The bell in the tower sounded again more sweetly than ever, and the instant Mopsa was inside there came from behind the fluted columns, which rose up on every side, the brown doe, followed by troops of deer and fawns!
“Mopsa! Mopsa!” cried Jack, “come away! come back!” But Mopsa was too much astonished to stir, and something seemed to hold Jack from following; but he looked and looked, till, as the brown doe advanced, the door of the castle closed—Mopsa was shut in, and Jack was left outside.
So Mopsa had come straight to the place she thought she had run away from.
“But I am determined to get her away from those creatures,” thought Jack; “she does not want to reign over deer.” And he began to look about him, hoping to get in. It was of no use: all the windows in that front of the castle were high, and when he tried to go round, he came to a high wall with battlements. Against some parts of this wall the ivy grew, and looked as if it might have grown there for ages; its stems were thicker than his waist, and its branches were spread over the surface like network; so by means of them he hoped to climb to the top.
He immediately began to try. Oh, how high the wall was! First he came to several sparrows’ nests, and very much frightened the sparrows were; then he reached starlings’ nests, and very angry the starlings were; but at last, just under the coping, he came to jackdaws’ nests, and these birds were very friendly, and pointed out to him the best little holes for him to put his feet into. At last he reached the top, and found to his delight that the wall was three feet thick, and he could walk upon it quite comfortably, and look down into a lovely garden, where all the trees were in blossom, and creepers tossed their long tendrils from tree to tree, covered with puffs of yellow, or bells of white, or bunches and knots of blue or rosy bloom.
He could look down into the beautiful empty rooms of the castle, and he walked cautiously on the wall till he came to the west front, and reached a little casement window that had latticed panes. Jack peeped in; nobody was there. He took his knife, and cut away a little bit of lead to let out the pane, and it fell with such a crash on the pavement below that he wondered it did not bring the deer over to look at what he was about. Nobody came.
He put in his hand and opened the latchet, and with very little trouble got down into the room. Still nobody was to be seen. He thought that the room, years ago, might have been a fairies’ schoolroom, for it was strewn with books, slates, and all sorts of copybooks. A fine soft dust had settled down over everything—pens, papers, and all. Jack opened a copybook: its pages were headed with maxims, just as ours are, which proved that these fairies must have been superior to such as he had hitherto come among. Jack read some of them:
“Turn your back on the light, and you’ll follow a shadow.”
“The deaf queen Fate has dumb courtiers.”
“If the hound is your foe, don’t sleep in his kennel.”