The Blue Moon | Page 5

of her station. When
she heard of it, she went at nightfall to her pansies, all lying in their
beds, and told them of her grief. They, awakened by her tears, lifted up
their grave eyes and looked at her.
"Do you not hear?" said they.
"Hear what?" asked the Princess.
"We are low in the ground: we hear!" said the pansies. "Stoop down
your head and listen!"
The Princess let her head go to the ground; and "click, click," she heard
wooden shoes coming along the road. She ran to the gate, and there was
Hands, tall and lean, dressed as a poor peasant, with a bundle tied up in
a blue cotton handkerchief across his shoulder, and five thousand miles
trodden to nothing by the faithful tramping of his old wooden shoes.
"Oh, the blue moon, the blue moon!" cried the Princess; and running
down the road, she threw herself into his arms.
How happy and proud they were of each other! He, because she
remembered him and knew him so well by the sight of his face and the
sound of his feet after all these years; and she, because he had come all
that way in a pair of wooden shoes, just as he was, and had not been
afraid that she would be ashamed to know him again.
"I am so hungry!" said Hands, when he and Nillywill had done kissing
each other. And when Nillywill heard that, she brought him into the
palace through the pansies by her own private way; then with her own
hands she set food before him, and made him eat. Hands, looking at her,
said, "You are quite as beautiful as I thought you would be!"
"And you--so are you!" she answered, laughing and clapping her hands.
And "Oh, the blue moon," she cried--"surely the blue moon must rise
to-night!"
Low down in the west the new moon, leaning on its side, rocked and
turned softly in its sleep; and there, facing the earth through the cleared
night, the blue moon hung like a burning grape against the sky. Like
the heart of a sapphire laid open, the air flushed and purpled to a deeper
shade. The wind drew in its breath close and hushed, till not a leaf
quaked in the boughs; and the sea that lay out west gathered its waves
together softly to its heart, and let the heave of its tide fall wholly to
slumber. Round-eyed, the stars looked at themselves in the charmed

water, while in a luminous azure flood the light of the blue moon
flowed abroad.
Under the light of many tapers within drawn curtains of tapestry, and
feasting her eyes upon the happiness of Hands, the Princess felt the
change that had entranced the outer world. "I feel," she said, "I do not
know how--as if the palace were standing siege. Come out where we
can breathe the fresh air!"
The light of the tapers grew ghostly and dim, as, parting the thick
hangings of the window, they stepped into the night.
"The blue moon!" cried Nillywill to her heart; "oh, Hands, it is the blue
moon!"
All the world seemed carved out of blue stone; trees with stems
dark-veined as marble rose up to give rest to boughs which drooped the
altered hues of their foliage like the feathers of peacocks at roost. Jewel
within jewel they burned through every shade from blue to onyx. The
white blossoms of a cherry-tree had become changed into turquoise,
and the tossing spray of a fountain as it drifted and swung was like a
column of blue fire. Where a long inlet of sea reached in and touched
the feet of the hanging gardens the stars showed like glow-worms,
emerald in a floor of amethyst.
There was no motion abroad, nor sound: even the voice of the
nightingale was stilled, because the passion of his desire had become
visible before his eyes.
"Once in a blue moon!" said Nilly-will, waiting for her dream to
become altogether true. "Let us go now, she said, "where I can put
away my crown! To-night has brought you to me, and the blue moon
has come for us: let us go!"
"Where shall we go?" asked Hands.
"As far as we can," cried Nillywill. "Suppose to the blue moon!
To-night it seems as if one might tread on water or air. Yonder across
the sea, with the stars for stepping-stones, we might get to the blue
moon as it sets into the waves."
But as they went through the deep alleys of the garden that led down to
the shore they came to a sight more wonderful than anything they had
yet seen.
Before them, facing toward the sea, stood two great reindeer, their high
horns reaching to