Husband and Wife
Once upon a time, in a green village where noisy brooks babbled, there lived a naive man and his clever wife, who had her eye on higher things. During the hours when her husband was in the field, the wife would secretly invite a wealthy merchant to the house and lay delicious tables for him. Adorned with showy carpets and sweet-smelling dishes, these secret meetings went on for days without anyone knowing. But one late afternoon, when the weather suddenly turned bad, the naive husband came home at an unexpected moment. Bewildered by the knocking at the door, the woman hid the merchant in panic inside the big wooden chest in the room. When the weary man came in, he saw the feast on the table and asked in astonishment, "And who is all this preparation for?"
The clever woman smiled without losing her composure at all and took the heavy cloak from her husband's hand with respect. "My beloved," said the woman, "a white-bearded old man who came into my dream brought the good news that a great guest would come to our house tonight." While the man naively believed what his wife said and his eyes shone, a faint sound of coughing was heard from the chest. The woman at once embraced her husband, who grew suspicious and turned towards the chest, and spoke sweet words to stop him. "Do not ever open that lid," the woman whispered, "the sacred gifts I have promised for you are hidden there." The man was deceived by these words of his wife, went out through the door and began to say a prayer of thanks in the garden.
The alert woman seized the opportunity, opened the chest at once and let the merchant escape quietly through the back door. The man finished his prayer and returned inside, and when he opened the lid of the chest he found only an empty cloth. The husband, who could not understand what had happened, was completely taken in by this masterful game his wife had plotted and resigned himself to his fate. The woman, however, was proud of her own cleverness before her husband's naivety, but she never attempted such dangerous affairs again. Thus the naive husband never learned that he had been deceived, and the peace in the house went on with an invented lie. Every lie told to close the eye of truth thins the ground of trust in the end. One cannot go down into a well on the rope of a lie.