"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 Zümbül 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 Zümbül 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 honourable fathers and who had passed his life honourably 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, that 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 Hélène would say something, would cry out against Zümbül 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 Hélène. 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 Hélène, too—because she was young, and it was Judas-tree time, and she was married to grey 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?
"Zümbül 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 you 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 realise 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, travelled 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.