The Shaving of Shagpat - George Meredith (bookreader TXT) 📗

am I, yonder my dominions!” Then he thought, “I will solve it!” So, on a sudden he said to her beside him, “O Queen, sovereign of hearts! enlighten me as to a perplexity.”

She answered, “The voice of my lord is music in the ear of the bride.”

Then said he, in the tone of one doubting realities, “O fair Queen, is there truly now such a one as Shagpat in the world?”

She laughed at his speech and the puzzled appearance of his visage, replying, “Surely there liveth one, Shagpat by name in the world; strange is the history of him, his friends, and enemies; and it would bear recital.”

Then he said, “And one, the daughter of a Vizier, Vizier to the King in the City of Shagpat?”

Thereat, she shook her head, saying, “I know nought of that one.”

Now, Shibli Bagarag was mindful of his thwackings; and in this the wisdom of Noorna is manifest, that the sting of them yet chased away doubts of illusion regarding their having been, as the poet says,

“If thou wouldst fix remembrance⁠—thwack!
’Tis that oblivion controls;
I care not if’t be on the back,
Or on the soles.”

He thought, “Wah! yet feel I the thong, and the hiss of it as of the serpent in the descent, and the smack of it as the mouth of satisfaction in its contact with tender regions. This, wullahy! was no dream.” Nevertheless, he was ashamed to allude thereto before the Queen, and he said, “O my mistress, another question, one only! This Shagpat⁠—is he shaved?”

She said, “Clean shorn!”

Quoth he, astonished, grief-stricken, with drawn lips, “By which hand, chosen above men?”

And she exclaimed, “O thou witty one that feignest not to know! Wullahy! by this hand of thine, O my lord and king, daring that it is; dexterous! surely so! And the shaving of Shagpat was the task achieved⁠—I the dower of it, and the rich reward.”

Now, he was meshed yet deeper in the net of her subtleties, and by her calling him “lord and king”; and she gave a signal for fresh entertainments, exhausting the resources of her art, the mines of her wealth, to fascinate him. Ravishments of design and taste were on every side, and he was in the lap of abundance, beguiled by magic, caressed by beauty and a Queen. Marvel not that he was dazzled, and imagined himself already come to the great things foretold of him by the readers of planets and the casters of nativities in Shiraz. He assisted in beguiling himself, trusting wilfully to the two witnesses of things visible; as is declared by him of wise sayings:

“There is in every wizard-net a hole,
So the entangler first must blind the soul.”

And it is again said by that same teacher:

“Ye that the inner spirit’s sight would seal,
Nought credit but what outward orbs reveal.”

And the soul of Shibli Bagarag was blinded by Rabesqurat in the depths of the Enchanted Sea. She sang to him, luting deliriously; and he was intoxicated with the blissfulness of his fortune, and took a lute and sang to her love-verses in praise of her, rhyming his rapture. Then they handed the goblet to each other, and drank till they were on fire with the joy of things, and life blushed beauteousness. Surely, Rabesqurat was becoming forgetful of her arts through the strength of those draughts, till her eye marked the Lily by his side, which he grasped constantly, the bright flower, and she started and said, “One grant, O my King, my husband!”

So he said courteously, “All grants are granted to the lovely, the fascinating; and their grief will be lack of aught to ask for?”

Then said she, “O my husband, my King, I am jealous of that silly flower: laugh at my weakness, but fling it from thee.”

Now, he was about to cast it from him, when a vanity possessed his mind, and he exclaimed, “See first the thing I will do, a wonder.”

She cried, “No wonders, my life! I am sated with them.”

And he said, “I am oblivious, O Queen, of how I came by this flower and this phial; but thou shalt hear a thing beyond the power of common magic, and see that I am something.”

Now, she plucked at him to abstain from his action, but he held the phial to the flower. She signed imperiously to some slaves to stay his right wrist, and they seized on it; but not all of them together could withhold him from dropping a drop into the petals of the flower, and lo, the Lily spake, a voice from it like the voice of Noorna, saying, “Remember the Seventh Pillar.” Thereat, he lifted his eyes to his brows and frowned back memory to his aid, and the scene of Karaz, Rabesqurat, Abarak, and his betrothed was present to him. So perceiving that, the Queen delayed not while he grasped the phial to take in her hands some water from a basin near, and flung it over him, crying, “Oblivion!” And while his mind was straining to bring back images of what had happened, he fell forward once more at the feet of Rabesqurat, senseless as a stone falls; such was the force of her enchantments.

Now, when he awoke the second time he was in the bosom of darkness, and the Lily gone from his hand; so he lifted the phial to make certain of that, and groped about till he came to what seemed an urn to the touch, and into this he dropped a drop, and asked for the Lily; and a voice said, “I caught a light from it in passing.” And he came in the darkness to a tree, and a bejewelled bank, and other urns, and swinging lamps without light, and a running water, and a grassy bank, and flowers, and a silver seat, sprinkling each; and they said all in answer to his question of the Lily, “I caught a light from it in passing.” At the last