The Wise Woman | Page 9

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, please, let me in!" said the princess. "The moon will keep staring
at me; and I hear the wolves in the wood."
Then the door opened, and the princess entered. She looked all around,
but saw nothing of the wise woman.
It was a single bare little room, with a white deal table, and a few old
wooden chairs, a fire of fir-wood on the hearth, the smoke of which
smelt sweet, and a patch of thick-growing heath in one corner. Poor as
it was, compared to the grand place Rosamond had left, she felt no little
satisfaction as she shut the door, and looked around her. And what with
the sufferings and terrors she had left outside, the new kind of tears she
had shed, the love she had begun to feel for her parents, and the trust
she had begun to place in the wise woman, it seemed to her as if her
soul had grown larger of a sudden, and she had left the days of her

childishness and naughtiness far behind her. People are so ready to
think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed.
Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day, will be
ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only
in the one case the fine weather has got into them, in the other the rainy.
Rosamond, as she sat warming herself by the glow of the peat-fire,
turning over in her mind all that had passed, and feeling how pleasant
the change in her feelings was, began by degrees to think how very
good she had grown, and how very good she was to have grown good,
and how extremely good she must always have been that she was able
to grow so very good as she now felt she had grown; and she became so
absorbed in her self-admiration as never to notice either that the fire
was dying, or that a heap of fir-cones lay in a corner near it. Suddenly,
a great wind came roaring down the chimney, and scattered the ashes
about the floor; a tremendous rain followed, and fell hissing on the
embers; the moon was swallowed up, and there was darkness all about
her. Then a flash of lightning, followed by a peal of thunder, so
terrified the princess, that she cried aloud for the old woman, but there
came no answer to her cry.
Then in her terror the princess grew angry, and saying to herself, "She
must be somewhere in the place, else who was there to open the door to
me?" began to shout and yell, and call the wise woman all the bad
names she had been in the habit of throwing at her nurses. But there
came not a single sound in reply.
Strange to say, the princess never thought of telling herself now how
naughty she was, though that would surely have been reasonable. On
the contrary, she thought she had a perfect right to be angry, for was
she not most desperately ill-used- and a princess too? But the wind
howled on, and the rain kept pouring down the chimney, and every now
and then the lightning burst out, and the thunder rushed after it, as if the
great lumbering sound could ever think to catch up with the swift light!
At length the princess had again grown so angry, frightened, and
miserable, all together, that she jumped up and hurried about the
cottage with outstretched arms, trying to find the wise woman. But

being in a bad temper always makes people stupid, and presently she
struck her forehead such a blow against something--she thought herself
it felt like the old woman's cloak--that she fell back--not on the floor
though, but on the patch of heather, which felt as soft and pleasant as
any bed in the palace. There, worn out with weeping and rage, she soon
fell fast asleep.
She dreamed that she was the old cold woman up in the sky, with no
home and no friends, and no nothing at all, not even a pocket;
wandering, wandering