One afternoon, Jigerdilla again accompanied her lord into the garden. She again mingled opium with his tobacco so as to make him dead-drunk, and then, as Valentine still refused to sing a flower song with her, she threw herself on the grass in a pet, and pretended to fall asleep.
The sun was shining fiercely, and so great was Valentine's thirst that his tongue cleaved to the very roof of his mouth. The grapes he dare not touch, for their juice left a black stain behind it, but the rosy red plums smiled at him so enticingly. They, at any rate, were not numbered. So fancying that no one saw him, he ventured to steal up to the tree, drew down a branch, and ate of the plums that were reserved for the pasha's table.
"The pasha would get the fever if he ate so many. Why should he have them all?"
Suddenly he heard behind him a mocking peal of laughter—Jigerdilla had been on the watch all the time—and in his terror he started back so violently, that he snapped off the branch of the plum tree which he had pulled down toward him.
"Ha, ha, Valentine! Now you can look forward to something pleasant."
Back he went to his work very much ashamed, and he now worked with such zeal that he finished in one hour what it usually took him two to do. But Jigerdilla gave him no peace. She made ribald songs upon him, pelted him with green nuts, and mocked him in all sorts of ways.
And Valentine felt just like a child who has been naughty and expects to be beaten for it. The Turk had often said that he would not give a branch of this tree for a hundred denarii. How many blows with a whip would he reckon to a denarius?
When it was evening the butcher awoke. He fell to drinking again, and he drank so much that his wife and his slave had to prop him up on his way back to the house.
As he passed by the bonamera tree, he perceived that a branch had been broken off.
At this sight he immediately became quite sober.