Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short StoriesNesbit, E. (Edith)
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Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories
Nesbit, E. (Edith)
Short stories
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 Helene 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 Zuembuel Agha. And after all, there was a simple way to
answer his question for himself. He threw away his cigarette, went 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 his. 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 furs and embroideries. The irony of the
contrast paralyzed 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 Zuembuel Agha.
'Go down and get Shaban,' he ordered, 'and don't come back.'
The eunuch stared. But if he had anything to say, he concluded not to
say it. He saluted silently and went away.
V
The Pasha sat down on the divan and lighted a cigarette. Almost
immediately the nightingale stopped singing. For a few moments Zuembuel
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 Helene 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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