The evening after the burial of Adams, Calmiden appeared, to bid Julie good-by before leaving the next morning to take the field. The troops, with the exception of a small detachment for the protection of the post, had been ordered out to punish the lawless elements of the islands. Adams’s death had uprooted the Major’s last inner reluctance. He was at last going to take the responsibility of acting.
Calmiden sat down on the steps and looked about him at the miserable little house.
“It’s horrible to think of your living here alone. There are three of us together there across the plaza. I thought of course that some one of those women would take you in. Aren’t you afraid?”
“Perhaps—sometimes,” the girl said slowly. “I have the musical clock, though.”
Julie stirred uncomfortably. “It sings when the night is long and lonely—after the golden wine-bibbers, with their careless voices, have passed on; it sings through that dead stop of the night when people die on earth. Then I am afraid, until I hear—well, do you ever hear strange things? Did you ever sit up and listen, and hear the powers of the invisible universe sweep by? Some denizen down deep in me responds to all this, and makes out it knows what is going on. Otherwise it would be horrible!”
His face grew grave. “You should never have come here to undergo such things! Ah, what do you think you are making of life amid such hardships?”
“I don’t know,” Julie downcastly replied. “How can any one know until the sum is finally cast up? I am still trying to cast up the sum of Jack Adams’s life, and make it come out right. The memory of our brief poignant talks, with the moan of isolated forests in them, comes back to me—” The girl’s voice broke.
Calmiden glanced at her quickly. “You think a good deal about him, don’t you?” Then he added, as if to get away from the thought, “Poor Jack! However did he come to do it? He seems to have lost his head over there. The Major knows what happened, but he never says a word.”
Julie leaned forward earnestly. “Do you think that Jack understands—that it was worth while; that what he did over there all counted in the project—in the whole big scheme? For you see, he used to say we were grist for the mill—he and I; and I never understood that. It seems sort of disquieting to recall it.”
“Oh, can’t you see that, even if the revolution, or evolution, you talk about did come over here, you are too slight a fabric for such a thing? You don’t belong in it.”