“You mean that you don’t quite understand that you think,” interposed the good lady, sweetly. “Well, I will explain. The child whom you wickedly designed to bring up in a life of shame and turbulence was not, as you thought, a girl, but a boy!
“I determined, as I think I told you at the time, to save the innocent being from the contamination of a wicked world and the evil example of an unworthy sire. The Physician whom you ruthlessly put to death consented to the pious deception, for which I have ever revered his memory. He was a worthy man, and understood my nervous system better than any leech that I have ever known. Another kind of husband would have appreciated his merits, but let that pass. As for the old Soothsayer, he deserved his doom for lacking faith in his own predictions. I regret not his death. No government can be conducted safely unless its members be able to convince themselves and others that with them all wisdom dieth. Frequent changes of administration, save in favor of our own party, are disastrous to the welfare of any country.
“Henceforth place your trust in me; and I will see to it that all official prophecies come out correctly, though it cost a new soothsayer every week.
“I leave you now,” she added, “to prepare my daughter-in-law for her bridal, and to instruct her in the proper way of managing a husband. I fear me much that the present Queen of Nhulpar is sadly lacking in decision of character. His Majesty the King, I am told, keepeth State secrets from her ears,—a great error on the part of a dutiful spouse.”
It was even as the good Kayenna had said. Young Muley Mustapha was a genuine Prince, with all his father’s old-time courage, re-enforced by a strain of firmness inherited from his noble mother. The rebel horde, who had taken up the false Soothsayer’s taunt that the youth was effeminate, no longer repeated the insult, partly because the lad had proved his manhood on the field, but chiefly because, after Al Choppah had finished his work, not one of them was left to talk indiscreetly, nor, indeed, to talk at all.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the harem seclusion in which he had been reared, the youth was more than commonly free from bashfulness in the presence of women; and his own harem (for he did not copy his sire’s monogamous example) was ruled by him in right royal fashion. “In numbers is safety,” was his sagacious maxim. Yet, because of the mystery surrounding his youth, he was ever known throughout three kingdoms as “Her Majesty the King.”
When the aged Pasha went to his account, a few years later, everybody in official position said, as with one voice, that, with the exception of his illustrious successor, he was the wisest and best ruler that had ever reigned in Ubikwi. The same had been said of his sire and his grandsire and his greatgrandsire, so that it was evident that virtue and wisdom were hereditary in that noble family, as they are in all reigning dynasties everywhere.
Kayenna lived to see her son mount successively the thrones of Ubikwi, Kopaul, and Nhulpar, and to supervise the education of a large and interesting family of children and grandchildren, dying at the last of a tetanus superinduced by the arduous labor of umpiring a debate on “Woman Suffrage.”
Shacabac lived to a ripe old age. Of his latter years his biographer says, “Allah had granted to him length of days and the divine faculty of repose, so that, while saying much, he thought but little, and worked hardly at all.”
When his mental faculties had become sufficiently impaired, the gallant King of Nhulpar appointed him Regius Professor of Political Economy in the National University,—a position which he filled with great credit for many years. By his thoughtful lectures and essays, “Patriotism Another Name for Selfishness,” “A Nation’s Debt a Nation’s Wealth,” “Our Country always Wrong,”—and especially by his erudite monograph on “Finance,” so profound that not even the ablest minds could comprehend it,—his fame spread throughout all lands, and made him the envy of philosophers all over the earth. His stately monument bears the simple motto which governed him through life,—