Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night - Volume 4.djvu/263

 and enjoyed myself and entertained him with talk deep in to the night; after which I said to him, 'O my master, is there no music in thy house.' He answered, 'Verily for many a day we have drunk without music.' Then he called out, saying, 'Ho, Shajarat al-Durr?' Whereupon a slave- girl answered him from her chamber and came in to us, with a lute of Hindu make, wrapped in a silken bag. And she sat down and, laying the lute in her lap, preluded in one and twenty modes; then, returning to the first, she sang to a lively measure these couplets,

'We have ne'er tasted of Love's sweets and bitter draught, * No     difference kens 'twixt presence-bliss and absence-stress; And so, who hath declined from Love's true road, * No diference kens 'twixt smooth and ruggedness: I ceased not to oppose the votaries of love, * Till I had tried its sweets and bitters not the less: How many a night my pretty friend conversed with me * And sipped I from his lips honey of love liesse: Now have I drunk its cup of bitterness, until * To bondman and to freedman I have proved me base. How short-aged was the night together we enjoyed, * When seemed it daybreak came on nightfall's heel to press! But Fate had vowed to disunite us lovers twain, * And she too well hath kept her vow, that votaress. Fate so decreed it! None her sentence can withstand: * Where is     the wight who dares oppose his Lord's command?'

Hardly had she finished her verses, when her lord cried out with a great cry and fell down in a fit; whereupon exclaimed the damsel, 'May Allah not punish thee, O old man! This long time have we drunk without music, for fear the like of this falling sickness befal our lord. But now go thou to yonder chamber and there sleep.' So I went to the chamber which she showed me and slept till the morning, when behold, a page brought me a purse of five hundred dinars and said to me, 'This is what my master promised thee; but return thou not to the damsel who sent thee, god let it be as though neither thou nor we had ever heard of this matter.' 'Hearkening and obedience,' answered I and taking the purse,