As they drove away, detaching themselves from the human caravansary, Julie looked back upon the rough and struggling mass of humanity which was wresting destiny out of the standardless East, and sensed over all the exiles a pervading pensiveness, an air of waiting till the stroke of fate should open the gate.
CHAPTER II
The Mayor of Manila lived in the Walled City, although most Americans had chosen the space and coolness of the outside districts.
His house was very old, and stood close to the ancient walls, overlooking the ocean. Its gardens lifted the graceful shadows of trees over the tops of the high lichened walls and out into the world. The house was in the ecclesiastical locality that had so strangely impressed Julie that afternoon.
In company with the Calixters, she entered the inclosed estate and found herself beneath the towering shadow of a great white house rearing so high above the walls that the glow of light pouring from the opened window spaces of the upper regions seemed almost to belong to the starred canopy of the night.
These upper regions presented an appearance of spacious stately halls with very high ceilings and brilliantly polished floors. Pieces of handsomely carved Spanish furniture were disposed about the room, and some huge darkened paintings of Spanish captains who had come this way hung on the walls.
The people, however, made the atmosphere of these rooms. At first, Julie thought she was in a dream. People from all the unheard-of places of the earth seemed collected here. Such queer little brown women, moving about on their fairy feet, in long gorgeous trains, like gay little peacocks; and their men, mailed in European evening dress—as if it were armor donned for the eternal triumph of civilization. Most of them were painfully polite, Julie thought; with a touch of humility in their politeness. Spain had not been very long gone, and even mestizos and rich Filipinos had not figured in her social lists.
The Sultan of Sulu, temporarily absent from his own dominions, appeared much satisfied with the stir he and his preposterous pearls were creating. “Holy Mary! Such as the very gates of Heaven are made of!” one dusky maiden exclaimed in rapture.
“An illiterate Malay, making an artistic collection of wives, and deliberately decking himself out with those things as a decoy. He’s perfectly odious,” Mrs. Calixter declared.