The Princess and the Goblin
I've heard the noises yesterday and today too.'
'It'll be grand fun, then, for my Tom and Mrs Housekeeper's Bob,' said
the cook. 'They'll be friends for once in their lives, and fight on
the same side. I'll engage Tom and Bob together will put to flight any
number of rats.'
'It seems to me,' said the nurse, 'that the noises are much too loud
for that. I have heard them all day, and my princess has asked me
several times what they could be. Sometimes they sound like distant
thunder, and sometimes like the noises you hear in the mountain from
those horrid miners underneath.'
'I shouldn't wonder,' said the cook, 'if it was the miners after all.
They may have come on some hole in the mountain through which the
noises reach to us. They are always boring and blasting and breaking,
you know.'
As he spoke, there came a great rolling rumble beneath them, and the
house quivered. They all started up in affright, and rushing to the
hall found the gentlemen-at-arms in consternation also. They had sent
to wake their captain, who said from their description that it must
have been an earthquake, an occurrence which, although very rare in
that country, had taken place almost within the century; and then went
to bed again, strange to say, and fell fast asleep without once
thinking of Curdie, or associating the noises they had heard with what
he had told them. He had not believed Curdie. If he had, he would at
once have thought of what he had said, and would have taken
precautions. As they heard nothing more, they concluded that Sir
Walter was right, and that the danger was over for perhaps another
hundred years. The fact, as discovered afterwards, was that the
goblins had, in working up a second sloping face of stone, arrived at a
huge block which lay under the cellars of the house, within the line of
the foundations.
It was so round that when they succeeded, after hard work, in
dislodging it without blasting, it rolled thundering down the slope
with a bounding, jarring roll, which shook the foundations of the
house. The goblins were themselves dismayed at the noise, for they
knew, by careful spying and measuring, that they must now be very near,
if not under the king's house, and they feared giving an alarm. They,
therefore, remained quiet for a while, and when they began to work
again, they no doubt thought themselves very fortunate in coming upon a
vein of sand which filled a winding fissure in the rock on which the
house was built. By scooping this away they came out in the king's
wine cellar.
No sooner did they find where they were, than they scurried back again,
like rats into their holes, and running at full speed to the goblin
palace, announced their success to the king and queen with shouts of
triumph.
In a moment the goblin royal family and the whole goblin people were on
their way in hot haste to the king's house, each eager to have a share
in the glory of carrying off that same night the Princess Irene.
The queen went stumping along in one shoe of stone and one of skin.
This could not have been pleasant, and my readers may wonder that, with
such skilful workmen about her, she had not yet replaced the shoe
carried off by Curdie. As the king, however, had more than one ground
of objection to her stone shoes, he no doubt took advantage of the
discovery of her toes, and threatened to expose her deformity if she
had another made. I presume he insisted on her being content with skin
shoes, and allowed her to wear the remaining granite one on the present
occasion only because she was going out to war.
They soon arrived in the king's wine cellar, and regardless of its huge
vessels, of which they did not know the use, proceeded at once, but as
quietly as they could, to force the door that led upwards.
CHAPTER 27
The Goblins in the King's House
When Curdie fell asleep he began at once to dream. He thought he was
ascending the Mountainside from the mouth of the mine, whistling and
singing 'Ring, dod, bang!' when he came upon a woman and child who had
lost their way; and from that point he went on dreaming everything that
had happened to him since he thus met the princess and Lootie; how he
had watched the goblins, how he had been taken by them, how he had been
rescued by the princess; everything, indeed, until he was wounded,
captured, and imprisoned by the men-at-arms. And now he thought he was
lying wide awake where they had laid him, when suddenly he heard a
great thundering sound.
'The cobs are coming!' he said. 'They didn't believe a word I told
them! The cobs'll be carrying off the princess from under their stupid
noses! But they shan't! that they shan't!'
He jumped up, as he thought, and began to dress, but, to his dismay,
found that he was still lying in bed.
'Now then, I will!' he said. 'Here goes! I am up now!'
But yet again he found himself snug in bed. Twenty times he tried, and
twenty times he failed; for in fact he was not awake, only dreaming
that he was. At length in an agony of despair, fancying he heard the
goblins all over the house, he gave a great cry. Then there came, as
he thought, a hand upon the lock of his door. It opened, and, looking
up, he saw a lady with white hair, carrying a silver box in her hand,
enter the room. She came to his bed, he thought, stroked his head and
face with cool, soft hands, took the dressing from his leg, rubbed it
with something that smelt like roses, and then waved her hands over him
three times. At the last wave of her hands everything vanished, he
felt himself sinking into the profoundest slumber, and remembered
nothing more until he awoke in earnest.
The setting moon was throwing a feeble light through the casement, and
the house was full of uproar. There was soft heavy multitudinous
stamping, a clashing and clanging of weapons, the voices of men and the
cries of women, mixed with a hideous bellowing, which sounded
victorious. The cobs were in the house! He sprang from his bed,
hurried on some of his clothes, not forgetting his shoes, which were
armed with nails; then spying an old hunting-knife, or short sword,
hanging on the wall, he caught it, and rushed down the stairs, guided
by the sounds of strife, which grew louder and louder.
When he reached the ground floor he found the whole place swarming.
All the goblins of the mountain seemed gathered there. He rushed
amongst them, shouting:
'One, two,
Hit and hew!
Three, four,
Blast and bore!'
and with every rhyme he came down a great stamp upon a foot, cutting at
the same time their faces--executing, indeed, a sword dance of the
wildest description. Away scattered the goblins in every
direction--into closets, up stairs, into chimneys, up on rafters, and
down to the cellars. Curdie went on stamping and slashing and singing,
but saw nothing of the people of the house until he came to the great
hall, in which, the moment he entered it, arose a great goblin shout.
The last of the men-at-arms, the captain himself, was on the floor,
buried beneath a wallowing crowd of goblins. For, while each knight
was busy defending himself as well as he could, by stabs in the thick
bodies of the goblins, for he had soon found their heads all but
invulnerable, the queen had attacked his legs and feet with her
horrible granite shoe, and he was soon down; but the captain had got
his back to the wall and stood out longer. The goblins would have torn
them all to pieces, but the king had given orders to carry them away
alive, and over each of them, in twelve groups, was standing a knot of
goblins, while as many as could find room were sitting upon their
prostrate bodies.
Curdie burst in dancing and gyrating and stamping and singing like a
small incarnate whirlwind.
'Where 'tis all a hole, sir,
Never can be holes:
Why should their shoes have soles, sir,
When they've got no souls?
'But she upon her foot, sir,
Has a granite shoe:
The strongest leather boot, sir,
Six would soon be through.'
The queen gave a howl of rage and dismay; and before she recovered her
presence of mind, Curdie, having begun with the group nearest him, had
eleven of the knights on their legs again.
'Stamp on their feet!' he cried as each man rose, and in a few minutes
the hall was nearly empty, the goblins running from it as fast as they
could, howling and shrieking and limping, and cowering every now and
then as they ran to cuddle their wounded feet in their hard hands, or
to protect them from the frightful stamp-stamp of the armed men.
And now Curdie approached the group which, in trusting in the queen and
her shoe, kept their guard over the prostrate captain. The king sat on
the captain's head, but the queen stood in front, like an infuriated
cat, with her perpendicular eyes gleaming green, and her hair standing
half up from her horrid head. Her heart was quaking, however, and she
kept moving about her skin-shod foot with nervous apprehension. When
Curdie was within a few paces, she rushed at him, made one tremendous
stamp at his opposing foot, which happily he withdrew in time, and
caught him round the waist, to dash him on the marble floor. But just
as she caught him, he came down with all the weight of his iron-shod
shoe upon her skin-shod foot, and with a hideous howl she dropped him,
squatted on the floor, and took her foot in both her hands. Meanwhile
the rest rushed on the king and the bodyguard, sent them flying, and
lifted the prostrate captain, who was all but pressed to death. It was
some moments before he recovered breath and consciousness.
'Where's the princess?' cried Curdie, again and again.
No one knew, and off they all rushed in search of her.
Through every room in the house they went, but nowhere was she to be
found. Neither was one of the servants to be seen. But Curdie, who
had kept to the lower part of the house, which was now quiet enough,
began to hear a confused sound as of a distant hubbub, and set out to
find where it came from. The noise grew as his sharp ears guided him
to a stair and so to the wine cellar. It was full of goblins, whom the
butler was supplying with wine as fast as he could draw it.
While the queen and her party had encountered the men-at-arms, Harelip
with another company had gone off to search the house. They captured
every one they met, and when they could find no more, they hurried away
to carry them safe to the caverns below. But when the butler, who was
amongst them, found that their path lay through the wine cellar, he
bethought himself of persuading them to taste the wine, and, as he had
hoped, they no sooner tasted than they wanted more. The routed
goblins, on their way below, joined them, and when Curdie entered they
were all, with outstretched hands, in which were vessels of every
description from sauce pan to silver cup, pressing around the butler,
who sat at the tap of a huge cask, filling and filling. Curdie cast
one glance around the place before commencing his attack, and saw in
the farthest corner a terrified group of the domestics unwatched, but
cowering without courage to attempt their escape. Amongst them was the
terror-stricken face of Lootie; but nowhere could he see the princess.
Seized with the horrible conviction that Harelip had already carried
her off, he rushed amongst them, unable for wrath to sing any more, but
stamping and cutting with greater fury than ever.
'Stamp on their feet; stamp on their feet!' he shouted, and in a moment
the goblins were disappearing through the hole in the floor like rats
and mice.
They could not vanish so fast, however, but that many more goblin feet
had to go limping back over the underground ways of the mountain that
morning.