The Shaving of Shagpat, George Meredith [popular e readers TXT] 📗

from her figure, and smiled, for Mashalleed was mute, the torrent of invective frozen on his mouth when he beheld the miracle of beauty that she was, the splendid jewel of throbbing loveliness. So to scourge him with the bitter lash of jealousy, Bhanavar turned her eyes on Ruark, and said sweetly, “Yet shalt thou live to taste again the bliss of the Desert. Pleasant was our time in it, O my Chief!” The King glared and choked, and she said again, “Nor he conquered thee, but I; and I that conquered thee, little will it be for me to conquer him: his threats are the winds of idleness.”

Surely the world darkened before the eyes of Mashalleed, and he arose and called to his guard hoarsely, “Have off their heads!” They hesitated, dreading the Queen, and he roared, “Slay them!”

Bhanavar beheld the winking of the steel, but ere the scimitars descended, she seized Ruark, and they stood in a whizzing ring of serpents, the sound of whom was as the hum of a thousand wires struck by storm-winds. Then she glowed, towering over them with the Chief clasped to her, and crying:

“King of vileness! match thy slaves
With my creatures of the caves.”

And she sang to the Serpents:

“Seize upon him! sting him thro’!
Thrice this day shall pay your due.”

But they, instead of obeying her injunction, made narrower their circle round Bhanavar and the Chief. She yellowed, and took hold of the nearest Serpent horribly, crying:

“Dare against me to rebel,
Ye, the bitter brood of hell?”

And the Serpent gasped in reply:

“One the kiss to us secures:
Give us ours, and we are yours.”

Thereupon another of the Serpents swung on, the feet of Ruark, winding his length upward round the body of the Chief; so she tugged at that one, tearing it from him violently, and crying:

“Him ye shall not have, I swear!
Seize the King that’s crouching there.”

And that Serpent hissed:

“This is he the kiss ensures:
Give us ours, and we are yours.”

Another and another Serpent she flung from the Chief, and they began to swarm venomously, answering her no more. Then Ruark bore witness to his faith, and folded his arms with the grave smile she had known in the desert; and Bhanavar struggled and tussled with the Serpents in fierceness, strangling and tossing them to right and left. “Great is Allah!” cried all present, and the King trembled, for never was sight like that seen, the hall flashing with the Serpents, and a woman-serpent, their Queen, raging to save one from their fury, shrieking at intervals:

“Never, never shall ye fold,
Save with me the man I hold.”

But now the hiss and scream of the Serpents and the noise of their circling was quickened to a slurred savage sound and they closed on Ruark, and she felt him stifling and that they were relentless. So in the height of the tempest Bhanavar seized the Jewel in the gold circlet on her brow and cast it from her. Lo! the Serpents instantly abated their frenzy, and flew all of them to pluck the Jewel, chasing the one that had it in his fangs through the casement, and the hall breathed empty of them. Then in the silence that was, Bhanavar veiled her face and said to the Chief, “Pass from the hall while they yet dread me. No longer am I Queen of Serpents.”

But he replied, “Nay! said I not my soul is thine?”

She cried to him, “Seest thou not the change in me? I was bound to those Serpents for my beauty, and ’tis gone! Now am I powerless, hateful to look on, O Ruark my Chief!”

He remained still, saying, “What thou hast been thou art.”

She exclaimed, “O true soul, the light is hateful to me as I to the light; but I will yet save thee to comfort Rukrooth, thy mother.”

So she drew him with her swiftly from the hall of the King ere the King had recovered his voice of command; but now the wrath of the All-Powerful was upon her and him! Surely within an hour from the flight of the Serpents, the slaves and soldiers of Mashalleed laid at his feet two heads that were the heads of Ruark and Bhanavar; and they said, “O great King, we tracked them to her chamber and through to a passage and a vault hung with black, wherein were two corpses, one in a tomb and one unburied, and we slew them there, clasping each other, O King of the age!”

Mashalleed gazed upon the head of Bhanavar and sighed, for death had made the head again fair with a wondrous beauty, a loveliness never before seen on Earth.

The Betrothal

Now, when Shibli Bagarag had ceased speaking, the Vizier smiled gravely, and shook his beard with satisfaction, and said to the Eclipser of Reason, “What opinest thou of this nephew of the barber, O Noorna bin Noorka?”

She answered, “O Feshnavat, my father, truly I am content with the bargain of my betrothal. He, wullahy, is a fair youth of flowing speech.” Then she said, “Ask thou him what he opineth of me, his betrothed?”

So the Vizier put that interrogation to Shibli Bagarag, and the youth was in perplexity; thinking, “Is it possible to be joyful in the embrace of one that hath brought thwackings upon us, serious blows?” Thinking, “Yet hath she, when the mood cometh, kindly looks; and I marked her eye dwelling on me admiringly!” And he thought, “Mayhap she that groweth younger and counteth nature backwards, hath a history that would affect me; or, it may be, my kisses⁠—wah! I like not to give them, and it is said,

“ ‘Love is wither’d by the withered lip’;

“and that,

“ ‘On bones become too prominent he’ll trip.’

“Yet put the case, that my kisses⁠—I shower them not, Allah the All-Seeing is my witness! and they be given daintily as ’twere to the leaf of a nettle, or over-hot pilau. Yet haply kisses repeated might