Part 2

He came no more forth that day. The army was marshalled by the princes, and the rebels were routed with great slaughter; but Yuentsoong never more wielded sword. "He pined to death," says the historian, "with the wane of the same moon that shone upon the forgiveness of Teh-leen."

II

IN THE PASHA'S GARDEN*

H. G. DWIGHT

*Reprinted by permission of the author.

_At the old gentleman's side sat a young lady more beautiful than pomegranate blossoms, more exquisite than the first quarter moon viewed at twilight through the tops of oleanders._

--O. Henry: THE TRIMMED LAMP.

I

As the caique glided up to the garden gate the three boatmen rose from their sheepskins and caught hold of iron clamps set into the marble of the quay. Shaban, the grizzled gate-keeper, who was standing at the top of the water-steps with his hands folded respectfully in front of him, came salaaming down to help his master out.

"Shall we wait, my Pasha?" asked the head _kaikji_.

The Pasha turned to Shaban, as if to put a question. And as if to answer it Shaban said:

"The Madama is up in the wood, in the kiosque. She sent down word to ask if you would go up too."

"Then don't wait." Returning the boatmen's salaam, the Pasha stepped into his garden. "Is there company in the kiosque or is Madama alone?" he inquired.

"I think no one is there--except Zümbül Agha," replied Shaban, following his master up the long central path of black and white pebbles.

"Zümbül Agha!" exclaimed the Pasha. But if it had been in his mind to say anything else he stopped instead to sniff at a rosebud. And then he asked: "Are we dining up there, do you know?"

"I don't know, my Pasha, but I will find out."

"Tell them to send up dinner anyway, Shaban. It is such an evening! And just ask Moustafa to bring me a coffee at the fountain, will you? I will rest a little before climbing that hill."

"On my head!" said the Albanian, turning off to the house.

The Pasha kept on to the end of the walk. Two big horse-chestnut trees, their candles just starting alight in the April air, stood there at the foot of a terrace, guarding a fountain that dripped in the ivied wall. A thread of water started mysteriously out of the top of a tall marble niche into a little marble basin, from which it overflowed by two flat bronze spouts into two smaller basins below. From them the water dripped back into a single basin still lower down, and so tinkled its broken way, past graceful arabesques and reliefs of fruit and flowers, into a crescent-shaped pool at the foot of the niche.

The Pasha sank down into one of the wicker chairs scattered hospitably beneath the horse-chestnut trees, and thought how happy a man he was to have a fountain of the period of Sultan Ahmed III, and a garden so full of April freshness, and a view of the bright Bosphorus and the opposite hills of Europe and the firing West. How definitely he thought it I cannot say, for the Pasha was not greatly given to thought. Why should he be, since he possessed without that trouble a goodly share of what men acquire by taking thought? If he had been lapped in ease and security all his days, they numbered many more, did those days, than the Pasha would have chosen. Still, they had touched him but lightly, merely increasing the dignity of his handsome presence and taking away nothing of his power to enjoy his little walled world.

So he sat there, breathing in the air of the place and the hour, while gardeners came and went with their watering-pots, and birds twittered among the branches, and the fountain plashed beside him, until Shaban reappeared carrying a glass of water and a cup of coffee in a swinging tray.

"Eh, Shaban! It is not your business to carry coffee!" protested the Pasha, reaching for a stand that stood near him.

"What is your business is my business, _Pasha'm_. Have I not eaten your bread and your father's for thirty years?"

"No! Is it as long as that? We are getting old, Shaban."

"We are getting old," assented the Albanian simply.

The Pasha thought, as he took out his silver cigarette-case, of another Pasha who had complimented him that afternoon on his youthfulness. And, choosing a cigarette, he handed the case to his gatekeeper. Shaban accepted the cigarette and produced matches from his gay girdle.

"How long is it since you have been to your country, Shaban?"

The Pasha, lifting his little cup by its silver zarf, realised that he would not have sipped his coffee quite so noisily had his French wife been sitting with him under the horse-chestnut trees. But with his old Shaban he could still be a Turk.

"Eighteen months, my Pasha."

"And when are you going again?"

"In Ramazan, if God wills. Or perhaps next Ramazan. We shall see."

"Allah, Allah! How many times have I told you to bring your people here, Shaban? We have plenty of room to build you a house somewhere, and you could see your wife and children every day instead of once in two or three years."

"Wives, wives--a man will not die if he does not see them every day! Besides, it would not be good for the children. In Constantinople they become rascals. There are too many Christians." And he added hastily: "It is better for a boy to grow up in the mountains."

"But we have a mountain here, behind the house," laughed the Pasha.

"Your mountain is not like our mountains," objected Shaban gravely, hunting in his mind for the difference he felt but could not express.

"And that new wife of yours," went on the Pasha. "Is it good to leave a young woman like that? Are you not afraid?"

"No, my Pasha. I am not afraid. We all live together, you know. My brothers watch, and the other women. She is safer than yours. Besides, in my country it is not as it is here."

"I don't know why I have never been to see this wonderful country of yours, Shaban. I have so long intended to, and I never have been. But I must climb my mountain or they will think I have become a rascal too." And, rising from his chair, he gave the Albanian a friendly pat.

"Shall I come too, my Pasha? Zümbül Agha sent word----"

"Zümbül Agha!" interrupted the Pasha irritably. "No, you needn't come. I will explain to Zümbül Agha."

With which he left Shaban to pick up the empty coffee cup.

II

From the upper terrace a bridge led across the public road to the wood. If it was not a wood it was at all events a good-sized grove, climbing the steep hillside very much as it chose. Every sort and size of tree was there, but the greater number of them were of a kind to be sparsely trimmed in April with a delicate green, and among them were so many twisted Judas trees as to tinge whole patches of the slope with their deep rose bloom. The road that the Pasha slowly climbed, swinging his amber beads behind him as he walked, zigzagged so leisurely back and forth among the trees that a carriage could have driven up it. In that way, indeed, the Pasha had more than once mounted to the kiosque, in the days when his mother used to spend a good part of her summer up there, and when he was married to his first wife. The memory of the two, and of their old-fashioned ways, entered not too bitterly into his general feeling of well-being, ministered to by the budding trees and the spring air and the sunset view. Every now and then an enormous plane tree invited him to stop and look at it, or a semi-circle of cypresses.

So at last he came to the top of the hill, where in a grassy clearing a small house looked down on the valley of the Bosphorus through a row of great stone pines. The door of the kiosque was open, but his wife was not visible. The Pasha stopped a moment, as he had done a thousand times before, and looked back. He was not the man to be insensible to what he saw between the columnar trunks of the pines, where European hills traced a dark curve against the fading sky, and where the sinuous waterway far below still reflected a last glamour of the day. The beauty of it, and the sharp sweetness of the April air, and the infinitesimal sounds of the wood, and the half-conscious memories involved with it all, made him sigh. He turned and mounted the steps of the porch.

The kiosque looked very dark and unfamiliar as the Pasha entered it. He wondered what had become of Hélène--if by any chance he had passed her on the way. He wanted her. She was the expression of what the evening roused in him. He heard nothing, however, but the splash of water from a half-visible fountain. It reminded him for an instant of the other fountain, below, and of Shaban. His steps resounded hollowly on the marble pavement as he walked into the dim old saloon, shaped like a T, with the crossbar longer than the leg. It was still light enough for him to make out the glimmer of windows on three sides and the square of the fountain in the centre, but the painted domes above were lost in shadow.

The spaces on either side of the bay by which he entered, completing the rectangle of the kiosque, were filled by two little rooms opening into the cross of the T. He went into the left-hand one, where Hélène usually sat--because there were no lattices. The room was empty. The place seemed so strange and still in the twilight that a sort of apprehension began to grow in him, and he half wished he had brought up Shaban. He turned back to the second, the latticed room--the harem, as they called it. Curiously enough it was Hélène who would never let him Europeanise it, in spite of the lattices. Every now and then he found out that she liked some Turkish things better than he did. As soon as he opened the door he saw her sitting on the divan opposite. He knew her profile against the checkered pallor of the lattice. But she neither moved nor greeted him. It was Zümbül Agha who did so, startling him by suddenly rising beside the door and saying in his high voice:

"Pleasant be your coming, my Pasha."

The Pasha had forgotten about Zümbül Agha; and it seemed strange to him that Hélène continued to sit silent and motionless on her sofa.

"Good evening," he said at last. "You are sitting very quietly here in the dark. Are there no lights in this place?"

It was again Zümbül Agha who spoke, turning one question by another:

"Did Shaban come with you?"

"No," replied the Pasha shortly. "He said he had a message, but I told him not to come."

"A-ah!" ejaculated the eunuch in his high drawl. "But it does not matter--with the two of us."

The Pasha grew more and more puzzled, for this was not the scene he had imagined to himself as he came up through the part in response to his wife's message. Nor did he grow less puzzled when the eunuch turned to her and said in another tone:

"Now will you give me that key?"

The French woman took no more notice of this question than she had of the Pasha's entrance.

"What do you mean, Zümbül Agha?" demanded the Pasha sharply. "That is not the way to speak to your mistress."

"I mean this, my Pasha," retorted the eunuch--"that some one is hiding in this chest and that Madama keeps the key."

That was what the Pasha heard, in the absurd treble of the black man, in the darkening room. He looked down and made out, beside the tall figure of the eunuch, the chest on which he had been sitting. Then he looked across at Hélène, who still sat silent in front of the lattice.

"What are you talking about?" he asked at last, more stupefied than anything else. "Who is it? A thief? Has any one--?" He left the vague question unformulated, even in his mind.

"Ah, that I don't know. You must ask Madama. Probably it is one of her Christian friends. But at least if it were a woman she would not be so unwilling to unlock her chest for us!"

The silence that followed, while the Pasha looked dumbly at the chest, and at Zümbül Agha, and at his wife, was filled for him with a stranger confusion of feelings than he had ever experienced before. Nevertheless he was surprisingly cool, he found. His pulse quickened very little. He told himself that it wasn't true and that he really must get rid of old Zümbül after all, if he went on making such preposterous gaffes and setting them all by the ears. How could anything so baroque happen to him, the Pasha, who owed what he was to honourable fathers and who had passed his life honourably and peaceably until this moment? Yet he had had an impression, walking into the dark old kiosque and finding nobody until he found these two sitting here in this extraordinary way--as if he had walked out of his familiar garden, that he knew like his hand, into a country he knew nothing about, where anything might be true. And he wished, he almost passionately wished, that Hélène would say something, would cry out against Zümbül Agha, would lie even, rather than sit there so still and removed and different from other women.

Then he began to be aware that if it were true--if!--he ought to do something. He ought to make a noise. He ought to kill somebody. That was what they always did. That was what his father would have done, or certainly his grandfather. But he also told himself that it was no longer possible for him to do what his father and grandfather had done. He had been unlearning their ways too long. Besides, he was too old.

A sudden sting pierced him at the thought of how old he was, and how young Hélène. Even if he lived to be seventy or eighty she would still have a life left when he died. Yes, it was as Shaban said. They were getting old. He had never really felt the humiliation of it before. And Shaban had said, strangely, something else--that his own wife was safer than the Pasha's. Still he felt an odd compassion for Hélène, too--because she was young, and it was Judas-tree time, and she was married to grey hairs. And although he was a Pasha, descended from great Pashas, and she was only a little French girl _quelconque_, he felt more afraid than ever of making a fool of himself before her--when he had promised her that she should be as free as any other European woman, that she should live her life. Besides, what had the black man to do with their private affairs?

"Zümbül Agha," he suddenly heard himself harshly saying, "is this your house or mine? I have told you a hundred times that you are not to trouble the Madama, or follow her about, or so much as guess where she is and what she is doing. I have kept you in the house because my father brought you into it; but if I ever hear of you speaking to Madama again, or spying on her, I will send you into the street. Do you hear? Now get out!"

"Aman, my Pasha! I beg you!" entreated the eunuch. There was something ludicrous in his voice, coming as it did from his height.

The Pasha wondered if he had been too long a person of importance in the family to realise the change in his position, or whether he really----

All of a sudden a checkering of lamplight flickered through the dark window, touched the Negro's black face for a moment, travelled up the wall. Silence fell again in the little room--a silence into which the fountain dropped its silver patter. Then steps mounted the porch and echoed in the other room, which lighted in turn, and a man came in sight, peering this way and that, with a big white accordeon lantern in his hand. Behind the man two other servants appeared, carrying on their heads round wooden trays covered by figured silks, and a boy tugging a huge basket. When they discovered the three in the little room they salaamed respectfully.

"Where shall we set the table?" asked the man with the lantern.

For the Pasha the lantern seemed to make the world more like the place he had always known. He turned to his wife, apologetically.

"I told them to send dinner up here. It has been such a long time since we came. But I forgot about the table. I don't believe there is one here."

"No," uttered Hélène from her sofa, sitting with her head on her hand.

It was the first word she had spoken. But, little as it was, it reassured him, like the lantern.

"There is the chest," hazarded Zümbül Agha.

The interruption of the servants had for the moment distracted them all. But the Pasha now turned on him so vehemently that the eunuch salaamed in haste and went away.

"Why not?" asked Hélène, when he was gone. "We can sit on the cushions."

"Why not?" echoed the Pasha. Grateful as he was for the interruption, he found himself wishing, secretly, that Hélène had discouraged his idea of a picnic dinner. And he could not help feeling a certain constraint as he gave the necessary orders and watched the servants put down their paraphernalia and pull the chest into the middle of the room. There was something unreal and stage-like about the scene, in the uncertain light of the lantern. Obviously the chest was not light. It was an old cypress-wood chest that they had always used in the summer, to keep things in, polished a bright brown, with a little inlaid pattern of dark brown and cream colour running around the edge of each surface, and a more complicated design ornamenting the centre of the cover. He vaguely associated his mother with it. He felt a distinct relief when the men spread the cloth. He felt as if they had covered up more things than he could name. And when they produced candlesticks and candles, and set them on the improvised table and in the niches beside the door, he seemed to come back again into the comfortable light of common sense.

"This is the way we used to do when I was a boy," he said with a smile, when he and Hélène established themselves on sofa cushions on opposite sides of the chest. "Only then we had little tables six inches high, instead of big ones like this."

"It is rather a pity that we have spoiled all that," she said. "Are we any happier for perching on chairs around great scaffoldings, and piling the scaffoldings with so many kinds of porcelain and metal? After all, they knew how to live--the people who were capable of imagining a place like this. And they had the good taste not to fill a room with things. Your grandfather, was it?"

He had had a dread that she would not say anything, that she would remain silent and impenetrable as she had been before Zümbül Agha, as if the chest between them were a barrier that nothing could surmount. His heart lightened when he heard her speak. Was it not quite her natural voice?

"It was my great-grandfather, the Grand Vizier. They say he did know how to live--in his way. He built the kiosque for a beautiful slave of his, a Greek, whom he called Pomegranate."

"Madame Pomegranate! What a charming name! And that is why her cipher is everywhere. See?" She pointed to the series of cupboards and niches on either side of the door, dimly painted with pomegranate blossoms, and to the plaster reliefs around the hooded fireplace, and to the cluster of pomegranates that made a centre to the gilt and painted lattice-work of the ceiling. "One could be very happy in such a little house. It has an air--of being meant for moments. And you feel as if they had something to do with the wonderful way it has faded." She looked as if she had meant to say something else, which she did not. But after a moment she added: "Will you ask them to turn off the water in the fountain? It is a little chilly, now that the sun has gone, and it sounds like rain--or tears."

The dinner went, on the whole, not so badly. There were dishes to be passed back and forth. There were questions to be asked or comments to be made. There were the servants to be spoken to. Yet, more and more, the Pasha could not help wondering. When a silence fell, too, he could not help listening. And least of all could he help looking at Hélène. He looked at her, trying not to look at her, with an intense curiosity, as if he had never seen her before, asking himself if there were anything new in her face, and how she would look if-- Would she be like this? She made no attempt to keep up a flow of words, as if to distract his attention. She was not soft either; she was not trying to seduce him. And she made no show of gratitude toward him for having sent Zümbül Agha away. Neither did she by so much as an inflection try to insinuate or excuse or explain. She was what she always was, perfect--and evidently a little tired. She was indeed more than perfect, she was prodigious, when he asked her once what she was thinking about and she said Pandora, tapping the chest between them. He had never heard the story of that other Greek girl and her box, and she told him gravely about all the calamities that came out of it, and the one gift of hope that remained behind.

"But I cannot be a Turkish woman long!" she added inconsequently with a smile. "My legs are asleep. I really must walk about a little."

When he had helped her to her feet she led the way into the other room. They had their coffee and cigarettes there. Hélène walked slowly up and down the length of the room, stopping every now and then to look into the square pool of the fountain and to pat her hair.

The Pasha sat down on the long low divan that ran under the windows. He could watch her more easily now. And the detachment with which he had begun to look at her grew in spite of him into the feeling that he was looking at a stranger. After all, what did he know about her? Who was she? What had happened to her, during all the years that he had not known her, in that strange free European life which he had tried to imitate, and which at heart he secretly distrusted? What had she ever really told him, and what had he ever really divined of her? For perhaps the first time in his life he realised how little one person may know of another, and particularly a man of a woman. And he remembered Shaban again, and that phrase about his wife being safer than Hélène. Had Shaban really meant anything? Was Hélène "safe"? He acknowledged to himself at last that the question was there in his mind, waiting to be answered.

Hélène did not help him. She had been standing for some time at an odd angle to the pool, looking into it. He could see her face there, with the eyes turned away from him.

"How mysterious a reflection is!" she said. "It is so real that you can't believe it disappears for good. How often Madame Pomegranate must have looked into this pool, and yet I can't find her in it. But I feel she is really there, all the same--and who knows who else."

"They say mirrors do not flatter," the Pasha did not keep himself from rejoining, "but they are very discreet. They tell no tales!"

Hélène raised her eyes. In the little room the servants had cleared the improvised table and had packed up everything again except the candles.

"I have been up here a long time," she said, "and I am rather tired. It is a little cold, too. If you do not mind I think I will go down to the house now, with the servants. You will hardly care to go so soon, for Zümbül Agha has not finished what he has to say to you."

"Zümbül Agha!" exclaimed the Pasha. "I sent him away."

"Ah, but you must know him well enough to be sure he would not go. Let us see." She clapped her hands. The servant of the lantern immediately came out to her. "Will you ask Zümbül Agha to come here?" she said. "He is on the porch."

The man went to the door, looked out, and said a word. Then he stood aside with a respectful salaam, and the eunuch entered. He negligently returned the salute and walked forward until his air of importance changed to one of humility at sight of the Pasha. Salaaming in turn, he stood with his hands folded in front of him.

"I will go down with you," said the Pasha to his wife, rising. "It is too late for you to go through the woods in the dark."