“I am sorry for you. I am sorry for all of us who sought fortune in the East. We are a pitiable lot, Señor. Drive around the Escolta any night, and you will see us in our several unhappy stages of decay. Some of us were not big enough for our task. Oh, I, too, would have given anything to have succeeded!”
“But what is to become of you?” he cried, in genuine solicitude. “You are ill. You have no money and without money one cannot live one instant in this terrible land. Reverse your mad decision, and stay here. You shall have nothing to fear from me.”
Julie shook her head speechlessly. She and her concerns had sunk into a whirlpool of despair, but there remained the one passionate satisfaction of being able to sweep her soul clean at last. So much, much money that she had not earned—the thought of it burned like fire. She put out her hand. “Good-by, Señor!”
Isabel’s house twinkled from a distance with fiery lights. The strains of the orchestra playing, like a band, loud chords of revel, tore open the peace of the night. Julie ascended into an atmosphere in which the note of triumph seemed everywhere proclaimed. Isabel had decorated the place amazingly with palms and tropical flowers. Dark faces flowed about in currents of festivity, wearing, Julie thought, an appalling aspect of victory. Isabel conveyed this impression preëminently. She appeared to be in the throes of some delirious celebration of soul. It was as if there blazed forth from her personality the triumph of many cities and multitudes of islands made glad. She terrified Julie.
All this exultation fell like the weight of doom on the girl’s aching spirit. She herself seemed to represent the living defeat of her countrymen. Few of them were here to-night. Their absence made a haunting void in the throng. The charge had gone out of them, the force: almost as if something had taken God out of the universe, and left it to stumble on by itself. Her weary mind dwelt with a great effort for an instant on the tangled threads of their disappointments. America wished to withdraw from her position in the East; from all the potentialities of her presence there. The Eastern problem was not, she held, her responsibility. Perhaps the corner of it she had lifted appalled her. Perhaps she had attempted a too ambitious job. No group of men—not even the dauntless ones who had grappled with the tremendous difficulties here—could make over the East in a few short experimental years. At any rate, after successive agitations, the country, divided on the question of colonial possessions, seemed now to have come to the point of relinquishment; and the unclosed scaffoldings of the attempted structure of enlightened government in the East would be left to rot before the gaze of the Orient. Julie knew that that was what her countrymen hated—not the going, but the failure left behind, the judgment pronounced upon them in the courts of the world.
Julie was watching with every nerve for Barry. Once more to have the old fire thrown over her. But after all this fearful waiting, what would there be to say? Even if she poured forth the tale of her wholly wretched situation, there was nothing ever, ever, that he could do. If she had been before unfit for him, she was now utterly removed from him. Certainly he could not move through life with such a thing as it was fated she should become dragging around his neck. They had been too near to each other for her to inflict upon him a brutality like that. Fright at this picture of ruin for them both turned her faint. Perhaps after all, she had better not wait.
Chad passed, his face pale and abstracted. He nodded at the spot where Julie stood rooted. She gazed after him with a piteous absence of ill-will. His had been such a tiny contributory force to the avalanche. She forced herself to move on towards Isabel, who intolerably radiant and shining, wavered across her path. Isabel came down abruptly out of her glorified mood, and searched the girl’s broken and disintegrated being with a passionately curious gaze.
Julie knew that Isabel was waiting for the signal of complete capitulation, and she struggled with all her force to withhold the surrendering sign. As she looked on the triumph and terror of this woman, one of the dark lusts of this land that had surged all about her heretofore without touching her, suddenly took possession of her. She wanted to strike Isabel, to beat her out of existence. She had borne enough in this black land, and this woman was not only her enemy, but her destroyer—the very symbol of the country which had twisted and thwarted and wholly wrecked her life. She stumbled toward Isabel, whose purple eyes must have fathomed some mad intent, for she stepped warily back till the crowd interposed between them. Julie’s impulse failed—a poor avenging instrument she. As she wheeled away, she saw Isabel’s countenance assume an expression as if some godly satisfaction had been handed down to her.
Her desperate eyes still searching in every direction, Julie rambled unsteadily on. Everything looked strange, as if she had never belonged to the pageant of human passions. Oh! To be back again in the rich moving of human passions!
She came upon a group talking in hushed tones. The ejaculations of dismay sounded an odd note in this hard festal blare. Major Holborne was knitting his brows; Chad’s face wore a queer arrested look; a woman uttered a soft cry.