"When the curtain rose, I, with this new life rushing through my veins, looked triumphantly at the troop of my companions who did me homage. This new existence made me so joyous that I must have been beautiful. Thus inspired I acted my part so wondrously well that a deep murmur of applause ran throughout the hall. His Majesty's eyes were riveted upon me in startled astonishment and evident admiration. I acted my part with a keen sense of its reality, and gave utterance to the burning passion of my heart. As if I were really a queen, I commanded my courtiers to drive away the suitors who wooed me, declaring that anything beneath royalty would stain my queenly dignity and beauty.
"But when the banished prince, my lover, appeared, I rose hastily from my gilded and ivory chariot, and with my hair floating round my form like a deep lustrous veil, through which the gems on my robe shone out like glorious stars of a dark night, I laid myself, like the lotus-stem uprooted, prostrate at his feet. I pronounced his name in the most tender accents. I improvised verses even more passionate than those contained in the drama:—
'Instantly I knew my lord, as the heat betrays the fire,
When through the obscuring earth unclouded
Shining out thou didst appear
Worthy of all joy; my soul is wrung with rapture,
And it quivers in thy presence, as the lotus petals before a mighty wind.'
"The courtiers raised me up from the floor, and led me back to the chariot. The prince, who was no other than 'Murakote,' took his, or more properly her, place beside me, and the curtain fell. The play was over. With nothing but the memory of a look, I returned to my now still more dismal rooms. I disrobed myself of all my glittering ornaments with a sigh, bound up my long, shining hair, and sat down to enjoy the only happiness left me,—my proud, swelling thoughts. I was just losing myself in soft, delicious reveries, which illuminated as with a celestial light the whole world within me, when I observed a couple of old duennas, who came fawning upon me, caressing and praising me, while telling me that his Majesty had ordered that I should be in attendance in his supper-chamber that evening.
"I listened in mute pain. The power of the new passion that now filled my heart seemed to defy all authority, and the very thing for which I had so long worked and longed had become valueless and as nothing to me. But I dared not excuse myself, so I silently followed my conductresses, and for the first time in my life ascended to his Majesty's private supper-chamber.
"How changed I was! that which had been my sole ambition ever since I was ten years old came down upon me with a gush of woe that I could hardly have believed myself capable of feeling.
"I sat down to await the coming of the king; but I could have plucked out the heart that had rushed so madly on, casting its young life away at the feet of a man whose name even I did not know, whose face I had not seen till that day, but the tones of whose voice were still sounding through and through my quivering pulses.
"Well, my forehead, if not my heart, I laid at his Majesty's feet. 'I am your slave, my lord,' said my voice, the sound of which startled my own ears, so hollow and deceptive did it seem.