Every day the curious Zayda renewed her inquiries, and every day the
sage duenna repeated her stories, which were listened to with profound
interest, though with frequent sighs, by her gentle auditors. The
discreet old woman awoke at length to the mischief she might be doing.
She had been accustomed to think of the princesses only as children;
but they had imperceptibly ripened beneath her eye, and now bloomed
before her three lovely damsels of the marriageable age. It is time,
thought the duenna, to give notice to the king.
Mohamed the Left-handed was seated one morning on a divan in a
cool hall of the Alhambra, when a slave arrived from the fortress of
Salobrena, with a message from the sage Kadiga, congratulating him
on the anniversary of his daughters' birth-day. The slave at the
same time presented a delicate little basket decorated with flowers,
within which, on a couch of vine and fig-leaves, lay a peach, an
apricot, and a nectarine, with their bloom and down and dewy sweetness
upon them, and all in the early stage of tempting ripeness. The
monarch was versed in the Oriental language of fruits and flowers, and
rapidly divined the meaning of this emblematical offering.
"So," said he, "the critical period pointed out by the astrologers
is arrived: my daughters are at a marriageable age. What is to be
done? They are shut up from the eyes of men; they are under the eyes
of the discreet Kadiga- all very good- but still they are not under my
own eye, as was prescribed by the astrologers: I must gather them
under my wing, and trust to no other guardianship.
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