Mister Duly

A merchant's son once paid a hundred gold coins for an old book that contained only a single line: "What is duly his, a man receives." His furious father disowned him for such foolishness and threw him out of the house.

Wandering to a distant city, the young man became known only by that line, since he answered every question — his name, his home, his purpose — with the same words: "What is duly his, a man receives." People began calling him Mister Duly.

A chain of strange coincidences followed him: he wandered by mistake into a princess's chamber, then a policeman's house, then found himself in the wrong bed entirely, sleeping instead with a policeman's daughter who had mistaken him for her secret lover. Each time, when asked to explain himself, he simply repeated his one line — and each time, the person he'd confused sent him on his way, bewildered but unharmed.

At last, amid a runaway elephant's rampage through a wedding procession, Mister Duly alone stood his ground and calmly saved the terrified bride, driving the beast away while everyone else fled.

When the king himself arrived to sort out the extraordinary tangle of events, each woman he had encountered spoke up in turn, each finishing a line of the same old verse, until the truth emerged plainly. The king gave Mister Duly his daughter's hand and, having no son of his own, made him heir to the kingdom.

Through every twist — poverty, confusion, danger — nothing was ever truly lost or truly gained that was not already his by destiny. What is duly ours arrives in its own time; what is not ours slips away no matter how tightly we grasp it.