“Good morning, Padre,” Miss Hope essayed deferentially. “May I present Miss Dreschell, who has come to take charge of the Boys’ School?”
A change flashed through the priest’s face, which was not suppressed before Julie had looked into a hidden chamber of his personality. The priest—he was young and had all the swift movements of youth—looked at Julie quickly, and murmured a few Spanish words; then with an inclination of the head, he moved away. A crowd of children on their way to school came flocking about him.
Miss Hope said that he was a mestizo, the usual warring half-and-half—all restless souls vainly seeking, between two races, their destiny. James, the American teacher, who had visited him in his convento, said that Father Herrero knew both Greek and Latin, which in these parts was the same as saying that the Sultan of Jolo could speak French.
The Ayuntamiento, or government building, seemed in its huge concrete size, to overtop the village. It held all the offices of the government, and streams of people were to be seen hurrying in and out.
In a wing of the building Julie saw a great upstairs gallery where two hammocks were hung. These were the quarters, Miss Hope thought, of the new Treasurer, the gentleman who had brought Julie ashore. Troops quartered downstairs made this building eminently safe. In a low-roofed building adjoining, prisoners stuck sociable faces out between iron bars.
The bachelor officers lived on the corner opposite the Major, the rest of the colony in intermediate houses. Thus the Major had his whole domain under his eyes, and could even see when those of the bachelors who messed separately across the plaza came to the table in their shirt-sleeves.
As Miss Hope and Julie walked down the road toward the side street where the two schools were located, the crowd of children who had been following the Padre detached themselves with the inevitable inconstancy of childhood, and formed a devoted train around the teachers, offering them flowers. Julie, who was pretty and always popular with children, fell into possession of most of these.
The priest, left alone, frowned slightly in her direction. Before turning back into the church grounds he paused a moment at the gate, and Julie saw a portentous shadow cross his face.
“He’s the most powerful man on the island,” Miss Hope remarked. “The Padre, for that matter, always is. He is the mind of these people. Some of the officers accuse him of all sorts of things. It’s hard to tell from his face what he is.”
The boys’ and the girls’ schools stood opposite each other on a long, wide side street, over-shadowed by great tropical trees, in which the boys roosted out of hours among the mangoes and bananas. The buildings were high and roomy, overlooking charming scenery of jungle and sea, and were surrounded by the overgrown grounds that children love. This street was their retreat; they lived in it nearly all the time, played their games, mostly now those imported from America, and satisfied their hungry appetites with the queer cheap candies and little sponge cakes, made of very ancient eggs, that were purveyed in its stalls.