"You have certainly improved on the moral of my story," said the astrologer, addressing the merchant, silent now after the telling of his tale. "If it is for God alone to pronounce the censure on mankind, then assuredly it is for God also to award the praise. As the story of Sheikh Ahmed and his jewelled harp well shows, deeds may be done openly by the hand, but the motives for their doing lie secretly in the heart. And the heart is the innermost temple where none but the high priest, the individual soul, holds communion with his God, the supreme Deity of the universe."
"So that a man's life is an unsolvable riddle to all but himself," concurred the hakeem.
"And not to be solved even by himself," remarked the Afghan with a laugh, half of bitterness, half of bravado. "We may know in our secret heart the motive that prompts to a deed, but we cannot tell the consequences of that deed as affecting even ourselves who wrought it. Take this very story of the Sheikh; when recovering his precious harp he was but digging his own grave. So with all of us; we imagine we are marching bravely to accomplish some preconceived plan, when all the time we are merely groping with blinded eyes along the path of destiny, avoiding the mud holes, it may be, but failing to see the tiger, crouched for his spring, a few paces further along."
"Shabash!" cried the fakir, in a shrill tone of approval that drew all eyes to the lean and naked and ash-besprinkled figure seated at the foot of the veranda steps. "Shabash! shabash!" he cried, again and yet again.
"And your story?" asked the Rajput, with a nod of inquiry and encouragement.
"Is one that shows how a man may keep on running all his life yet never reach the goal he has in sight," replied the ascetic. And with the sturdy independence of his calling he beat a peremptory tattoo with finger-tips on wooden begging-bowl to command attention to his tale.
"Behold in me a man who possesses nothing in this world excepting a begging-bowl and a loin cloth. Yet was I at one time the owner of lands and of cattle, of a home bountifully stored for comfort and for sustenance, of wives who wore rich jewels, necklets of pearls, armlets of gold, and bangles of silver, with maid-servants to minister to their needs and children to play around them. All gone! by my own doing, or undoing, call it which you will.
"And know, too, that in those days I also was a soldier"—this with a defiant glance first at the Rajput chief and then at the Afghan general. "At my side rattled the steel scabbard, and in my belt was the sharp poinard, swift messenger of death when it came to hand-to-hand fighting, and the horse I rode had its rich trappings of gold and silver. It may all seem strange, to hear me tell those things of the long ago and to look upon me now"—and the speaker stretched forth his skinny, twisted fingers and attenuated arms, and for a moment ruefully contemplated them.
"But I speak the truth," he went on, "for to-night, prompted by the stories to which I have listened and the thoughts they have engendered, will I unseal my lips after fifty long years of wandering alone, giving no man my confidence, seeking no man's confidence, intent only on the attainment of the one desire deeply seated in my heart, and which, in my eager striving to achieve, seems to be ever more remote from accomplishment. To-night will I reveal the story of my life, so that, perchance, the lesson it teaches will show still more clearly the impotence of man to constitute himself the avenger of wrongs. For if judgment belongs to Allah, so does vengeance. And the choice of instrument, of time and place, of the very manner of the deed—all this belongs to God alone, as this night, listening to the stories that have gone before, have I for the first time come fully to comprehend."