Julie passed across the city, coursing through its dusky streets, in a mood of subtle excitement. Everywhere she was met by the Change! Not a change that assailed the physical senses, but one that transcended them: a subtle, widespread intimation that quivered on some inner receptivity. Not the altered streets, the new buildings, the material renovation, gave it forth so much as the peculiar quickening of the atmosphere through which the soul of these people seemed to suspire. How can one trace the leaven in the bread or follow through the far filaments of thought a psychic metamorphosis? Yet there it was. The very stones of the pavement proclaimed it. The Resurrection was stirring through the worn kingdoms of men, and the blood of the Builders coursed beneath it all like the rivers of life!
Every moment Julie thrilled deeply to what she saw. The Builders were beginning to fulfil. Here in this single corner the stagnant spirit of the East was awaking to life. Wars might be fought in the future, and races degraded and aggrandized, but the spreading influences of this endeavor would reach far into the future of men.
Again she found herself in that perfumed garden before the sweep of Babylonian pillars with the shimmering palace lifting like a jeweled Taj Mahal out of the mystery of the thick, soft night—and the giant trees and scented shadows, and the bamboo chanting to the forthcoming stars. The mansion of the Caliph!
She stepped softly up the flights of stairs into the great lengths of chambers, glowing under dim lights with the rich acquisitions of strange lands. The house was all sheer beauty, exquisitely compiled. The river came up to the verdant banks on its rear. Mystical, shadow-banked, it set the senses quivering. The surroundings stirred Julie like the confused beauty of Eastern music, and brought up dim, poetic suggestions of Queens of Sheba and Scheherezades and the unending dynasties of kings—of the poetry and the romance of old, unchanging things.
She ate her dinner, a solitary figure, at a huge banquet table of shining nara set forth with Indian silver, delicately carved with the loves and conquests of maharajahs and goddesses. After dinner, she wandered about fascinated. What a triumph Isabel had made of the house. What a marvelous woman, indeed, she was!
She stopped short in a chamber of shining carvings, slow wrought wonders of a land where hands were cheaper than tools, and life was the cheapest of all. From the midst of the labor of these unvalued hands, she caught the glimmer of a strange little figure with bent head, shining stilly out of the dusk. The Green God! Beautiful, terrible, Lord of the Eastern universe—to whom myriads of souls were fastened in supreme faith. With what awful power he was invested by their belief! She had walked upon him unawares, and now hurried to get away.
As she emerged disquieted into the main sala, a head thrust itself softly, like a projected shadow, above the old Spanish balustrade of the stairs. The body did not appear and the head paused only long enough to startle Julie. A dark, aged human vision. In the fleeting look she could not tell whether it was the face of a man or a woman; but there had been a flash from the depths of that being that had frightened the girl. It was gone, and she calmed again. After all, in the East, all sorts of unexpected faces peer at one from odd corners.
Later Julie tried to question the dwarf. Who was the old being she had seen? Did it pop in and out of people’s houses at will? Did his Mistress know anything about her? Dicky-Dicky, the dwarf, looked at her with inscrutable eyes, and knew nothing. Julie decided to say no more about it.
The next day Isabel appeared. Vividly beautiful like some bright houri, she came smiling to the gallery where Julie was sitting. “I am happy to see that you have found your way back to us!” She kissed Julie with her perfumed lips. Then she stood back and regarded her. “Ah, my poor little friend, you have changed! A hard time is written all over you, and you are too thin for your clothes. Poor little dust-covered Atlas! Tell me about it. I love all brave journeys. But first we will have lunch. I am starved. I have had a long trip.”
“From your letter, I thought you would be gone longer.”