Barry glanced up wonderingly. “She is an old friend of mine, and does not want, I imagine, the best of her friendships broken. In a way, you can scarcely blame her for seeing things as she does.”
“She is beautiful—very!” Julie added, with a trifle of severity toward herself.
“She is justly the Queen of the East.”
“Suppose,” the girl broke out feverishly, “she should find something splendid to offer you!”
“There is no splendor left to me here, that I can conceive of.”
“But if you could still serve in the East—would you do it—at all hazards?”
“I will serve the East till I die,” he said between set teeth. “It may revile me, trample on me, repudiate me altogether, but it shall not, I say, utterly cast me out—as this place is about to do.”
He looked at her in despair. “The cholera is in the city, Julie. A just judgment on the blind. Lord God of Hosts, after our labor and sweat, the eternal plague! It seems to have broken out in nearly every province; and if it keeps on at this gait, it will rot the Archipelago. It looks like a holocaust this time, to sweep away this blind beggars’ caravan.
“The Peste!” he muttered. “You haven’t heard that wail of the lost over the devastation of their little lives, as I have, nor walked at sunset through the blood-red light into their poor hamlets and found them dying darkly behind their rush walls, with the fiat of God written on their foreheads, as they’d say. Isn’t that the human soul of it—conceiving the curse that its blindness has brought down upon it to be a splendid decree of God? If a thousand years were as a day—as they are to Him—we’d win over here. But look at these creatures now, tearing everything away, and shouting out across the seas that they can stand alone, their bewildered souls on their splendid feet!” Barry relapsed into his native idiom, as he often did when he was greatly stirred. “And here they are at last in the power of the Plague, with their splendid feet a-fleeing, and their bewildered souls going out to God, who never asked for them in such a hurry.
“That’s the soul-splitting East! You may take its highways barefooted, your veins bleeding all over them at every step, you may hand its people from a high mountain the kingdom of God, but they’ll never be caring a bit. It’s not in the nature of any of them to give thanks to God or man. Sometime far hence, when I’m through with the East and wish to go up into a cloud to rest my soul of it, they may try to persuade me down with a mountain of gold, but I’ll kick the whole thing over and go on my way up.”