She waded through the lush growth along the old stone walls, wormed herself through Chiquito’s egress, and hurried across the grounds toward the house.
The garden had commenced to take on the covertly wild look of a thing that no longer acknowledges a master. All its lovely blooms had, with the waywardness of tropical foliage, betaken themselves to the tops of walls or trees. The snowy cadena shone timidly in silvery filagree high against Julie’s old window.
The shell shutters were all closed fast; not a sound came from behind them. The house was totally dark. Gaining courage, the girl tried the door, knocked, and finally boldly shook the heavy framework.
Across the door sill and over the floor of the trellised porch, sun-faded newspapers were broadly scattered. The Señor had taken his family off to Spain, as he had said he would do. He had doubtless gone hurriedly at the coming of the Plague to his district, without stopping to give instructions concerning these Manila periodicals, which the native carrier, with an increasingly divergent aim, had continued to throw over the gate.
Julie stooped and rummaged among the papers on the sill. Stuck fast under the door, she discovered a couple of letters. She pried them forth, and, examining them in the moonlight at the edge of the porch, found they were both addressed to her. She moved toward the seat under the fire-tree, which she and Barry had so often occupied; the full moon was now flooding the garden; she could read her letters there. In a vague appetite for news of the world she caught up, as she went, two or three of the papers from the walk.
Through curiosity she opened the unknown letter before her uncle’s. She wondered why little Mrs. Smith had taken it into her head to write, after all this time.
The Smiths were now stationed in Solano, and Mrs. Smith rather pathetically wished to know if any of the things that had happened to Julie’s old friends of Nahal were happening to Julie. She hoped not—for the worst thing that could happen to anybody had happened to her. She knew that the natives over here suffered from terrible things, but she had never dreamed that anything so awful could befall her. Those first cruel red spots on her white skin—looking as if they had been branded on with a red hot iron; Marlborough’s desperate efforts to disprove them; the doctor’s reticence; the nurse’s gingerly cautious attitude, had all only disclosed the unbearable truth. She had caught the small pox in Nahal—though she was in Solano when it developed. Where else than in that ill-omened island could one have got such a thing! She could demonstrate to everybody how fatal a spot to everybody Nahal had been.
She had not been anywhere near death, but rather than this thing she would have prayed for any other conceivable, cruel curse of the East—this East which had so many to give.
Marlborough had been a miracle of devotion, assuring her a thousand times that it would never matter to him what she looked like. A girl might believe all this—but to a woman whose heart was deeply versed in the frailty of men it was all intolerable. It wasn’t that she was marked so badly—not really so much at all—but that she would never again see in the glass her old self. Marlborough was going to take her to Paris and have her skin peeled, but—she dared not believe.
Yes, certainly, there must have been a curse on that place! To further prove it there was Calmiden. After Julie left, Calmiden had been ordered to Dao to take Adams’s place. “But, you know, Julie, he was never Adams’s metal, and I guess he rebelled utterly at being put in Adams’s shoes. Templeton goaded Calmiden to what he did—one day he struck him. I can’t imagine any one’s striking Calmiden and going on living, can you? Well—Templeton didn’t, Julie, and that’s it! It’s so hard to tell, but in the big fight they had—men lose their balance so completely in places like this—Templeton somehow dropped dead. Of course you understand that he was a rotten old shell of a dipsomaniac that would cave in at the first few blows.