Part 39

(You remember the bells had not rung for nearly two hundred years.)

'Dear me,' said the King to the Queen, 'what odd ideas people had in the old days. I always understood that these bells had beautiful voices.'

'They're quite hideous,' said the Queen. And so they were. Now that night the lazy Bell-folk came down out of the belfry full of anger against the Princess whose birth had disturbed their idleness. There is no anger like that of a lazy person who is made to work against his will.

And they crept out of the dark domes of their houses and came down in their dust dresses and cobweb cloaks, and crept up to the palace where every one had gone to bed long before, and stood round the mother-of-pearl cradle where the baby princess lay asleep. And they reached their seven dark right hands out across the white satin coverlet, and the oldest and hoarsest and laziest said:

'She shall grow uglier every day, except Sundays, and every Sunday she shall be seven times prettier than the Sunday before.'

'Why not uglier every day, and a double dose on Sunday?' asked the youngest and spitefullest of the wicked Bell-people.

'Because there's no rule without an exception,' said the eldest and hoarsest and laziest, 'and she'll feel it all the more if she's pretty once a week. And,' he added, 'this shall go on till she finds a bell that doesn't ring, and can't ring, and never will ring, and wasn't made to ring.'

'Why not for ever?' asked the young and spiteful.

'Nothing goes on for ever,' said the eldest Bell-person, 'not even ill-luck. And we have to leave her a way out. It doesn't matter. She'll never know what it is. Let alone finding it.'

Then they went back to the belfry and rearranged as well as they could the comfortable web-and-owls' nest furniture of their houses which had all been shaken up and disarranged by that absurd ringing of bells at the birth of a Princess that nobody could really be pleased about.

When the Princess was two weeks old the King said to the Queen:

'My love--the Princess is not so handsome as I thought she was.'

'Nonsense, Henry,' said the Queen, 'the light's not good, that's all.'

Next day--it was Sunday--the King pulled back the lace curtains of the cradle and said:

'The light's good enough now--and you see she's----'

He stopped.

'It must have been the light,' he said, 'she looks all right to-day.'

'Of course she does, a precious,' said the Queen.

But on Monday morning His Majesty was quite sure really that the Princess was rather plain, for a Princess. And when Sunday came, and the Princess had on her best robe and the cap with the little white ribbons in the frill, he rubbed his nose and said there was no doubt dress did make a great deal of difference. For the Princess was now as pretty as a new daisy.

The Princess was several years old before her mother could be got to see that it really was better for the child to wear plain clothes and a veil on week days. On Sundays, of course she could wear her best frock and a clean crown just like anybody else.

Of course nobody ever told the Princess how ugly she was. She wore a veil on week-days, and so did every one else in the palace, and she was never allowed to look in the glass except on Sundays, so that she had no idea that she was not as pretty all the week as she was on the first day of it. She grew up therefore quite contented. But the parents were in despair.

'Because,' said King Henry, 'it's high time she was married. We ought to choose a king to rule the realm--I have always looked forward to her marrying at twenty-one--and to our retiring on a modest competence to some nice little place in the country where we could have a few pigs.'

'And a cow,' said the Queen, wiping her eyes.

'And a pony and trap,' said the King.

'And hens,' said the Queen, 'yes. And now it can never, never be. Look at the child! I just ask you! Look at her!'

'No,' said the King firmly, 'I haven't done that since she was ten, except on Sundays.'

'Couldn't we get a prince to agree to a "Sundays only" marriage--not let him see her during the week?'

'Such an unusual arrangement,' said the King, 'would involve very awkward explanations, and I can't think of any except the true ones, which would be quite impossible to give. You see, we should want a first-class prince, and no really high-toned Highness would take a wife on those terms.'