It was this person who led them up the stairs to Father Hull’s sala, where he rose out of a long chair to greet them. Julie was so startled by the change in his appearance that she barely suppressed an exclamation. In some strange way his personality seemed already to have commenced to break its moorings. To Julie, who was particularly acute to intimations, the shadow of death seemed already to lie upon him.
Two other callers came up on the porch, and Barry went out to join them. Julie sank down in a chair and regarded the priest troubledly.
“I want to tell you how grateful I am to you for getting me a transfer to Manila. I was so anxious to get away from Nahal! I am inclined to believe you were right about—my not being exactly fitted for it.”
“Things have been happening to you,” he said.
Julie smiled painfully.
“My child,” he said indulgently, “you are on one quest and you think you are on another. Sometime, with some pain perhaps, it will be straightened out. But it is people like you who help move the world. Without such there would be no human history—just the thoughts of scholars—and priests. You see, it takes deeper forces than personal passions to carry forward the human pilgrimage. It took the master passion—man’s love for man—to lift humanity into a soul.”
He broke off, and pointed to the glimpse of the ocean that could be seen through the spaces of the vines. “It’s a very beautiful sunny sea, isn’t it? And always I can see the ships on it—going out.”
Julie who had been regarding him with emotion, exclaimed tremulously, “Why don’t you go home? You look so tired.”
The great calm in which he had been enfolded suddenly broke. A fire smoldered into life above his sunken cheeks, an alert look as at some trumpet call. He squared wearied shoulders. “My place is here! Some of us will never go back. We came to see it through. My camp-fire colony, full of raw life, of struggle, of tragedy! I couldn’t leave it. Accoutered for the wilderness, we sit around the flames—faces of failure, despair, and crime turned out of the shadow of the past to the hope of the new land, where the slate is wiped clean. It is this hour, my child, that must be watched over. A sea of struggling humanity with heads stuck up out of the flood. In the New Chance, the swimmer must be stronger than the current. I have been a soldier,” he added; “I have followed hard trails. I couldn’t turn back now.
“The Odyssey of the East!” he mused. “Life here has seethed down to its elements. The passions of men are too dangerously on the surface, and existence is wild, swift and sweet. Strong unbridled youth of men and beauty in a land of no traditions or standards. Sudden wealth in prodigal untried hands; princely Americans living so that the poor native thinks that kings have come to dwell with him. Millions of dollars from home to run the Treasure Islands! All magnificently, gallantly American! In conditions like these ghosts begin to walk, and I must be here to lay them.