“Who is to blame for all this?” he exclaimed in a hoarse voice. “If you had taken me, I would have stuck to you through thick and thin. I wouldn’t have cast you off like your friend Calmiden. He never intended to marry you. You must know that. Didn’t I warn you long ago?”
“And you saw to it that your evil prophecies came true. You have hurt me in every way possible.”
She turned and started to go.
Suddenly she felt that he had pressed up behind her. “If you’ll still say it isn’t too late—I’ll—”
Julie wrenched herself out of his detaining grasp. “You’ll— What will you do?” she cried, turning savagely on him. “Having deliberately ruined the whole compass of my life and brought to pass the worst that was humanly possible, you still dare to think you have power over my life? Listen to me! I have power over your life—at any moment. I held it on the tip of my finger this morning, and balanced it there—and if you lift your hand against me again—” She stopped in a wild sob and ran from the room.
When she got to school, she found five boys huddled together awaiting her, generaled thither by the faithful Delphine, who had gathered them up outlaw fashion from the streets, and who was now oratorically instructing them from the platform. Delphine announced to her that the present gathering was the very best he could do, for—though he had lain in wait for the former scholars from dawn—they contrived to get down to the river, and from its inaccessible depths had defied him, their heads bobbing along the surface like grimacing corks.
James, too, was furious and had been twice to see the Padre, who had retreated to the sanctity of his lofty and impregnable convento to avoid the emissary of education.
“I’m going to climb the bell tower and beat him,” James declared in heat, “if he doesn’t call off this boycott.”
Purcell’s rumors, monstrously exaggerated and embroidered upon, had swept through the village. Public opinion had pronounced judgment in these empty rooms. In desperation, Julie went to the Major. He had heard the reports, and as he had a particular sensibility for Julie, who had been the means of cutting the Gordian Knot of his military career, he offered to give Purcell a piece of his mind. It was an extremely delicate thing for him to undertake; for, since Purcell was actually the chief civil functionary on the island, it was the Major’s duty to remain on good terms with him.
Julie found in these trying moments that she had misjudged this man who towered in his rigid rectitude of character over the life of the colony. He was stern military metal, but every atom of that metal rang true.