Julie threw him a sharply amazed glance. “Why should Isabel have repeated that? How can you talk about things you don’t understand? I needn’t answer you, of course, but I will. The man you speak of is never coming back. Nobody but Isabel would have dreamed of such a thing.”
“Then why sit in this dark thrall and wait for him?”
Julie drew away in fresh surprise. “Could it occur to you that this probing might become painful?” She put her hands to her head. “But it’s because I don’t blame you greatly that I reply at all.” She lifted her head, and looked at him with a great earnestness. “You found out that I was—waiting; but you didn’t know for what. I’ll tell you now,” she almost sobbed. “I wanted to be released from the dark, brutal spell of failure—I wanted to recapture a last territory of my soul.”
After he had left Julie at her gate, Chad drove to Isabel’s house. Isabel was one of Chad’s best friends. Beautiful and seductive as an houri, she was surrounded in both his mind and Barry’s with the romance and tragedy of an unappeased Kundry soul. Her fallen ambitions among her father’s race touched them. They were haunted by the cruel fact that the East alone offered a destiny; and though she was their antagonist, they courted and admired her. Her wild aspirations they had credited to her natural mental opulence, and her environment. Recent events, however, were tending to shake some of their comfortable convictions.
The houses of the East are open, and there are no bells. Dicky-Dicky, the dwarf, whose duty it was to stand on guard at the stair case, was nowhere about when Chad arrived. He climbed the stairs and, completely at home, sat down on the railing of the gallery, and looked at the river, the view of which from this point was always enchanting.
A light burned in the sala, but the rest of the house appeared to be in darkness. Isabel, no doubt, had not reached home. He would wait for her.
Voices from somewhere back of him floated indistinctly at first across his thoughts. Then, as the sounds became clearer, and arresting in their significance, his attention focused. In his long sojourn in the islands he had picked up the use of the Tagalog dialect. He heard an exclamation, and recognized the voice as Isabel’s.
“And so this pilgrimage of spells and charms, and working upon lives, goes on, Witch of Arayat!”
Chad pricked up his ears instantly. The Witch of Arayat had been a fantastic legend when he at first came to the islands. From the obscurity of the years, Isabel had evidently raised to life her spell-casting mother.
“The march is long,” a fainter voice replied. “First I sought the Covenant in the Golden Ark on the Sacred Mountain. Now I seek it all over the earth. Why have you sent for me?”