"Nevertheless I know her Majesty well, and I love her and her child. And--since you dropped him on the marble stairs (this she said in a mysterious whisper, which made the young lady tremble in spite of her anger)--I choose to take him for my own, and be his godmother, ready to help him whenever he wants me.""You help him!" cried all the group breaking into shouts of laughter, to which the little old woman paid not the slightest attention. Her soft gray eyes were fixed on the Prince, who seemed to answer to the look, smiling again and again in the causeless, aimless fashion that babies do smile.
"His Majesty must hear of this," said a gentleman-in-waiting.
"His Majesty will hear quite enough news in a minute or two," said the old woman sadly.
And again stretching up to the little Prince, she kissed him on the forehead solemnly.
"Be called by a new name which nobody has ever thought of. Be Prince Dolor, in memory of your mother Dolorez.""In memory of!" Everybody started at the ominous phrase, and also at a most terrible breach of etiquette which the old woman had committed. In Nomansland, neither the king nor the queen was supposed to have any Christian name at all. They dropped it on their coronation day, and it never was mentioned again till it was engraved on their coffins when they died.
"Old woman, you are exceedingly ill-bred," cried the eldest lady-in-waiting, much horrified.
"How you could know the fact passes my comprehension. But even if you did know it, how dared you presume to hint that her most gracious Majesty is called Dolorez?""WAS called Dolorez," said the old woman, with a tender solemnity.
The first gentleman, called the Gold-stick-in-waiting, raised it to strike her, and all the rest stretched out their hands to seize her; but the gray mantle melted from between their fingers like air; and, before anybody had time to do anything more, there came a heavy, muffled, startling sound.
The great bell of the palace the bell which was only heard on the death of some one of the royal family, and for as many times as he or she was years old--began to toll. They listened, mute and horror-stricken. Some one counted: one--two--three--four--up to nine-and-twenty --just the Queen's age.
It was, indeed, the Queen. Her Majesty was dead! In the midst of the festivities she had slipped away out of her new happiness and her old sufferings, not few nor small. Sending away all her women to see the grand sight,--at least they said afterward, in excuse, that she had done so, and it was very like her to do it,--she had turned with her face to the window, whence one could just see the tops of the distant mountains --the Beautiful Mountains, as they were called --where she was born. So gazing, she had quietly died.
When the little Prince was carried back to his mother's room, there was no mother to kiss him. And, though he did not know it, there would be for him no mother's kiss any more.
As for his godmother,--the little old woman in gray who called herself so,--whether she melted into air, like her gown when they touched it, or whether she flew out of the chapel window, or slipped through the doorway among the bewildered crowd, nobody knew--nobody ever thought about her.
Only the nurse, the ordinary homely one, coming out of the Prince's nursery in the middle of the night in search of a cordial to quiet his continual moans, saw, sitting in the doorway, something which she would have thought a mere shadow, had she not seen shining out of it two eyes, gray and soft and sweet. She put her hand before her own, screaming loudly. When she took them away the old woman was gone.
