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 Mustafa 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, as 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.