Three Wonder Plays | Page 4

no day to be lost. I will go write the letter.
_Nurse:_ Oh, you wouldn't send away the poor child!
_Dall Glic:_ It would be a great hardship to send her so far. Our poor little Princess Nu!
_Queen: (Sharply.)_ What are saying? _(Dall Glic is silent.)_
_King:_ I would not wish her to be sent out of this.
_Queen:_ There is no other way to set her mind to sense and learning. It will be for her own good.
_Nurse:_ Where's the use troubling her with lessons and with books that maybe she will never be in need of at all. Speak up for her, King.
_King:_ Let her stop for this year as she is.
_Queen:_ You are all too soft and too easy. She will turn on you and will blame you for it, and another year or two years slipped by.
_Nurse:_ That she may!
_Dall Glic:_ Who knows what might take place within the twelvemonth that is coming?
_King:_ Ah, don't be talking about it. Maybe it never might come to pass.
_Dall Glic_: It will come to pass, if there is truth in the clouds of sky.
_King_: It will not be for a year, anyway. There'll be many an ebbing and flowing of the tide within a year.
_Queen_: What at all are you talking about?
_King_: Ah, where's the use of talking too much.
_Queen_: Making riddles you are, and striving to keep the meaning from your comrade, that is myself.
_King_: It's best not be thinking about the thing you would not wish, and maybe it might never come around at all. To strive to forget a threat yourself, it might maybe be forgotten by the universe.
_Queen_: Is it true something was threatened?
_King_: How would I know is anything true, and the world so full of lies as it is?
_Nurse_: That is so. He might have been wrong in his foretelling. What is he in the finish but an old prophecy?
_Dall Glic_: Is it of Fintan you are saying that?
_Queen_: And who, will you tell me, is Fintan?
_Dall Glic_: Anyone that never heard tell of Fintan never heard anything at all.
_Queen_: His name was not up on the tablets of big men at the King of Alban's Court, or of Britain.
_Nurse_: Ah, sure in those countries they are without religion or belief.
_Queen_: Is it that there was a prophecy?
_King_: Don't mind it. What are prophecies? Don't we hear them every day of the week? And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.
_Queen: (To Dall Glic_). I must get to the root of this, and the handle. Who, now, is Fintan?
_Dall Glic:_ He is an astrologer, and understanding the nature of the stars.
_Nurse:_ He wore out in his lifetime three eagles and three palm trees and three earthen dykes. It is down in a cleft of the rocks beyond he has his dwelling presently, the way he can be watching the stars through the daytime.
_Dall Glic:_ He prophesied in a prophecy, and it is written in clean letters in the King's yew-tree box.
_King:_ It is best to keep it out of sight. It being to be, it will be; and, if not, where's the use troubling our mind?
_Queen:_ Sound it out to me.
_Dall Glic: (Looking from window and drawing curtain.)_ There is no story in the world is worse to me or more pitiful; I wouldn't wish any person to hear.
_Nurse:_ Oh, take care it would come to the ears of my darling Nu!
_Dall Glic:_ It is said by himself and the heavens that in a year from this day the King's daughter will be brought away and devoured by a scaly Green Dragon that will come from the North of the World.
_Queen:_ A Dragon! I thought you were talking of some danger. I wouldn't give in to dragons. I never saw one. I'm not in dread of beasts unless it might be a mouse in the night-time!
_King:_ Put it out of mind. It is likely anyway that the world will soon be ended the way it is.
_Queen: I_ will send and search out this astrologer and will question him.
_Dall Glic_: You have not far to search. He is outside at the kitchen door at this minute, and as if questioning after something, and it a half-score and seven years since I knew him to come out of his cave.
_King_: Do not! He might waken up the Dragon and put him in mind of the girl, for to make his own foretelling come true.
_Nurse_: Ah, such a thing cannot be! The poor innocent child! _(Weeps.)_
_Queen_: Where's the use of crying and roaring? The thing must be stopped and put an end to. I don't say I give in to your story, but that would be an unnatural death. I would be scandalised being stepmother to a girl that would be swallowed by a