Chapter 13

Bee, with a crown set on her forehead, was more pensive and more sad than in those days when her hair flowed unbound on her shoulders, and when she went laughing to the smithy dwarfs to pull the beards of her good friends, Pic, Tad, and Dig, whose faces, reddened by the glow of the flames, grew merry at her welcome. The good dwarfs, who once used to dandle her on their knee and call her their Bee, now bowed at her approach and kept deferentially silent. She regretted she was no longer a child, and she was oppressed by being the princess of the dwarfs.
It no longer gave her any pleasure to see King Loc since she had seen him cry on her account. But she liked him; for he was kind, and he was unhappy.
One day (if it can be said that there are days in the empire of the dwarfs) she took King Loc by the hand and drew him to the fissure of the rock admitting a beam in which golden motes danced gaily.
“Little King Loc,” she said to him, “I am in pain. You are also a king, you love me, and I am in pain.”
Hearing these words of the beautiful maiden, King Loc answered:
“I love you, Bee of the Clarides, princess of the dwarfs; and this is why I have kept you in this our world, so as to teach you our secrets which are more great and wonderful than anything you can learn on earth among men, for men are less clever and less learned than dwarfs.”
“Yes,” said Bee, “but they are more like me than the dwarfs; that is why I like them better. Little King Loc, let me see my mother again, if you do not wish me to die.”
King Loc walked away without answering.
Bee, alone and dejected, gazed on the beam of that light which bathes the whole face of the earth and pours its radiant floods on all living men, and even on the beggars that tramp the road. Slowly the beam grew faint and changed its golden splendour into a pale, blue light. Night had come upon earth. A star glittered through the fissure in the rock.
Then some one touched her on the shoulder and she saw King Loc wrapped in a black mantle. On his arm hung another mantle which he put round the girl.
"Come," he said to her.
And he led her from underground. When she again saw the trees swept by the wind, the clouds racing over the moon and the whole of the fresh, blue night, when she smelt the scent of the grasses, and took to her bosom in a flood the air she had breathed during her childhood, she gave a great sigh and thought to die of joy.
King Loc had taken her in his arms; small as he was, he carried her as easily as a feather, and the two went gliding over the earth like the shadow of two birds.
"Bee, you are going to see your mother again. But listen. Every night, as you know, I send your image to your mother. Every night, she sees your dear shape. She smiles and speaks to it, and kisses it. To-night I am going to show you instead of your ghost. You will see her; but do not touch her, do not speak of her, for then the charm would be broken, and she will never again see you nor your image, which she does not distinguish from yourself."
“I will therefore be careful, alas! Little King Loc… there it is, there it is!”
There was the keep of the Clarides rising black on the hill. Bee hardly had time to send a kiss to the old, well-beloved stones; now she saw, blooming with gilliflowers, the ramparts of the town of the Clarides fly past her; now she was going up along a slope where glow-worms shone in the grass to the eastern gate, which King Loc opened easily, for the dwarfs, the metal workers, are not stopped by locks, padlocks, bolts, chains, and bars.
She went up the spiral staircase leading to her mother's room and stopped to put her two bands to her beating heart. The door opened slowly, and, by the light of the lamp hung from the ceiling, Bee saw, in the brooding, religious silence, her mother, worn and pale, her hair silvered at the temples, but more beautiful thus for her daughter than in the days gone by of splendid jewels and fearless rides. As the mother saw the daughter in a dream, she opened her arms to embrace her. And the child, laughing and sobbing, tried to cast herself into these open arms; but King Loc tore her from this embrace and carried her off like a straw over the dark champaign, down into the kingdom of the dwarfs.

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