“Now I desire to know,” continues the African author, “if this man had reason to make himself uneasy on the score of a mistress, and to spend the night like a mad man? For the fact is, that a thousand reflections rolled in his head; and the more he loved Fulvia, the more he feared to find her unfaithful. ‘Into what labyrinth have I thrust my self?’ said he to himself. ‘And to what purpose? What advantage will accrue to me, in case the favorite should win a castle; and what will be my fate, if she loses it? But why should she lose it? Am I not certain of Fulvia’s love? Ah! I am in the sole and entire possession of her; and if her Toy speak, it will be of me alone.—But if the treacherous—no, no, I should have had some previous notion of it; I should have observed some unevenness in her temper. Some time or other, these five years past, she would have betrayed herself.—Yet the trial is dangerous.—But it is now no longer time to recoil, I have lifted the vessel to my mouth, I must finish, though I were to spill the liquor.—Perhaps also the oracle will be in my favour.—Alas! what can I expect from it? Why must others have failed in their attacks on that virtue, over which I have triumphed?—Ah! dear Fulvia, I wrong thee by my suspicions, and I forget what it cost me to conquer thee. A ray of hope enlightens me, and I flatter myself that thy Toy will obstinately keep silence.’ ”
Selim was in this agitation of mind, when he received a card from the Sultan, which contained these words: This night, precisely at half an hour after eleven, you will be where you know. Selim took his pen, and answered with a trembling hand: Prince, I will obey.
Selim passed the rest of the day, as he had done the preceding night, fluctuating between hope and fear. Nothing is truer, than that lovers have an instinct: if their mistress be unfaithful, they are seized with an horror much like to that, which animals feel at the approach of bad weather. The suspicious lover is a cat, whose ear itches in cloudy weather. Animals and lovers have this property also in common, that domestic animals lose this instinct, and that it grows dull in lovers, when they are converted into husbands.
The hours seemed very tedious to Selim, he look’d a hundred times on his watch: infine the fatal moment came, and the courtier went to visit his mistress. It was late, but as he had admission at all hours, Fulvia’s apartment was opened for him—“I had given you over,” said she, “and I went to bed with a swimming in my head, which I owe to the impatience you have thrown me into.”
“Madam,” answered Selim, “business and respect have detained me with the Sultan; and since I parted from you, I have not been master of myself one moment.”
“And for my part,” replied Fulvia, “I have been in a dreadful humour. How! two whole days without seeing you.”
“You know,” answered Selim, “what my rank obliges me to: and let the favour of the great appear ever so fixed—”
“How,” interrupted Fulvia, “has the Sultan shown you any coldness? Has he forgot your services? Selim, you are pensive, you do not answer me.—Alas! if you love me, of what avail is the prince’s good or bad reception to your happiness. It is not in his eyes, it is in mine, ’tis in my arms that you are to seek it.”
Selim listened attentively to this discourse, examined the countenance of his mistress, and in its motions sought that character of truth, in which a person is not deceived, and which is impossible to counterfeit well: when I say impossible, I mean to us men: for Fulvia was so perfectly composed, that Selim began to blame himself for having suspected her, when Mangogul entered the room. Fulvia was silent in an instant, Selim trembled; and the Toy said: “In vain does my lady make pilgrimages to all the Pagodas of Congo, she will have no children; for reasons well known to me, who am her Toy.—”
At this declaration a deadly paleness seized Selim: he attempted to rise, but his trembling knees failed him, and he fell back into his seat. The invisible Sultan step’d up to him, and whispered in his ear: “Have you enough?”
“Alas! Prince,” replied the melancholic Selim, “why did I not follow the advice of Mirzoza; and the misgivings of my own heart? My happiness is eclipsed, I am a lost man: I die, if her Toy does not speak; if it does, I am a dead man: let it speak out however. I expect frightful intelligences; but I fear them less than I hate the state of perplexity, in which I am.—”
In the meantime Fulvia’s first motion was to put her hand on her Toy, and to shut its mouth: what it had hitherto said, might bear a favorable interpretation: but she dreaded the sequel. As she began to take courage on account of its remaining silent, the Sultan, urged by Selim, turned his ring: Fulvia was obliged to spread her fingers, and the Toy went on.
“I will never hold, I am too much harassed. The too assiduous visits of so many holy men will always obstruct my intentions,
