Adela Cathcart Volume I Part 14

"'How do you feel, my child?' he resumed, after a pause of discomfiture.

"'Quite well, thank you.'

"'I mean, what do you feel like?'

"'Like nothing at all, that I know of.'

"'You must feel like something.'

"'I feel like a princess with such a funny papa, and such a dear pet of a queen-mamma!'

"'Now really!' began the queen; but the princess interrupted her.

"'Oh! yes,' she added, 'I remember. I have a curious feeling sometimes, as if I were the only person that had any sense in the whole world.'

"She had been trying to behave herself with dignity; but now she burst into a violent fit of laughter, threw herself backwards over the chair, and went rolling about the floor in an ecstasy of enjoyment.

The king picked her up easier than one does a down quilt, and replaced her in her former relation to the chair. The exact preposition expressing the relation I do not happen to know.

"'Is there nothing you wish for?' resumed the king, who had learned by this time that it was quite useless to be angry with her.

"'O you dear papa!--yes,' answered she.

"'What is it, my darling?'

"'I have been longing for it--oh, such a time! Ever since last night.'

"'Tell me what it is.'

"'Will you promise to let me have it?'

"The king was on the point of saying _yes_; but the wiser queen checked him with a single motion of her head.

"'Tell me what it is first,' said he.

"'No, no. Promise first.'

"'I dare not. What is it?'

"'Mind I hold you to your promise.--It is--to be tied to the end of a string--a very long string indeed, and be flown like a kite. Oh, such fun! I would rain rose-water, and hail sugar-plums, and snow whipt-cream, and, and, and--'

"A fit of laughing checked her; and she would have been off again, over the floor, had not the king started up and caught her just in time. Seeing that nothing but talk could be got out of her, he rang the bell, and sent her away with two of her ladies-in-waiting.

"'Now, queen,' he said, turning to her majesty, 'what _is_ to be done?'

"'There is but one thing left,' answered she. 'Let us consult the college of Metaphysicians.'

"'Bravo!' cried the king; 'we will.'

"Now at the head of this college were two very wise Chinese philosophers--by name, Hum-Drum, and Kopy-Keck. For them the king sent; and straightway they came. In a long speech, he communicated to them what they knew very well already--as who did not?--namely, the peculiar condition of his daughter in relation to the globe on which she dwelt; and requested them to consult together as to what might be the cause and probable cure of her _infirmity_. The king laid stress upon the word, but failed to discover his own pun. The queen laughed; but Hum-Drum and Kopy-Keck heard with humility and retired in silence.

Their consultation consisted chiefly in propounding and supporting, for the thousandth time, each his favourite theories. For the condition of the princess afforded delightful scope for the discussion of every question arising from the division of thought--in fact of all the Metaphysics of the Chinese Empire. But it is only justice to say that they did not altogether neglect the discussion of the practical question, _what was to be done_.

"Hum-Drum was a Materialist, and Kopy-Keck was a Spiritualist. The former was slow and sententious; the latter was quick and flighty; the latter had generally the first word; the former the last.

"'I a.s.sert my former a.s.sertion,' began Kopy-Keck, with a plunge.

'There is not a fault in the princess, body or soul; only they are wrong put together. Listen to me now, Hum-Drum, and I will tell you in brief what I think. Don't speak. Don't answer me. I won't hear you till I have done.--At that decisive moment, when souls seek their appointed habitations, two eager souls met, struck, rebounded, lost their way, and arrived each at the wrong place. The soul of the princess was one of those, and she went far astray. She does not belong by rights to this world at all, but to some other planet, probably Mercury. Her proclivity to her true sphere destroys all the natural influence which this...o...b..would otherwise possess over her corporeal frame. She cares for nothing here. There is no relation between her and this world.

"'She must therefore be taught, by the sternest compulsion, to take an interest in the earth as the earth. She must study every department of its history--its animal history; its vegetable history; its mineral history; its social history; its moral history; its political history; its scientific history; its literary history; its musical history; its artistical history; above all, its metaphysical history. She must begin with the Chinese Dynasty, and end with j.a.pan. But first of all she must study Geology, and especially the history of the extinct races of animals--their natures, their habits, their loves, their hates, their revenges. She must----'

"'Hold, h-o-o-old!' roared Hum-Drum. 'It is certainly my turn now. My rooted and insubvertible conviction is that the causes of the anomalies evident in the princess's condition are strictly and solely physical. But that is only tantamount to acknowledging that they exist. Hear my opinion.--From some cause or other, of no importance to our inquiry, the motion of her heart has been reversed. That remarkable combination of the suction and the force pump, works the wrong way--I mean in the case of the unfortunate princess: it draws in where it should force out, and forces out where it should draw in. The offices of the auricles and the ventricles are subverted. The blood is sent forth by the veins, and returns by the arteries. Consequently it is running the wrong way through all her corporeal organism--lungs and all. Is it then all mysterious, seeing that such is the case, that on the other particular of gravitation as well, she should differ from normal humanity? My proposal for the cure is this:

"Phlebotomize until she is reduced to the last point of safety. Let it be effected, if necessary, in a warm bath. When she is reduced to a state of perfect asphyxy, apply a ligature to the left ancle, drawing it as tight as the bone will bear. Apply, at the same moment, another of equal tension around the right wrist. By means of plates constructed for the purpose, place the other foot and hand under the receivers of two air-pumps. Exhaust the receivers. Exhibit a pint of French brandy, and await the result.'

"'Which would presently arrive in the form of grim Death,' said Kopy-Keck.

"'If it should, she would yet die in doing our duty,' retorted Hum-Drum.

"But their Majesties had too much tenderness for their volatile offspring to subject her to either of the schemes of the equally unscrupulous philosophers. Indeed the most complete knowledge of the laws of nature would have been unserviceable in her case; for it was impossible to cla.s.sify her. She was a fifth imponderable body, sharing all the other properties of the ponderable.

"CHAPTER VIII.--TRY A DROP OF WATER.

"Perhaps the best thing for the princess would have been falling in love. But how a princess who had no gravity at all, could fall into anything, is a difficulty--perhaps _the_ difficulty. As for her own feelings on the subject, she did not even know that there was such a bee-hive of honey and stings to be fallen into. And now I come to mention another curious fact about her.

"The palace was built on the sh.o.r.e of the loveliest lake in the world; and the princess loved this lake more than father or mother. The root of this preference no doubt, although the princess did not recognize it as such--was, that, the moment she got into it, she recovered the natural right of which she had been so wickedly deprived--namely, gravity. Whether this was owing to the fact that water had been employed as the means of conveying the injury, I do not know. But it is certain that she could swim and dive like the duck that her old nurse said she was. The way that this alleviation of her misfortune was discovered, was as follows. One summer evening, during the carnival of the country, she had been taken upon the lake, by the king and queen, in the royal barge. They were accompanied by many of the courtiers in a fleet of little boats. In the middle of the lake she wanted to get into the lord chancellor's barge, for his daughter, who was a great favourite with her, was in it with her father. The old king rarely condescended to make light of his misfortune; but on this occasion he happened to be in a particularly good humour; and, as the barges approached each other, he caught up the princess to throw her into the chancellor's barge. He lost his balance, however, and, dropping into the bottom of the barge, lost his hold of his daughter; not however before imparting to her the downward tendency of his own person, though in a somewhat different direction; for, as the king fell into the boat, she fell into the water. With a burst of delighted laughter, she disappeared in the lake. A cry of horror ascended from the boats. They had never seen the princess go down before. Half the men were under water in a moment; but they had all, one after another, come up to the surface again for breath, when--tinkle, tinkle, babble and gus.h.!.+ came the princess's laugh over the water from far away. There she was, swimming like a swan. Nor would she come out for king or queen, chancellor or daughter. But though she was obstinate, she seemed more sedate than usual. Perhaps that was because a great pleasure spoils laughing. After this, the pa.s.sion of her life was to get into the water, and she was always the better behaved and the more beautiful the more she had of it. Summer and winter it was all the same; only she could not stay quite so long in the water, when they had to break the ice to let her in. Any day, from morning till evening, she might be descried--a streak of white in the blue water--lying as still as the shadow of a cloud, or shooting along like a dolphin; disappearing, and coming up again far off, just where one did not expect her. She would have been in the lake of a night too, if she could have had her way; for the balcony of her window overhung a deep pool in it; and through a shallow reedy pa.s.sage she could have swum out into the wide wet water, and no one would have been any the wiser. Indeed when she happened to wake in the moonlight, she could hardly resist the temptation. But there was the sad difficulty of getting into it. She had as great a dread of the air as some children have of the water. For the slightest gust of wind would blow her away; and a gust might arise in the stillest moment. And if she gave herself a push towards the water and just failed of reaching it, her situation would be dreadfully awkward, irrespective of the wind; for at best there she would have to remain, suspended in her nightgown, till she was seen and angled for by somebody from the window.

"'Oh! if I had my gravity,' thought she contemplating the water, 'I would flash off this balcony like a long white sea-bird, head-long into the darling wetness. Heigh-ho!'

"This was the only consideration that made her wish to be like other people.

"Another reason for being fond of the water was that in it alone she enjoyed any freedom. For she could not walk out without a cortege, consisting in part of a troop of light horse, for fear of the liberties which the wind might take with her. And the king grew more apprehensive with increasing years, till at last he would not allow her to walk abroad without some twenty silken cords fastened to as many parts of her dress, and held by twenty n.o.ble-men. Of course horseback was out of the question. But she bade good-bye to all this ceremony when she got into the water. So remarkable were its effects upon her, especially in restoring her for the time to the ordinary human gravity, that, strange to say, Hum-Drum and Kopy-Keck agreed in recommending the king to bury her alive for three years; in the hope that, as the water did her so much good, the earth would do her yet more. But the king had some vulgar prejudices against the experiment, and would not give his consent. Foiled in this, they yet agreed in another recommendation; which, seeing that the one imported his opinions from China and the other from Thibet, was very remarkable indeed. They said that, if water of external origin and application could be so efficacious, water from a deeper source might work a perfect cure; in short, that, if the poor afflicted princess could by any means be made to cry, she might recover her lost gravity.

"But how was this to be brought about? Therein lay all the difficulty.

The philosophers were not wise enough for this. To make the princess cry was as impossible as to make her weigh. They sent for a professional beggar; commanded him to prepare his most touching oracle of woe; helped him, out of the court charade-box, to whatever he wanted for dressing up, and promised great rewards in the event of his success. But it was all in vain. She listened to the mendicant artist's story, and gazed at his marvellous make-up, till she could contain herself no longer, and went into the most undignified contortions for relief, shrieking, positively screeching with laughter.

"When she had a little recovered herself, she ordered her attendants to drive him away, and not give him a single copper; whereupon his look of mortified discomfiture wrought her punishment and his revenge, for it sent her into violent hysterics, from which she was with difficulty recovered.

"But so anxious was the king that the suggestion should have a fair trial, that he put himself in a rage one day, and, rus.h.i.+ng up to her room, gave her an awful whipping. But not a tear would flow. She looked grave, and her laughing sounded uncommonly like screaming--that was all. The good old tyrant, though he put on his best gold spectacles to look, could not discover the smallest cloud in the serene blue of her eyes.

"CHAPTER IX.--PUT ME IN AGAIN.

"It must have been about this time that the son of a king, who lived a thousand miles from Lagobel, set out to look for the daughter of a queen. He travelled far and wide, but as sure as he found a princess, he found some fault with her. Of course he could not marry a mere woman, however beautiful, and there was no princess to be found worthy of him. Whether the prince was so near perfection that he had a right to demand perfection itself, I cannot pretend to say. All I know is that he was a fine, handsome, brave, generous, well-bred and well-behaved youth, as all princes are.

"In his wanderings he had come across some reports about our princess; but as everybody said she was bewitched, he never dreamed that she could bewitch him. For what indeed could a prince do with a princess that had lost her gravity? Who could tell what she might not lose next? She might lose her visibility; or her tangibility; or, in short, the power of making impressions upon the radical sensorium; so that he should never be able to tell whether she was dead or alive. Of course he made no further inquiries about her.

"One day he lost sight of his retinue in a great forest. These forests are very useful in delivering princes from their courtiers, like a sieve that keeps back the bran. Then the princes get away to follow their fortunes. In this they have the advantage of the princesses, who are forced to marry before they have had a bit of fun. I wish our princesses got lost in a forest sometimes.