Wet Magic - E. Nesbit (read novels website TXT) 📗

throne sat the loveliest lady in the world. She wore a starry crown and a gown of green, and golden shoes, and she smiled at them so kindly that they forgot any fear they may have felt. The music ended on a note of piercing sweetness and in the great hush that followed the children felt themselves gently pushed forward to the foot of the throne. All around was a great crowd, forming a circle about the pearly pavement on which they stood.

The Queen rose up in her place and reached toward them the end of her scepter where shone a star like those that crowned her.

“Welcome,” she said in a voice far sweeter than the music, “Welcome to our Home. You have been kind, you have been brave, you have been unselfish, and all my subjects do homage to you.”

At the word the whole of that great crowd bent toward them like bulrushes in the wind, and the Queen herself came down the steps of her throne and held out her hands to the children.

A choking feeling in their throats became almost unbearable as those kind hands rested on one head after another.

Then the crowd raised itself and stood upright, and someone called out in a voice like a trumpet:

“The children saved one of us⁠—We die in captivity. Shout for the children. Shout!”

And a roar like the roar of wild waves breaking on rocks went up from the great crowd that stood all about them. There was a fluttering of flags or handkerchiefs⁠—the children could not tell which⁠—and then the voice of their own Mermaid, saying: “There⁠—that’s over. And now we shall have the banquet. Shan’t we, Mamma?”

“Yes, my daughter,” said the Queen.

So the Mermaid they had rescued was a Queen’s daughter!

“I didn’t know you were a Princess,” said Mavis, as they followed the Queen along a corridor.

“That’s why they have made such a fuss, I suppose,” said Bernard.

“Oh, no, we should have given the ovation to anyone who had saved any of us from captivity. We love giving ovations. Only we so seldom get the chance, and even ordinary entertaining is difficult. People are so prejudiced. We can hardly ever get anyone to come and visit us. I shouldn’t have got you if you hadn’t happened to find that cave. It would have been quite impossible for me to give Kathleen that clinging embrace from shallow water. The cave water is so much more buoyant than the sea. I daresay you noticed that.”

Yes⁠—they had.

“May we sit next you at the banquet?” Kathleen asked suddenly, “because, you know, it’s all rather strange to us.”

“Of course, dear,” said the sea lady.

“But,” said Bernard, “I’m awfully sorry, but I think we ought to go home.”

“Oh, don’t talk of it,” said the Mermaid. “Why, you’ve only just come.”

Bernard muttered something about getting home in time to wash for tea.

“There’ll be heaps of time,” said Francis impatiently; “don’t fuss and spoil everything.”

“I’m not fussing,” said Bernard, stolid as ever. “I never fuss. But I think we ought to be thinking of getting home.”

“Well, think about it then,” said Francis impatiently, and turned to admire the clusters of scarlet flowers that hung from the pillars of the gallery.

The banquet was very magnificent, but they never could remember afterward what it was that they ate out of the silver dishes and drank out of the golden cups. They none of them forgot the footmen, however, who were dressed in tight-fitting suits of silver scales, with silver fingerless gloves, and a sort of helmet on that made them look less like people than like fish, as Kathleen said.

“But they are fish,” said the Princess, opening her beautiful eyes; “they’re the Salmoners, and the one behind Mother’s chair is the Grand Salmoner. In your country I have heard there are Grand Almoners. We have Grand Salmoners.”

“Are all your servants fish?” Mavis asked.

“Of course,” said the Princess, “but we don’t use servants much except for state occasions. Most of our work is done by the lower orders⁠—electric eels, most of them. We get all the power for our machinery from them.”

“How do you do it?” Bernard asked, with a fleeting vision of being some day known as the great man who discovered the commercial value of the electricity obtainable from eels.

“We keep a tank of them,” said she, “and you just turn a tap⁠—they’re connected up to people’s houses⁠—and you connect them with your looms or lathes or whatever you’re working. That sets up a continuous current and the eels swim around and around in the current till the work’s done. It’s beautifully simple.”

“It’s simply beautiful,” said Mavis warmly. “I mean all this.” She waved her hand to the row of white arches through which the green of the garden and the blue of what looked like the sky showed plainly. “And you live down here and do nothing but play all day long? How lovely.”

“You’d soon get tired of play if you did nothing else,” said Bernard wisely. “At least I know I should. Did you ever make a steam engine?” he asked the Princess. “That’s what I call work.”

“It would be, to me,” she said, “but don’t you know that work is what you have to do and don’t like doing? And play’s whatever you want to do. Have some more Andrew Aromaticus.”

She made a sign to a Salmoner, who approached with a great salver of fruit. The company were seated by fours and fives and sixes at little tables, such as you see in the dining rooms of the big hotels where people feed who have motors. These little tables are good for conversation.

“Then what do you do?” Kathleen asked.

“Well, we have to keep all the rivers flowing, for one thing⁠—the earthly rivers, I mean⁠—and to see to the rain and snow taps, and to attend to the tides and whirlpools, and open the cages where the winds are kept. Oh, it’s no easy business being a Princess in our country, I can tell you,