He dropped his fervent fantasies, and fixed upon her a passion of solicitude. “Take care of yourself, Julie, mind! You have a shining bit of light on you that I never saw on another mortal woman—and which will hold me through all the dark places I shall pass through. What does it matter whom else they say you are waiting for! Never, to the end of time, will I believe the soul of you stands waiting for another man! In all these days, when my heart has been going out to you, you’ve had this will-o’-the-wisp in your brain. It can’t be anything more—just a screen down the path, hiding for a little while the light.”
“Who,” Julie asked, turning white in amazement, “told you that?”
“Chad and Isabel—my friends who do not see your fairy light. They want me to let you pass on—as though I wouldn’t go on following after you across all the tracks of the universe!”
Often the portals of her spirit had started to spring—to loosen her imprisoned emotion, but the conviction of her unworthiness, the fear of mischievously or malignantly encroaching upon his life, had dammed it back. Sometimes even in her despair, she had felt that his eyes were looking for something the confines of her gates did not contain. Now, almost overpoweringly the impulse to disregard the consequences, to fling open her soul, to disemburden it to the bottom on that instant of all the pain that had habitation there, flared up in Julie. The very citadel of her soul had been struck.
Then sweeping over her again came all that Isabel had said—the terrible, almost inconceivably terrible calamities she had threatened. Once more she remembered the prophetic flash of look between Isabel and the Rajah of Ramook—the king of Ramook! after independence Barry was to have a high place—the highest they had to give, perhaps. She swept out her hands distressfully, as if to clear away this mammoth bewilderment. Suddenly she found resolve, even with the suppressed tears choking her.
“Chad and Isabel are right!” she declared huskily. “I am not fit to come in your path—not at all worthy of ideals and energies like yours. Chad said I was a wastrel—and so did she. The woman who should touch your life, Chad said, should be one of concentrated fine forces. I have never concentrated anything. I have moments of inspiration, moods of fervor, but never have they—never perhaps will they knit into anything abiding. I tried in Nahal. I gave it the best in the compass of my being. If anything was to be fulfilled, it would have been fulfilled there. Nahal was my Chance. I can’t think why it turned out as it did—I wonder if I shall ever know. My catastrophes there have made me stagnant. You see, everything mattered so terribly then. I was red-hot iron to be struck to any shape of the future. I couldn’t make you understand—not even by opening up a whole train of luckless experiences and abasing myself in the telling of them. Sometime, perhaps, a reckoning will come.
“Why did I have to go South—after we had met that night on the roof! That is when our spirits really met. But something took me on and on in another direction. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been—I—the sum of me—without all that has come to pass. I don’t know what the answer is going to be. I won’t be a marsh light to you, luring you along false paths—but I can’t bear, Barry, dear”—her voice broke—“to have you desert me altogether. Go on holding me in your thoughts!” she entreated with a little sob.
The sight of his bowed shoulders and hopeless face overwhelmed her. Atlas crushed under his load, struggling tragically against destruction.
“I’ll do anything to save you, Barry!” she cried, clinging wildly to him. “You mustn’t drop down. Something is going to happen to you. Some one is going to help you out!”
After he had left her at the Reredos’ gate, the universe seemed to have widened fatefully between them, leaving her alone—all alone, in fearsome areas of space. She crept up the stairs to her room. But not even the medicine brought her any sleep that night; never had her being been so hideously disturbed. Isabel had promised mysteriously tremendous things, for the fruition of which she had been ordered out of the way. Everybody was ordering her out of the way. Out of the vague plots that seemed everywhere about her, but one thing emerged, but one thing counted—the possibility of a turn in Barry’s fortune.