The Prince of India, vol 2 | Page 7

his great height to hear further.
"This is the way of it," she continued of her own prompting. "Some
years ago, my father, Uel, the merchant, received a letter from an old
friend of his father's, telling him that he was about to return to
Constantinople after a long absence in the East somewhere, and asking
if he, Uel, would assist the servant who was bearer of the note in
buying and furnishing a house. Uel did so, and when the stranger
arrived, his home was ready for him. I was then a little girl, and went
one day to see the Prince of India, his residence being opposite Uel's on
the other side of the street. He was studying some big books, but quit
them, and picked me up, and asked me who I was? I told him Uel was
my father. What was my name? Lael, I said. How old was I? And when
I answered that also, he kissed me, and cried, and, to my wonder,
declared how he had once a child named Lael; she looked like me, and
was just my age when she died"--
"Wonderful!" exclaimed Sergius.
"Yes, and he then said Heaven had sent me to take her place. Would I
be his Lael? I answered I would, if Uel consented. He took me in his
arms, carried me across the street and talked so Uel could not have
refused had he wanted to."
The manner of the telling was irresistible. At the conclusion, she turned
to him and said, with emotion: "There, now. You see I really have two
fathers, and you know how I came by them: and were I to recount their
goodness to me, and how they both love me, and how happy each one
of them is in believing me the object of the other's affection, you would
understand just as well how I know no difference between them."
"It is strange; yet as you tell it, little friend, it is not strange," he
returned, seriously. They were at the instant in a bar of brightest
sunlight projected across the road; and had she asked him the cause of
the frown on his face, he could not have told her he was thinking of

Demedes.
"Yes, I see it--I see it, and congratulate you upon being so doubly
blessed. Tell me next who the Prince of India is."
She looked now here, now there, he watching her narrowly.
"Oh! I never thought of asking him about himself."
She was merely puzzled by an unexpected question.
"But you know something of him?"
"Let me think," she replied. "Yes, he was the intimate of my father
Uel's father, and of his father before him."
"Is he so old then?"
"I cannot say how long he has been a family acquaintance. Of my
knowledge he is very learned in everything. He speaks all the
languages I ever heard of; he passes the nights alone on the roof of his
house"--
"Alone on the roof of his house!"
"Only of clear nights, you understand. A servant carries a chair and
table up for him, and a roll of papers, with pen and ink, and a clock of
brass and gold. The paper is a map of the heavens; and he sits there
watching the stars, marking them in position on the map, the clock
telling him the exact time."
"An astronomer," said Sergius.
"And an astrologer," she added; "and besides these things he is a doctor,
but goes only amongst the poor, taking nothing from them. He is also a
chemist; and he has tables of the plants curative and deadly, and can
extract their qualities, and reduce them from fluids to solids, and
proportionate them. He is also a master of figures, a science, he always
terms it, the first of creative principles without which God could not be

God. So, too, he is a traveller--indeed I think he has been over the
known world. You cannot speak of a capital or of an island, or a tribe
which he has not visited. He has servants from the farthest East. One of
his attendants is an African King; and what is the strangest to me,
Sergius, his domestics are all deaf and dumb."
"Impossible!"
"Nothing appears impossible to him."
"How does he communicate with them?"
"They catch his meaning from the motion of his lips. He says signs are
too slow and uncertain for close explanations."
"Still he must resort to some language."
"Oh, yes, the Greek."
"But if they have somewhat to impart to him?"
"It is theirs to obey, and pantomime seems sufficient to convey the little
they have to return to him, for it is seldom more than, 'My Lord, I have
done the thing you gave me to do.'