Page:Edmund Dulac's picture-book for the French Red cross.djvu/176

 JUSEF AND ASENATH

A LOVE STORY OF EGYPT

The loves of Jusef and Asenath which ran not smooth! Deep is the poet's singing thereon, and sweet is the song that is sung.

In the days of old, even on a day when Jusef, having interpreted the dream of Egypt's king, set forth through the whole land to gather the plenteous harvest against the seven years of famine to come, a beautiful maiden named Asenath sat in the tower of her father's palace surrounded by seven damsels whose beauty was rare, though it paled before that of Asenath herself. She had chosen these damsels from the multitudes of Syria and Egypt and Arabia — a choice beset with difficulty, for each one of them was neither older nor younger than Asenath, having been born in the selfsame midnight hour, though in places far distant beneath the moon.

'Think not,' she was saying to them, 'that my father Putiphra, priest of Heliopolis and satrap of Pharaoh though he be, can say to me, "This man shalt thou love," or, "That man shall take thee to wife." Nay, the heart of Asenath is her own, and it goes not out to any man, be he the greatest in the land or so beautiful that the stars bow down before him. True, my father is a good man and just, yet would not I obey him in such a matter, for, in the first place, my dead mother's words are locked in my bosom. "My daughter," she said, "although thy father is of Egypt, thou art not, as I am not. I, a Hebrew of Syria, descended from Zedekiah, in the region beyond the Euphrates, did spoil the Egyptians of thee, by thy very birth from me. See to it, therefore, that thou take no prince of the land of Pharaoh to thy bosom, but rather one of my own Hebrew blood, which has flowed through Syria to the east, and, having at length 124