The King never spoke of the shell again nor did he ever tell what member of his family he had heard speaking that night. It is likely, however, that he took some steps to protect himself against the plot, because nothing ever came of it. He was not destined (as were so many of his line before him) for a death by violence.
The next morning Giles was up early. But he made no sound. He was standing motionless at the open window while he waited for his sleeping master to stir. He was reminded of his first awakening in this castle, years before, as he gazed down over the palace courtyard, the sloping gardens and the great city beyond, all murky and dim in the half-light of dawn.
Presently he noticed someone moving among the flowers and bushes below. It was Geoffrey the Gipsy with a spade upon his shoulder. A moment later the figure paused, standing now, Giles calculated, at just about the spot where the shell would have fallen last night. Geoffrey stooped and picked something up from the ground. And the Finder suddenly leant out over the sill, screwing up his eyes as if to make out what manner of thing it was. But at that moment the King stirred upon the bed, turning with a sleepy sigh. At once Giles left the window and came noiselessly to his master’s side.
Later in the morning he took a stroll through the garden. By now the sun was well risen and the warm bright air was sweet with the scent of flowers. He sought out the Gipsy and found him grubbing at the roots of a white rose.
‘Did you happen to find anything around here this morning?’
‘Why, yes,’ answered the gardener, straightening up. ‘A shell. I was wondering how it got here.’
He wiped earthy hands upon his apron, stepped over to his jacket that hung from the limb of a tree and drew the shell from the pocket.
‘It’s a beauty,’ he said as he held it out.
‘Thank you.’ Giles took it and instantly turned to go.
But after a few steps along the terrace the King’s Finder bethought him he had perhaps been a little ungracious. The Gipsy, with whom he nearly always spent a minute chatting when he met him, might even think himself suspected of keeping something not his own. Giles did not want to talk about the shell to Geoffrey—who of course could not know anything of its strange powers. But he would not have him offended for the world. He turned and came back to the stooping gardener.
‘Do you believe in magic, Geoffrey?’ he asked, plucking a sprig of lavender from a bush that overhung the path.
‘Why—er—yes,’ said the Gipsy, ‘if by that you mean, Sir, anything we can’t understand or explain. But, don’t forget, a whole lot passes for magic with us which is simple enough to birds and beasts. Every day something we thought had the Devil in it is shown to be naught more than our own simple-minded ignorance. “Must be magic,” says Man, as soon as he grows tired of trying to understand a thing. Like children! What’s more magic than the way a flower grows out of a seed, I’d like to know?’
And then to Giles’s great astonishment the gardener looked straight at him and added:
‘Were you thinking of that shell, Sir, by any chance?’
Giles could not yet decide how much the man knew. The jacket had been hanging on a tree six paces away.
‘Er—yes; I was,’ he said at last.
‘Oh, well, I’ve seen lots stranger things than that in foreign lands. Queer deeds—where a man couldn’t believe his own eyes. Yet there they were, happening in front of him.’
The frown deepened on the face of the King’s Finder. Suddenly he stepped forward and lowered his voice.
‘Do you mean to tell me, Geoffrey, you knew about the shell? How—it—er—’
‘How it whispers?’ put in the gardener as the other hesitated. ‘Grows hot when others speak of you? Yes, Sir. I was listening to it a few minutes before you came along.’
He turned back to his work on the rose tree. Giles could not make him out at all.
‘You meant to keep it, then?’ he asked at last, glancing at the jacket on the tree-limb.
‘No, indeed. What would I want it for? To hear people talk about me? No. People have to talk, Sir. And if they want to talk about me, let ’em, I say. But listen to them?’ A smile came over the Gipsy’s calm, lean face. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time, Sir, lying in meadows watching the clouds sail over me, changing their drifting shapes. But I haven’t got time for listening to folks chatter about me. If I could hear ’em talk of someone else, or tell stories or something, maybe ’twould be different.’
‘Were you, then, going to sell it for money?’
‘Money, Sir?’ The gardener shook his head. ‘No. The King’s wage is enough for all I need.’
He drew a pruning-knife from his belt and cut a faded bloom from the white rose tree.
‘Well, what did you mean to do with it, then?’ asked Giles. ‘You had put it in your pocket.’
‘I was going to grow ferns in it, Sir. It would look elegant in the rockery behind the Queen’s bench—with maidenhair and maybe myrtle. I’d planned to set it there when I was done with the roses. But if you want it, Sir, of course that’s—’
Geoffrey the Gipsy gazed after the young knight, who had suddenly walked away from him down the terrace. He put his pruning-knife back in his sheath and went to work again with the spade.
‘Drat these moles!’ he muttered.
But as he bent over the fresh-turned earth he did not see that the King’s Finder had halted again—this time at a distant bend in the terrace—and was now gazing back at him.
Giles was accustomed to find himself in thoughtful mood when he had come to the end of a talk with Geoffrey. But this calm and sunny morning he felt more stirred and uneasy in his heart than he had ever been before. He wondered why he had broken off the chat and hurried away. And then with sudden queer shame he knew he had been afraid—afraid lest when he had done cross-questioning, Geoffrey the Gipsy would turn and ask him what he meant to do with the shell.
He had come out this morning to get it for the Princess Sophronia. Now that the King had done with it he must make good his promise, and she should be allowed to listen to all the praise and flattery she could get. He found that he had to take it from a Gipsy gardener to carry it to a Princess Royal. And he did not like his mission at all. Those smooth-tongued courtiers, he thought to himself, would have said that he was taking it from the lowliest in the land to the highest. But as he looked back, that peaceful figure delving in the earth about the roses suddenly seemed to grow and grow against the sky—taller, stronger and more lasting than the towering castle itself. And when he put the shell in his pocket and turned to go on, Giles knew in his own heart that he was really taking it from the greatest to the smallest.
At the foot of the stone steps leading up to the courtyard, his mood was pleasantly changed by his meeting with the Countess Barbara. She was close to his own age of eighteen years, shorter than he but tall for a girl, graceful and slender. And Giles was reminded of the white roses he had just left as she smiled down a greeting to him. She was on her way, with two frisky black spaniels, to get water-lilies for the Queen Mother from the Lower Lake. Giles begged her to wait for him a moment while he did an errand. She said she would, if he would not be too long.
He dashed into the castle and up the great stairs to the Princess’s rooms.
Sophronia’s joy at getting the shell for her own at last seemed to Giles almost sad as she grabbed it from his hand with a happy squeal. Of late she had been growing a little hard of hearing; and in her fumbling eagerness to see if it still worked she nearly dropped it more than once. But at last she got it, growing warm already, to her ear. She heard the foreign prince—the one she hoped to marry—telling the Queen Mother that no stars in the heavens were so beautiful or bright as the eyes of his beloved Sophronia. (What the prince was really thinking was that no coins would look so beautiful or bright as the dowry-money he hoped to get from the King when he married his pest of an aunt. But he didn’t say that, so it didn’t spoil the Princess’s joy.)
And when Giles left her and went running down the steps to the Countess Barbara, the romantic Sophronia was seated at the window with the cold shell still clutched to her ear, smilingly waiting for more.