‘The kind messages she sent me! The pleasant surprise she has prepared for me!’ repeated the minister’s son in a hard, dry tone. ‘My lord will be pleased to tell me how she heard of my name?’
‘I was sitting one night,’ replied the prince, ‘in anxious thought about you, when at that moment the princess coming in and seeing my condition, asked, “Why are you thus sad? Explain the cause to me.” I then gave her an account of your cleverness, and when she had heard it she gave me permission to go and see you, and sent these sweetmeats for you: eat them and I shall be pleased.’
‘Great king!’ rejoined the young statesman, ‘one, thing vouchsafe to hear from me. You have not done well in that you have told my name. You should never let a woman think that your left hand knows the secret which she confided to your right, much less that you have shared it to a third person. Secondly, you did evil in allowing her to see the affection with which you honour your unworthy servant—a woman ever hates her lover’s or husband’s friend.’
‘What could I do?’ rejoined the young Raja, in a querulous tone of voice. ‘When I love a woman I like to tell her everything—to have no secrets from her—to consider her another self——’
‘Which habit,’ interrupted the pradhan’s son, ‘you will lose when you are a little older, when you recognise the fact that love is nothing but a bout, a game of skill between two individuals of opposite sexes: the one seeking to gain as much, and the other striving to lose as little, as possible; and that the sharper of the twain thus met on the chess-board must, in the long run, win. And reticence is but a habit. Practise it for a year, and you will find it harder to betray than to conceal your thoughts. It hath its joys also. Is there no pleasure, think you, when suppressing an outbreak of tender but fatal confidence, in saying to yourself, “O, if she only knew this?” “O, if she did but suspect that?” Returning, however, to the sugar-plums, my life to a pariah’s that they are poisoned!’
‘Impossible!’ exclaimed the prince, horror-struck at the thought; ‘what you say, surely no one ever could do. If a mortal fears not his fellow-mortal, at least he dreads the Deity.’
‘I never yet knew,’ rejoined the other, ‘what a woman in love does fear. However, prince, the trial is easy. Come here, Muti!’ cried he to the old woman’s dog, ‘and off with thee to that three-headed kinsman of thine, that attends upon his amiable-looking master.’[67]