A Mine of Faults. Bain Francis William
with this very object it was, that long ago, as thou knowest, I obtained thy permission to cultivate thy daughter, and to train her, and to tutor her; and as I watched her growing, I said within myself: Some day, this sowing of thine, aided by my culture, will be fruitful, and it may be, she will prove an instrument of policy, to save the kingdom from destruction, when every other instrument has failed. And very apt indeed was my pupil, and yet there is another Master, who has done infinitely more for her, in this matter of diplomacy, than I. For I think that the very God of Love himself has befriended this kingdom, and conspired to assist it in its need, lending his aid to supplement my own insufficient efforts, and mixing in thy daughter's composition some bewildering ingredient, peculiar to herself.
And then, all at once, the King exclaimed: Ah! no, not so. O Yogeshwara, thou art mistaken, for he took it from her mother. Ah! cunning god, well he knew, where to find the fascination he required. O her voice! and her eyes! and the smile upon her lips! and O alas! for the sweetness that is gone for ever! Aye! indeed, there breathed from every part of her something that I cannot name, some spell, some property, some fragrance, flung as it were from some intoxicating source within her soul, to drive me to despair.
And as the King stopped, sadly fixing his eyes upon the ground, Yogeshwara said again: Maháráj, whether the Deity took it, as thou sayest, from the Queen her mother, or invented it afresh, I cannot tell: but certain it is, that the feminine delusion in thy daughter is the very masterpiece of a Deity skilled beyond all others in the production of the irresistible: and old as I am, and versed in all the varieties and ways of women, I never saw anything that resembled it before. And often, as I have watched her, innocently casting what thou hast called her fragrance about her in the air, with none to note it, and all unconscious of her own inexplicable charm, like a great blue lonely lotus-flower growing on a silent mirror of black water in an undiscovered forest-pool, never even dreaming of looking at its own reflection in the water, towards which all the time it bends, as if to kiss it, absolutely blind to the loveliness that almost touches it, and issues from itself, depriving everyone that sees it of his reason, I have striven in wonder to discover, exactly in what the charm consisted, and in what part of her it lay: and yet I could not, so craftily has the Creator distributed it everywhere about her. And yet, musing over it alone, it has seemed to me to be a thing compounded, as it were, of contradiction. For as you listen to her, you are amazed by her intelligence, and when you look at her, you smile as it were against your will, and yet with an inclination to laugh, from pure delight, so strange and so surprising and somehow or other, absurdly delicious does it seem, for such sagacity to lodge, incongruously, in such a casket, so dainty, and so delicate, and so curiously and beautifully mocking as it were the cruder mould of all her ordinary sisters, that it leaves you puzzled and perplexed and doubtful, whether to treat her as a woman or a child, or something altogether different from both. And there is a sort of exhilarating, and as it were, caressing sweetness, and a sound resembling liquid laughter, falling far away and yet lurking, somewhere or other, in the tone of her voice, as it gives utterance to aphorisms worthy of Brihaspati,17 that flatters and intoxicates the ear, stealing through it straight into the soul, and lending to everything she says, even were it nonsense, a power of persuasion not its own. And as if this, coupled to her beauty, were not enough, there is something affectionate, and confiding, and as it were, an appealing submission that is mixed, I cannot tell how, with a kind of proud and half playful, half serious defiance, that flatters and delights and bribes and corrupts you in her behaviour, and would utterly disarm you, even if you were, what is absolutely impossible, her enemy; so that if once you looked at her, you would be helpless, and wholly unable to be angry with her, no matter what she did; for she would laugh at your anger and beguile it, like a bewitching child endeavouring to play with incomparable grace the part of a woman, and challenging you to find fault with her on any ground whatever. And yet she has the cunning of her sex in so large a measure, that she seems to have monopolised it all. And now I am a booby, and all my experience is of less value than a straw, if there is even one young man in the eight quarters of the world capable of looking at her for an instant without losing all his senses at one blow; were he even the very incarnation of asceticism. But as to this young Chand, I have followed him from his childhood, by means of my spies, and know him; and very cheap do I hold his professions of misogyny and brahmacharyam, now that his father is away. For an old misogynist may be in earnest, and actually mean what he says, having been deceived and betrayed and disgusted, by reason of his experience of some women in particular, with all. But the man whose wisdom is taken at second-hand from another, and who is filled only with the conceit of a knowledge not drawn from his experience, finds it crumble to pieces as a rule at the very first touch of reality and life, like sand: since a single shock to any part of his imaginary fortress brings the whole to the ground with a run. For finding it untrustworthy in any one point, he distrusts it all, and is left utterly defenceless, at the mercy of his antagonist. And of all kinds of conceit, that of a youth, himself, as Chand is, formed as it were of amber, on purpose to attract the sex, like grass, who boasts himself proof against a woman's glamour, never even dreaming what it is or what it means, is the greatest, and the shortest, and the most easily annihilated, and the most easily abandoned, and forgotten and forgiven, both by women and the world. And thy daughter will bring him to his senses, and deprive him of his reason, in the same instant that he sees her: for then he will suddenly discover what a woman means: since till now, she has been to him nothing but a word. And now, O King, I have told thee: and now all rests with thee alone. For thy daughter must in any case marry somebody: and where could be found for her a better husband than this very Chand, whose alliance would be the salvation of the state?
And when he ended, after a while, the King said, very slowly: Old friend, thy words resembled a sword, driven into my heart. And as I listened to thy voice, holding up before me, like a skilful painter, the picture of my daughter's charm, I saw in it, as in a mirror, another standing all the while beside her, looking at me all the while with the affection in her eyes that I shall never see again. And I flew back in an instant, carried on thy voice, to old sweet idle hours, when like thee I used to sit and watch and muse, striving to discover the essence and the secret of that very self-same charm. And I would give a hundred lives only to be young Chand, and have that charm employed on me, again. And if he is able to resist it, I do not envy him, nor think the more of him on that account. But let us try, and see. For as to the wisdom and the policy of what thou hast proposed, there cannot be a doubt of it: and my daughter must alas! be married, as thou sayest, either to another, or to him. Only they say, that this young Chand is so declared an enemy of women, as never even to suffer any one of them so much as to approach him. And how, then, is the charm to work? For in magic of this kind, the spell will not act, unless the magician be in contact with his object. And how, then, shall we bring about the meeting of the charmer and the charmed?
Then said Yogeshwara: O King, I have a stratagem to meet that very difficulty, which, if my experience is not utterly at fault, is the real, and the only one before us. For could we only place them in proximity, I am ready to cut my own head off, if he can ever get away. And thy daughter will fall into the scheme, and understand it, almost before we begin to tell her, and require no instructions, since this is a matter in which she is wiser than us all: and to go about to tell a young beauty how to lay her snares for her natural and proper prey would be to give lessons to the spider how to make his web. Moreover, I do not doubt that she will take part in the plot not merely with avidity, but something more. For she has heard, as who has not? of this young Chand, and nothing is so attractive to the curiosity of a woman as a young woman-hater: since every woman thinks, in her heart, that she could perhaps persuade him to count her an exception to his rule, and every woman in her heart partly agrees with him, since, if she could have chosen, she would have preferred to be a man. And women have been adorers, since the beginning, of exactly such young warriors of whom he is the type.
So, then, by Yogeshwara's advice, King Mitra sent an answer to the message of King Chand, saying: That King Mitra was ready to accede to all King Chand's demands, and pay him tribute in any such form as he might choose, if only King Chand would come up in person, under the safe-conduct of King Mitra, to require it. For the matter would touch, in its adjustment, the honour of both families, and the hereditary differences could only be determined by personal arrangement on the spot.
And when Chand got his answer, he said to his ministers: See, now, everything is
The preceptor of the gods; as we should say, a Solon.