The Pasha knew, but he did not say anything. As he walked up and down, smoking and thinking, his eye caught in the pool a reflection from the other side of the room, where the door of the latticed room was and where the cypress-wood chest stood as the servants had left it in the middle of the floor. Was that what Hélène had stood looking at so long, he asked himself? He wondered that he could have sat beside it so quietly. It seemed now like something dark and dangerous crouching there in the shadow of the little room.
"I sat down, under the terrace," he heard the eunuch go on, "where no one could see me, and I listened. And after she had stopped I heard——"
"Never mind what you heard," broke in the Pasha. "I have heard enough."
He was ashamed—ashamed and resolved. He felt as if he had been playing the spy with Zümbül Agha. And after all there was a very simple way to answer his question for himself. He threw away his cigarette, went forward into the little room, bent over the chest, and fitted the key into the lock.
Just then a nightingale burst out singing, but so near and so loud that he started and looked over his shoulder. In an instant he collected himself, feeling the black man's eyes upon him. Yet he could not suppress the train of association started by the impassioned trilling of the bird, even as he began to turn the key of the chest where his mother used to keep her quaint old silks and embroideries. The irony of the contrast paralysed his hand for a strange moment, and of the difference between this spring night and other spring nights when nightingales had sung. And what if, after all, only calamity were to come out of the chest, and he were to lose his last gift of hope! Ah! He knew at last what he would do! He quickly withdrew the key from the lock, stood up straight again, and looked at Zümbül Agha.
"Go down and get Shaban," he ordered, "and don't come back."
The eunuch stared. But if he had anything to say he thought better of uttering it. He saluted silently and went away.
IV
The Pasha sat down on the divan and lighted a cigarette. Almost immediately the nightingale stopped singing. For a few moments Zümbül Agha's steps could be heard outside. Then it became very still. The Pasha did not like it. Look which way he would he could not help seeing the chest—or listening. He got up and went into the big room, where he turned on the water of the fountain. The falling drops made company for him, and kept him from looking for lost reflections. But they presently made him think of what Hélène had said about them. He went out to the porch and sat down on the steps. In front of him the pines lifted their great dark canopies against the stars. Other stars twinkled between the trunks, far below, where the shore lights of the Bosphorus were. It was so still that water sounds came faintly up to him, and every now and then he could even hear nightingales on the European side. Another nightingale began singing in his own woods—the nightingale that had told him what to do, he said to himself. What other things the nightingales had sung to him, years ago! And how long the pines had listened there, still strong and green and rugged and alive, while he, and how many before him, sat under them for a little while and then went away!
Presently he heard steps on the drive and Shaban came, carrying something dark in his hand.