She was facing a critical state of affairs. Although certain varieties of food were cheap in the village, her resources would soon be unequal to purchasing even these. She had been doing her own cooking—very badly indeed; and suffering from it, as well as from a too rigid economy of diet.
Moreover the school, which was the center of her life, was subtly, as under an evil enchantment, disintegrating. Every day disclosed more and more empty benches, the youthful occupants of which, in Julie’s dreams, were to have been shining pillars of the future. The girl’s efforts to locate the cause of the disaffection came up against a dead wall. The secret psychology of the East confronted her. In vain, after facing those deserted benches that struck like a blow at the very roots of her spirit, had she appealed to the parents. The women were silently sympathetic, the men were non-committal; but none reached out a hand to her.
She guessed only too well whose power alone was great enough to deflect the boys from their upward course. The souls of their parents were throttled by their leader, at whose heels they would have gone to the devil.
The priest had learned who had instigated peace—Maria Tectos having hung in the terrible limbo of excommunication till full confession had been forthcoming. His spiritual subjects had begun to show the disquieting effects of revolutionary new thought, and he hastened to stretch out inexorable arms over his dominion. A spiritual czar, whose whole power in life lay in his compelling hold on the souls of men, he did not intend that any of his chattels should escape their bonds. He had an overweening sense of possession, but little real interest in his creatures. Above everything conceivable, he hated the Americans. Since he had laid his special curse upon Julie’s establishment and had not interfered with Miss Hope’s school, it was perfectly clear upon whom his ill-will was concentrated. With the vital structure of her work shaking about her, she was in the worst possible straits.
Her money, or rather Purcell’s, had come to an end. She was facing starvation. There was no one whom she could bring herself to approach for help. She summoned her last forces of resistance. Calmiden must certainly be back within a few days, and the money from Manila could not diabolically hold away much longer.
She picked up Mrs. Calixter’s letter. It was full of explanations of divers sorts, and threw light in multiple directions—belated light.
She and her husband had been to India on an extended official visit with the Governor-General. She had meant to write sooner to Julie, but on a trip like that, Julie would understand, a great many things had been wiped out of mind.
“Barry McChord, whom you remember, I know, and who still holds himself as your friend, told me on my return of his fruitless efforts to find out what had become of you—and a very strange mix-up it was. I was gone—and your Department gave your location as Solano. But when Barry wrote there he received the answer, after an unconscionable time, that there was no such person on duty there. The Department, upon being again questioned, hazarded the theory that you might have died or gone home—although it admitted that of such events it should have a record. At any rate you were given up for lost. What chaos inconceivable! And that red-headed schemer—who I suspect was to blame for all this—is still away on a long rest in Japan! I believe that wretch has been deliberately miscarrying you on his lists so that upon investigation he could point to his magnanimity in assigning you to the superior station of Solano. If you would, brave little Julie, insist upon going to the dangers of Nahal, he may have argued, whatever happened to you should not be set down to his account. If you wandered off any place else, it was not his fault. But how you have received your salary I can’t think unless he has made it his own concern.”
And was that why, Julie wondered, she was left in these straits; and would be—until the red-headed man came back?
She read on: