I noticed after a while that the Princess, my wife, began to respond to my constant gayety more carelessly; at times she would sit and look at me wonderingly, I knew not why.
One day she asked me to accompany her on a little excursion in the city. She did not tell me where she meant to go, but I asked nothing; it was enough to be with her. I could not conceal my surprise, however, when she stopped our carriage at the entrance to the city’s poorest quarter; but I had no doubt she had planned some pleasant diversion, and I followed her, talking in my liveliest manner all the while. She herself was quite silent.
She led me from one hovel to another, for more than an hour. In one we saw a sick child lying on a pallet of straw on a dirt floor, and around him his mother and sisters and brothers, all weeping absurdly; I rallied the mother on it in the pleasantest way possible, but she did not take it in very good part. In another we found an old man, blind and alone, without food and without wife or child, talking to himself in a gibberish which was truly laughable; I tried, for sport, to talk to him in the same sort of gibberish, but though it was excellent sport, I saw that for some reason or other it did not amuse my wife, so I led her away. In another place we saw a man who was evidently overcome by wine, and who appeared to be in terror of certain vipers and spiders which, as I ascertained, existed nowhere but in his own imagination. This man was the prize of the whole collection; I amused myself with him for a long time; and I was altogether so greatly diverted that the Princess had some difficulty in dragging me away.
On the way home, I commented on what we had seen with a drollery which I had thought sufficient to draw a smile from a stone; but the Princess was unmoved; she sat in stony silence, and when we reached the castle she went at once to her room, and I saw her no more that day.
Not long afterward, a beautiful boy was born to us; and in course of time he grew to be the finest child of his age in the Island Kingdom; there were many who said so, even to his mother.
He was two years of age, when on a certain day in summer his mother sent him into the gardens with a nurse, while she remained with me in conversation in her room. Some half hour later, I was telling her an amusing story, which I had recently heard, when the door burst open, and a man-servant rushed into the room carrying our boy, dripping wet, in his arms, and laid him in his mother’s lap. The child was dead. The nurse had left him beside the same fountain pool from which years before I had rescued his mother’s ball, and in her absence he had fallen into the water. The Princess turned pale and screamed; she clasped the child to her breast and rocked him back and forth; she spoke to him as if he were still alive, and even tried to call him back to life.
I smiled at her delusion. I put my hand on her shoulder and shook her gently. She looked up at me with streaming eyes, and saw the bright and smiling look on my own face.
“Come, my dear,” I said kindly, laughing quietly as I spoke, “there is no use talking to him like that, you know. You must be reasonable. The dear little fellow is dead, that is all. Surely there is nothing in that to disturb you? Look at me. I’m not disturbed. I can’t understand what you find in this to bother you. Come, let the good man take him away to another room, and I will go on with the story I was telling when we were interrupted.”
She rose slowly, never taking her eyes from me, and hugging the child closer backed away from me, and suddenly turned and fled from the room. I smiled to myself at the whimsical nature of women.
It was a long time before she would speak to me; and although I did not permit this to ruffle me, I waited with some impatience for her explanation. I was of course reluctant to blame her too much without giving her an opportunity of explaining her conduct. I was accordingly pleased when she took me aside one day and asked to speak with me in private. She sat down before me in her room and looked me steadily in the eyes.