Julie had received a note from Calmiden. "We will cross the causeway
to-night," it said.
She waved back the toiling future generations of light, and took the
note to the window. What did it mean? The few lines managed to convey
a message quite beyond their import. She read them over and over,
then gazed across the white winding road and the green banana trees,
to the causeway lying like a high thoroughfare between two worlds. Was
to-day to be the last of an old existence, which she was to shed like
a discarded garment? Would the footsteps that had followed strange
paths in the East turn about completely, and the dream that had burned
in her soul be left forever unfulfilled?
The breeze swayed the sacred tree of India beneath the window,
and its golden incense full of mystic and exhilarating intimations
showered upon the air. Julie was carried on the wave of its magic to
a roof garden in Manila and the hero who had first overwhelmed the
horizon of her youth. Often, looking out on this glowing landscape,
she had seen this image, but more and more as something lost in the
swift passage of life.
She, would not see him any more. Fate, that fate which ruled this
world had arranged it so. Her destiny lay along the beaten paths of the
world. She was too small an atom, as Calmiden had said, to survive the
great chances of the coming upheaval, or to dare ever, ever to achieve
a force like Barry McChord's. His spirit had lighted areas of her life
tremendously. Nobody ever had so stirred or quickened the pulse of her
soul. But that spirit was receding before the hard facts of existence
that Nahal had brought. It was getting too terribly hard, with so much
pressing upon her, to inhabit two spheres. And if anybody in the North
had given her a thought again, he had not taken the trouble to make
it known. She had dropped completely out of those great activities,
and not a reverberation of her life or its yearnings had reached the
far-off goal of her city of dreams. She herself shrinking to her real,
insignificant dimensions.
The tangle of her affairs complicated all her thought, and sent a chill
wave over her. The cold, hard, insuperable fact of her debts! She
owed the merchants in Solano, the small merchants of her village,
and still, after the lapse of many months, she owed Mrs. Morris a huge
obligation. Finally, and very nearly the worst of all, there was the
desperate debt in which Purcell was involved. A pauper and a gambler
with life! How else could a person who had managed to put herself
in everybody's debt be called? Clearly she had demonstrated that she
could not handle her own life, to say nothing of playing a part in that
complex organization to which she had had the assumption to aspire.
A great agitation came over her when in that one solemn final moment
she looked into her soul and bade good-by to all she had come to
do. Slowly she began to efface and obliterate the old orders of life,
and the transcendent consecration of the past. The East to which
she had come with a torch became a mere drear fact of over-powering
millions. Ages, and the tried souls of many men would be offered up
before the East found its freedom. What she did or did not do could
not weigh in the infinite balance.
Slowly she turned back to the room. The brown gnomes were sweating
terribly in the throes of composition, mining the realms of thought for
a few throttled ideas. Never anywhere were they so dearly born. Julie
stopped still to stare at them. "Poor little generation of light!" she
murmured.
Delphine glanced up at her with his quick brown eyes. He was the
barometer of the class--a youthful personality that had escaped the
general languor of the race. He watched the other boys, and interpreted
their needs. He seldom sat in his seat, but was, with his books under
his arm, almost always in a state of itinerant education. He had been a
devotee of the betel-nut, but at Julie's solicitation had given it up.
The children marched out at the end of the morning session. Julie
thrust her note in her pocket, and was following after them when
Delphine, trailing by a string a big bright red tropical beetle,
stopped her.
"You stay here always, Maestra? You never go away?" he urged earnestly.
Julie glanced at him absently. "Go home, Delphine," she said gently.
"Here," said the boy, "is a present for you of this beautiful bug--if
you will not go."
"No, thank you, Delphine. I know it would break your heart to give
up Balthazar, though he bites nasty welts all over you all the time."
But Delphine stuck along after her.
A quickening of her being took place as she came out into the
street. After all, she was in the golden possession of life. She
picked some heavily fragrant flowers and thrust them in her hair. She
was young, and Calmiden was young.
She moved along in the light like the heart of the golden day,
her shimmering head lifted to the perfume of the Ylang-Ylang, and
a hundred visions stirring in her brain. Behind her unperceived,
Delphine and the scarlet splendor of Balthazar desolately trailed.
In the evening she donned the green dress; but as she slipped the
green bracelet over her wrist, a sinister shadow swept for a moment
upon her mood.
A lithe white figure appeared in the road. She went out to meet it. She
had never seen Calmiden when he was so beautifully grave. She walked
along beside him. Neither of them spoke.
They went down to the beach, where leaving the village behind they
walked silently along the shore. The water washed darkly on clean
white sand with the beat and rhythm of a majestic poem of which their
emotions supplied the motive. They pressed on through the starlit
hush till the causeway lay directly before them.
Wonderful lighted bridge! Water from great distances bore up on either
bank, and in mighty rushes took itself off again into space. When the
moonlight sprinkled through the darkness, this narrow shining strip
stood aloft over the fretted world.
As they started to cross it, Julie said: "I feel as if I were suspended
between heaven and earth! I hope I won't drop."
"Are you afraid?"
They stopped short. With the turbulence of passion the water was
hurling darkly about them. The land appeared to be groups of mystic
shadows, and the stars were down almost within reach.
"It's all said around me," Calmiden declared in an unsteady voice. "I
have loved you from the first, and I shall always love you. Nothing
can change that."
An agitating vibration passed through Julie's body. Was this the hour
of fulfillment, toward which she had been moving like a star?
"Promise me," he urged, "that you will belong to me forever, that
you will go with me out of this poisonous East."
"Of course," she said; "of course," speaking like one in a dream. "Why,
are you too afraid that something might happen?"
"We could be married soon, and have done with all fears."
Julie started perceptibly. Her thoughts had never traveled that
far. Marriage seemed vaguely a sort of risk to her emotion.
"Why can't we go on for a while as we are--till you are ordered
away?" she queried nervously. "It is so perfect as it is."
"But my existence is so uncertain! And why should you continue to be
flung around in this whirlpool? Some one should look out for you."
"Because I am such a little fool that I can't look out for myself? Oh,
let us wait till the end of my term. I came out here, you see, really
to do something--and I am so soon to drop it all!" An unconscious
anguish crept into her voice.
"I believe this country has put a spell upon you, or you wouldn't be
putting me off."
They were walking now along the causeway. The island ahead of them lay
like a sable mesh of mystery, with midnight archways through its dense
foliage. Startling creepers, like multiform arms of an unseen body,
groped over the heart of the earth. A sad fragrance floated out to
them. Once or twice the moonlight making bold with the forest lit up
its stilly beautiful chambers.
Julie made a sudden startled movement. "There is somebody over
there! He is stirring along under the trees. He looks all black. He
is watching us! Come away!" She dragged frantically at Calmiden's hand.
He hesitated, his gaze strained into the darkness.
"Don't you see that you are only one man--with only one pistol? There
may be a lot of men in there." She pulled him back.
He yielded at last. "I've got you to look out for," he muttered.
They ran swiftly back over the causeway, a target they well knew for
any one who might wish to shoot.
"I was a fool to take you to such a place!" Calmiden exclaimed when
they had reached the other end in safety.
"I am sure it was the priest!" Julie panted. "Where rather than to
that Eleusian island would that dark spirit go? Those black trees
just ached with the hatred of that Lucifer soul. Over there, he plots
to stir up discord among men. There on that ground that he has made
forbidding with supernatural tales he plans insurrections."
"I wonder how many rifles he's got stored away over there," Calmiden
said.
Then he sighed. "We didn't get across the causeway, after all!"