Perhaps she should have confessed this incident to Calmiden, she thought, but she had never been able to bring herself to speak of that adventure, now that Adams was “out of it.” It seemed something sealed forever between him and her.
Another hour passed and the girl’s black resentments and outraged pride rose into fresh tumult. The pride of the Dreschells was their dominant trait. The world might hold Calmiden’s position in life better than hers, he might tower in immeasurable contempt over the sordid disaster of her life, yet she had one bomb left to deliver. She would drive him out of her life. He had forced his way into it. The world might go hang! Purcell could make it believe what he would. But upon one person the outrage to her dignity and pride should be indelibly branded, so that never till the end of his life would he be able to forget.
His moment had come and passed—in the dark, terrible hours, when frightened and half starved, she sat waiting for him to come and set things right. Her brain had traveled the whole blistered course of thought for extenuation, and now, roused to a fury of injury, she determined to hurt Calmiden in the last way possible—to cast him off finally and completely. That he had already accomplished this repudiation beyond anything that lay in her power goaded her to madness.
In a suffocation of emotions she wrote the letter. It was not what she said in the letter but the way she found to say it, the white heat of the words, that must later have seared a path through his brain.
“My vulgar debts repulsed you! The insinuations of that man were preëminently revolting to your sense of pride. Not to speak! It was an easy way out! There is another kind of Judas, it seems! You sat and sold me away by your silence. You have done what I did not dream it was possible for any living being to do. For such a betrayal there can be no explanation ever. None is humanly possible.”
She summoned Pablo Cherico from the other side of the house, and told him to get Delphine, who lived not far away. The little boy, roused out of his bed, came running. One person in this disheveled world was always eager to serve her. She handed the letter to Delphine.
“Take it at once to Teniente Calmiden, at the Mess. Put it in his hands!”
She stumbled back into the house, given over to the demons of darkness and despair.
When Julie awoke next morning, she found a bundle of mail tied with a string, lying on her doorstep. There were two official letters. Now when disaster was quite complete and irretrievable, her money had come—all the arrears of it. A week ago and her life would have traveled into safe places. Now there was nothing left but the bleak privilege of paying her debts.
Delphine, with the captive Balthazar grubbing along in the dust, appeared. “I gave the letter into the hands of the Teniente, last night, as you told me to do. He was already in bed. The house is very ugly. No flowers on the table, no lace in the windows, like in the beautiful residence of Mrs. Smeeth—nodding but banjoes.”