Owen Wister: The Dragon of Wantley: His Tale

When the Governess heard Miss Elaine open the door behind her, she thought it was the family Chaplain, and, quickly throwing the shocking story on the floor, she opened the household cookery-book, – an enormous volume many feet square, suspended from the ceiling by strong chains, and containing several thousand receipts for English, French, Italian, Croatian, Dalmatian, and Acarnanian dishes, beginning with a poem in blank verse written to his confectioner by the Emperor Charles the Fat. German cooking was omitted.

“I’m looking up a new plum-pudding for Christmas,” said Mistletoe, nervously, keeping her virtuous eyes on the volume.

“Ah, indeed!” Miss Elaine answered, indifferently. She was thinking harder than ever, – was, in fact, inventing a little plan.

“Oh, so it’s you, deary!” cried the Governess, much relieved. She had feared the Chaplain might pick up the guilty magazine and find its pages cut only at the place where the French story was. And I am grieved to have to tell you that this is just what he did do later in the evening, and sat down in his private room and read about Roger and Angelica himself.

“Here’s a good one,” said Mistletoe. “Number 39, in the Appendix to Part Fourth. Chop two pounds of leeks and – ”

“But I may not be here to taste it,” said Elaine.

“Bless the child!” said Mistletoe. “And where else would you be on Christmas-day but in your own house?”

“Perhaps far away. Who knows?”

“You haven’t gone and seen a young man and told him – ”

“A young man, indeed!” said Elaine, with a toss of her head. “There’s not a young man in England I would tell anything save to go about his business.”

Miss Elaine had never seen any young men except when they came to dine on Sir Godfrey’s invitation; and his manner on those occasions so awed them that they always sat on the edge of their chairs, and said, “No, thank you,” when the Baron said, “Have some more capon?” Then the Baron would snort, “Nonsense! Popham, bring me Master Percival’s plate,” upon which Master Percival invariably simpered, and said that really he did believe he would take another slice. After these dinners, Miss Elaine retired to her own part of the house; and that was all she ever saw of young men, whom she very naturally deemed a class to be despised as silly and wholly lacking in self-assertion.

“Then where in the name of good saints are you going to be?” Mistletoe went on.

“Why,” said Elaine, slowly (and here she looked very slyly at the old Governess, and then quickly appeared to be considering the lace on her dress), “why, of course, papa would not permit me to sacrifice myself for one dragon or twenty dragons.”

“What!” screamed Mistletoe, all in a flurry (for she was a fool). “What?”

“Of course, I know papa would say that,” said Miss Elaine, demure as possible.

“Oh, mercy me!” squeaked Mistletoe; “we are undone!”

“To be sure, I might agree with papa,” said the artful thing, knowing well enough she was on the right track.

“Oo – oo!” went the Governess, burying her nose in the household cookery-book and rocking from side to side.

“But then I might not agree with papa, you know. I might think, – might think – ” Miss Elaine stopped at what she might think, for really she hadn’t the slightest idea what to say next.

“You have no right to think, – no right at all!” burst out Mistletoe. “And you sha’n’t be allowed to think. I’ll tell Sir Godfrey at once, and he’ll forbid you. Oh, dear! oh, dear! just before Christmas Eve, too! The only night in the year! She has no time to change her mind; and she’ll be eaten up if she goes, I know she will. What villain told you of this, child? Let me know, and he shall be punished at once.”

“I shall not tell you that,” said Elaine.

“Then everybody will be suspected,” moaned Mistletoe. “Everybody. The whole household. And we shall all be thrown to the Dragon. Oh, dear! was there ever such a state of things?” The Governess betook herself to weeping and wringing her hands, and Elaine stood watching her and wondering how in the world she could find out more. She knew now just enough to keep her from eating or sleeping until she knew everything.

“I don’t agree with papa, at all,” she said, during a lull in the tears. This was the only remark she could think of.

“He’ll lock you up, and feed you on bread and water till you do – oo – oo!” sobbed Mistletoe; “and by that time we shall all be ea – ea – eaten up!”

“But I’ll talk to papa, and make him change his mind.”

“He won’t. Do you think you’re going to make him care more about a lot of sheep and cows than he does about his only daughter? Doesn’t he pay the people for everything the Dragon eats up? Who would pay him for you, when you were eaten up?”

“How do you know that I should be eaten up?” asked Miss Elaine.

“Oh, dear! oh, dear! and how could you stop it? What could a girl do alone against a dragon in the middle of the night?”

“But on Christmas Eve?” suggested the young lady. “There might be something different about that. He might feel better, you know, on Christmas Eve.”

“Do you suppose a wicked, ravenous dragon with a heathen tail is going to care whether it is Christmas Eve or not? He’d have you for his Christmas dinner, and that’s all the notice he would take of the day. And then perhaps he wouldn’t leave the country, after all. How can you be sure he would go away, just because that odious, vulgar legend says so? Who would rely on a dragon? And so there you would be gone, and he would be here, and everything!”

Mistletoe’s tears flowed afresh; but you see she had said all that Miss Elaine was so curious to know about, and the fatal secret was out.

The Quarter-Bell rang for dinner, and both the women hastened to their rooms to make ready; Mistletoe still boo-hooing and snuffling, and declaring that she had always said some wretched, abominable villain would tell her child about that horrid, ridiculous legend, that was a perfect falsehood, as anybody could see, and very likely invented by the Dragon himself, because no human being with any feelings at all would think of such a cruel, absurd idea; and if they ever did, they deserved to be eaten themselves; and she would not have it.

She said a great deal more that Elaine, in the next room, could not hear (though the door was open between), because the Governess put her fat old face under the cold water in the basin, and, though she went on talking just the same, it only produced an angry sort of bubbling, which conveyed very little notion of what she meant.

So they descended the stairway, Miss Elaine walking first, very straight and solemn; and that was the way she marched into the banquet-hall, where Sir Godfrey waited.

“Papa,” said she, “I think I’ll meet the Dragon on Christmas Eve!”

Around the sullen towers of Oyster-le-Main the snow was falling steadily. It was slowly banking up in the deep sills of the windows, and Hubert the Sacristan had given up sweeping the steps. Patches of it, that had collected on the top of the great bell as the slanting draughts blew it in through the belfry-window, slid down from time to time among the birds which had nestled for shelter in the beams below. From the heavy main outer-gates, the country spread in a white unbroken sheet to the woods. Twice, perhaps, through the morning had wayfarers toiled by along the nearly-obliterated high-road.

“Good luck to the holy men!” each had said to himself as he looked at the chill and austere walls of the Monastery. “Good luck! and I hope that within there they be warmer than I am.” Then I think it very likely that as he walked on, blowing the fingers of the hand that held his staff, he thought of his fireside and his wife, and blessed Providence for not making him pious enough to be a monk and a bachelor.