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He immediately mounts his horse, and reaches the city the next morning at sunrise. In the street he mixes with the throng; hears Veenah pitied, her father blamed, and himself lamented.
"I continued for some time in a sort of dreaming ecstasy; but as soon as I collected my thoughts, I began to devise some scheme by which I could again have the happiness of seeing and conversing with the lovely Veenah.
I soon found that Hircarrahs, in the pay of Balty Mahu, watched all my motions; and if I had attempted any scheme of vengeance, its execution would have been impracticable. "After my first transports had subsided into deep and settled grief, my love and tenderness for Veenah returned in full force.
But so it was, that one moonlight night I thought I was watched by some person; and on the following night an individual of the same figure, and whom I now suspected to be Balty Mahu, came suddenly from a cross street, and passed near me. A few evenings afterwards, instead of a letter, I received a scrap of paper from Veenah, on which was written the following words: "We are discovered.
"To the same sort of management I had recourse every day, and seldom failed to see and converse with Veenah, sometimes in company with all her cousins, but oftener with Fatima, the youngest. By dividing my attentions among them all, I succeeded for a while in concealing from them the object of my preference; but the sex are too sharp-sighted to be long deceived in these matters.
These fleeting joys are ever recurring to my imagination, to show me what my lot might have been, and to contrast it with its sad reverse! "The time now approached for Veenah and her mother to return to Benares. On the evening before they set out, Fatima contrived for us a longer interview than usual. It was as melancholy as it was tender.
I approached, bowed to them all, but to Veenah last; and although my cousins showed surprise at seeing me in their garden, at this time, they did not seem displeased. I felt very desirous, I could not tell why, to conceal my feelings from every person except her who was the object of them.
I have occasionally used the metal to counterbalance the gravity of a small car, by which I have profited, by a favourable wind, to indulge the melancholy satisfaction of looking down on the tombs of my parents, and of the ill-fated Veenah: approaching the earth near enough, in the night, to see the sacred spots, but not enough to violate the religious injunctions of my caste; to avoid which, however, it was sometimes necessary for me to go across Hindostan to Arabia or Persia, and there wait for a change of wind before I could return: and it was these excursions which suggested to the superstitious Burmans that my form had undergone a temporary transformation.
He now sees Veenah approach the funeral pile, who, at the well known sound of his voice, shrieked out, "he lives! he lives!" and would have attempted to save herself from the flames; but the shouts of the surrounding multitude, and the sound of the instruments, drowned her voice.
Oh! what happiness I enjoyed in these interviews in seeing Veenah in gazing on her lovely features in listening to her sentiments, that were sometimes gay and thoughtless, sometimes serious and melancholy, but always tender and affectionate, and now and then, when not perceived, in venturing to take her hand.
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