The Wise Woman | Page 8

would that instant wither up and cease. If an army of them had rushed to invade it, it would have melted away on the edge of it, and ceased like a dying wave.--She even imagined that the moon was slowly coming nearer and nearer down the sky, to take her and freeze her to death in her arms. The wise woman, too, she felt sure, although her cottage looked asleep, was watching her at some little window. In this, however, she would have been quite right if she had only imagined enough- namely, that the wise woman was watching over her from the little window. But after all, somehow, the thought of the wise woman was less frightful than that of any of her other terrors, and at length she began to wonder whether it might not turn out that she was no ogress, but only a rude, ill-bred, tyrannical, yet on the whole not altogether illmeaning person. Hardly had the possibility arisen in her mind, before she was on her feet: if the woman was anything short of an ogress, her cottage must be better than that horrible loneliness, with nothing in all the world but a stare; and even an ogress had at least the shape and look of a human being.
She darted round the end of the cottage to find the front. But to her surprise she came only to another back, for no door was to be seen. She tried the further end, but still no door! She must have passed it as she ran--but no--neither in gable nor in side was any to be found!
A cottage without a door!--she rushed at it in a rage and kicked at the wall with her feet. But the wall was hard as iron, and hurt her sadly through her gay silken slippers. She threw herself on the heath, which came up to the walls of the cottage on every side, and roared and screamed with rage. Suddenly, however, she remembered how her screaming had brought the horde of wolves and hy?nas about her in the forest, and, ceasing at once, lay still, gazing yet again at the moon. And then came the thought of her parents in the palace at home. In her mind's eye she saw her mother sitting at her embroidery with the tears dropping upon it, and her father staring into the fire as if he were looking for her in its glowing caverns. It is true that if they had both been in tears by her side because of her naughtiness, she would not have cared a straw; but now her own forlorn condition somehow helped her to understand their grief at having lost her, and not only a great longing to be back in her comfortable home, but a feeble flutter of genuine love for her parents awoke in her heart as well, and she burst into real tears--soft, mournful tears--very different from those of rage and disappointment to which she was so much used. And another very remarkable thing was that the moment she began to love her father and mother, she began to wish to see the wise woman again. The idea of her being an ogress vanished utterly, and she thought of her only as one to take her in from the moon, and the loneliness, and the terrors of the forest-haunted heath, and hide her in a cottage with not even a door for the horrid wolves to howl against.
But the old woman--as the princess called her, not knowing that her real name was the Wise Woman--had told her that she must knock at the door: how was she to do that when there was no door? But again she bethought herself--that, if she could not do all she was told, she could at least do a part of it: if she could not knock at the door, she could at least knock--say on the wall, for there was nothing else to knock upon--and perhaps the old woman would hear her and lift her in by some window. Thereupon she rose at once to her feet, and picking up a stone, began to knock on the wall with it. A loud noise was the result, and she found she was knocking on the very door itself. For a moment she feared the old woman would be offended, but the next there came a voice saying,
"Who is there?"
The princess answered, "Please, old woman, I did not mean to knock so loud."
To this there came no reply.
Then the princess knocked again, this time with her knuckles, and the voice came again, saying,
"Who is there?"
And the princess answered, "Rosamond."
Then a second time there was silence. But the princess soon ventured to knock a third time.
"What do you want? " said the voice.
"Oh,