“If I do not revenge myself upon him,” thought the beautiful Padmavati, smiling like an angel as she listened to the youth’s confidence, “may I become a gardener’s ass in the next birth!”
Having thus registered a vow, she broke silence, and praised to the skies the young pradhan’s wisdom and sagacity; professed herself ready from gratitude to become his slave, and only hoped that one day or other she might meet that true friend by whose skill her soul had been gratified in its dearest desire. “Only,” she concluded, “I am convinced that now my Vajramukut knows every corner of his little Padmavati’s heart, he will never expect her to do anything but love, admire, adore and kiss him!” Then suiting the action to the word, she convinced him that the young minister had for once been too crabbed and cynic in his philosophy.
But after the lapse of a month Vajramukut, who had eaten and drunk and slept a great deal too much, and who had not once hunted, became bilious in body and in mind melancholic. His face turned yellow, and so did the whites of his eyes; he yawned, as liver patients generally do, complained occasionally of sick headaches, and lost his appetite: he became restless and anxious, and once when alone at night he thus thought aloud: “I have given up country, throne, home, and everything else, but the friend by means of whom this happiness was obtained I have not seen for the long length of thirty days. What will he say to himself, and how can I know what has happened to him?”
In this state of things he was sitting, and in the meantime the beautiful princess arrived. She saw through the matter, and lost not a moment in entering upon it. She began by expressing her astonishment at her lover’s fickleness and fondness for change, and when he was ready to wax wroth, and quoted the words of the sage, “A barren wife may be superseded by another in the eighth year; she whose children all die, in the tenth; she who brings forth only daughters, in the eleventh; she who scolds, without delay,” thinking that she alluded to his love, she smoothed his temper by explaining that she referred to his forgetting his friend. “How is it possible, O my soul,” she asked with the softest of voices, that thou canst happiness here whilst thy heart is wandering there? Why didst thou conceal this from me, O astute one? Was it for fear of distressing me? Think better of thy wife than to suppose that she would ever separate thee from one to whom we both owe so much!
After this Padmavati advised, nay ordered, her lover to go forth that night, and not to return till his mind was quite at ease, and she begged him to take a few sweetmeats and other trifles as a little token of her admiration and regard for the clever young man of whom she had heard so much.
Vajramukut embraced her with a transport of gratitude, which so inflamed her anger, that fearing lest the cloak of concealment might fall from her countenance, she went away hurriedly to find the greatest delicacies which her comfit boxes contained. Presently she returned, carrying a bag of sweetmeats of every kind for her lover, and as he rose up to depart, she put into his hand a little parcel of sugar-plums especially intended for the friend; they were made up with her own delicate fingers, and they would please, she flattered herself, even his discriminating palate.
The young prince, after enduring a number of farewell embraces and hopings for a speedy return, and last words ever beginning again, passed safely through the palace gate, and with a relieved aspect walked briskly to the house of the old nurse. Although it was midnight his friend was still sitting on his mat.
The two young men fell upon one another’s bosoms and embraced affectionately. They then began to talk of matters nearest their hearts. The Raja’s son wondered at seeing the jaded and haggard looks of his companion, who did not disguise that they were caused by his anxiety as to what might have happened to his friend at the hand of so talented and so superior a princess. Upon which Vajramukut, who now thought Padmavati an angel, and his late abode a heaven, remarked with formality—and two blunders to one quotation—that abilities properly directed win for a man the happiness of both worlds.
The pradhan’s son rolled his head.
“Again on your hobby-horse, nagging at talent whenever you find it in others!” cried the young prince with a pun, which would have delighted Padmavati. “Surely you are jealous of her!” he resumed, anything but pleased with the dead silence that had received his joke; “jealous of her cleverness, and of her love for me. She is the very best creature in the world. Even you, woman-hater as you are, would own it if you only knew all the kind messages she sent, and the little pleasant surprise that she has prepared for you. There! take and eat; they are made by her own dear hands!” cried the young Raja, producing the sweetmeats. “As she herself taught me to say—
Thank God I am a man,
Not a philosopher!”
“The kind messages she sent me! The pleasant surprise she has prepared for me!” repeated the minister’s son in a hard, dry tone. “My lord will be pleased to tell me how she heard of my name?”
“I was sitting one night,” replied the prince, “in anxious thought about you, when at that moment the princess coming in and seeing my condition, asked, ‘Why are you thus sad? Explain the cause to me.’ I then gave her an account of your cleverness, and when she heard it she gave me permission to go and see you, and sent these sweetmeats for you: eat them and I shall be pleased.”
“Great king!” rejoined the young statesman, “one thing vouchsafe to hear from me. You have not done well in that you have told my name. You should never let a woman think that your left hand knows the secret which she confided to your right, much less that you have shared it to a third person. Secondly, you did evil in allowing her to see the affection with which you honour your unworthy servant—a woman ever hates her lover’s or husband’s friend.”
“What could I do?” rejoined the young Raja, in a querulous tone of voice. “When I love a woman I like to tell her everything—to have no secrets from her—to consider her another self——”
“Which habit,” interrupted the pradhan’s son, “you will lose when you are a little older, when you recognize the fact that love is nothing but a bout, a game of skill between two individuals of opposite sexes: the one seeking to gain as much, and the other striving to lose as little as possible; and that the sharper of the twain thus met on the chessboard must, in the long run, win. And reticence is but a habit. Practise it for a year, and you will find it harder to betray than to conceal your thoughts. It hath its joy also. Is there no pleasure, think you, when suppressing an outbreak of tender but fatal confidence in saying to yourself, ‘O, if she only knew this?’ ‘O, if she did but suspect that?’ Returning, however, to the sugar-plums, my life to a pariah’s that they are poisoned!”
“Impossible!” exclaimed the prince, horror-struck at the thought; “what you say, surely no one ever could do. If a mortal fears not his fellow-mortal, at least he dreads the Deity.”
“I never yet knew,” rejoined the other, “what a woman in love does fear. However, prince, the trial is easy. Come here, Muti!” cried he to the old woman’s dog, “and off with thee to that three-headed kinsman of thine, that attends upon his amiable-looking master.[67]”
Having said this, he threw one of the sweetmeats to the dog; the animal ate it, and presently writhing and falling down, died.
“The wretch! O the wretch!” cried Vajramukut, transported with wonder and anger. “And I loved her! But now it is all over. I dare not associate with such a calamity!”
“What has happened, my lord, has happened!” quoth the minister’s son calmly. “I was prepared for something of this kind from so talented a princess. None commit such mistakes, such blunders, such follies as your clever women; they cannot even turn out a crime decently executed.