“Do you think you have to plead with me, you little wastrel? The East will requite those who truly give themselves to it. There will be a place in it for Barry—but there will never be any place for you—that is what I want you to understand. When the hour comes to requite him, I warn you not to intervene.”
Julie’s spirit asserted itself. “What is going to happen to him?” she demanded.
Isabel flung at her a contemptuous glance, and exclaimed in a sudden abandon of revelation: “The finest thing that ever happened to a white man in the East.”
The girl’s head sank. Upon her memory had flashed the new portentous words exchanged in Barry’s house between Isabel and the white Rajah of Ramook. Her whole being felt suddenly borne down. Her lips slowly paled; the light swept out of her face, leaving it a chill, ghastly white.
Isabel strained forward, her eyes riveted on the blue blur which stood out now under the girl’s lips. “Ah!—” she said, and sank back, while Julie moved unsteadily to the stairs.
She went through the down-dropping dusk of the garden, in utter hopelessness of mood. The choice of the starry ways cut off forever.
CHAPTER XXI
Barry hurriedly presented himself one afternoon at the Señor’s offices. Father Hull was fatally ill, and Barry had come to get Julie.
Outside the priest’s room, in the Military Hospital, they found a hushed motley assemblage—officials of high standing, prominent natives and poor ones, many of those Father Hull had called his camp-fire colony, grouped there waiting for news. A nurse flitted occasionally in and out; in those days of over-crowded hospitals, nurses were forced to disseminate their administrations.