Azalea's Silver Web

by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

My Carin:

It is done, my dear, it is done. I am free. And the getting of the freedom has not been so terrible as I feared it would be.

I went home from Miss Ravanel’s that afternoon with my courage, as you remember, screwed to the sticking point. It was a glorious afternoon, Carin, and although the summer was gone, everywhere there were things to remind me of how plenteous it had been. I had not ridden far before I came to the Knox estate, which is marked by low stone posts with the letter “K” upon the top. The sunshine was over everything—over the wide, well-kept fields, the beautiful woodlands, the creeks, the broad, noisy shallows, the winding roads, the houses of the tenants and the noble structure of Mallowbanks. If ever there was a fair domain it is this. And half of it is mine—or was mine. I have given it up—resigned all claim to it. I can hardly realize it yet. But I must soon set my hand to certain signatures, and then my sacrifice will be made regular and legal, and Azalea will go out of this house as poor as when she entered it. Almost, that is. For it is true that I shall have an annuity which will last as long as I do, and will provide for my needs. Once, I suppose, I would have called that a fortune. But it seems very little now. Since I came here, I have spent more a month on gifts than this will come to.

But never mind all that. I must tell you what happened. As I said, it was a glorious afternoon, and I found my uncle and aunt sitting in the great hallway before a fire, laughing and talking together very happily. When I saw how contented they were with each other, and how perfectly they fitted into that beautiful home, I was able to comfort myself by thinking of all they had to make their life rich. They did not, as I have so often said, really need me.

So, without even waiting to change from my habit to my house garments, I went up to them and kissed them both, and then I stood by the side of the great fireplace and prayed for the right words to come. All I could think of was this—or something like this:

“Uncle David,” I began, “Aunt Lorena, I have come to say something very important.”

Uncle David looked up sharply. I had had a letter that morning from Gerald Hargreaves and he knew it. I think he thought that what I had to say related to that. So I shook my head at him, and he knew I had been reading his thoughts.

“It has to do,” I said, “with a princess who was not fit to be a princess. She was a princess with a very queer life. She had her high inheritance, but she was born in poverty for all of that, and she was reared in poverty, and in the days when she was poor she used to dream that some day her kingdom would be given to her, and that she would find her own people and live with them, beloved and loving. There was no reason to suppose this dream would ever come true, and certainly the princess never supposed it would. Dreaming the dream was just a game that she played to pass away the time.

“Then, one day, by the strangest chance, her people found her—her own people—and so kind and noble were they that they at once acknowledged her and took her to her own kingdom—though it might all have been theirs had they not been so good and true that it was a pleasure to them to do right and to divide it between themselves and her. They did all they could to make the princess happy. The great house and the garden, the fields and woods, were for her to enjoy. She was taken on a journey to beautiful lands. She was given tutors and books, gowns and jewels, a horse after her own heart and many luxuries which it would take too long to name. But there was one thing she did not have, and that was the right to make her own choice of the sort of life she wished to lead. She must stay within her kingdom, she must marry the prince that her kin should choose, and she must live as became one of her rank.

“Now it so happened that the manner in which the princess had been reared did not make it possible for her to consent to this, although she wished from the bottom of her heart to pay full duty to these kind and true kinsmen of hers. But she had a higher duty yet than that, and that was to be true to her own soul. Day by day and hour by hour this truth grew upon her: that it would be a great sin for her not to be what she was made to be. ‘Be what thou art’ she had once read in a book. ‘Be what thou art.’ She could not forget it. It seemed to her that there was great wisdom in that saying.