She and her husband had only the most moderate means. They lived in what I like now to believe must have been a rose-covered cottage. But oh, the love of them! She had a mass of wonderful hair which it seems he loved to unpin at night, to see it fall at either side of her lovely face, down to her knees and beyond; and a tiny foot, whose slipper he would allow no one but himself to put on. All reports of every member of the family agreed: these were a pair of perfect lovers; like "Rose in Bloom" and "Ansal Wajoud"; no harsh word was ever spoken between them; they lived wholly for each other, in a blissful world apart, rich in their own manner; where neither poverty, nor distress, nor discord could find them; and where no hand could ever fall upon the latch to bring them sorrow—save only one.
That hand fell—the hand of him gently termed by Scheherazade and other tale-tellers of the East, "The Terminator of Delights, and Separator of Companions."
She came to be with us the winter that she was widowed. It was thought the change of air, and perhaps the brightness of our household, might be of some little help. We children were admonished to be very gentle—not to be noisy. Superfluous precaution! She was to me sacred!
She used to walk up and down the upper veranda, taking the air slenderly, a light shawl about her shoulders, her tiny foot pausing now and then for greater steadiness, when the wind swayed her frail body too rudely. I have known many faces since then; I never knew one with a lovelier look. Heartbroken though she was, the depth of her love was daily attested, for there never came complaint or bitter word across her lips; and you went to her, without question, for quiet and comfort, as to a sanctuary.
At first, it seems, she had been pitifully rebellious, had longed and prayed to die (we children knew these facts); but, having been denied so much as this, she rose delicately, and lived on worthy of him, binding and unbinding her hair, fastening her little slippers anew for the daily road and routine of life. Sometimes, with tactful or tactless devotion (I do not know to this day which), I would offer to fasten them for her; and she would smile and let me do it, and usually kissed me afterward.
There were years and years when I never saw her. She grew more frail, I am told, and her cheek withered; but to me she was always incomparable, and always "Rose-in-Bloom"; and like Rose-in-Bloom, looking always to one thing only—reunion with her beloved.
"Will fortune, after separation and distance, grant me union with my beloved?" sighs the lover of Rose-in-Bloom. "Close the book of estrangement and efface my trouble? Shall my beloved be my cup-companion once more? Where is Rose-in-Bloom, O King of the Age?"
It might have been her lover who so questioned a mightier king, while she waited far from him, there even in our very house. And the reply of the king in the story would still have been fitting: "By Allah, ye are two sincere lovers; and in the heaven of beauty two shining stars, and your case is wonderful and your affair extraordinary."
It were indeed impossible to explain all that these, the vivid lives of my own, meant to me, and what effect they had on what I like to call my education—how much indeed they were my education.