The two remaining members of the mess present were Lieutenants Dwight and Brentwood, members temporarily, since they had lost their cook; Bentwood, the Major’s Adjutant, was a prosaically good-looking young man who certainly tried his best to please the Major by purring optimistically at him all the time, only to get snarled at for his pains.
The very slimmest lady with the very yellowest hair Julie had ever seen leaned across and whispered encouragingly: “Isn’t he an ogre! I came here, a bride, six months ago, and he frightened me to death. I had come seven thousand miles to marry dear Marlborough—I hadn’t seen him since he was thirteen years old—and you can imagine!”
“Luella,” Mr. Smith called from the door.
“Some time I’ll tell you what the monster said.” The slim lady floated off.
Julie gave ear to Mr. Dwight on her left, whose attention had been so persistently straying from his food to her that the Major’s basilisk eye had frequently to recall it. Dwight explained to Julie in lowered tones—the Major was happily a little deaf—that the Commanding Officer was a somber old file, of belated rank and defeated hopes. Even his marriage had been a retarded affair—the lady had become middle-aged waiting for him to propose, when suddenly she had discovered that he had been making declarations to her for fifteen years, which, owing to his unintelligible utterance, she had never understood. Since the Major had been so deliberate in his own matrimonial concerns, he regarded with disfavor the precipitate nuptials of the Smiths.
The next morning when they again climbed the hill, Julie saw the village of Guindulman for the first time. Always thereafter it was set apart in her memory as a shining village set upon a bluff above the sea against an emerald tropical forest. Along its lone lines of snow-white beach, palms waved in solitude. Over to the east a very singular natural causeway united the island with a smaller one. To Julie there was something very aloof and strange about this causeway with the sea surging up on either side. The whole looked like Eden, new, green, and expectant.
Nahal was in insurrection. A great proportion of its native men had decamped for the hills, where under General Andegas they engaged in outlawry of every sort, seizing the property of peaceful natives and even killing them on the slightest suspicion that they were friendly to the Americans.
The Major was an old soldier, and for all his brusquerie a good one; but after a long sojourn in the subordinate grades he had lost youth’s sublime capacity for hazard. He knew that if he should employ the measures essential to the pacification of the island, the measures requisite for the obliteration of its chaos and disorder, he would end up as an oblation on the altar of American conscience. There might be others who could laugh in the teeth of the gods but the Major was too old. So, high up in his great open room, he could be seen by his world eternally walking about like a caged lion. There is no such bitter spectacle as that of a strong man knowing and yet fearing his own mind.
Around the plaza was all the history Guindulman had ever had. The church was very old, and was supposed to trace back to the activities of the Legaspian missionaries. It had a three-storied stone tower, in which there yawned three gaps for missing bells carried off by Mohammedan pirates to their own terrible island—discernible on clear days as a sinister shadow against the sea. The façade of the church offered an entertaining exposition of the Book of Revelations. The several different kinds of Horned Beasts roared sulphurously from its brow, surreptitiously urged on from under the eaves by the Scarlet Woman; an incensed angel in the center with militant wings and drawn sword, gave them all battle, while under his feet a frightened saint hugged the arms of Spain in desperation.
Outside the door of the church stood a slim, black-robed figure, which, as the two women approached, turned upon them out of a somber and lonely face the sudden fire of a pair of piercing black eyes.