The day for Donald's departure had arrived—that is, to the extent that the sun, rising clear and bright at four o'clock, shone alike upon the big castle on the hill and the little one beneath it. In the big castle, let us hope, since we may not know, that even crowned heads were resting easily, and that the level rays were powerless at that early hour to waken them to that sense of great uneasiness supposed to be inseparable from the lot of the “nobly born.”
But alas! I for one know to a Certainty that in the little castle there was rebellion almost amounting to mutiny, and that one curly, uncrowned head, that need not have had a care in all the world, was tossing uneasily on its pillow. It was behaving, indeed, like the most unruly little head imaginable, and obstinately refusing to accept a course of action which heads far older and wiser than the little head in question had agreed upon as in every way desirable. Indeed, the little queen, whose realm was the hearts of her nearest and dearest, would have been obliged to abdicate, for a while at least, I fancy, had she not chosen before nightfall of that same day to bury her head in the lap of her very most loyal subject, and with tears and sohs confess to her extreme unreasonableness and avow her determination not soon again to be overtaken by such a sorry state of mind and temper. Even Donald stared at Marie-Celeste in grieved and reproving wonder, and yet to all appearances it was all for Donald's sake, this defiant, protesting attitude of hers, and Donald knew it. The trouble was that Marie-Celeste did not see or would not see either rhyme or reason in Donald's being sent down to Nuneham.
She gave full rein to a certain “little member,” and working herself up to the highest pitch of excitement, gave vent in very aggressive fashion to such sentiments as these. For her part, she thought it was a downright shame to send a little fellow, who was just getting over a fever, away to work himself to death on an old farm, where he would surely be ill again before a week was over. And then it seemed so mean not to be willing to pay his expenses outright for just one summer, till he should be able to go to sea, instead of making him go to work and earn money in the mean time.
For her part, too, when somebody (which was Harold) stood ready only too gladly to pay Donald's way on the trip they were to take through the Lake Country, and was just longing to invite him, she thought it was cruelly unkind in somebody else (which was her father) to say he did not think best that he should be invited. If she were Harold, she just believed she would go right ahead as she thought best herself. She should think he had a right to do what he chose with his own without so much as asking “by your leave” of anybody.
And this unqueenly state of mind lasted, I am sorry to say, for three whole days together, to the dire distress of the truest hearts in her kingdom. And all this while the wilful little queen was trying to convince herself that it was ready for Donald's sake, when the truth was that the long walks with Donald, when Harold—who was making up some necessary back work at college—was not at her service, were what she was determined not to give up, and the reading aloud in the evenings, when Donald was such a delightful listener; and, in fact, the hundred and one little amusing things that Donald was continually doing, and that made the days go by in such happy, merry fashion.
If only at the outset some good little fairy might have held a magic mirror close to her defiant little mind, and she could have seen “selfishness” written large, right straight across all her motives, there perhaps need never have been this dark chapter in her reign. But lacking the fairies, some of us have to learn a good many things from experience; and though hard enough in the learning, the lessons are worth their weight in gold. Even queens have to goto the same school, and it is a blessed thing for everybody when its lessons are learned by heart and in a way to be always remembered.
But at sunset on the fourth day Marie-Celeste relented, and coming into the house with a white flag of truce at her eyes, threw herself at the feet of her dearest subject, and burying her head, as I have already hinted, in the lap of the same, capitulated body and soul.