“My poor friend,” Isabel commiserated, “who tried to put a rope of sand around eternity! But no dreams are lost—some time inevitably they take form. Dreams are the souls of things that are about to happen. If only we could make these particular ambitions take real shape, you and I!
“Orcullu and I have worked hard, and we are about to win. Arturo, his brother in Washington, says it is sure. You can see that it will be so. It is a dizzy moment that is coming our way; we have found rapacious Eastern enemies not far off, where we expected to find friends. We must not be swallowed up, just as we become free. An American protectorate of some sort is at first imperative; we have the wisdom to comprehend that—and, at the helm, an American—with the power of that nation back of him—President of the first modern republic in Asia.
“You are to be the Captain of that coming republic—the greatest honor the East ever conferred upon a white man. We have decided it—Orcullu and I—when the hour strikes. Our neighbor Japan will not dare touch us then. You can go on, and do what you please. Ah, did you think I would desert you?” she cried.
“Did you not give this land the bottomless devotion of your heart? Well, then, the land will reward you, as it knows how to reward all those who truly serve.”
Julie fell back abruptly. Though in a measure she had dimly comprehended something like this, the tremendousness, the reality of it all overwhelmed her. Barry was to see fulfilled all that he had wanted in his soul.
And she was wiped out utterly—so consummately had Isabel contrived. There was something almost justifiable in the way Isabel—and Fate—had gauged her quality, her triviality, and had flung her aside. She had a blinding vision of herself as too weak and purposeless to survive in this cosmos, where one’s metal was tested at every turn. Back there in the old world, she might have muddled along; but here one must quickly win, or irretrievably lose—step on or out. Ellis had dropped out, but she had tagged on in a struggle for which she had in nowise been fitted.
And now, though she hated Isabel impotently, hopelessly, she saw at last, as almost an inevitable thing, her own brutal removal from all paths whatsoever. Even if she had not already been damned, she could not have offered Barry, ever, anything so splendid as Isabel had achieved. She acknowledged herself completely beaten.
She must get away—as hurriedly as possible. Groping her way back, she found the small staircase she had started out to seek. In the garden there was not a soul, just the stillness of impersonal space closing cruelly around her. The whole tropical world quivered with a passion of human futility. Pain, panic, despair, swept her on in a current of darkness.
The old cinder of a gate-keeper held open the gate to let her out. Gate-keepers, she thought, were fatal people; they were always opening disastrous portals. As she passed out, she snatched up, with the instinct for something to cling to, a blood-red hybiscus flower.
She stood and looked about her in hopeless uncertainty of soul, debating which direction of the compass she should choose. A carromata came drowsing along the street. The horse came to a halt before the gate. The driver insinuated a somnolent head in her direction, but without any real expectation in his manner.