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Updated: June 18, 2025
"Mother, one couch next to Lona is empty: I know I am unworthy, but may I not sleep this night in your chamber with my dead? Will you not pardon both my cowardice and my self-confidence, and take me in? I give me up. I am sick of myself, and would fain sleep the sleep!" "The couch next to Lona is the one already prepared for you," she answered; "but something waits to be done ere you sleep."
But Lona saw nothing, and I saw but Lona. "Mother! mother!" she sighed, and her breathing ceased. I carried her into the court: the sun shone upon a white face, and the pitiful shadow of a ghostly smile. Her head hung back. She was "dead as earth." I forgot the Little Ones, forgot the murdering princess, forgot the body in my arms, and wandered away, looking for my Lona.
I sprang from mine, and followed Lona. "Mother! mother!" she cried, and her clear, lovely voice echoed in the dome. The princess shivered; her face grew almost black with hate, her eyebrows met on her forehead. She rose to her feet, and stood. "Mother! mother!" cried Lona again, as she leaped on the daïs, and flung her arms around the princess.
Then Lona, queen and mother and sister of them all, spoke from her big horse by my side: "I would give my life," she said, "to have my mother! She might kill me if she liked! I should just kiss her and die!" "Come along, boys!" cried a girl. "We're going to our mothers!" A pang went through my heart. But I could not draw back; it would be moral ruin to the Little Ones!
Lona was so disgusted with the people, and especially with the women, that she wished to abandon the place as soon as possible; I, on the contrary, felt very strongly that to do so would be to fail wilfully where success was possible; and, far worse, to weaken the hearts of the Little Ones, and so bring them into much greater danger.
"I will," I replied and sat down. "Indeed you must go at once!" whispered Lona, who had been supporting me, and now knelt beside me. "I listened at his door," said one of the bigger boys, "and heard the bad giant say to his wife that he had found you idle, talking to a lot of moles and squirrels, and when he beat you, they tried to kill him.
I had learned from friends in Bombay that not only had Rama Ragobah recovered from the blows I had given him, but that, shortly after my encounter with him, he had married Lona, she whom I had loved, God only knows how madly! It was all one to me now whether I was married or single, living or dead. So it was all arranged.
When we reached the edge of the valley, there was the moon just lifting her forehead over the rim of the horizon. "She has come to take care of you, and show you the way," said Lona. I questioned those about me as we walked, and learned there was a great place with a giant-girl for queen. When I asked if it was a city, they said they did not know.
In the "Lord of the Isles" Scott beautifully contrasts the church on lona with the cave of Staffa, opposite: "Nature herself, it seemed, would raise A minister to her Maker's praise!
When it returned, I stood in the garret of my own house, in the little wooden chamber of the cowl and the mirror. Unspeakable despair, hopelessness blank and dreary, invaded me with the knowledge: between me and my Lona lay an abyss impassable! stretched a distance no chain could measure!
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