“The King will live. He will find happiness with someone fairer than you. That is well. Your life for his. It is the price.”
“The price is nothing. Have I not looked on my heart’s beloved one for five years—looked on his face—heard his voice—trembled with joy at his footsteps? Have I not waited and watched? Have I not gazed on my sons and seen their royal bearing, and known their touch?”
“You are, then, content?”
“You are a Wizard—you can read that I am.”
“It is not I that am a Wizard—it is Love. That is the only Wizard this world knows.”
curtain
SCENE V
The bed-chamber of the King—vast and shadowy. On heaped-up cushions and covers of yellow and blue, under a pearl-sewn creamy velvet baldaquin, embroidered with peacocks, lies meng beng, mortally stricken; his face bears the ashen pallor that only dark skins know. The ministers, the servants, the courtiers, the countless motley gathering of an Eastern Court are scattered in anxious groups, watching, waiting, murmuring. Only the space near the couch is clear. Without, the dawn breaks over the sea, and, stealing
through the opening, makes the great chamber flush till it looks like porphyry.
The tolling of a deep gong and the voices of a myriad birds invade the throbbing silence of the Palace.