With one fearful look at Jonathan, and one agonized scream, the wretched woman fell back a corpse, her diseased flesh already mouldering to destruction.
Jonathan regained his father’s bequests, and returned to his mother; the whole kingdom rejoiced at his return. Until his life’s end he remembered the lessons he had learnt in his prosperity and his poverty, and he lived and died in peace with God and with man.
“Your tale, of course, boasts of a moral?”
“Yes; a moral far from unreasonable. The Emperor Darius is typical of our Saviour, as is generally the case in these tales; and the queen-mother is the Church. The two sons are the men of this world; the third son typifies the good Christian. The lady, his great temptation and source of all his evils, is the flesh. She first obtains from him the ring of faith, and after that deprives him, by her devices, of the necklace of hope; and in despite of these warnings, steals front him, at last, the cloth of charity. The bitter water, that burneth away the flesh from the bouts, is repentance, and the first fruit is heartfelt remorse; the second river is repentance before God, and the unpromising fruit represents the deeds of faith, prayer, self-denial, and charity.”
“You have left the leprous king and the ship still unexplained.”
“The former is but a type of a sinful man, the other is intended to represent the Divine command, but the application seems forced and inappropriate.”
“You have another link between the East and West in this tale,” remarked Herbert. “The talisman of the magic cloth may be found in the ‘Arabian Nights,’ in the story of Prince Ahmed, and the Fairy Pari Banou.”
“All the three talismans proclaim the Eastern origin of the story,” remarked Lathom; “and besides this, its entire structure resembles the tale of Fortunatus, to which few have hesitated to assign an Eastern origin.”
“Many of the incidents of your story are to be found in the old German nursery tale of The Dwarf and the Three Soldiers.”
“Not unlikely; but the tale in question is so little known to me that I cannot trace the likeness.”