'Did Shaban come with you?'
'No,' replied the Pasha shortly. 'He said he had 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 park 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 Frenchwoman took no more notice of this question than she had of the
Pasha's entrance.
'What do you mean, Zuembuel 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 Helene, 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 Zuembuel 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
Zuembuel 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 the honorable fathers and who
had passed his life honorably 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, which 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 Helene would
say something, would cry out against Zuembuel 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 Helene. 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 Helene,
too--because she was young, and it was Judas-tree time, and she was
married to gray 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?
'Zuembuel 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 your 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 realize 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, traveled 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 Helene 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 Zuembuel 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.