Read Ebook: White Fang by London Jack

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Ebook has 191 lines and 12637 words, and 4 pages

"Eh, Shaban! It is not your business to carry coffee!" protested the Pasha, reaching for a stand that stood near him.

"No! Is it as long as that? We are getting old, Shaban."

"We are getting old," assented the Albanian simply.

The Pasha thought, as he took out his silver cigarette-case, of another Pasha who had complimented him that afternoon on his youthfulness. And, choosing a cigarette, he handed the case to his gatekeeper. Shaban accepted the cigarette and produced matches from his gay girdle.

"How long is it since you have been to your country, Shaban?"

The Pasha, lifting his little cup by its silver zarf, realised that he would not have sipped his coffee quite so noisily had his French wife been sitting with him under the horse-chestnut trees. But with his old Shaban he could still be a Turk.

"Eighteen months, my Pasha."

"And when are you going again?"

"In Ramazan, if God wills. Or perhaps next Ramazan. We shall see."

"Allah, Allah! How many times have I told you to bring your people here, Shaban? We have plenty of room to build you a house somewhere, and you could see your wife and children every day instead of once in two or three years."

"Wives, wives--a man will not die if he does not see them every day! Besides, it would not be good for the children. In Constantinople they become rascals. There are too many Christians." And he added hastily: "It is better for a boy to grow up in the mountains."

"But we have a mountain here, behind the house," laughed the Pasha.

"Your mountain is not like our mountains," objected Shaban gravely, hunting in his mind for the difference he felt but could not express.

"And that new wife of yours," went on the Pasha. "Is it good to leave a young woman like that? Are you not afraid?"

"No, my Pasha. I am not afraid. We all live together, you know. My brothers watch, and the other women. She is safer than yours. Besides, in my country it is not as it is here."

"I don't know why I have never been to see this wonderful country of yours, Shaban. I have so long intended to, and I never have been. But I must climb my mountain or they will think I have become a rascal too." And, rising from his chair, he gave the Albanian a friendly pat.

"Z?mb?l Agha!" interrupted the Pasha irritably. "No, you needn't come. I will explain to Z?mb?l Agha."

With which he left Shaban to pick up the empty coffee cup.

From the upper terrace a bridge led across the public road to the wood. If it was not a wood it was at all events a good-sized grove, climbing the steep hillside very much as it chose. Every sort and size of tree was there, but the greater number of them were of a kind to be sparsely trimmed in April with a delicate green, and among them were so many twisted Judas trees as to tinge whole patches of the slope with their deep rose bloom. The road that the Pasha slowly climbed, swinging his amber beads behind him as he walked, zigzagged so leisurely back and forth among the trees that a carriage could have driven up it. In that way, indeed, the Pasha had more than once mounted to the kiosque, in the days when his mother used to spend a good part of her summer up there, and when he was married to his first wife. The memory of the two, and of their old-fashioned ways, entered not too bitterly into his general feeling of well-being, ministered to by the budding trees and the spring air and the sunset view. Every now and then an enormous plane tree invited him to stop and look at it, or a semi-circle of cypresses.

So at last he came to the top of the hill, where in a grassy clearing a small house looked down on the valley of the Bosphorus through a row of great stone pines. The door of the kiosque was open, but his wife was not visible. The Pasha stopped a moment, as he had done a thousand times before, and looked back. He was not the man to be insensible to what he saw between the columnar trunks of the pines, where European hills traced a dark curve against the fading sky, and where the sinuous waterway far below still reflected a last glamour of the day. The beauty of it, and the sharp sweetness of the April air, and the infinitesimal sounds of the wood, and the half-conscious memories involved with it all, made him sigh. He turned and mounted the steps of the porch.

The kiosque looked very dark and unfamiliar as the Pasha entered it. He wondered what had become of H?l?ne--if by any chance he had passed her on the way. He wanted her. She was the expression of what the evening roused in him. He heard nothing, however, but the splash of water from a half-visible fountain. It reminded him for an instant of the other fountain, below, and of Shaban. His steps resounded hollowly on the marble pavement as he walked into the dim old saloon, shaped like a T, with the crossbar longer than the leg. It was still light enough for him to make out the glimmer of windows on three sides and the square of the fountain in the centre, but the painted domes above were lost in shadow.

The spaces on either side of the bay by which he entered, completing the rectangle of the kiosque, were filled by two little rooms opening into the cross of the T. He went into the left-hand one, where H?l?ne usually sat--because there were no lattices. The room was empty. The place seemed so strange and still in the twilight that a sort of apprehension began to grow in him, and he half wished he had brought up Shaban. He turned back to the second, the latticed room--the harem, as they called it. Curiously enough it was H?l?ne who would never let him Europeanise it, in spite of the lattices. Every now and then he found out that she liked some Turkish things better than he did. As soon as he opened the door he saw her sitting on the divan opposite. He knew her profile against the checkered pallor of the lattice. But she neither moved nor greeted him. It was Z?mb?l Agha who did so, startling him by suddenly rising beside the door and saying in his high voice:

"Pleasant be your coming, my Pasha."

The Pasha had forgotten about Z?mb?l Agha; and it seemed strange to him that H?l?ne continued to sit silent and motionless on her sofa.

"Good evening," he said at last. "You are sitting very quietly here in the dark. Are there no lights in this place?"

It was again Z?mb?l Agha who spoke, turning one question by another:

"Did Shaban come with you?"

"No," replied the Pasha shortly. "He said he had a message, but I told him not to come."

"A-ah!" ejaculated the eunuch in his high drawl. "But it does not matter--with the two of us."

The Pasha grew more and more puzzled, for this was not the scene he had imagined to himself as he came up through the part in response to his wife's message. Nor did he grow less puzzled when the eunuch turned to her and said in another tone:

"Now will you give me that key?"

The French woman took no more notice of this question than she had of the Pasha's entrance.

"What do you mean, Z?mb?l Agha?" demanded the Pasha sharply. "That is not the way to speak to your mistress."

"I mean this, my Pasha," retorted the eunuch--"that some one is hiding in this chest and that Madama keeps the key."

That was what the Pasha heard, in the absurd treble of the black man, in the darkening room. He looked down and made out, beside the tall figure of the eunuch, the chest on which he had been sitting. Then he looked across at H?l?ne, who still sat silent in front of the lattice.

"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 Z?mb?l 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 Z?mb?l 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 H?l?ne would say something, would cry out against Z?mb?l 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.

"Z?mb?l 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.

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.

For the Pasha the lantern seemed to make the world more like the place he had always known. He turned to his wife, apologetically.

"I told them to send dinner up here. It has been such a long time since we came. But I forgot about the table. I don't believe there is one here."

"No," uttered H?l?ne from her sofa, sitting with her head on her hand.

It was the first word she had spoken. But, little as it was, it reassured him, like the lantern.

"There is the chest," hazarded Z?mb?l Agha.

The interruption of the servants had for the moment distracted them all. But the Pasha now turned on him so vehemently that the eunuch salaamed in haste and went away.

"Why not?" asked H?l?ne, when he was gone. "We can sit on the cushions."

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