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[Illustration: _Frontispiece. "Come in, Curdie," said the voice._]
THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE
by
GEORGE MACDONALD, LL.D
With Eleven Illustrations by James Allen
Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott & Co.
1883.
CONTENTS.
CHAP.
I. THE MOUNTAIN
II. THE WHITE PIGEON
III. THE MISTRESS OF THE SILVER MOON
IV. CURDIE'S FATHER AND MOTHER
V. THE MINERS
VI. THE EMERALD
VII. WHAT IS IN A NAME?
VIII. CURDIE'S MISSION
IX. HANDS
X. THE HEATH
XI. LINA
XII. MORE CREATURES
XIII. THE BAKER'S WIFE
XIV. THE DOGS OF GWYNTYSTORM
XV. DERBA AND BARBARA
XVI. THE MATTOCK
XVII. THE WINE CELLAR
XVIII. THE KING'S KITCHEN
XIX. THE KING'S CHAMBER
XX. COUNTER-PLOTTING
XXI. THE LOAF
XXII. THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN
XXIII. DR. KELMAN
XXIV. THE PROPHECY
XXV. THE AVENGERS
XXVI. THE VENGEANCE
XXVII. MORE VENGEANCE
XXVIII. THE PREACHER
XXIX. BARBARA
XXX. PETER
XXXI. THE SACRIFICE
XXXII. THE KING'S ARMY
XXXIII. THE BATTLE
XXXIV. JUDGMENT
XXXV. THE END
THE PRINCESS AND CURDIE.
CHAPTER I.
THE MOUNTAIN.
Curdie was the son of Peter the miner. He lived with his father and
mother in a cottage built on a mountain, and he worked with his father
inside the mountain.
A mountain is a strange and awful thing. In old times, without knowing
so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people were yet
more afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not come to see how
beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them,--and what
people hate they must fear. Now that we have learned to look at them
with admiration, perhaps we do not always feel quite awe enough of them.
To me they are beautiful terrors.
I will try to tell you what they are. They are portions of the heart of
the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up
and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of
blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot melted
metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump
of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried
sunlight--that is what it is. Now think: out of that caldron, where all
the bubbles would be as big as the Alps if it could get room for its
boiling, certain bubbles have bubbled out and escaped--up and away, and
there they stand in the cool, cold sky--mountains. Think of the change,
and you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about
the very look of a mountain: from the darkness--for where the light has
nothing to shine upon, it is much the same as darkness--from the heat,
from the endless tumult of boiling unrest--up, with a sudden heavenward
shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of
snow that lies like ermine above the blue-green mail of the glaciers;
and the great sun, their grandfather, up there in the sky; and their
little old cold aunt, the moon, that comes wandering about the house at
night; and everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the
rocks and caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that
are studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the
molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the
glaciers fresh-born. Think too of the change in their own substance--no
longer molten and soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and
cold. Think of the creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and
the birds building their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of its
sides, like hair to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the valleys, and
the gracious flowers even at the very edge of its armour of ice, like
the rich embroidery of the garment below, and the rivers galloping down
the valleys in a tumult of white and green! And along with all these,
think of the terrible precipices down which the traveller may fall and
be lost, and the frightful gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers,
and the dark profound lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with
floating lumps of ice. All this outside the mountain! But the inside,
who shall tell what lies there? Caverns of awfullest solitude, their
walls miles thick, sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or
iron, tin or mercury, studded perhaps with precious stones--perhaps a
brook, with eyeless fish in it, running, running ceaseless, cold and
babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes, or
over a gravel of which some of the stones are rubies and emeralds,
perhaps diamonds and sapphires--who can tell?--and whoever can't tell
is free to think--all waiting to flash, waiting for millions of
ages--ever since the earth flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire,
and began to cool. Then there are caverns full of water, numbing cold,
fiercely hot--hotter than any boiling water. From some of these the
water cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood
in the body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the
great caverns of the mountain's heart, whence the arteries let it out
again, gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and kinds,
through and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to the light, and
rushes down the mountain side in torrents, and down the valleys in
rivers--down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs of the world, that is
the sea, where it is tossed in storms and cyclones, heaved up in
billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to mist upon rocks, beaten by
millions of tails, and breathed by millions of gills, whence at last,
melted into vapour by the sun, it is lifted up pure into the air, and
borne by the servant winds back to the mountain tops and the snow, the
solid ice, and the molten stream.
Well, when the heart of the earth has thus come rushing up among her
children, bringing with it gifts of all that she possesses, then
straightway into it rush her children to see what they can find there.
With pickaxe and spade and crowbar, with boring chisel and blasting
powder, they force their way back: is it to search for what toys they
may have left in their long-forgotten nurseries? Hence the mountains
that lift their heads into the clear air, and are dotted over with the
dwellings of men, are tunnelled and bored in the darkness of their
bosoms by the dwellers in the houses which they hold up to the sun and
air.
Curdie and his father were of these: their business was to bring to
light hidden things; they sought silver in the rock and found it, and
carried it out. Of the many other precious things in their mountain they
knew little or nothing. Silver ore was what they were sent to find, and
in darkness and danger they found it. But oh, how sweet was the air on
the mountain face when they came out at sunset to go home to wife and
mother! They did breathe deep then!
The mines belonged to the king of the country, and the miners were his
servants, working under his overseers and officers. He was a real
king--that is one who ruled for the good of his people, and not to
please himself, and he wanted the silver not to buy rich things for
himself, but to help him to govern the country, and pay the armies that
defended it from certain troublesome neighbours, and the judges whom he
set to portion out righteousness amongst the people, that so they might
learn it themselves, and come to do without judges at all. Nothing that
could be got from the heart of the earth could have been put to better
purposes than the silver the king's miners got for him. There were
people in the country who, when it came into their hands, degraded it by
locking it up in a chest, and then it grew diseased and was called
_mammon_, and bred all sorts of quarrels; but when first it left the
king's hands it never made any but friends, and the air of the world
kept it clean.
About a year before this story began, a series of very remarkable events
had just ended. I will narrate as much of them as will serve to show the
tops of the roots of my tree.
Upon the mountain, on one of its many claws, stood a grand old house,
half farmhouse, half castle, belonging to the king; and there his only
child, the Princess Irene, had been brought up till she was nearly nine
years old, and would doubtless have continued much longer, but for the
strange events to which I have referred.
At that time the hollow places of the mountain were inhabited by
creatures called goblins, who for various reasons and in various ways
made themselves troublesome to all, but to the little princess
dangerous. Mainly by the watchful devotion and energy of Curdie,
however, their designs had been utterly defeated, and made to recoil
upon themselves to their own destruction, so that now there were very
few of them left alive, and the miners did not believe there was a
single goblin remaining in the whole inside of the mountain.
The king had been so pleased with the boy--then approaching thirteen
years of age--that when he carried away his daughter he asked him to
accompany them; but he was still better pleased with him when he found
that he preferred staying with his father and mother. He was a right
good king, and knew that the love of a boy who would not leave his
father and mother to be made a great man, was worth ten thousand offers
to die for his sake, and would prove so when the right time came. For
his father and mother, they would have given him up without a grumble,
for they were just as good as the king, and he and they perfectly
understood each other; but in this matter, not seeing that he could do
anything for the king which one of his numerous attendants could not do
as well, Curdie felt that it was for him to decide. So the king took a
kind farewell of them all and rode away, with his daughter on his horse
before him.
A gloom fell upon the mountain and the miners when she was gone, and
Curdie did not whistle for a whole week. As for his verses, there was no
occasion to make any now. He had made them only to drive away the
goblins, and they were all gone--a good riddance--only the princess was
gone too! He would rather have had things as they were, except for the
princess's sake. But whoever is diligent will soon be cheerful, and
though the miners missed the household of the castle, they yet managed
to get on without them.
Peter and his wife, however, were troubled with the fancy that they had
stood in the way of their boy's good fortune. It would have been such a
fine thing for him and them too, they thought, if he had ridden with the
good king's train. How beautiful he looked, they said, when he rode the
king's own horse through the river that the goblins had sent out of the
hill! He might soon have been a captain, they did believe! The good,
kind people did not reflect that the road to the next duty is the only
straight one, or that, for their fancied good, we should never wish our
children or friends to do what we would not do ourselves if we were in
their position. We must accept righteous sacrifices as well as make
them.