“Now she is raising carrots and beets,” cried the queen, wringing her hands. “She grows more different from us every moment of her life!”
“She seems to do so,” admitted the king; but he was very wise; and, “Let her be,” he commanded everybody. “We may see what this all means, and a great many other things as well.”
Meanwhile Prince Hesperus, journeying from land to land and from height to valley, was seeking in vain for the one person who, as he thought, could remove from the princess the curse of her difference from all the rest of the world. And it was very strange how love had changed him; for now, instead of his silly complaint that every fairy is like every other fairy, and his silly longing for a different pattern in fairies, he sought only for the charm which should make his beloved princess like everybody else. Where should he find this terrible Human Being, this uninvited one who held the key to the princess’s bracelet that was so like a fetter?
He went first to the town nearest to fairyland. The people of the town, having no idea how near to fairyland they really were, were going prosaically about their occupations, and though they could have looked up into the magic garden itself, they remained serenely indifferent. There he found the very mother who had been at the christening of the princess; and alighting close to a great task that she was doing for the whole world, he tried to ask her who it was who makes folk different from all the rest. But she could not hear his tiny, tiny voice which came to her merely as a thought about something which could not possibly be true. In a pleasant valley he came on that one who, at the christening, had brought the lyre which played of itself, but when the prince asked him his question, he fancied it to be merely the wandering of his own melody, with a note about something new to his thought. The poet by the stream singing of the brotherhood of man, the prophet on a mountain foreseeing the brotherhood as in a gazing crystal, the scientist weaving the brotherhood in a tapestry of the universe—none of these knew anyone who can possibly make folk different from everybody else, nor did any of the others on whom Prince Hesperus chanced.
When one day he thought that he had found her, because he met one whose face had the look of many cities and was like the painted cover of an empty box, straightway he saw another and another and still others, men and women both, who were like her, with only the meaning of those who never look at the stars, or walk in gardens, or think about others rather than themselves, or listen to hear what is right for them to do. And then he saw that these are many and many, who believe themselves to be different from everybody else and who try to make others so, and he saw that it would be useless to look further among them for that one who had the key for which he sought.
So at last Prince Hesperus turned sadly back toward the palace of the princess.
“Alas,” said the prince, “it is for her own happiness that I seek to have her like other people. For myself I would love her anyway. But yet, what am I to do—for she seems so different that she will never believe that I love her!”
It was already late at night when the prince found himself in the neighbourhood of the palace, and being tired and travel-worn, he resolved to take shelter in the cup of some flower and wait until the palace revelries were done. Accordingly he entered the garden of an humble cottage and crept within the petals of a wild lily growing in the long, untended grass.
He had hardly settled himself to sleep when he heard from the cottage the sound of bitter crying. Now this is a sound which no fairy will ever pass by or ever so much as hear about without trying to comfort, and at once Prince Hesperus rose and flew to the sill of an open lattice.
He looked in on a poor room, with the meanest furnishings. On a comfortless bed lay the father of the house, ill and helpless. His wife sat by his side, and the children clung about her, crying with hunger and mingling their tears with her own. The man turned and looked at her, making a motion to speak, and Prince Hesperus flew into the room and alighted on the handle of a great spade, covered with earth, which stood in a corner.