Nevertheless Julie was stirred to concern by the abnormal agitations within herself. She scrutinized herself in the glass one day, and was startled by what she saw. The delicate outlines of her face, which looked like sculptured crystal, reflected a disturbing inner ravage. Under her lower lip a singular bluish shadow, which for some time had been dimly suggested, had become definitely marked, as if some menacing malady were revealing its first sign.
She was puzzled and a little alarmed. She resolved to go and see a doctor, only to remember that in her present unstable state she dared not risk the complication of the cost. She consoled herself with the thought that if she were really ill more malevolent symptoms than these would have declared themselves.
Her mind skirted lightly an under-current speculation concerning the medicine she had been taking. Because it had become so indispensable, she did not actually attempt closely to question it. It was unquestionably, peculiarly and irregularly derived; but it certainly was not poison, as her use of it had proved. And it did work; it took pain away;—whatever abnormal after-agitations it might produce—and just now that was what overwhelmingly counted. Back of that fact she was not disposed to go. Rosalie had been perfectly right when she said that a large part of the valuable drugs of the world were to be found wild here. Julie herself had walked through pungent jungles and forests and felt that she was traversing some universal pharmacopœia. The natives of Nahal through the use of herbs, which were the only medicinal aids at their disposal, had learned how to exist quite without doctors. Julie had a consciousness that clung to any sort of panacea. She manifested always an inability to stand upon her own spiritual powers. This particular panacea, she was however aware, had caught upon some vital fiber. On blistering days when the heat hung in the air like a stifling blanket and all the forces of her being refused to go on, the old crone’s nostrum dropped a soothing veil over her blinded, quivering senses and freed her awhile from her intolerable burden.
It helped also in another struggle, the struggle to keep from understanding, as the days passed in the Señor’s office, why her services were so valuable to a pupil who paid so high a price to make no progress at all. Subconsciously she had sensed for a long time at what this artistically indirect method aimed. As the Señor’s vocabulary of gallantry began to come out more clearly from behind its Spanish ambush, the girl sometimes felt as if she were hanging by a hair over a precipice. She cursed devoutly her knowledge of French; for though she pretended not to understand, the translation would too often come out on her burning face. She dared not be angry; she could not revolt: were not her last bridges cut behind her? Between her and the most desperate extremity, this situation alone interposed. This slow, creeping Spaniard was the rope on which she must balance across the cataract. So when opulent emerald rings and rare rubies were discovered lying casually upon her desk—for her to admire—and were waved back silently upon her when she tried aghast, to return them to their owner, she could only employ the foolish subtlety of remarking how much Señora Sansillo would appreciate these intended gifts of her thoughtful husband.
It was a silly strategy, executed by a crude man in the crudest way. There was no spirit in it; the lovely stones stood for nothing but an ignorant man’s misapprehension of the human soul. It would have been laughable to the girl had she been in other than a desperate plight. Nor could she laugh at anything that caused her so to despise herself, her own ignoble clinging to such a rope of life.
But she would not retreat from her individual stand. Barry alas, had troubles enough now. And this place, which had monstrously and unjustly, and without a hearing, cast her out, should receive no appeals from her. One must make a final stand on one’s own in this shattering world—and not if she were to die to-morrow would she come out and declare her failure. She was still desperately, so she conceived, the mistress of her own fate.
Then at the climax of these over-head emotions, would come an engulfing ennui, as if all this stir were but an eternal pouring of water through a sieve. To keep alive in this fearful foreign whirlpool, one had to struggle every instant. Something seemed to be thrusting her gradually toward the edge of a dark and fatal pool, and there was creeping over her an appalling weariness of life.
One day she received word that Isabel wished to see her. She had not seen Isabel for some time. After having been discarded from the real life of this colony and forced to her present anomalous mode of livelihood, she shrank from encounter with the brilliantly successful ones whose rival she had once essayed to be. As the outcast from the Great Project that Chad had predicted she would become, her despair at seeing those who had entered the race when she had, became sometimes more than she could combat. The wretched queerness of her being lately had made her morbidly acute.
Isabel most of all had seemed to press this superior fortune pitilessly upon her, had even, so the girl thought, demonstrated a hint of hatred on their meetings. This thought troubled Julie; but she could not bring herself to ignore the summons, for not only had Isabel’s friendship more than once been turned to account, but Isabel sending for her in this unexplained way, showed that she had something vital to say. Out of this infinite restlessness Julie wondered, as she set out for the house of the caliphs, what was to develop.
Everything appeared unchanged. The old keeper, with the withered face like a Chinese nut, who had told her the first time she had seen the place that this was the dwelling of a “daughter of the country,” came forth from his lodge and ushered Julie into Isabel’s domain. Absolute stillness pervaded the house. The dwarf, who had watched her acutely as he conducted her up the stairs, disappeared. The pensiveness and inertia of the tropical afternoon had fallen like a sad mood over the exotic world. Julie looked about her and sighed. She felt a desire to get out of this ageless Asian splendor down into the sun of the street. To-day the teak wood called up visions of distant sweating bodies. The shining dark floors stretched like black waters beneath the feet; the heavy golden curtains stirred as under Indian magic; and the ivory Buddhas dozed in a changeless Nirvana. Perfume hung in the air: the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of ivory palaces, mixed with the odors of dying flowers. Back in the next room, in a corner where she could just glimpse it, was the gilt shrine of the Green God, who from time immemorial had inspired in the hearts of men the fear of fate.