Shems-ud-dìn sat with his back to the trunk, where the shade was darkest. It was nowhere a continuous blot of shade, but rather like a net enmeshing forms and faces. Nesìb the Thief, who had brought a waterskin along with him, gave to drink in a horn cup, to the sheykh first, and then to all the company; not forgetting the women, upon whose needs Mâs waited.
By and by, as they sat in drowsy converse, came a sighing of the branches overhead. Flowers that grew among the stones swayed a little. It was as though a cool hand fell on every brow. The breeze which tempers noon had found them out.
Throughout the halt Shems-ud-dìn gazed straight before him, or else upon the ground at his feet. Not until Hassan gave the word to remount did he raise his eyes in thanksgiving for that half-hour’s refreshment. They remained fixed in awful contemplation.
From the lowest branch of the tree, just overhead, hung a strip of brightness, fluttering, among other similar strips by no means bright. This strip was new, the rest were very old. Moreover, a sunbeam threading the maze of twigs had singled it out for illumination. The sheykh stared and stared. Those colors—green and white in stripes, with a slender thread of crimson down the green—were most familiar. He had bought a piece of silk of that pattern not long ago of a traveling merchant, and had made of it a garment for Alia.
He turned toward the litter. A hush had fallen on the group around him.
“O Fatmeh, come forth! Whence is this silken rag? How comes it to hang here?”
“Rag! What rag?” screamed the woman, creeping out through the curtains. “Allah witness! What have I to do with it? Is it my tree that I should be held accountable for all that grows on it? Allah forbid!...”
Her voice, which had arisen shrill and brazen, soon quavered and broke. The grins of the Circassians cut the ground from under her. She fell on her face before Shems-ud-dìn, in a paroxysm of repentance.
“How often have I forbidden thee all traffic with this tree? A wrong to myself I had forgiven; but this is an insult to the providence of God. Henceforth I wash my two hands of thee. Return to thy kindred, and may Allah bless thee!”
Fatmeh rolled on the ground in convulsions of shame and grief. She shrieked to the bystanders to slay her then and there. But the sheykh stood by his horse, obdurate. He surveyed her contortions without mercy, till a new voice of lamentation smote his ear.