“I think I will go where I was assigned,” Julie reiterated—which decision seemed considerably further to irritate the florid head. It was clear that he was keenly eager to serve the writer of the letter.
But Julie rose with an air of finality. He stared at her with annoyance; and when she did not alter her mind, he leaned over his desk and jotted down a note. Julie knew somehow that it referred to her. She caught a glimpse of the word Solano, and wondered if he intended forcing her to go there. Evidently he did not, for as she stepped through the door, he apologized perfunctorily for the difficulties of the occasion, and bowed her out with great courtesy. But Julie, looking up into his face, saw that he would never forget the person who had challenged his power and caused him to be ashamed of himself. Some time this incident would unfailingly bear fruit.
Mrs. Calixter was aghast. “He has banished you into exile!” she exclaimed. “Could it be because he and George are at swords’ points? Did you give him Father Hull’s letter?”
“I gave it to him, and he took everything back in a wink, and offered me Manila; but while I sat there looking at my mysterious island, I recalled the faces of some of those teachers, and the face of—a person I met last night, and I asked myself why I should shirk just exactly that which I had come over to do. Why,” she added suddenly, “did Father Hull’s letter make such an impression? The Church over here must be very powerful.”
“The Church hasn’t a thing to do with it. It’s the man! He’s a saint, and the spiritual custodian of the colony. He came over here as the Chaplain of the Twenty-fourth, and marched right alongside the men into every danger. There wasn’t a soldier in the regiment that wouldn’t have gone straight through Hell at his word. Yet I imagine he found it harder to make them go the other way. He is known everywhere, and by everybody. No one could deny him anything—it’s the power of one man’s life.”
“There seem to be so many over here like that!” Before Julie’s half-closed eyes a stream of faces rose. One preëminently stood out, illuminated by moonlight, and fired with the undying fervor of purpose. It was her sub-conscious being which, stirred by the intimations received last night on the roof, had decided in a flash for her in the Superintendent’s office.
With the vision still about her and before her, she arrived at the home of Isabel Armistead, the woman of Asian mystery.
The dwarf that she had seen before in the garden received her. She had thought that he looked like a child, but she saw now that the queer little creature was of a man’s years. She could not resist speaking to him, and the mannikin smiled at her out of his saddened, puckered little face. He showed her upstairs into a sala so vast that it seemed literally a sweep of space broken by transcendently carved pillars.
The house was more than a century old, and had come down to Isabel through her inconjectural native connections. Its carvings belonged to an era of Pharaonic hordes of labor, or slavery. The house and the other vast properties of its owner had somehow come down unmolested by official upheavals.
The family was a queer one of many strains; all the East was in its veins. After her husband and her daughter had departed for England, Isabel’s mother, it was said, had gone up into a holy mountain to practice witchcraft. At any rate, after a time, she had disappeared, never, apparently, to be heard of again. The influence of this strange mother, Mrs. Calixter had told Julie, was still perpetuated. One native lady of her acquaintance had shown Mrs. Calixter one of the old witch-mother’s anting-antings, proclaiming that she always wore it, and that it had astoundingly protected all her life, shielding her and her family from all evil and lifting them above the common lot of men.