‘No wonder, my pearl, my rose!’ cried the Khan; ‘and how I bless that good lady for keeping the truth from thee! as thou wert then, the remembrance of it might have been fatal. And so thou dost not know that thou wert nearly lost to me for ever,—that I had seen thee plunged beneath that roaring flood, and little hoped ever to have been greeted by that sweet smile again?’
‘Alas, no!’ said the lady shuddering; ‘and was I indeed in such peril? who then saved me?—it was thou surely, my noble lord! and I have been hitherto unmindful of it,’ she cried, bowing her head to his feet? ‘how insensible must thou not have thought me!’
‘Not so, beloved, not so,’ was the eager reply of the Khan as he raised her up; ‘I had not that happiness. I cast myself, it is true, into the waters after thee when the bearers fell, but it was useless. I should have been lost, encumbered as I was with my arms, only for the bearers who saved me. No, even as Alla sends visitations of evil, so does he most frequently in his wisdom find a path of extrication from them; there was a youth—a noble fellow, a very Roostum, and by Alla a Mejnoon in countenance,—who saw the accident. His quick eye saw thy lifeless form cast up by the boiling water, and he rescued thee at the peril of his own life,—a valuable one too, fairest, for he is the son of a widow, the only son, and the head of the family,—in a word the son of her who has tended thee so gently—’
‘Holy Prophet!’ exclaimed the lady, ‘was I in this peril, and so rescued? At the peril of his own life too,—and he a widow’s son, thou saidst? What if he had been lost?’ And she fell to musing silently.
Gradually however (for the Khan did not hazard a reply) her bosom heaved: a tear welled over one of her eyelids, and fell upon her hand unnoticed,—another, and another. The Khan let them have their course. ‘They will soothe her better than my words,’ he thought, and thought truly.
After awhile she spoke again; it was abruptly, and showed her thoughts had been with her deliverer.
‘Thou wilt reward him, noble Khan,’ she said; ‘mine is but a poor life, ’tis true, but of some worth in thy sight, I know,—and of much in that of those I have left behind. My mother! it would have been a sore blow to thee to have heard of thy rose’s death so soon after parting.’
‘Reward him, Ameena!’ cried the Khan, ‘ay, with half my wealth, would he take it; but he is of proud blood and a long ancestry, though he is but a Patél, and such an offer would be an insult. Think—thou art quick-witted, and speak thy thought freely.’
‘He would not take money?’ thou saidst.
‘No, no,—I dare not offer it.’