THE VIOLET FLAME
Rosamond was the child of a village blacksmith, and of a lady said by the villagers to be a princess from a far land. She herself claimed to be descended from an Ocean Queen; but no one believed that, except her little girl, who thought her mother must know best. Rosamond would sit by her for hours, gazing into the river that flowed through their garden, and listening to her mothers stories of golden palaces beneath the water. But she also liked to pry about her father's forge, and wonder at the quick sparks and great roaring fires. Her cousin Alfred would stay there with her, but while she was watching the red glow of the fire and the heavy fall of her father's hammer, he was gazing upon the violet flame that flickered above her forehead.
One day, when she was playing with him in the picture gallery of the old castle, in which his mother was housekeeper, she called him to look at the portrait of a child daintily holding a bird on the tip of her finger, and arrayed in the quaint richness of the old-fashioned costume. “She looks like you,” her cousin said, “only she has not a little trembling flame upon her forehead.”
“Have I a flame upon my forehead?” asked Rosamond, wondering.
“Come and look,” answered Alfred, and he led her to a great mirror, where she for the first time saw the violet flame. “How beautiful it is!” she exclaimed.
“O, but it is growing dim; you must not look at it,” said Alfred. “Come and let us run up and down the garden, between the great hedges.”
But Rosamond, having once seen the violet flame, could not be satisfied until she had been to the castle to take another look, and found so much pleasure in gazing at herself in the great mirror, that she went every day to pay herself a stolen visit, while Alfred was at school. But one day he found her there, and said, “I see how it is that the pretty flame has gone; you have been admiring it too much by yourself. I shall not love you now.”
Then Rosamond felt very sorry, and wondered how she could win back Alfred's love. At length she took all her money, with which she had intended to buy her old nurse a warm cloak for the winter, and bought a golden feronière with a purple stone in it, to wear around her head in the place of the vanished flame. Then she walked into the picture gallery with a proud step. “O Rosamond!” exclaimed her cousin, “can you believe that bit of purple glass can replace the dancing flame that shone with, such a lovely violet light over your golden hair? Pray take it off, for it seems mere tinsel to me.”
But neither he nor Rosamond could unclasp the feronère; and she had to go back to the jeweller, of whom she bought it, to ask him to file it off, which he tried in vain to do; and at last he said, “The pedler who sold it to me must be right. He said that, once clasped, it could only be loosened by dipping it into a hidden fountain. What fountain it is I do not know; but some old priest, who lives in a town on the mouth of a river, knows.”
This was discouraging for Rosamond, there are so many towns and rivers, and so many old priests, in the world. She looked on the map, and thought it must be Paris, for that is not so very far from the sea, and there they know every thing. So, with her mother's leave, and some jewels she gave her, she went off to Paris, taking a bit of the mirror set in a gilt frame. When she arrived there, what was her surprise to find the city entirely inhabited by birds and animals! Parrots and peacocks prevailed, but ospreys and jackdaws, vultures and cormorants, crows and cockerels, and many, many other kinds of birds were also fluttering about, making a perpetual whizzing. Then there were hundreds of monkeys, all jauntily dressed, with little canes in their hands, and a great many camels and spaniels, and other animals, wild and tame, in neat linen blouses. What bewildered her still more, was to see that they were all skating about on the thinnest possible ice. Why it did not crack, to let them all through, she could not imagine. At first she was afraid even to set her foot upon it, but soon found herself skating merrily about, enjoying it as much as any of them. Another queer thing was, that, reflected in the ice, all these birds and animals appeared to be men and women; and she saw that in her own reflection she was a nice little girl. She wondered how she looked in her mirror, and took it out to see. “What kind of an animal am I?” she exclaimed. “O, I see—an ibex. What neat little horns, and how bright my eyes are! What would Alfred say if he knew I was an ibex?”