Khadijah was not wrong in believing that this last argument would touch her husband in a tender point, for he was very proud of Temimah, and looked forward to see her married into one of the highest families in the tribe; he therefore gave up the contest with a sigh of dissatisfaction, and consented that Khadijah should on the following morning inform Hassan of all that she knew of his early history.
Now that she had gained the victory, Khadijah, like many other conquerors, was at a loss how to improve it. She was essentially a good-hearted woman, and although while Hassan’s interests came into collision with those of her own offspring, Nature pleaded irresistibly for the latter, still she called to mind how good and affectionate Hassan had always been to herself, how he had protected and taken care of her little son, and tears came into her eyes when she reflected that the disclosure of the morrow must not only give him pain, but probably cause a final separation.
The hours of night passed slowly away, but anxiety and excitement kept unclosed the eyes of Hassan and Khadijah: the one hoping, yet fearing to penetrate the mystery of his birth, the other unwilling to banish from her sight one whom, now that she was about to lose him, she felt that she loved more than she had been aware of.
The hours of night! Brief words that should indicate a short space of universal tranquillity and repose, yet what a countless multitude of human joys, sorrows, and vicissitudes do they embrace! In the forest and in the wilderness they look upon the prowling wolf and the tiger stealing towards their unconscious prey, upon the lurking assassin, the noiseless ambush, and the stealthy band about to fall with war-shout and lance on the slumbering caravan. In the densely peopled city they look not on the sweet and refreshing rest which the God of nature meant them to distil from their balmy wings, but on gorgeous rooms blazing with light, in which love and hate, jealousy and envy, joy and sorrow, all clothed with silk, with jewels, and with smiles, are busy as the minstrel’s hand and the dancer’s feet; on halls where the circling cup, and laugh, and song proclaim a more boisterous revelry; on the riotous chambers of drunkenness; on those yet lower dens of vice into which a ray of God’s blessed sun is never permitted to shine, where the frenzied gambler stakes on the cast of a die the last hopes of his neglected family; on the squalid haunts of misery, to whose wretched occupants the gnawing pangs of hunger deny even the temporary forgetfulness of sleep. Yes, on these and a thousand varieties of scenes like these, do the hours of night look down from their starry height, wondering and weeping to see how their peaceful influence is marred by the folly and depravity of man.