Fairy Book - Sophie May (love story books to read .txt) 📗
- Author: Sophie May
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One day, as she was sitting by the shore of the lake, a water-kelpie saw her weeping, and came to her in the form of a white-haired old man, saying,—
“Charming lady! why do you weep? Come with me to my kingdom under the waters. My people are always happy.”
Then she looked where he bade her, and saw, afar down under the waters, a beautiful city, whose streets were paved with red and white coral.
The kelpie said, “Will you go down?”
“No,” sighed Moneta, thinking of the kind words her husband had sometimes spoken to her: “I cannot go yet.”
But the kelpie came every day, repeating the question, “Will you go now?” and she answered, “I cannot go yet.”
But at last her husband said,—
“How often the thought comes to me, If I had no wife and child, all this gold would be mine!” and he knitted his brows with a frown.
Then Moneta looked in his face, and said,—
“Dear Ivan, I have loved you truly; but you no longer care for Moneta. I will go away with the little child, and all our gold shall be yours. Farewell!”
Then she embraced him with falling tears. His heart was stirred within him; and he would have followed her, only he knew not which way she had gone.
Soon the water-kelpie came to him in the form of a horse; and ran before him, neighing fiercely, and breathing fire from his mouth. This is the way kelpies take to announce the fact that some one has gone under the water.
So the man followed the kelpie. His heart was swelling with grief; and all his love for his wife and child had come back to him.
He looked into the lake, and saw the fair city. In a transparent palace Moneta was sitting, crowned with pearls, the child sleeping on her bosom. He shouted,—
“Come back, O Moneta!” but she heard him not.
He went every day to the same spot, never leaving it until the water was clear, and he had seen his wife and child. He cared no more for his fine castle and his gold; for the castle was empty, and the gold could not speak.
“Alas,” cried he, “if I could listen to the music of Moneta’s voice! if I could hold the child in my arms once more!”
Now he cared for nothing but to gaze into the waters at Moneta and her child.
One day, the water-kelpie appeared to him in the form of an old man.
THE WATER-KELPIE. Page 70.
“Why sit you here, sighing like the north wind?” said the kelpie.
“I have loved gold better than my best friends,” replied Ivan; “and now my best friends are taken away from me, and the gold is left; but I love it no longer.”
“Ah, ah!” growled the kelpie; “I have heard of such men as you: nothing is dear till it is missed. You should have thought of that before. If your lost ones were to return, you would treat them as badly as ever, no doubt.”
“No, no,” groaned Ivan; “I would love them better than all the wealth in the world! I would love them better than my own life! Ah, the sting it is to think of my own ingratitude!”
“Hold!” said the kelpie: “grumble to yourself if you like, but don’t vex my ears with your complaints. Suppose I were to bring back Moneta and the child,—would you give me your chests of gold?”
“That I will,” cried the man, “right joyfully.”
“Not so fast: will you give me your castle as well?”
“Ah, yes, castle and gold; take them, and welcome.”
“Not so fast: Moneta and her child are worth more than these. Will you give me the castle and gold, and ten years of your life?”
“With all my heart.”
“Then,” said the kelpie “go home, and to-morrow you shall see Moneta and her child.”
When the morrow came, the husband and wife wept for joy at meeting once more; and Ivan said,—
“Can you forgive me, dearest Moneta?”
Moneta had already forgiven him; and the three—father, mother, and child—loved one another, and were content to the end of their lives; and Ivan said,—
“Once for all I have found that gold cannot make one happy; but, with the blessing of a clear conscience, warm hearts and loving words are the sweetest things in life.”
THE LOST SYLPHID.“I tell the tale as ’twas told to me.”
I have heard that one night, on a distant shore, a band of water-nixies were dancing to gentle music, their golden sandals twinkling like stars.
A lord and lady were walking on the same shore. The lord’s eyes were bent on the ground; but his wife paused, and said,—
“Listen, my lord, to that enchanting music!”
“I hear no music,” he replied, laughing. “You must wake up, dear wife.
Falling asleep in a half-dream.”
“But, my lord, those exquisite beings in gossamer robes! surely you see them!”
“I see the play of the moonbeams, my love, and nothing more.”
But the wife stood transfixed. One beautiful fairy, taller and fairer than her companions, had wings, and floated through the dance, scarcely touching the earth.
“Was ever such a vision of loveliness?” cried the enraptured lady: “she must be my own little daughter,—eat of my bread, and sleep upon my bosom.”
Then, kneeling, she sang,—
Give me the winged one to be my own daughter.”
The dance ceased. The nixies, bewildered, looked north and south, and knew not which way to flee; but the winged fairy, attracted by the human love in the lady’s eyes, glided slowly forward. Then the nixies stormed in fierce wrath, their willowy figures swaying to and fro as if blown by the wind.
“They shall not harm you, little one. Come with me, be my own daughter, and I will carry you home.”
“Home!” echoed the lovely child; “my home is in the Summer-land. Oh, will you indeed carry me there?”
Then she folded her white wings, and nestled in the lady’s bosom like a gentle dove, and was borne to a beautiful castle that overlooked the sea. The water-nixies soon forgot her, for they could not hold her memory in their little humming-bird hearts.
She was not of their race. Her wings were soft and transparent, like those of a white butterfly; and she ever declared that she had once alighted from a cloud, and been caught in a nixie’s net spread upon the grass.
But, in time, her wings dwindled and disappeared; and then the lord, who was now her father, could not remember that she had ever been other than an earthly child.
“You fancy you were once a sylphid,” said he; “but there are no sylphids, my sweet one, and there is no Summer-land.”
The child became as dear to the lord and lady as their very heart’s blood; and they forgot her foreign birth, and almost believed, as all the world did, that she was their own little daughter. But the child did not forget. She longed for the true home she had left; but whither should she go to seek it?
“Dear papa,” said she, one day, “I beg you will not say again there are no sylphids; for I remember so well how I spread my wings and flew. It was glorious to see the clouds float under my feet!”
“Very well,” said the lord; “if you like, I will say there are sylphids in the air, and trolls inside the earth; and, once on a time, I was myself a great white butterfly: do you remember chasing me over a bed of roses?”
“O papa, now you laugh! I love the twinkle in your eye; and I am so glad it is you, and no one else, who is my papa; but just the same, and forevermore, I shall keep saying, I was a sylphid!”
Sometimes, when she set her white teeth into some delicious fruit, she said with dreamy eyes,—
“These grapes of Samarcand came across the seas; but they are not so sweet as the fruit in my own garden, mamma.”
“And where is your garden, my child?”
“Oh, in the Summer-land. I always forget that you have never seen it. When I go there again, mamma, I will certainly take you too; for I love you with all my heart. I can never go without you.”
When she heard the evening-bells from the minster, she said, “Oh, they are like the joy-bells at home, only not so sweet. Nothing, here, is so sweet. Even my dear mamma is not so lovely as the lady who comes when I am asleep.”
Little One—they called her Little One for the want of a name—loved to prattle about the wonders of that mysterious fairy-land, which no one but herself had ever seen. Her mother would not check her, but let her tell her pretty visions of remembered rainbows, and palaces, and precious gems. She said,—
“The child has such a vivid fancy! It is not all of us who can see pictures when our eyes are shut.”
But the lord was not so well pleased; and once, when his daughter looked at a frozen stream and murmured, “We have the happiest rivers at home; they sing all day long, all the year, without freezing! Can I find that Summer-land again! Oh, I would creep all over the world to seek it,” he replied,—
“Little One, it is some cloud-city you are thinking of, some dream-land, or isle of Long Ago, which you will never see again. I beg you to forget these wild fancies.”
But still the child dreamed on. Once she heard the glad song of the Hyperboreans:—
Where golden gardens glow;
Where the winds of the North, becalmed in sleep,
Their conch-shells never blow.”
She clapped her hands, murmuring to herself,—
“There is my home! I think I remember now it was ‘a land in the sun-bright deep!’”
So, when she journeyed with her parents to distant countries, she always hoped that some ship would bear her away to the Happy Isles; and when they once touched a bright shore, and some one cried, “The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece!” she thought she was home at last, and hardly dared look at the remembered shore. But, alas, she had not yet reached the Summer-land: this was not her home.
Then she heard her father say that the jewels she wore had been brought up from the deep places under the earth.
“I wonder I had not thought of that,” she said to herself. “Since there are such beautiful gems in my lost home, it must lie under the earth. No doubt if I could only find the right cave, and walk in it far enough, I should come to the Summer-land.”
So she set out, one day, in wild haste, but only lost herself in a deep cavern;
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