Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/154

146 Saying this she sprang to her feet, rushed wildly up the battlements, and threw herself over; but before her body had reached the rocks below her breath had gone out of her, and Queen Koklan, the false, the beautiful, was dead.

When King Rasálu saw this he hastened to the gate and went out. Stooping over the dead body of the only woman whom he had ever cared for, he felt what it was to have loved and for ever to have lost. He then took her up tenderly, carried her into the palace, and laid her down, Both the bodies, his wife's and her lover's, he laid down side by side, and covered them with the same sheet. Then he considered within himself: "But if I burn them, the disgraceful secret will be known abroad. No! at midnight I will carry them both down, and throw them into the river." Then, seeing the parrot, he said to her, "Your partner is dead and gone, so also is mine. Poor parrot and poor King! We shall now have to amuse each other."

After this the King being very weary lay down and slept, and, forgetting the two bodies, he did not wake till late in the night. It was almost dawn when he approached the river, bearing the corpses on his shoulders. Just then he caught sight of a washerman and his wife going down with a bundle of clothes. So he stepped aside behind a rock to escape their notice, and dropped the dead into the river.

As he watched them sinking he overheard the woman saying to her husband, "It is not yet morning. To pass the time tell me a story." The husband answered, "What is the use? We have to get through the world somehow. Part of our life is over, and part remains. We have no time to waste over stories." "But," replied she, "it is not yet daylight, so tell me something." Then the washerman said, "Shall I tell you a true story, or some other one?" She answered, "A true story." Then the man began:

"Hear me, wife. Not long ago, before I married you, I had another wife. She used to say her prayers five times in the day, and I thought her a treasure. Yet every night she absented herself from my house for at least an hour, until I began to wonder what was her motive. At last I determined to find out. The next time she went away, I followed her, because I said, 'Perhaps she goes out to her prayers, but I should like to see for myself.' I found she visited the grave of a fakir, and that she prayed to him that I might become blind. When I heard this, I could not help feeling 'Before my face she respects me, but how false she is behind my back. To-morrow I