The Other Side of the Sun Part 5

"Shall I never go to court, then?" asked his G.o.dchild, with tears in her eyes.

"Of course you shall!" said Smilax. "Can you not go to court without being a princess? There is a back door to the palace as well as a front one, and any ordinary person can get in at the back door. But you must give up all your witchcraft the moment you set foot in the palace, for it is impossible to be an ordinary person and a bewitching one at the same moment."

"I don't mind that," said his G.o.dchild. "If I cannot bewitch the King I do not want to be an enchantress any more. I will go to the palace this very minute!"

And so she did, and that was how it came about that there was a new scullery-maid at the palace; and, one fine morning, the King met her all among the vegetables, as he took his stroll in the garden after breakfast. It is extremely probable that the King would not have noticed her at all if she had not happened to be wearing a bright green handkerchief tied over her dark red hair. He felt sure that he had seen that bright green and that dark red somewhere before, so he stopped and looked at her.

"What are you doing?" he asked her, with a smile.

"I am picking beans for the King's dinner," answered the little scullery-maid.

"How extremely kind of you!" exclaimed the King, who had always supposed that the beans for his dinner picked themselves. "Will you let me look at them?"

She held out her basket, and the King peeped inside and found it full of bright scarlet flowers.

"Are those beans?" asked the King in wonderment, and he thought he had never seen anything so charming before.

"I _hope_ so," said the little scullery-maid with an anxious sigh, for she knew no more about it than the King and was dreadfully afraid of being scolded for picking the wrong thing. Indeed, she had hardly finished speaking when the angry voice of the chief cook called her from the back door; and away she scampered down the garden path.

Every one noticed how absent-minded the King was at dinner, that day. He talked even less than usual, and when the fifteenth course came round he turned reproachfully to the Prime Minister.

"I thought I was going to have beans for dinner," observed the King, in a disappointed tone.

"Your Majesty has just helped himself to beans," said the Prime Minister, when he had recovered from his surprise at the King's remark.

"What?" exclaimed the King, looking at his plate. "Are these the beautiful scarlet beans that grow in my kitchen-garden? Impossible!"

"They turn green when they are cooked, your Majesty," said the Prime Minister, who had never seen a bean growing in his life but could not possibly have owned such a thing before the court.

"Then let me have my beans before they are cooked, in future," said the King; and the Prime Minister hastily made a note of it on his clean cuff.

There was a magnificent ball at the palace that evening, and the King had ninety-nine delightful princesses to dance with, but none of them had dark red hair, and when he had finished dancing with the ninety-ninth he once more turned reproachfully to the Prime Minister.

"Where is the hundredth Princess?" he demanded impatiently.

The Prime Minister knew no more about the hundredth Princess than he had known about beans, and he wished he had gone to bed instead of coming to the court ball to be worried by the King's questions. He was too sleepy, however, to invent any more answers, so he had to tell the truth; and no doubt he would have made a much better Prime Minister if he had always been too sleepy to invent things that were not true, but that, of course, has nothing to do with the story.

"I have never heard of the hundredth Princess, your Majesty," he said wearily. "Would it please your Majesty to tell me what she is like?"

He fully expected the King to be exceedingly angry, and he wondered whether he should be beheaded at once or only imprisoned in one of the King's dungeons. It was therefore a great surprise to him when the King burst out laughing and was not in the least offended.

"I never heard of her myself until this morning," said the King. "She has wonderful dark red hair, and she is so sweet and so kind that she actually picks the vegetables for my dinner!"

The Prime Minister was so relieved at not being put into a dungeon that he positively yawned in the King's presence; and the King, for the first time in his life, noticed that he looked tired and sent him home to bed, which was certainly a much nicer place to send him to than a dungeon.

And as for the Prime Minister, he went on speaking the truth to the end of his days.

The next morning, the King hastened into his garden the moment he had swallowed his breakfast. The chief huntsman met him just as he was leaving the palace, and asked him what time it would please him to start for the hunt.

"Hunt?" cried the King, impatiently. "What hunt? I am going to pick the vegetables for my dinner, and that is ever so much more important!" And he ran down the steps and across the lawn, as never a King ran before.

The little scullery-maid was wandering among the gooseberry bushes with a very disconsolate look on her face. "I am looking for sage to stuff the King's ducks with," she said, when the King came hurrying towards her; "but I don't know a bit what it is like, and how can I be expected to pick things when I don't know what to pick?"

"Do not look so distressed," said the King, for her eyes were full of tears. "I am the King, and I do not mind whether my ducks are stuffed or not."

"Ah, but the chief cook does," said the little scullery-maid, who, of course, had known all the while that he was the King. "The chief cook will beat me if I do not fill my basket with sage. Look! this is where he beat me yesterday for bringing the wrong beans."

She rolled up her sleeve and showed him a tiny black speck on her dainty white arm. To be sure, it was not much of a bruise, but when one has been an enchantress all one's life it is a little hard to be beaten for not knowing enough. The King was quite overcome with distress, and he stooped and kissed the little black mark tenderly; and that, as every one knows, is the only way to cure a bruise.

"Come with me," he said, "and I will help you to find some sage. Then the King's ducks will be stuffed, and the chief cook will not be able to beat you."

So the King and the scullery-maid wandered all over the kitchen-garden and hunted for sage. And the King knew just as much about it as the scullery-maid, and the scullery-maid knew as much as the King, and that was just exactly nothing at all; so there is no doubt that the King's ducks would never have got stuffed that day, if the pair of them had not suddenly stumbled upon a bush of rosemary.

"Does it not smell sweet?" exclaimed the little scullery-maid, and she picked a whole handful of it and gave it to the King.

"Surely," cried the King, "anything so charming as this must be the very thing we are looking for!"

The angry voice of the chief cook sounded once more from the back door, so they did not stop to think any more about it but filled the basket with rosemary as fast as they could; and then away scampered the little scullery-maid down the path, while the King stood and watched the little curls of dark red hair that fluttered in the breeze.

The chief cook was far too grand a person to stuff the King's ducks, so he left it to the little scullery-maid; and the result was that the King's ducks were stuffed with rosemary. There were only two people in the palace who enjoyed their dinner that day: one was the King, who sat at the head of the royal table and had three helpings of roast duck; and the other was the little scullery-maid, who sat on the back doorstep and ate the sc.r.a.pings of all the plates out of a big brown bowl. As for the courtiers, they never forgot that dinner as long as they lived; but this was not surprising, for ducks that are stuffed with rosemary are surely ducks to be remembered.

After that, the courtiers had to eat a good many nasty things for dinner. Every day the chief cook sent the little scullery-maid into the garden to pick something for the King's dinner, and every day the King came and helped her to find it; and although they never found the right thing and although it was generally very nasty, the King always ate three helpings of it, and that was all that mattered to the chief cook.

To be sure, it was a lot of trouble to take, just to please the chief cook, and it would have been far simpler to have cut off his head then and there; but neither the King nor the scullery-maid thought of that.

After all, it was much nicer to go on meeting each other among the gooseberry bushes, and it certainly saved the expense of an execution.

Before long people began to wonder what had come over the King. He never went near the royal forest, and when he was not in the kitchen-garden he was in the library, looking for books that would tell him the difference between a banana and a turnip and the best place to find a cauliflower.

The chief huntsman and all the other huntsmen had never been so dull in their lives; but the wild boars and all the other animals were as happy as the day was long. Even the rabbits began to pop up their heads above the bracken, and were quite amazed when they found that no one was waiting to kill them. "Truly," they squeaked to one another, "the Green Enchantress must have bewitched the King after all!" And perhaps they were not far wrong.

Now, the same thing cannot go on for ever; and one morning, when the King hastened out into the garden as usual, the scullery-maid saw at once that he had something important to say.

"There is to be a ball to-morrow," he told her. "The Prime Minister says so! And there will be ninety-nine princesses there besides yourself."

The little scullery-maid shook her head. "I shall not be there," she said. "I am only a scullery-maid; and no one, not even the Fairy Queen, can make me into a real princess."

"You are the hundredth Princess," declared the King; "and no one, not even the Fairy Queen, can make you into a scullery-maid."

"The ninety-nine other princesses have never picked the vegetables for the King's dinner," sighed the little scullery-maid.

"They would never do anything half so sweet nor so kind," said the King.

"The ninety-nine other princesses," continued the little scullery-maid, looking down at her crumpled print gown, "have never worn such an old frock as mine!"

"Nor have they ever looked half so beautiful or so charming," said the King.

The angry voice of the chief cook sounded loudly from the back door, and the little scullery-maid turned to run down the path as usual. But, this time, the King caught her by the hand and held her back.

"Will you come to the ball and dance with me?" he asked coaxingly.

She looked very sad. "I am not a real princess, you see," she sighed.