“The man was an officer in an English regiment—fair as the daylight. On my knees I used to worship him as a god. Nobody suspected what I was, and I did not myself understand. He loved me, too—with the kind of love the English understand. No fire, no poetry in it—the love that is just strong enough to manufacture a few pink-cheeked children for their tidy British homes. I loved him as we of the East know how to love.
“In Europe one marries not merely a man, but a family. How different from my mother’s land, where mates find each other under the sun! Yet they call it civilization over there. Well, his family grew suspicious. They had heard tales of my father’s wild youth in strange parts of the world. It sometimes happens that one must pay a very heavy price for one’s father’s youth.
“The only retort my father could make was a bigger dowry. But I was different. I had then sublime ideas of honesty of soul. My lover, I believed, would love me the more exaltedly for them. I acknowledged my Malay blood—all the bloods of the East that ran through me. I stood up against the wall and did it in a great splendor of mood.
“Ah! You know the rest. When they, when he—that European matrimonial compound threw me off, I did everything that a woman of your race would not have done. I threw myself in his path at every turn—offered myself to him on any terms; for I knew now that never could I exact terms at all.
“And he took me on the lowest. West—East; it is always the same. He got himself ordered to India. That last night!” Isabel sat up straight. “I crept along the brush of the lane into which he was to turn. An Igorotte from the Mountains had taught me how to catch my foe. I slid out when he came! I would have killed him, but the knife was poor. I only wounded him. I had meant to kill us both, but—” Isabel nonchalantly threw open the négligé, and exposed a large scar—“we go on, do we not, Green God of the Universe?” She turned her head toward the room where the preposterous idol lived.
To this narrative, told with oriental fervor, of things quite as beyond her experience of existence as the pits of Erebus, Julie had listened in a conflict of emotions.
“The priest will tell you many things about me—among them that a young man killed himself here for me not long ago. Men may have killed themselves because of me, but not Grahaeme. He killed himself, not because he was in love with me, but because he couldn’t alter the universe to an Englishman’s idea—because I was what I shall eternally remain—an Eurasian, a mongrel! You see, your Englishman can gloriously destroy himself, but he can’t sacrifice his caste. Grahaeme was jaded by the East, and he took me to die for. I would never again accept low terms. A Ghengis Khan, perhaps—or—” She stopped short. “Yes, I will be unchangeably I, till the end. It is so decreed. There is something about you, though, that stirs me, and makes me wish that one died like the English summer and came up anew with the spring.”
Julie rose, and in a surge of feeling looked down upon the recumbent figure. For a bare moment Isabel had opened the very secret gate and let her glimpse in. The girl laid her hand on the olive shoulder.
“Those things—make no difference to me,” she said diffidently. “We will always be friends.”
Isabel glanced up at her ironically. “Is that a covenant? Go away, little friend, with your spring insistence! There is no resurrection here. And Europe shall never see me again! Once I wrote quaint lyrics, full, they said, of the magic and mystery of the East; now I am preparing a volume that is not written on pages—of things that must shortly stir the race of men. ‘Waters dried up that the way of the Kings of the East shall be prepared!’ Alpha and Omega. Here the struggle of man began, and here it will end! And ‘he who shall come, taking the peace from the earth, and making kings’! Great resurrected Ghengis Khan! Where is he? In what recess of Asia is he making ready to sweep the East to victory? Him my soul awaits. He will put the sun and moon under my feet!