Remonstrance was quite useless, for Pepin was no longer afraid of his father, since he could leave him at any time in total darkness. So one night there was heard a loud knocking at the palace gate, and, though the pages and the guards and the watchmen turned over on the other side, and tried very hard to go to sleep again, the knocking grew so loud that they were obliged to get up and see what was the matter. There was a mob at the gates; the people, tired of Pepin’s jokes, had rebelled. Some ran one way and some another. Prince Nutcracker put his luck-penny in his pocket and walked out of the back door; no one stayed to look after the King and Queen, who were running about in nightcap and slippers, in a terrible fright; and if it had not been for Buttons, who, on the first alarm, ran to the palace, from which he had been kicked out six months before, they would have been in a sorry case, I think.
On the next day the Court Journal came out with a new heading. It was called now the People’s Journal, and it said that, on the night before, old Mr. and Mrs. Nutcracker and their boy Pepin had escaped, nobody knew how, and nobody cared; and that young Mr. Nutcracker, the former heir to the throne, had opened a fine new store on Main Street.
So, you perceive, there was no longer a royal family.
As Nutcracker had the luck-penny, of course he made money in his new store. Every day, and all day long, he looked straight at the penny. At first he used to see other things; but as he took no notice of them, by and by the penny grew so large that it covered them all, and then he had no more trouble. He made money all the year round and he gave none of it away. None to Pepin, because he had brought about their misfortunes. None to Buttons, because he might have wished for something better, if he liked, than a holly-bush and the shoemaker’s daughter. None to anybody, because why should not people work and earn money, as he had done, if they wanted it? And every day he grew more and more like his penny,—that is, of less and less use for anything that was not buying and selling. For Santa Claus, he had not seen him in ten years, till one Christmas eve, when hearing a sudden jingling of sleigh-bells, he looked up and saw Santa Claus just coming down on the hearth-rug.
“I stopped my sleigh,” said Santa Claus, “to see if you had anything to send your father and brothers.”
“Why should I send them anything?” answered Nutcracker, surlily.
Santa Claus put his hands down deep in his fur pockets, as if he was trying to hold himself. “What for! Aren’t you rich and they poor? Your own flesh and blood? Confound it, man! if you have not the instinct of a son and a brother, you must feel the Christmas spirit at least once a year in your heart, urging you to love and kindness towards your fellow-men.”
“Well, I don’t, then,” snarled Nutcracker. “Men need holidays to rest, I suppose, though I don’t; but for Christmas being any better, or having anything more in it than any other day, I say, bosh! Give me plenty of money, and I can buy all the love and kindness I want! And if other folks want it, let them work and earn money as I do, and——”
Nutcracker never finished this speech, because—he could not. A singular dumb, dry and hard feeling had taken possession of him. His legs were gone. At least he could see them nowhere; so were his arms. Something wrapped him around. He had a strange notion that he had grown round, and that—it sounds ridiculous—but Nutcracker was quite positive that he was in a table drawer among some coin, and that he was—a copper penny.
By and by he heard a shrill voice, “Mr. Nutcracker, Mr. Nutcracker!” That was his wife. Then he heard his children calling, “Papa, papa!” Then a running up and down stairs. They were searching for him. Then somebody declared that he had disappeared, somebody else said that he must be advertised for, and, taking a handful of money from the drawer, Nutcracker among the rest, carried him to a newspaper office, and paid him in at a window for an advertisement about his own disappearance. Two minutes after, the man at the window gave him in change to a gentleman, who paid him out to a newsboy, who bought an apple with him of a grocer, who gave him in change again to a shoemaker, who dropped him into his soiled and patched pocket, where Nutcracker found nothing else but a five-dollar gold-piece.