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 which 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 Helene--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-invisible 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 cross 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 Helene 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 Helene who would never let him Europeanize
it, in spite of the lattices. Every now and then he discovered 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 Zuembuel 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 Zuembuel Agha; and it seemed strange to him
that Helene 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?'