes upon Lina.

'Don't be afraid, Lina,' cried Curdie.  'I'll kill one--you kill the
other.'

Lina gave a howl that might have terrified an army, and crouched ready
to spring.  The butchers turned and ran.

By this time a great crowd had gathered behind the butchers, and in it
a number of boys returning from school who began to stone the
strangers.  It was a way they had with man or beast they did not expect
to make anything by.  One of the stones struck Lina; she caught it in
her teeth and crunched it so that it fell in gravel from her mouth.
Some of the foremost of the crowd saw this, and it terrified them.
They drew back; the rest took fright from their retreat; the panic
spread; and at last the crowd scattered in all directions.  They ran,
and cried out, and said the devil and his dam were come to Gwyntystorm.
So Curdie and Lina were left standing unmolested in the market place.
But the terror of them spread throughout the city, and everybody began
to shut and lock his door so that by the time the setting sun shone
down the street, there was not a shop left open, for fear of the devil
and his horrible dam.  But all the upper windows within sight of them
were crowded with heads watching them where they stood lonely in the
deserted market place.

Curdie looked carefully all round, but could not see one open door. He
caught sight of the sign of an inn, however, and laying down his
mattock, and telling Lina to take care of it, walked up to the door of
it and knocked.  But the people in the house, instead of opening the
door, threw things at him from the windows.  They would not listen to a
word he said, but sent him back to Lina with the blood running down his
face.  When Lina saw that she leaped up in a fury and was rushing at
the house, into which she would certainly have broken; but Curdie
called her, and made her lie down beside him while he bethought him
what next he should do.

'Lina,' he said, 'the people keep their gates open, but their houses
and their hearts shut.'

As if she knew it was her presence that had brought this trouble upon
him, she rose and went round and round him, purring like a tigress, and
rubbing herself against his legs.

Now there was one little thatched house that stood squeezed in between
two tall gables, and the sides of the two great houses shot out
projecting windows that nearly met across the roof of the little one,
so that it lay in the street like a doll's house.  In this house lived
a poor old woman, with a grandchild.  And because she never gossiped or
quarrelled, or chaffered in the market, but went without what she could
not afford, the people called her a witch, and would have done her many
an ill turn if they had not been afraid of her.

Now while Curdie was looking in another direction the door opened, and
out came a little dark-haired, black-eyed, gypsy-looking child, and
toddled across the market place toward the outcasts.  The moment they
saw her coming, Lina lay down flat on the road, and with her two huge
forepaws covered her mouth, while Curdie went to meet her, holding out
his arms.  The little one came straight to him, and held up her mouth
to be kissed.  Then she took him by the hand, and drew him toward the
house, and Curdie yielded to the silent invitation.

But when Lina rose to follow, the child shrank from her, frightened a
little.  Curdie took her up, and holding her on one arm, patted Lina
with the other hand.  Then the child wanted also to pat doggy, as she
called her by a right bountiful stretch of courtesy, and having once
patted her, nothing would serve but Curdie must let her have a ride on
doggy.  So he set her on Lina's back, holding her hand, and she rode
home in merry triumph, all unconscious of the hundreds of eyes staring
at her foolhardiness from the windows about the market place, or the
murmur of deep disapproval that rose from as many lips.

At the door stood the grandmother to receive them.  She caught the
child to her bosom with delight at her courage, welcomed Curdie, and
showed no dread of Lina.  Many were the significant nods exchanged, and
many a one said to another that the devil and the witch were old
friends.  But the woman was only a wise woman, who, having seen how
Curdie and Lina behaved to each other, judged from that what sort they
were, and so made them welcome to her house. She was not like her
fellow townspeople, for that they were strangers recommended them to
her.

The moment her door was shut the other doors began to open, and soon
there appeared little groups here and there about a threshold, while a
few of the more courageous ventured out upon the square--all ready to
make for their houses again, however, upon the least sign of movement
in the little thatched one.

The baker and the barber had joined one of these groups, and were
busily wagging their tongues against Curdie and his horrible beast.

'He can't be honest,' said the barber; 'for he paid me double the worth
of the pane he broke in my window.'

And then he told them how Curdie broke his window by breaking a stone
in the street with his hammer.  There the baker struck in.

'Now that was the stone,' said he, 'over which I had fallen three times
within the last month: could it be by fair means he broke that to
pieces at the first blow?  Just to make up my mind on that point I
tried his own hammer against a stone in the gate; it nearly broke both
my arms, and loosened half the teeth in my head!'



CHAPTER 15

Derba and Barbara

Meantime the wanderers were hospitably entertained by the old woman and
her grandchild and they were all very comfortable and happy together.
Little Barbara sat upon Curdie's knee, and he told her stories about
the mines and his adventures in them.  But he never mentioned the king
or the princess, for all that story was hard to believe.  And he told
her about his mother and father, and how good they were.  And Derba sat
and listened.  At last little Barbara fell asleep in Curdie's arms, and
her grandmother carried her to bed.

It was a poor little house, and Derba gave up her own room to Curdie
because he was honest and talked wisely.  Curdie saw how it was, and
begged her to allow him to lie on the floor, but she would not hear of
it.

In the night he was waked by Lina pulling at him.  As soon as he spoke
to her she ceased, and Curdie, listening, thought he heard someone
trying to get in.  He rose, took his mattock, and went about the house,
listening and watching; but although he heard noises now at one place
now at another, he could not think what they meant for no one appeared.
Certainly, considering how she had frightened them all in the day, it
was not likely any one would attack Lina at night.  By and by the
noises ceased, and Curdie went back to his bed, and slept undisturbed.

In the morning, however, Derba came to him in great agitation, and said
they had fastened up the door, so that she could not get out. Curdie
rose immediately and went with her: they found that not only the door,
but every window in the house was so secured on the outside that it was
impossible to open one of them without using great force.  Poor Derba
looked anxiously in Curdie's face.  He broke out laughing.

'They are much mistaken,' he said, 'if they fancy they could keep Lina
and a miner in any house in Gwyntystorm--even if they built up doors
and windows.'

With that he shouldered his mattock.  But Derba begged him not to make
a hole in her house just yet.  She had plenty for breakfast, she said,
and before it was time for dinner they would know what the people meant
by it.

And indeed they did.  For within an hour appeared one of the chief
magistrates of the city, accompanied by a score of soldiers with drawn
swords, and followed by a great multitude of people, requiring the
miner and his brute to yield themselves, the one that he might be tried
for the disturbance he had occasioned and the injury he had committed,
the other that she might be roasted alive for her part in killing two
valuable and harmless animals belonging to worthy citizens.  The
summons was preceded and followed by flourish of trumpet, and was read
with every formality by the city marshal himself.

The moment he ended, Lina ran into the little passage, and stood
opposite the door.

'I surrender,' cried Curdie.

'Then tie up your brute, and give her here.'

'No, no,' cried Curdie through the door.  'I surrender; but I'm not
going to do your hangman's work.  If you want MY dog, you must take
her.'

'Then we shall set the house on fire, and burn witch and all.'

'It will go hard with us but we shall kill a few dozen of you first,'
cried Curdie.  'We're not the least afraid of you.'  With that Curdie
turned to Derba, and said:

'Don't be frightened.  I have a strong feeling that all will be well.
Surely no trouble will come to you for being good to strangers.'

'But the poor dog!' said Derba.

Now Curdie and Lina understood each other more than a little by this
time, and not only had he seen that she understood the proclamation,
but when she looked up at him after it was read, it was with such a
grin, and such a yellow flash, that he saw also she was determined to
take care of herself.

'The dog will probably give you reason to think a little more of her
ere long,' he answered.  'But now,' he went on, 'I fear I must hurt
your house a little.  I have great confidence, however, that I shall be
able to make up to you for it one day.'

'Never mind the house, if only you can get safe off,' she answered. 'I
don't think they will hurt this precious lamb,' she added, clasping
little Barbara to her bosom.  'For myself, it is all one; I am ready
for anything.'

'It is but a little hole for Lina I want to make,' said Curdie. 'She
can creep through a much smaller one than you would think.'

Again he took his mattock, and went to the back wall.

'They won't burn the house,' he said to himself.  'There is too good a
one on each side of it.'

The tumult had kept increasing every moment, and the city marshal had
been shouting, but Curdie had not listened to him.  When now they heard
the blows of his mattock, there went up a great cry, and the people
taunted the soldiers that they were afraid of a dog and his miner.  The
soldiers therefore made a rush at the door, and cut its fastenings.

The moment they opened it, out leaped Lina, with a roar so unnaturally
horrible that the sword arms of the soldiers dropped by their sides,
paralysed with the terror of that cry; the crowd fled in every
direction, shrieking and yelling with mortal dismay; and without even
knocking down with her tail, not to say biting a man of them with her
pulverizing jaws, Lina vanished--no one knew whither, for not one of
the crowd had had courage to look upon her.

The moment she was gone, Curdie advanced and gave himself up.  The
soldiers were so filled with fear, shame, and chagrin, that they were
ready to kill him on the spot.  But he stood quietly facing them, with
his mattock on his shoulder; and the magistrate wishing to examine him,
and the people to see him made an example of, the soldiers had to
content themselves with taking him.  Partly for derision, partly to
hurt him, they laid his mattock against his back, and tied his arms to
it.

They led him up a very steep street, and up another still, all the
crowd following.  The king's palace-castle rose towering above them;
but they stopped before they reached it, at a low-browed door in a
great, dull, heavy-looking building.

The city marshal opened it with a key which hung at his girdle, and
ordered Curdie to enter.  The place within was dark as night, and while
he was feeling his way with his feet, the marshal gave him a rough
push.  He fell, and rolled once or twice over, unable to help himself
because his hands were tied behind him.

It was the hour of the magistrate's second and more important
breakfast, and until that was over he never found himself capable of
attending to a case with concentration sufficient to the distinguishing
of the side upon which his own advantage lay; and hence was this
respite for Curdie, with time to collect his thoughts.  But indeed he
had very few to collect, for all he had to do, so far as he could see,
was to wait for what would come next. Neither had he much power to
collect them, for he was a good deal shaken.

In a few minutes he discovered, to his great relief, that, from the
projection of the pick end of his mattock beyond his body, the fall had
loosened the ropes tied round it.  He got one hand disengaged, and then
the other; and presently stood free, with his good mattock once more in
right serviceable relation to his arms and legs.



CHAPTER 16

The Mattock

While The magistrate reinvigorated his selfishness with a greedy
breakfast, Curdie found doing nothing in the dark rather tiresome work.
It was useless attempting to think what he should do next, seeing the
circumstances in which he was presently to find himself were altogether
unknown to him.  So he began to think about his father and mother in
their little cottage home, high in the clear air of the open
Mountainside, and the thought, instead of making his dungeon gloomier
by the contrast, made a light in his soul that destroyed the power of
darkness and captivity.

But he was at length startled from his waking dream by a swell in the
noise outside.  All the time there had been a few of the more idle of
the inhabitants about the door, but they had been rather quiet.  Now,
however, the sounds of feet and voices began to grow, and grew so
rapidly that it was plain a multitude was gathering. For the people of
Gwyntystorm always gave themselves an hour of pleasure after their
second breakfast, and what greater pleasure could they have than to see
a stranger abused by the officers of justice?

The noise grew till it was like the roaring of the sea, and that
roaring went on a long time, for the magistrate, being a great man,
liked to know that he was waited for: it added to the enjoyment of his
breakfast, and, indeed, enabled him to eat a little more after he had
thought his powers exhausted.

But at length, in the waves of the human noises rose a bigger wave, and
by the running and shouting and outcry, Curdie learned that the
magistrate was approaching.

Presently came the sound of the great rusty key in the lock, which
yielded with groaning reluctance; the door was thrown back, the light
rushed in, and with it came the voice of the city marshal, calling upon
Curdie, by many legal epithets opprobrious, to come forth and be tried
for his life, inasmuch as he had raised a tumult in His Majesty's city
of Gwyntystorm, troubled the hearts of the king's baker and barber, and
slain the faithful dogs of His Majesty's well-beloved butchers.

He was still reading, and Curdie was still seated in the brown twilight
of the vault, not listening, but pondering with himself how this king
the city marshal talked of could be the same with the Majesty he had
seen ride away on his grand white horse with the Princess Irene on a
cushion before him, when a scream of agonized terror arose on the
farthest skirt of the crowd, and, swifter than flood or flame, the
horror spread shrieking.  In a moment the air was filled with hideous
howling, cries of unspeakable dismay, and the multitudinous noise of
running feet.  The next moment, in at the door of the vault bounded
Lina, her two green eyes flaming yellow as sunflowers, and seeming to
light up the dungeon.  With one spring she threw herself at Curdie's
feet, and laid her head upon them panting.  Then came a rush of two or
three soldiers darkening the doorway, but it was only to lay hold of
the key, pull the door to, and lock it; so that once more Curdie and
Lina were prisoners together.

For a few moments Lina lay panting hard: it is breathless work leaping
and roaring both at once, and that in a way to scatter thousands of
people.  Then she jumped up, and began snuffing about all over the
place; and Curdie saw what he had never seen before--two faint spots of
light cast from her eyes upon the ground, one on each side of her
snuffing nose.  He got out his tinder box--a miner is never without
one--and lighted a precious bit of candle he carried in a division of
it just for a moment, for he must not waste it.

The light revealed a vault without any window or other opening than the
door.  It was very old and much neglected.  The mortar had vanished
from between the stones, and it was half filled with a heap of all
sorts of rubbish, beaten down in the middle, but looser at the sides;
it sloped from the door to the foot of the opposite wall: evidently for
a long time the vault had been left open, and every sort of refuse
thrown into it.  A single minute served for the survey, so little was
there to note.

Meantime, down in the angle between the back wall and the base of the
heap Lina was scratching furiously with all the eighteen great strong
claws of her mighty feet.

'Ah, ha!' said Curdie to himself, catching sight of her, 'if only they
will leave us long enough to ourselves!'

With that he ran to the door, to see if there was any fastening on the
inside.  There was none: in all its long history it never had had one.
But a few blows of the right sort, now from the one, now from the other
end of his mattock, were as good as any bolt, for they so ruined the
lock that no key could ever turn in it again. Those who heard them
fancied he was trying to get out, and laughed spitefully.  As soon as
he had done, he extinguished his candle, and went down to Lina.

She had reached the hard rock which formed the floor of the dungeon,
and was now clearing away the earth a little wider. Presently she
looked up in his face and whined, as much as to say, 'My paws are not
hard enough to get any farther.'

'Then get out of my way, Lina,' said Curdie, and mind you keep your
eyes shining, for fear I should hit you.'

So saying, he heaved his mattock, and assailed with the hammer end of
it the spot she had cleared.

The rock was very hard, but when it did break it broke in good-sized
pieces.  Now with hammer, now with pick, he worked till he was weary,
then rested, and then set to again.  He could not tell how the day
went, as he had no light but the lamping of Lina's eyes.  The darkness
hampered him greatly, for he would not let Lina come close enough to
give him all the light she could, lest he should strike her.  So he
had, every now and then, to feel with his hands to know how he was
getting on, and to discover in what direction to strike: the exact spot
was a mere imagination.

He was getting very tired and hungry, and beginning to lose heart a
little, when out of the ground, as if he had struck a spring of it,
burst a dull, gleamy, lead-coloured light, and the next moment he heard
a hollow splash and echo.  A piece of rock had fallen out of the floor,
and dropped into water beneath.  Already Lina, who had been lying a few
yards off all the time he worked, was on her feet and peering through
the hole.  Curdie got down on his hands and knees, and looked.  They
were over what seemed a natural cave in the rock, to which apparently
the river had access, for, at a great distance below, a faint light was
gleaming upon water.  If they could but reach it, they might get out;
but even if it was deep enough, the height was very dangerous.  The
first thing, whatever might follow, was to make the hole larger.  It
was comparatively easy to break away the sides of it, and in the course
of another hour he had it large enough to get through.

And now he must reconnoitre.  He took the rope they had tied him
with--for Curdie's hindrances were always his furtherance--and fastened
one end of it by a slipknot round the handle of his pickaxes then
dropped the other end through, and laid the pickaxe so that, when he
was through himself, and hanging on the edge, he could place it across
the hole to support him on the rope.  This done, he took the rope in
his hands, and, beginning to descend, found himself in a narrow cleft
widening into a cave.  His rope was not very long, and would not do
much to lessen the force of his fall--he thought to himself--if he
should have to drop into the water; but he was not more than a couple
of yards below the dungeon when he spied an opening on the opposite
side of the cleft: it might be but a shadow hole, or it might lead them
out.  He dropped himself a little below its level, gave the rope a
swing by pushing his feet against the side of the cleft, and so
penduled himself into it.  Then he laid a stone on the end of the rope
that it should not forsake him, called to Lina, whose yellow eyes were
gleaming over the mattock grating above, to watch there till he
returned, and went cautiously in.  It proved a passage, level for some
distance, then sloping gently up.  He advanced carefully, feeling his
way as he went.  At length he was stopped by a door--a small door,
studded with iron.  But the wood was in places so much decayed that
some of the bolts had dropped out, and he felt sure of being able to
open it.  He returned, therefore, to fetch Lina and his mattock.
Arrived at the cleft, his strong miner arms bore him swiftly up along
the rope and through the hole into the dungeon.  There he undid the
rope from his mattock, and making Lina take the end of it in her teeth,
and get through the hole, he lowered her--it was all he could do, she
was so heavy.  When she came opposite the passage, with a slight push
of her tail she shot herself into it, and let go the rope, which Curdie
drew up.

Then he lighted his candle and searching in the rubbish found a bit of
iron to take the place of his pickaxe across the hole.  Then he
searched again in the rubbish, and found half an old shutter.  This he
propped up leaning a little over the hole, with a bit of stick, and
heaped against the back of it a quantity of the loosened earth. Next he
tied his mattock to the end of the rope, dropped it, and let it hang.
Last, he got through the hole himself, and pulled away the propping
stick, so that the shutter fell over the hole with a quantity of earth
on the top of it.  A few motions of hand over hand, and he swung
himself and his mattock into the passage beside Lina.

There he secured the end of the rope, and they went on together to the
door.



CHAPTER 17

The Wine Cellar

He lighted his candle and examined it.  Decayed and broken as it was,
it was strongly secured in its place by hinges on the one side, and
either lock or bolt, he could not tell which, on the other.  A brief
use of his pocket-knife was enough to make room for his hand and arm to
get through, and then he found a great iron bolt--but so rusty that he
could not move it.

Lina whimpered.  He took his knife again, made the hole bigger, and
stood back.  In she shot her small head and long neck, seized the bolt
with her teeth, and dragged it, grating and complaining, back. A push
then opened the door.  It was at the foot of a short flight of steps.
They ascended, and at the top Curdie found himself in a space which,
from the echo to his stamp, appeared of some size, though of what sort
he could not at first tell, for his hands, feeling about, came upon
nothing.  Presently, however, they fell on a great thing: it was a wine
cask.

He was just setting out to explore the place thoroughly, when he heard
steps coming down a stair.  He stood still, not knowing whether the
door would open an inch from his nose or twenty yards behind his back.
It did neither.  He heard the key turn in the lock, and a stream of
light shot in, ruining the darkness, about fifteen yards away on his
right.

A man carrying a candle in one hand and a large silver flagon in the
other, entered, and came toward him.  The light revealed a row of huge
wine casks, that stretched away into the darkness of the other end of
the long vault.  Curdie retreated into the recess of the stair, and
peeping round the corner of it, watched him, thinking what he could do
to prevent him from locking them in.  He came on and on, until curdie
feared he would pass the recess and see them.  He was just preparing to
rush out, and master him before he should give alarm, not in the least
knowing what he should do next, when, to his relief, the man stopped at
the third cask from where he stood.  He set down his light on the top
of it, removed what seemed a large vent-peg, and poured into the cask a
quantity of something from the flagon.  Then he turned to the next
cask, drew some wine, rinsed the flagon, threw the wine away, drew and
rinsed and threw away again, then drew and drank, draining to the
bottom.  Last of all, he filled the flagon from the cask he had first
visited, replaced then the vent-peg, took up his candle, and turned
toward the door.

'There is something wrong here!' thought Curdie.

'Speak to him, Lina,' he whispered.

The sudden howl she gave made Curdie himself start and tremble for a
moment.  As to the man, he answered Lina's with another horrible howl,
forced from him by the convulsive shudder of every muscle of his body,
then reeled gasping to and fro, and dropped his candle. But just as
Curdie expected to see him fall dead he recovered himself, and flew to
the door, through which he darted, leaving it open behind him.  The
moment he ran, Curdie stepped out, picked up the candle still alight,
sped after him to the door, drew out the key, and then returned to the
stair and waited.  In a few minutes he heard the sound of many feet and
voices.  Instantly he turned the tap of the cask from which the man had
been drinking, set the candle beside it on the floor, went down the
steps and out of the little door, followed by Lina, and closed it
behind them.

Through the hole in it he could see a little, and hear all.  He could
see how the light of many candles filled the place, and could hear how
some two dozen feet ran hither and thither through the echoing cellar;
he could hear the clash of iron, probably spits and pokers, now and
then; and at last heard how, finding nothing remarkable except the best
wine running to waste, they all turned on the butler and accused him of
having fooled them with a drunken dream.  He did his best to defend
himself, appealing to the evidence of their own senses that he was as
sober as they were. They replied that a fright was no less a fright
that the cause was imaginary, and a dream no less a dream that the
fright had waked him from it.

When he discovered, and triumphantly adduced as corroboration, that the
key was gone from the door, they said it merely showed how drunk he had
been--either that or how frightened, for he had certainly dropped it.
In vain he protested that he had never taken it out of the lock--that
he never did when he went in, and certainly had not this time stopped
to do so when he came out; they asked him why he had to go to the
cellar at such a time of the day, and said it was because he had
already drunk all the wine that was left from dinner.  He said if he
had dropped the key, the key was to be found, and they must help him to
find it.  They told him they wouldn't move a peg for him.  He declared,
with much language, he would have them all turned out of the king's
service.  They said they would swear he was drunk.

And so positive were they about it, that at last the butler himself
began to think whether it was possible they could be in the right. For
he knew that sometimes when he had been drunk he fancied things had
taken place which he found afterward could not have happened. Certain
of his fellow servants, however, had all the time a doubt whether the
cellar goblin had not appeared to him, or at least roared at him, to
protect the wine.  In any case nobody wanted to find the key for him;
nothing could please them better than that the door of the wine cellar
should never more be locked.  By degrees the hubbub died away, and they
departed, not even pulling to the door, for there was neither handle
nor latch to it.

As soon as they were gone, Curdie returned, knowing now that they were
in the wine cellar of the palace, as indeed, he had suspected. Finding
a pool of wine in a hollow of the floor, Lina lapped it up eagerly: she
had had no breakfast, and was now very thirsty as well as hungry.  Her
master was in a similar plight, for he had but just begun to eat when
the magistrate arrived with the soldiers.  If only they were all in
bed, he thought, that he might find his way to the larder!  For he said
to himself that, as he was sent there by the young princess's
great-great-grandmother to serve her or her father in some way, surely
he must have a right to his food in the Palace, without which he could
do nothing.  He would go at once and reconnoitre.

So he crept up the stair that led from the cellar.  At the top was a
door, opening on a long passage dimly lighted by a lamp.  He told Lina
to lie down upon the stair while he went on.  At the end of the passage
he found a door ajar, and, peering through, saw right into a great
stone hall, where a huge fire was blazing, and through which men in the
king's livery were constantly coming and going. Some also in the same
livery were lounging about the fire.  He noted that their colours were
the same as those he himself, as king's miner, wore; but from what he
had seen and heard of the habits of the place, he could not hope they
would treat him the better for that.

The one interesting thing at the moment, however, was the plentiful
supper with which the table was spread.  It was something at least to
stand in sight of food, and he was unwilling to turn his back on the
prospect so long as a share in it was not absolutely hopeless. Peeping
thus, he soon made UP his mind that if at any moment the hall should be
empty, he would at that moment rush in and attempt to carry off a dish.
That he might lose no time by indecision, he selected a large pie upon
which to pounce instantaneously.  But after he had watched for some
minutes, it did not seem at all likely the chance would arrive before
suppertime, and he was just about to turn away and rejoin Lina, when he
saw that there was not a person in the place.  Curdie never made up his
mind and then hesitated.  He darted in, seized the pie, and bore it
swiftly and noiselessly to the cellar stair.



CHAPTER 18

The King's Kitchen

Back to the cellar Curdie and Lina sped with their booty, where, seated
on the steps, Curdie lighted his bit of candle for a moment. A very
little bit it was now, but they did not waste much of it in examination
of the pie; that they effected by a more summary process.  Curdie
thought it the nicest food he had ever tasted, and between them they
soon ate it up.  Then Curdie would have thrown the dish along with the
bones into the water, that there might be no traces of them; but he
thought of his mother, and hid it instead; and the very next minute
they wanted it to draw some wine into.  He was careful it should be
from the cask of which he had seen the butler drink.

Then they sat down again upon the steps, and waited until the house
should be quiet.  For he was there to do something, and if it did not
come to him in the cellar, he must go to meet it in other places.
Therefore, lest he should fall asleep, he set the end of the helve of
his mattock on the ground, and seated himself on the cross part,
leaning against the wall, so that as long as he kept awake he should
rest, but the moment he began to fall asleep he must fall awake
instead.  He quite expected some of the servants would visit the cellar
again that night, but whether it was that they were afraid of each
other, or believed more of the butler's story than they had chosen to
allow, not one of them appeared.

When at length he thought he might venture, he shouldered his mattock
and crept up the stair.  The lamp was out in the passage, but he could
not miss his way to the servants' hall.  Trusting to Lina's quickness
in concealing herself, he took her with him.

When they reached the hall they found it quiet and nearly dark. The
last of the great fire was glowing red, but giving little light.
Curdie stood and warmed himself for a few moments: miner as he was, he
had found the cellar cold to sit in doing nothing; and standing thus he
thought of looking if there were any bits of candle about.  There were
many candlesticks on the supper table, but to his disappointment and
indignation their candles seemed to have been all left to burn out, and
some of them, indeed, he found still hot in the neck.

Presently, one after another, he came upon seven men fast asleep, most
of them upon tables, one in a chair, and one on the floor. They seemed,
from their shape and colour, to have eaten and drunk so much that they
might be burned alive without wakening.  He grasped the hand of each in
succession, and found two ox hoofs, three pig hoofs, one concerning
which he could not be sure whether it was the hoof of a donkey or a
pony, and one dog's paw.  'A nice set of people to be about a king!'
thought Curdie to himself, and turned again to his candle hunt.  He did
at last find two or three little pieces, and stowed them away in his
pockets.  They now left the hall by another door, and entered a short
passage, which led them to the huge kitchen, vaulted and black with
smoke.  There, too, the fire was still burning, so that he was able to
see a little of the state of things in this quarter also.

The place was dirty and disorderly.  In a recess, on a heap of
brushwood, lay a kitchen-maid, with a table cover around her, and a
skillet in her hand: evidently she too had been drinking.  In another
corner lay a page, and Curdie noted how like his dress was to his own.
In the cinders before the hearth were huddled three dogs and five cats,
all fast asleep, while the rats were running about the floor.  Curdie's
heart ached to think of the lovely child-princess living over such a
sty.  The mine was a paradise to a palace with such servants in it.

Leaving the kitchen, he got into the region of the sculleries. There
horrible smells were wandering about, like evil spirits that come forth
with the darkness.  He lighted a candle--but only to see ugly sights.
Everywhere was filth and disorder.  Mangy turnspit dogs were lying
about, and grey rats were gnawing at refuse in the sinks.  It was like
a hideous dream.  He felt as if he should never get out of it, and
longed for one glimpse of his mother's poor little kitchen, so clean
and bright and airy. Turning from it at last in miserable disgust, he
almost ran back through the kitchen, re-entered the hall, and crossed
it to another door.

It opened upon a wider passage leading to an arch in a stately
corridor, all its length lighted by lamps in niches.  At the end of it
was a large and beautiful hall, with great pillars.  There sat three
men in the royal livery, fast asleep, each in a great armchair, with
his feet on a huge footstool.  They looked like fools dreaming
themselves kings; and Lina looked as if she longed to throttle them.
At one side of the hall was the grand staircase, and they went up.

Everything that now met Curdie's eyes was rich--not glorious like the
splendours of the mountain cavern, but rich and soft--except where, now
and then, some rough old rib of the ancient fortress came through, hard
and discoloured.  Now some dark bare arch of stone, now some rugged and
blackened pillar, now some huge beam, brown with the smoke and dust of
centuries, looked like a thistle in the midst of daisies, or a rock in
a smooth lawn.

They wandered about a good while, again and again finding themselves
where they had been before.  Gradually, however, Curdie was gaining
some idea of the place.  By and by Lina began to look frightened, and
as they went on Curdie saw that she looked more and more frightened.
Now, by this time he had come to understand that what made her look
frightened was always the fear of frightening, and he therefore
concluded they must be drawing nigh to somebody.

At last, in a gorgeously painted gallery, he saw a curtain of crimson,
and on the curtain a royal crown wrought in silks and stones.  He felt
sure this must be the king's chamber, and it was here he was wanted;
or, if it was not the place he was bound for, something would meet him
and turn him aside; for he had come to think that so long as a man
wants to do right he may go where he can: when he can go no farther,
then it is not the way.  'Only,' said his father, in assenting to the
theory, 'he must really want to do right, and not merely fancy he does.
He must want it with his heart and will, and not with his rag of a
tongue.'

So he gently lifted the corner of the curtain, and there behind it was
a half-open door.  He entered, and the moment he was in, Lina stretched
herself along the threshold between the curtain and the door.



CHAPTER 19

The King's Chamber

He found himself in a large room, dimly lighted by a silver lamp that
hung from the ceiling.  Far at the other end was a great bed,
surrounded with dark heavy curtains.  He went softly toward it, his
heart beating fast.  It was a dreadful thing to be alone in the king's
chamber at the dead of night.  To gain courage he had to remind himself
of the beautiful princess who had sent him.

But when he was about halfway to the bed, a figure appeared from the
farther side of it, and came towards him, with a hand raised warningly.
He stood still.  The light was dim, and he could distinguish little
more than the outline of a young girl.  But though the form he saw was
much taller than the princess he remembered, he never doubted it was
she.  For one thing, he knew that most girls would have been frightened
to see him there in the dead of the night, but like a true princess,
and the princess he used to know, she walked straight on to meet him.
As she came she lowered the hand she had lifted, and laid the
forefinger of it upon her lips.  Nearer and nearer, quite near, close
up to him she came, then stopped, and stood a moment looking at him.

'You are Curdie,' she said.

'And you are the Princess Irene,' he returned.

'Then we know each other still,' she said, with a sad smile of
pleasure.  'You will help me.'

'That I will,' answered Curdie.  He did not say, 'If I can'; for he
knew that what he was sent to do, that he could do.  'May I kiss your
hand, little Princess?'

She was only between nine and ten, though indeed she looked several
years older, and her eyes almost those of a grown woman, for she had
had terrible trouble of late.

She held out her hand.

'I am not the little princess any more.  I have grown up since I saw
you last, Mr Miner.'

The smile which accompanied the words had in it a strange mixture of
playfulness and sadness.

'So I see, Miss Princess,' returned Curdie; 'and therefore, being more
of a princess, you are the more my princess.  Here I am, sent by your
great-great-grandmother, to be your servant.  May I ask why you are up
so late, Princess?'

'Because my father wakes so frightened, and I don't know what he would
do if he didn't find me by his bedside.  There! he's waking now.'

She darted off to the side of the bed she had come from.

Curdie stood where he was.

A voice altogether unlike what he remembered of the mighty, noble king
on his white horse came from the bed, thin, feeble, hollow, and husky,
and in tone like that of a petulant child:

'I will not, I will not.  I am a king, and I will be a king.  I hate
you and despise you, and you shall not torture me!'

'Never mind them, Father dear,' said the princess.  'I am here, and
they shan't touch you.  They dare not, you know, so long as you defy
them.'

'They want my crown, darling; and I can't give them my crown, can I?
For what is a king without his crown?'

'They shall never have your crown, my king,' said Irene.  'Here it
is--all safe.  I am watching it for you.'

Curdie drew near the bed on the other side.  There lay the grand old
king--he looked grand still, and twenty years older.  His body was
pillowed high; his beard descended long and white over the crimson
coverlid; and his crown, its diamonds and emeralds gleaming in the
twilight of the curtains, lay in front of him, his long thin old hands
folded round it, and the ends of his beard straying among the lovely
stones.  His face was like that of a man who had died fighting nobly;
but one thing made it dreadful: his eyes, while they moved about as if
searching in this direction and in that, looked more dead than his
face.  He saw neither his daughter nor his crown: it was the voice of
the one and the touch of the other that comforted him.  He kept
murmuring what seemed words, but was unintelligible to Curdie,
although, to judge from the look of Irene's face, she learned and
concluded from it.

By degrees his voice sank away and the murmuring ceased, although still
his lips moved.  Thus lay the old king on his bed, slumbering with his
crown between his hands; on one side of him stood a lovely little
maiden, with blue eyes, and brown hair going a little back from her
temples, as if blown by a wind that no one felt but herself; and on the
other a stalwart young miner, with his mattock over his shoulder.
Stranger sight still was Lina lying along the threshold--only nobody
saw her just then.

A moment more and the king's lips ceased to move.  His breathing had
grown regular and quiet.  The princess gave a sigh of relief, and came
round to Curdie.

'We can talk a little now,' she said, leading him toward the middle of
the room.  'My father will sleep now till the doctor wakes him to give
him his medicine.  It is not really medicine, though, but wine.
Nothing but that, the doctor says, could have kept him so long alive.
He always comes in the middle of the night to give it him with his own
hands.  But it makes me cry to see him wake up when so nicely asleep.'

'What sort of man is your doctor?' asked Curdie.

'Oh, such a dear, good, kind gentleman!' replied the princess.  'He
speaks so softly, and is so sorry for his dear king!  He will be here
presently, and you shall see for yourself.  You will like him very
much.'

'Has your king-father been long ill?' asked Curdie.

'A whole year now,' she replied.  'Did you not know?  That's how your
mother never got the red petticoat my father promised her. The lord
chancellor told me that not only Gwyntystorm but the whole land was
mourning over the illness of the good man.'

Now Curdie himself had not heard a word of His Majesty's illness, and
had no ground for believing that a single soul in any place he had
visited on his journey had heard of it.  Moreover, although mention had
been made of His Majesty again and again in his hearing since he came
to Gwyntystorm, never once had he heard an allusion to the state of his
health.  And now it dawned upon him also that he had never heard the
least expression of love to him.  But just for the time he thought it
better to say nothing on either point.

'Does the king wander like this every night?' he asked.

'Every night,' answered Irene, shaking her head mournfully.  'That is
why I never go to bed at night.  He is better during the day--a little,
and then I sleep--in the dressing room there, to be with him in a
moment if he should call me.  It is so sad he should have only me and
not my mamma!  A princess is nothing to a queen!'

'I wish he would like me,' said Curdie, 'for then I might watch by him
at night, and let you go to bed, Princess.'

'Don't you know then?' returned Irene, in wonder.  'How was it you
came?  Ah!  You said my grandmother sent you.  But I thought you knew
that he wanted you.'

And again she opened wide her blue stars.

'Not I,' said Curdie, also bewildered, but very glad.

'He used to be constantly saying--he was not so ill then as he is
now--that he wished he had you about him.'

'And I never to know it!' said Curdie, with displeasure.

'The master of the horse told papa's own secretary that he had written
to the miner-general to find you and send you up; but the miner-general
wrote back to the master of the horse, and he told the secretary, and
the secretary told my father, that they had searched every mine in the
kingdom and could hear nothing of you. My father gave a great sigh, and
said he feared the goblins had got you, after all, and your father and
mother were dead of grief.  And he has never mentioned you since,
except when wandering.  I cried very much.  But one of my grandmother's
pigeons with its white wing flashed a message to me through the window
one day, and then I knew that my Curdie wasn't eaten by the goblins,
for my grandmother wouldn't have taken care of him one time to let him
be eaten the next.  Where were you, Curdie, that they couldn't find
you?'

'We will talk about that another time, when we are not expecting the
doctor,' said Curdie.

As he spoke, his eyes fell upon something shining on the table under
the lamp.  His heart gave a great throb, and he went nearer. Yes, there
could be no doubt--it was the same flagon that the butler had filled in
the wine cellar.

'It looks worse and worse!'he said to himself, and went back to Irene,
where she stood half dreaming.

'When will the doctor be here?' he asked once more--this time hurriedly.

The question was answered--not by the princess, but by something which
that instant tumbled heavily into the room.  Curdie flew toward it in
vague terror about Lina.

On the floor lay a little round man, puffing and blowing, and uttering
incoherent language.  Curdie thought of his mattock, and ran and laid
it aside.

'Oh, dear Dr Kelman!' cried the princess, running up and taking hold of
his arm; 'I am so sorry!'  She pulled and pulled, but might almost as
well have tried to set up a cannon ball.  'I hope you have not hurt
yourself?'

'Not at all, not at all,' said the doctor, trying to smile and to rise
both at once, but finding it impossible to do either.

'If he slept on the floor he would be late for breakfast,' said Curdie
to himself, and held out his hand to help him.

But when he took hold of it, Curdie very nearly let him fall again, for
what he held was not even a foot: it was the belly of a creeping thing.
He managed, however, to hold both his peace and his grasp, and pulled
the doctor roughly on his legs--such as they were.

'Your Royal Highness has rather a thick mat at the door,' said the
doctor, patting his palms together.  'I hope my awkwardness may not
have startled His Majesty.'

While he talked Curdie went to the door: Lina was not there.

The doctor approached the bed.

'And how has my beloved king slept tonight?' he asked.

'No better,' answered Irene, with a mournful shake of her head.

'Ah, that is very well!' returned the doctor, his fall seeming to have
muddled either his words or his meaning.  'When we give him his wine,
he will be better still.'

Curdie darted at the flagon, and lifted it high, as if he had expected
to find it full, but had found it empty.

'That stupid butler!  I heard them say he was drunk!' he cried in a
loud whisper, and was gliding from the room.

'Come here with that flagon, you!  Page!' cried the doctor. Curdie came
a few steps toward him with the flagon dangling from his hand, heedless
of the gushes that fell noiseless on the thick carpet.

'Are you aware, young man,' said the doctor, 'that it is not every wine
can do His Majesty the benefit I intend he should derive from my
prescription?'

'Quite aware, sir, answered Curdie.  'The wine for His Majesty's use is
in the third cask from the corner.'

'Fly, then,' said the doctor, looking satisfied.

Curdie stopped outside the curtain and blew an audible breath--no more;
up came Lina noiseless as a shadow.  He showed her the flagon.

'The cellar, Lina: go,' he said.

She galloped away on her soft feet, and Curdie had indeed to fly to
keep up with her.  Not once did she make even a dubious turn.  From the
king's gorgeous chamber to the cold cellar they shot.  Curdie dashed
the wine down the back stair, rinsed the flagon out as he had seen the
butler do, filled it from the cask of which he had seen the butler
drink, and hastened with it up again to the king's room.

The little doctor took it, poured out a full glass, smelt, but did not
taste it, and set it down.  Then he leaned over the bed, shouted in the
king's ear, blew upon his eyes, and pinched his arm: Curdie thought he
saw him run something bright into it.  At last the king half woke.  The
doctor seized the glass, raised his head, poured the wine down his
throat, and let his head fall back on the pillow again.  Tenderly
wiping his beard, and bidding the princess good night in paternal
tones, he then took his leave.  Curdie would gladly have driven his
pick into his head, but that was not in his commission, and he let him
go.  The little round man looked very carefully to his feet as he
crossed the threshold.

'That attentive fellow of a page has removed the mat,' he said to
himself, as he walked along the corridor.  'I must remember him.'



CHAPTER 20

Counterplotting

Curdie was already sufficiently enlightened as to how things were
going, to see that he must have the princess of one mind with him, and
they must work together.  It was clear that among those about the king
there was a plot against him: for one thing, they had agreed in a lie
concerning himself; and it was plain also that the doctor was working
out a design against the health and reason of His Majesty, rendering
the question of his life a matter of little moment.  It was in itself
sufficient to justify the worst fears, that the people outside the
palace were ignorant of His Majesty's condition: he believed those
inside it also--the butler excepted--were ignorant of it as well.
Doubtless His Majesty's councillors desired to alienate the hearts of
his subjects from their sovereign.  Curdie's idea was that they
intended to kill the king, marry the princess to one of themselves, and
found a new dynasty; but whatever their purpose, there was treason in
the palace of the worst sort: they were making and keeping the king
incapable, in order to effect that purpose.  The first thing to be seen
to, therefore, was that His Majesty should neither eat morsel nor drink
drop of anything prepared for him in the palace.  Could this have been
managed without the princess, Curdie would have preferred leaving her
in ignorance of the horrors from which he sought to deliver her.  He
feared also the danger of her knowledge betraying itself to the evil
eyes about her; but it must be risked and she had always been a wise
child.

Another thing was clear to him--that with such traitors no terms of
honour were either binding or possible, and that, short of lying, he
might use any means to foil them.  And he could not doubt that the old
princess had sent him expressly to frustrate their plans.

While he stood thinking thus with himself, the princess was earnestly
watching the king, with looks of childish love and womanly tenderness
that went to Curdie's heart.  Now and then with a great fan of peacock
feathers she would fan him very softly; now and then, seeing a cloud
begin to gather upon the sky of his sleeping face, she would climb upon
the bed, and bending to his ear whisper into it, then draw back and
watch again--generally to see the cloud disperse.  In his deepest
slumber, the soul of the king lay open to the voice of his child, and
that voice had power either to change the aspect of his visions, or,
which was better still, to breathe hope into his heart, and courage to
endure them.

Curdie came near, and softly called her.

'I can't leave Papa just yet,' she returned, in a low voice.

'I will wait,' said Curdie; 'but I want very much to say something.'

In a few minutes she came to him where he stood under the lamp.

'Well, Curdie, what is it?' she said.

'Princess,' he replied, 'I want to tell you that I have found why your
grandmother sent me.'

'Come this way, then, she answered, 'where I can see the face of my
king.'

Curdie placed a chair for her in the spot she chose, where she would be
near enough to mark any slightest change on her father's countenance,
yet where their low-voiced talk would not disturb him. There he sat
down beside her and told her all the story--how her grandmother had
sent her good pigeon for him, and how she had instructed him, and sent
him there without telling him what he had to do.  Then he told her what
he had discovered of the state of things generally in Gwyntystorm, and
especially what he had heard and seen in the palace that night.

'Things are in a bad state enough,' he said in conclusion--'lying and
selfishness and inhospitality and dishonesty everywhere; and to crown
all, they speak with disrespect of the good king, and not a man knows
he is ill.'

'You frighten me dreadfully,' said Irene, trembling.

'You must be brave for your king's sake,' said Curdie.

'Indeed I will,' she replied, and turned a long loving look upon the
beautiful face of her father.  'But what is to be done?  And how am I
to believe such horrible things of Dr Kelman?'

'My dear Princess,' replied Curdie, 'you know nothing of him but his
face and his tongue, and they are both false.  Either you must beware
of him, or you must doubt your grandmother and me; for I tell you, by
the gift she gave me of testing hands, that this man is a snake.  That
round body he shows is but the case of a serpent. Perhaps the creature
lies there, as in its nest, coiled round and round inside.'

'Horrible!' said Irene.

'Horrible indeed; but we must not try to get rid of horrible things by
refusing to look at them, and saying they are not there.  Is not your
beautiful father sleeping better since he had the wine?'

'Yes.'

'Does he always sleep better after having it?'

She reflected an instant.

'No; always worse--till tonight,' she answered.

'Then remember that was the wine I got him--not what the butler drew.
Nothing that passes through any hand in the house except yours or mine
must henceforth, till he is well, reach His Majesty's lips.'

'But how, dear Curdie?' said the princess, almost crying.

'That we must contrive,' answered Curdie.  'I know how to take care of
the wine; but for his food--now we must think.'

'He takes hardly any,' said the princess, with a pathetic shake of her
little head which Curdie had almost learned to look for.

'The more need,' he replied, 'there should be no poison in it.' Irene
shuddered.  'As soon as he has honest food he will begin to grow
better.  And you must be just as careful with yourself, Princess,'
Curdie went on, 'for you don't know when they may begin to poison you,
too.'

'There's no fear of me; don't talk about me,' said Irene.  'The good
food!  How are we to get it, Curdie?  That is the whole question.'

'I am thinking hard,' answered Curdie.  'The good food?  Let me
see--let me see!  Such servants as I saw below are sure to have the
best of everything for themselves: I will go an see what I can find on
their table.'

'The chancellor sleeps in the house, and he and the master of the
king's horse always have their supper together in a room off the great
hall, to the right as you go down the stairs,' said Irene. 'I would go
with you, but I dare not leave my father.  Alas!  He scarcely ever
takes more than a mouthful.  I can't think how he lives!  And the very
thing he would like, and often asks for--a bit of bread--I can hardly
ever get for him: Dr Kelman has forbidden it, and says it is nothing
less than poison to him.'

'Bread at least he shall have,' said Curdie; 'and that, with the honest
wine, will do as well as anything, I do believe.  I will go at once and
look for some.  But I want you to see Lina first, and know her, lest,
coming upon her by accident at any time, you should be frightened.'

'I should like much to see her,' said the princess.

Warning her not to be startled by her ugliness, he went to the door and
called her.

She entered, creeping with downcast head, and dragging her tail over
the floor behind her.  Curdie watched the princess as the frightful
creature came nearer and nearer.  One shudder went from head to foot,
and next instant she stepped to meet her.  Lina dropped flat on the
floor, and covered her face with her two big paws.  It went to the
heart of the princess: in a moment she was on her knees beside her,
stroking her ugly head, and patting her all over.

'Good dog!  Dear ugly dog!' she said.

Lina whimpered.

'I believe,' said Curdie, 'from what your grandmother told me, that
Lina is a woman, and that she was naughty, but is now growing good.'

Lina had lifted her head while Irene was caressing her; now she dropped
it again between her paws; but the princess took it in her hands, and
kissed the forehead betwixt the gold-green eyes.

'Shall I take her with me or leave her?' asked Curdie.

'Leave her, poor dear,' said Irene, and Curdie, knowing the way now,
went without her.

He took his way first to the room the princess had spoken of, and there
also were the remains of supper; but neither there nor in the kitchen
could he find a scrap of plain wholesome-looking bread.  So he returned
and told her that as soon as it was light he would go into the city for
some, and asked her for a handkerchief to tie it in.  If he could not
bring it himself, he would send it by Lina, who could keep out of sight
better than he, and as soon as all was quiet at night he would come to
her again.  He also asked her to tell the king that he was in the
house.  His hope lay in the fact that bakers everywhere go to work
early.  But it was yet much too early.  So he persuaded the princess to
lie down, promising to call her if the king should stir.



CHAPTER 21

The Loaf

His Majesty slept very quietly.  The dawn had grown almost day, and
still Curdie lingered, unwilling to disturb the princess.

At last, however, he called her, and she was in the room in a moment.
She had slept, she said, and felt quite fresh.  Delighted to find her
father still asleep, and so peacefully, she pushed her chair close to
the bed, and sat down with her hands in her lap.

Curdie got his mattock from where he had hidden it behind a great
mirror, and went to the cellar, followed by Lina.  They took some
breakfast with them as they passed through the hall, and as soon as
they had eaten it went out the back way.

At the mouth of the passage Curdie seized the rope, drew himself up,
pushed away the shutter, and entered the dungeon.  Then he swung the
end of the rope to Lina, and she caught it in her teeth. When her
master said, 'Now, Lina!' she gave a great spring, and he ran away with
the end of the rope as fast as ever he could.  And such a spring had
she made, that by the time he had to bear her weight she was within a
few feet of the hole.  The instant she got a paw through, she was all
through.

Apparently their enemies were waiting till hunger should have cowed
them, for there was no sign of any attempt having been made to open the
door.  A blow or two of Curdie's mattock drove the shattered lock clean
from it, and telling Lina to wait there till he came back, and let no
one in, he walked out into the silent street, and drew the door to
behind them.  He could hardly believe it was not yet a whole day since
he had been thrown in there with his hands tied at his back.

Down the town he went, walking in the middle of the street, that, if
any one saw him, he might see he was not afraid, and hesitate to rouse
an attack on him.  As to the dogs, ever since the death of their two
companions, a shadow that looked like a mattock was enough to make them
scamper.  As soon as he reached the archway of the city gate he turned
to reconnoitre the baker's shop, and perceiving no sign of movement,
waited there watching for the first.

After about an hour, the door opened, and the baker's man appeared with
a pail in his hand.  He went to a pump that stood in the street, and
having filled his pail returned with it into the shop. Curdie stole
after him, found the door on the latch, opened it very gently, peeped
in, saw nobody, and entered.  Remembering perfectly from what shelf the
baker's wife had taken the loaf she said was the best, and seeing just
one upon it, he seized it, laid the price of it on the counter, and
sped softly out, and up the street.  Once more in the dungeon beside
Lina, his first thought was to fasten up the door again, which would
have been easy, so many iron fragments of all sorts and sizes lay
about; but he bethought himself that if he left it as it was, and they
came to find him, they would conclude at once that they had made their
escape by it, and would look no farther so as to discover the hole.  He
therefore merely pushed the door close and left it.  Then once more
carefully arranging the earth behind the shutter, so that it should
again fall with it, he returned to the cellar.

And now he had to convey the loaf to the princess.  If he could venture
to take it himself, well; if not, he would send Lina.  He crept to the
door of the servants' hall, and found the sleepers beginning to stir.
One said it was time to go to bed; another, that he would go to the
cellar instead, and have a mug of wine to waken him up; while a third
challenged a fourth to give him his revenge at some game or other.

'Oh, hang your losses!' answered his companion; 'you'll soon pick up
twice as much about the house, if you but keep your eyes open.'

Perceiving there would be risk in attempting to pass through, and
reflecting that the porters in the great hall would probably be awake
also, Curdie went back to the cellar, took Irene's handkerchief with
the loaf in it, tied it round Lina's neck, and told her to take it to
the princess.

Using every shadow and every shelter, Lina slid through the servants
like a shapeless terror through a guilty mind, and so, by corridor and
great hall, up the stair to the king's chamber.

Irene trembled a little when she saw her glide soundless in across the
silent dusk of the morning, that filtered through the heavy drapery of
the windows, but she recovered herself at once when she saw the bundle
about her neck, for it both assured her of Curdie's safety, and gave
her hope of her father's.  She untied it with joy, and Lina stole away,
silent as she had come.  Her joy was the greater that the king had
waked up a little before, and expressed a desire for food--not that he
felt exactly hungry, he said, and yet he wanted something.  If only he
might have a piece of nice fresh bread!  Irene had no knife, but with
eager hands she broke a great piece from the loaf, and poured out a
full glass of wine. The king ate and drank, enjoyed the bread and the
wine much, and instantly fell asleep again.

It was hours before the lazy people brought their breakfast.  When it
came, Irene crumbled a little about, threw some into the fireplace, and
managed to make the tray look just as usual.

In the meantime, down below in the cellar, Curdie was lying in the
hollow between the upper sides of two of the great casks, the warmest
place he could find.  Lina was watching.  She lay at his feet, across
the two casks, and did her best so to arrange her huge tail that it
should be a warm coverlid for her master.

By and by Dr Kelman called to see his patient; and now that Irene's
eyes were opened, she saw clearly enough that he was both annoyed and
puzzled at finding His Majesty rather better.  He pretended however to
congratulate him, saying he believed he was quite fit to see the lord
chamberlain: he wanted his signature to something important; only he
must not strain his mind to understand it, whatever it might be: if His
Majesty did, he would not be answerable for the consequences.  The king
said he would see the lord chamberlain, and the doctor went.

Then Irene gave him more bread and wine, and the king ate and drank,
and smiled a feeble smile, the first real one she had seen for many a
day.  He said he felt much better, and would soon be able to take
matters into his own hands again.  He had a strange miserable feeling,
he said, that things were going terribly wrong, although he could not
tell how.  Then the princess told him that Curdie had come, and that at
night, when all was quiet for nobody in the palace must know, he would
pay His Majesty a visit.  Her great-great-grandmother had sent him, she
said.  The king looked strangely upon her, but the strange look passed
into a smile clearer than the first, and irene's heart throbbed with
delight.



CHAPTER 22

The Lord Chamberlain

At noon the lord chamberlain appeared.  With a long, low bow, and paper
in hand, he stepped softly into the room.  Greeting His Majesty with
every appearance of the profoundest respect, and congratulating him on
the evident progress he had made, he declared himself sorry to trouble
him, but there were certain papers, he said, which required his
signature--and therewith drew nearer to the king, who lay looking at
him doubtfully.  He was a lean, long, yellow man, with a small head,
bald over the top, and tufted at the back and about the ears.  He had a
very thin, prominent, hooked nose, and a quantity of loose skin under
his chin and about the throat, which came craning up out of his
neckcloth.  His eyes were very small, sharp, and glittering, and looked
black as jet.  He had hardly enough of a mouth to make a smile with.
His left hand held the paper, and the long, skinny fingers of his right
a pen just dipped in ink.

But the king, who for weeks had scarcely known what he did, was today
so much himself as to be aware that he was not quite himself; and the
moment he saw the paper, he resolved that he would not sign without
understanding and approving of it.  He requested the lord chamberlain
therefore to read it.  His Lordship commenced at once but the
difficulties he seemed to encounter, and the fits of stammering that
seized him, roused the king's suspicion tenfold. He called the princess.

'I trouble His Lordship too much,' he said to her: 'you can read print
well, my child--let me hear how you can read writing.  Take that paper
from His Lordship's hand, and read it to me from beginning to end,
while my lord drinks a glass of my favourite wine, and watches for your
blunders.'

'Pardon me, Your Majesty,' said the lord chamberlain, with as much of a
smile as he was able to extemporize, 'but it were a thousand pities to
put the attainments of Her Royal Highness to a test altogether too
severe.  Your Majesty can scarcely with justice expect the very organs
of her speech to prove capable of compassing words so long, and to her
so unintelligible.'

'I think much of my little princess and her capabilities,' returned the
king, more and more aroused.  'Pray, my lord, permit her to try.'

'Consider, Your Majesty: the thing would be altogether without
precedent.  It would be to make sport of statecraft,' said the lord

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/709