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silent, O accursed wench!’ answered Helimeh. ‘Though he be married to another, yet needs must I occur to his thought some day. I cannot forget [the nights I have spent in] his company and in any case I console myself with the saying of the poet:
O lords, doth it betide you to give a thought to one Unto whose thought none other occurs save you alone?
Now God forbid that mindless you of his case should be Whom thought of your condition distracteth from his own!
It cannot be but he will bethink him of our loves and ask of me; wherefore I will not turn from loving him nor change from passion for him, though I die in prison, for he is my love and my physician,[1] and my hope is in him that he will yet return to me and deal graciously with me.’
When the jeweller heard his wife’s words, he went in to her and said to her, “O traitress, thy hope in him is as the hope of Iblis in Paradise. All these vices were in thee and I knew not thereof; for, had I been ware of one of them, I had not kept thee with me an hour. But now I am certified of this in thee, it behoveth me to kill thee, though they put me to death for thee, O traitress!’ And he seized her with both hands and repeated the following verses:
O fair ones, ye fordid my love so warm and true With sin nor had regard for what was right and due.
How long to you, indeed, with doting love I clave! But, after this my woe, I loathe the love of you.
Then he pressed upon her windpipe and broke her neck, whereupon her maid cried out, saying, ‘Alas, my mistress!’ ‘O harlot,’ said he, ‘it is thou who art to blame for all this, for that thou knewest this vice to be in her and toldest me not.’ Then he seized upon her and strangled her.
- ↑ Hebibi wa tebibi, a common jingling phrase.
