CHAPTER V.
An omen, said the Fakir, is a sign of the future. Blame not the omen, but the future, if the sign prove not true.—Shiraz, the Younger.
So it came to pass that little Muley grew up into his nineteenth year, a tall, well-favored, graceful stripling, but distinctly a “mother’s boy”; and nobody but his parents and the discreet Shacabac held, or thought they held, the secret of his effeminate appearance.
Then one day, sudden and fearful as the khamsin wind of the desert, came a message from the aged grandsire, informing Muley Mustapha and Kayenna that he had contracted a noble alliance for the heir to his throne with the Princess Amine, only daughter of his neighbor, the powerful King of Nhulpar.
Now here was a most serious complication. The King of Nhulpar was the mightiest monarch of all the earth. Twenty caliphates trembled at his nod; an hundred thousand lances were levelled at his word; the number of wild riders ready to follow his standard were as the sands of the desert multiplied by the sands of the seashore. When he said, “Do this,” it must be done, whether it could be done or not. In fact, he rather liked performing impossibilities by proxy, the daring one who failed in the task being added to his Majesty’s large and varied collection in the royal mausoleum of Dedhed.
Had he known that the Sultan of Kopaul in offering his “grandson’s” hand in marriage to the Princess Amine was essaying the most impossible of all impossibilities, he would have been delighted beyond expression. He had not a single Sultan’s head in his album; but even that of a Pasha was not to be despised, as Muley Mustapha thought with a shudder, when he was apprised of his father-in-law’s well-meant but most compromising negotiations.
What was to be done? It was not possible much longer to deceive the old Sultan; and it was absolutely out of the question to traverse the wishes of the fiery king.
“You see to what a pass you and your vagabond Vizier have brought us,” said Kayenna. “Now, mayhap, you may be able between you to extricate us from it.”
“I—I don’t know,” stuttered the bewildered Pasha, who did not see why he was especially to blame for the blunder of a dead and gone Soothsayer. Then, clutching at the suggestion of a companion in misery, he added: “By all means, my dear, let us call in Shacabac; and he may advise us for the best. He has some very sound views upon matrimony, I know.”
“Yes, no doubt he has,” said Kayenna, ironically. “I can fancy what they are like, but I should wish to have him repeat them to me.” Kayenna did not admire the abstruse philosophy of Shacabac, which she did not fully understand; but, with keen feminine intuition, she knew that it could be only evil, for she disliked the philosopher. She was, however, seriously impressed with one of his more homely maxims, which she always endeavored to follow, namely:—
“Talk not with thy guest of his own affairs, for with those he is sufficiently acquainted; but discourse ever of thine own,—of thy good luck and ill, of thy horses, thy servants, thy children, and thine ailments. If thou dost not succeed thereby in making him feel at home, thou mayst at least induce him to wish himself there.”
Fortified by these maxims, Kayenna consented to the presence of the Sage at the family council.
The messenger despatched for Shacabac found him in his lecture hall, discoursing to a class of scholars on Omens, and illustrating his words of wisdom with apposite examples. Even royalty had to wait until the precious pearls falling from his lips should be gathered by his hearers. He was saying:—
“It is very lucky to find a horseshoe, if there be a horse attached; but unlucky, if the owner be about.
“It is a bad omen to meet, on leaving thy house in the morning, a mad dog, a tiger which hath not breakfasted, or a man to whom thou owest money.
“Steel cuts love. The great Sultan Ras-el-Dasl never knew perfect conjugal bliss after inadvertently throwing the carving knife at his favorite sultana.
“To break a mirror is also portentous of evil. Backsheesh, the porter, once incautiously smashed a large pierglass over the head of his spouse; and it cost him a month’s fees to replace them both.
“It is unlucky to sleep thirteen in a bed.”
Here the Sage was rudely interrupted by a voice, which said, “I know of something yet more unlucky than all of these,—something which neither great nor small, neither Pasha nor Sage, may do with impunity.”
Shacabac fixed an angry eye in the direction of the intruder, but lowered it when he discovered the speaker to be Badeg, who was gazing at him with a contemptuous leer.
“I see a messenger from the palace,” said the Sage; “and this class is now dismissed. Badeg, I will speak with thee anon; for I would fain know what thou hast learned from the stars that is more wondrous than the marvels of which I have humbly discoursed.”
“Speak as thou wishest, or hold thy tongue, if that be wiser,” replied the Astrologer, insolently; “but my words are for thy betters, who may find them more precious than golden sequins, and only less valuable than my silence.”
With this significant threat, Badeg wrapped his mantle about him, and strode away, leaving a visible impression on the minds of the students, who listened to him in wonder.
Shacabac, much disconcerted, repaired to the palace, where he remained long in consultation with the Pasha and his spouse.
But, in a case wholly without precedent in history or fiction, the wisdom of even so great a man as Shacabac is necessarily at fault: the experience of one so aged as Muley Mustapha avails no more than the instincts of a child. Only the intuition of the superior mind finds a solution of the difficulty, or, at worst, a means of deferring the catastrophe.
The present case proved to be no exception. After listening patiently to the timid suggestions of her lord and the ineffectual though sagacious aphorisms of the Vizier, Kayenna calmly observed: “I see that there is but one way of settling the matter. I will go with the child to Nhulpar.”
“And tell the King the truth?” cried both men, in consternation.
“And tell the King the truth,” echoed Kayenna, blandly.
“But it will cost both of your lives!” exclaimed Shacabac.
“It will cost me my Pachalik,” cried Muley Mustapha, dismally.
“It will cost fifty thousand gold sequins, to begin with,” replied the noble matron. “As a preliminary step, you will order the First Lord of the Treasury to go into the Street of the Moneychangers, taking the Court Torturer along with him, and solicit a loan of that sum, at par, within half an hour. I shall prepare for our departure on the day after to-morrow, at sunrise. You, Shacabac, will come with us. See that the caravan and guards be ready ere the break of day.”