“By being bad you would only separate yourself still more from your father. My child, he was not torn away. He went submissively, obediently. He bade me love you as my own child, and I will. The King took him gently by the hand. Wait a little while, and he will come for you.”
The child’s head drooped. She leaned against the door, putting her arms up to it in a vain and empty embrace. “I want to go in!” she said faintly.
The prince opened the door and led her in.
A white veiled shape lay stretched out on a narrow bed. The prince folded back a cloth, and the child’s dilating eyes, startled and awe-stricken, looked for the first time on death.
“Is it a statue?” she whispered.
“It is his own body in its long sleep.”
“I have always seen him breathe,” she whispered, looking up at her guardian with frightened eyes. “His breast went up and down—so!” she panted. “I felt it when he held me in his arms. I did not know that it could stop.”
Sobs broke out. She threw herself on to the cold breast and clung to it. “He spoke; and I thought that it was a little thing,” she cried, in a storm of tears. “Sometimes I did not listen. I thought that I could always hear him speak. Sometimes he told me to do a thing, and I said no. I did not think that he would ever be ‘no’ to me. He is all ‘No!’ Speak one word, father! It is Iona. Why can he not speak? This is his hair, his face, his own self,—all but the cold!”
“He cannot hear you,” said the prince.
The child rose and looked wildly about. “I would climb over all these mountains, barefoot and alone in the dark, to hear him say one word!”