"Good-bye," the Bat said. "I suppose you won't marry _me_?"
"Don't be silly," the late Queen said; and she slipped behind the
curtain and ran through the deserted halls again, and once more out into
the garden. And once again she watered her favourite plants, for the
last time, and then flew right up into the air and away, away over the
troubled seas, to the land that lay low in the horizon.
"How delightful it feels not to be a Queen any longer!" she said to
herself. "I always used to feel afraid, when I sat under that great
crown, that it might fall on my head and squash me altogether. But I
wonder how the bat got on."
That the Queen never knew; but this was what happened. The bat took to
kingship quite as easily as a duck takes to water, and, for reasons that
the Queen gave, made a most popular ruler--even though he _was_ strictly
just. True, there were only three people in the kingdom who understood
him, and they were mouse-trap makers who had learnt the bat language
from mice. But, as the King always superintended the carrying out of
his own edicts, they did not care to play tricks. And the Bat language
was taught in all the schools, so that it became the state tongue. And
all the ladies took to wearing brown sealskin cloaks with great puffed
sleeves and capes, so as to look as much like bats as possible, and they
all pretended to be very weak-sighted and turned night into day, in
imitation of the King.
So that altogether the King was a great success from every point of
view, as he was very long-lived, the last news that has reached here
from the Narrowlands, reported that his Majesty was still hanging head
downwards from the great crown, and was still setting the fashion
throughout the kingdom, though the news does not tell us that his people
have yet resorted to hanging from the chandeliers by their toes.
But the Narrowlands is very far away from here, so that news does not
often reach us from it; there is even no talk of opening the country up,
which alone shows how difficult it must be to reach.
* * * * *
In the mean while the Queen had come to the other shore. She flew
straight to the little cottage in the valley, and the cock who was
standing on the doorsill greeted her with a lusty crow, being glad to
see her again.
In the house there was no one to be found.
"The little mother must have gone to her bleaching," the Queen said to
herself, "and he--oh, he told me he was going to work in the wood
to-day, so now I'll see about making the infusion. The kettle's on the
boil, and it won't take long."
She took off the faded wind-flower crown, and looked at it for a moment.
"You poor thing!" she said, "it seems a shame, but still it can't be
helped," and in a moment she had dropped it into the boiling water,
which rapidly assumed the golden straw colour of a weak cup of tea.
This she poured into a drinking-horn, and then set off with it into the
wood at the back of the house. It was rather a ticklish task, walking
through the low, dusky wood with the horn in her hand, for it was
getting on in the day and the light was bad, and the small trees of
which the wood was composed were difficult to walk among.
By her side the stream rushed and rustled over its rocky bottom, and her
feet crackled too on the flooring of last year's fallen leaves, but the
sound that she paused every now and then to listen for she could not
hear. There came no sharp ringing of the axe down the valley among the
trees.
"He must be binding the faggots together," she said to herself, and went
on until she came to the clearing where he should have been at work; but
there he was not.
The light came down the valley duskily through the mist; it gleamed upon
the stream and glimmered on the white ends of the newly chopped faggots
that were neatly bound together with withies.
"He must have gone further on," she said to herself, and ran quite
swiftly up the steep path that climbed into the heart of the mountains.
The falling of the night frightened her a little, and she was anxious to
find him.
Up and up the rocky path went, whilst the stream foamed down beside it,
and at last she saw him in a slant of light that came down a west-facing
valley. He was crossing the stream just above where it thundered over a
great boulder.
There was a bridge across the torrent, but it was only a tree-trunk, and
he preferred, in his blindness, to cross on the stream bottom, over the
boulders with the aid of a good staff. The water foamed up to his
knees.