The Little Lame Prince | Page 3

but 'the Prince.'
Keep away; his Royal Highness is just going to sleep."
"Nevertheless I must kiss him. I am his god-mother."
"You!" cried the elegant lady nurse.
"You!" repeated all the gentlemen and ladies-in-waiting.
"You!" echoed the heralds and pages--and they began to blow the silver
trumpets in order to stop all further conversation.
The Prince's procession formed itself for returning,--the King and his
train having already moved off toward the palace,--but on the top-most
step of the marble stairs stood, right in front of all, the little old woman
clothed in gray.
She stretched herself on tiptoe by the help of her stick, and gave the
little Prince three kisses.
"This is intolerable!" cried the young lady nurse, wiping the kisses off
rapidly with her lace handkerchief. "Such an insult to his Royal
Highness! Take yourself out of the way, old woman, or the King shall
be informed immediately."
"The King knows nothing of me, more's the pity," replied the old
woman, with an indifferent air, as if she thought the loss was more on
his Majesty's side than hers. "My friend in the palace is the King's
wife."
"King's have not wives, but queens," said the lady nurse, with a
contemptuous air.
"You are right," replied the old woman. "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