[1] Bilibid—Native prison. [↑]
CHAPTER XXIII
Julie walked back into her room, and stared heavily about this shell of her old existence where day by day the rope had been tightening inexorably around her throat. The room looked like a place she had never seen.
On the bed, suggesting her own spent mortal frame stretched helplessly prostrate, lay a worn evening gown. It brought the room back to familiar proportions. The recollection swept over her that to-night Isabel was going to have a party, and that she had put the dress there this morning—a time which seemed now to have no connection with her existence—to determine whether it could be made to hold together for this one night. Isabel had sent her a note, begging her to forget their last meeting and to come to the party. Nothing, of course, could change that explosion of hatred. Yet this morning she had decided to go.
She stared out at her Asian garden. She seemed to see a quick-stepping figure moving down there among the sighing trees. She turned away wretchedly. That was over forever. Soon, when the Reredos went away, the forsaken garden would revert to the jungle. Nobody would remember it. Yes, her soul would find a way to come to this spot of beauty, where the most splendid visions of her life had been evoked.
She began to gather up her belongings. They made just one trunkful,—everything that, after nearly twenty-one years of sojourn on the planet, she owned. She wondered if there were not something very wrong with a person who could not accumulate more than that after such a long time. The Señor had advanced her a week’s salary, which must be returned. She counted the money out of her purse, and laid it on the table. Then she fumbled in her trunk for her letters. The first one she came upon was the notification of dismissal from the Department. The next, Adams’s letter, still crying forth its bitter loneliness.
Then she sat down and wrote a letter to her uncle; and here at last her dulled heart was able to bleed. She had tried very, very hard, she told him. She was terribly sorry that things had turned out as they had. But the East was like the Bank of Monte Carlo—with the odds always against you. Of that final catastrophe that had come to wipe out her last chance, she found it impossible to speak. To his Western consciousness away off there, on the other side of the world, in a secure and ordered scheme of life, such monstrous happenings would be inconceivable. A pitiful, incoherent document, that accounted for nothing really, splashed all over with Julie’s tears.
She aroused herself feverishly, and examined the dress. The anger of that last meeting with Isabel stood out forcibly before her mind. Isabel hated her because of Barry. And Isabel did not hate fruitlessly. All her emotions found vital expression.
Something kept welling up from the depths of the girl’s sub-consciousness—something that was like a wavering clew. Quite without reason, a face rose before her vision—a face looking up stealthily above Isabel’s staircase. It turned, and revealed—the face of the old medicine crone! Not till this moment had memory welded these two associations. The old crone had some identification with Isabel. In her bent shadowy shape, Isabel’s hatred took form. Isabel had wanted terribly to get her out of the way. She had not dared to kill her, but she had selected a method of elimination too subtle for its agency to be traced. And Dicky-Dicky, the Dwarf, who had had a place in his heart that was called Nahal, had known, and because of it had frightened the Old Woman away, and attempted to save her—too late. Yes, it was clear enough now.