“Ah,” said she, “I am grieved, my husband, at your treatment of Keejeepaa. Whenever I say a good word for the gazelle you dislike to hear it. I pity you that your understanding is gone.”
“What do you mean by talking in that manner to me?” he blustered.
“Why, advice is a blessing, if properly taken. A husband should advise with his wife, and a wife with her husband; then they are both blessed.”
“Oh, stop,” said her husband, impatiently; “it’s evident you’ve lost your senses. You should be chained up.” Then he said to the old woman: “Never mind her talk; and as to this gazelle, tell him to stop bothering me and putting on style, as if he were the sultan. I can’t eat, I can’t drink, I can’t sleep, because of that gazelle worrying me with his messages. First, the gazelle is sick; then, the gazelle doesn’t like what he gets to eat. Confound it! If he likes to eat, let him eat; if he doesn’t like to eat, let him die and be out of the way. My mother is dead, and my father is dead, and I still live and eat; shall I be put out of my way by a gazelle, that I bought for a dime, telling me he wants this thing or that thing? Go and tell him to learn how to behave himself toward his superiors.”
When the old woman went downstairs, she found the gazelle was bleeding at the mouth, and in a very bad way. All she could say was, “My son, the good you did is all lost; but be patient.”
And the gazelle wept with the old woman when she told him all that had passed, and he said, “Mother, I am dying, not only from sickness, but from shame and anger at this man’s ingratitude.”
After a while Keejeepaa told the old woman to go and tell the master that he believed he was dying. When she went upstairs she found Daaraaee chewing sugar-cane, and she said to him, “Master, the gazelle is worse; we think him nearer to dying than getting well.”
To which he answered: “Haven’t I told you often enough not to bother me?”
Then his wife said: “Oh, husband, won’t you go down and see the poor gazelle? If you don’t like to go, let me go and see him. He never gets a single good thing from you.”
But he turned to the old woman and said, “Go and tell that nuisance of a gazelle to die eleven times if he chooses to.”