Part 3

“Oh, Routledge--see what comes o’ riding alone! In a month or six weeks, God loving the mails, the _Word_ will publish: ‘The civilian mess was joined to-night by that young roving planet, Cosmo Routledge, who in present and former campaigns has driven straight to the source of exclusive information and pulled the hole in after him.’ Then, for a stick or two, I have discussed the great frieze coat,” Finacune added whimsically, “described the prophet’s brow, the slender hands of swift eloquence, and the sad, ineffable eyes of Routledge, born of America, a correspondent for the British, a citizen of the world, at home in India, and mystic of the wars.”

“Just add,” Cardinegh remarked meltingly, “that his heart beats for Ireland.”

That was a marvellous night. Big natures throbbed in rhythm. Whiskey as it sometimes will--the devil of it--brought out the brave and true and tender of human speech. Routledge told a bit of the story of the great frieze coat.... They were moments of trampling violence in the narrative; instants of torrid romance--to which the wearer had been a witness or a listener....

“Ah, they made cloth in those days,” old Jerry sighed. “Would you look under the collar of it for the name of the old Belfast maker?”

“It’s there, sure enough,” said Routledge, “as Tyrone is water-marked in the great Cardinegh scroll.”

Jerry did not answer for a moment. His face looked singularly white in the dark.

“The dean went back to Ireland just before we came out here this trip,” growled old Feeney, of the _Pan-Anglo News Service_. “It seems he couldn’t start an insurrection there, so he rushed back to the _Witness_ office and haunted the cable-editor’s room until the Bhurpalese took pity on him and began shooting at Tommies.”

Hours passed with talk and laughter, liquor and song. It was strictly a night session of the inner section of war-painters; and in spirit the high priests of elder service trooped back to listen among the low-hanging Indian stars.... It was knee-deep in the morning hours when Routledge and Cardinegh drew apart at last. They walked out between the snoring lines, whispering:

“Jerry, what has this narrow-gauge campaign done to you? Fever or famine? You look drawn and blown and bleached.”

“I am going into the lair after this,” Cardinegh said. “The boys won’t believe it, but this is absolutely my last fling at the field. I am going home to Noreen, son, and London and the _Witness_ may go to hell.”

There was unnatural venom in the old man’s words. His tightened hands stirred restlessly; his eyes, seen in the flare of a match as he lit a cigarette, were unquiet, alive with some torture of tension. Routledge gripped the vehement arm.

“You are oxidizing a bit too much tissue, old war-horse,” he said quietly. “You’ll want to go into the meadows for a while when you get back--but you won’t stay there. This stuff--the smell of it, as now in the dawn-dew, and the muttering formations presently”--Routledge waved his arm over the bivouac--“things like this won’t let you run long in the pasture. When the war-headings begin to grow on the front pages of the _Witness_, and the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand grows and blackens into a mailed fist gripping a dagger--why, you’ll be at the lane-fence nickering for harness.”

“Routledge, don’t go over all that rot again,” said the old man. “It isn’t that I’m out of strength, but I’m too full of hate to go on. I’ve always hated this smug English people, and I’m not mellowing with years. I feel it hotter and hotter--sometimes I feel it like a running incandescence inside. It leaves my brain charred and noxious--that’s the way it seems to me.... Yet, I have been one of England’s first aggrandizers. I have rejoiced in print at her victories. I have cheered with the low-browed mob, ‘God save the Queen!’ I have borne the brunt of her wars--_the son of my father_!”

Routledge was disturbed, but he chuckled softly. “One would think you were still a fire-brand of the Fenians, Jerry.”

“I know to whom I am talking,” was whispered queerly. “The Fenians are not dead yet--not all the Fenians.”

“When did you hear from Miss Noreen last?”

“Oh, it’s a fortnight. We ought to get mail at Madirabad.... I must write. My God, I must write!... Don’t mind me if I ramble a bit, Routledge. I drank rather plenty to welcome you back. Whiskey sizzles along my spine rather faster than once upon a time.... And you haven’t seen Noreen for----?”

“For over a year,” Routledge said.

“And you haven’t heard that they call her the most beautiful woman in London?”

“Yes, Jerry. I heard it from General Falconer at Bombay; from the Sewards in Simla; from Bleakley, who came back to Hong Kong after a year’s leave with a made-over liver and a child-wife. But then I knew it, Jerry--yes, I knew it.”

“But she burst into bloom astonishingly after you left us. She has never forgotten you, Routledge.... She is like the Irish girl who gave her to me.”

“Come on to bed, Jerry. We drive like carrion-birds across the world wherever there is blood spilt upon the ground. We’re not fit for a woman to remember.”

“The woman who gave Noreen to me--could remember and wait, son!... Ah, God, the red hells I have passed through!”

Routledge reflected upon the furious emotions which had stormed his old friend in a ten minutes’ walk. From the furnaces of British hate, he had swept to the cold caverns of gloom wherein he had laid the wife of his youth. Only four months ago he had left Cardinegh hard, full-blooded, iron-gray. The dawn showed him now a bent, ashen, darting-eyed old man, of volatile but uncentered speech. The tragedy of it all was germinating in the faculties of the younger man. Moreover, with a thrilling freshness, the night and the return to old London friends had brought back his own memories.... “She has never forgotten you, Routledge!”... Nor had _he_ forgotten the pale, exquisite face of Noreen, large-eyed with listening under the lamp in Cheer Street. Her every change of expression recurred to him; and for each phase of the story he had related, there had been different ranges of sorrow and sympathy.

In the queer, sensitive mood, Routledge tried to put away his memories. Only a God was fit to mate with this moment’s conception of Noreen Cardinegh, as he stood with her father in the new day, already defiled by the sprawled army. He wished that he had not seen so much of war. Fate had put a volume of battles into the binding of his brain. In the very centres of his life, series upon series of the world’s late and horrible tableaux had been imprinted. Routledge was impressed with the queer thought that such pictures must dull the delicacy of a man and sear the surface of his soul, like lava over-running a vineyard of Italy.

“Will you go home after this little thing is over?” Jerry asked suddenly.

“Yes, and it won’t be long.”

“You wizard!--what do you mean?” Cardinegh muttered, with a start.

“I mean the present bubble is just about to be pricked.”

“I--at least, the boys--supposed this campaign to be but nicely on!” Cardinegh’s voice was a husky whisper, and his hand had gripped the sleeve of the other. “Tell me what you know!”

“Softly, Jerry!” The voice of Routledge was inaudible two feet from his lips. “It’s all rumor--indefinite, ungrippable, as if the clouds had whispered it--and yet there is something big behind it all. Down in Calcutta, the seats of the mighty are trembling. British India--take it from me--is too agitated by some discovery within, or revelation from without, to bother much further with a little native rebellion like this. And yet even this may have its relation to the big trouble. A native paper has dared to print this sentence--a good sentence, by the way: ‘Mother India is quivering with hatred for her white child, the British foundling!’ Would a Hindu journalist dare to print that without real or fancied backing? ‘Unauthoritative, but important if true,’ as the _Review_ says, is my own idea. It is this: Russian spies have insinuated themselves somewhere into the arcanum of British India; the Bear has lumbered off with information that is already pulling the English forces into defense--from bigger game than the Bhurpalese. If Russia is arming the Border States and has secured information of the fire-brand sort against England--the latter is a good deal like a shorn Samson just now--throwing so much power in little Bhurpal!... Something’s askew. There’s a rival in the north.... It’s all vague, vague, but big--big as Asia!... Listen to an amateur prophet, old Ironsides: if we live three years, we’ll see a collision of fifty-mile battle-fronts!”

They were back in the civilian camp. Cardinegh did not speak, but his face was mad with excitement, his hands ungovernable.

SECOND CHAPTER

THE BAFFLING INDIAN MYSTERY IS DISCUSSED BY FOUR MEN WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN FIRST TO SOLVE IT

The Powers are held together with links not welded by hands. The strain upon the weaker links sets to quivering the entire cable of civilization. Certain sections of the system grind constantly against each other, and inevitably there comes a period when snapping is imminent. At such a time the two material forces draw apart for defense. Frequently peace is preserved by silent affronts of power; frequently by an easing of tension on either hand, a more comfortable adjustment of boundaries, and thick applications of the lubricant, diplomacy. The time is critical, however, and in either background the engines of war are assembled against the crisis.

Something had happened in India. It was retching for outlet at Calcutta, seething through Indian provinces. London and St. Petersburg were jerking with its startling galvanism. The correspondents afield in Bhurpal began to sense this mysterious friction, but could get no word nor line on the truth. Rumors were thick as _confetti_ in Mardi Gras. Rumors ran through all shades of dreaming and shapes of reason. One story was that China had wiped out the foreign concessions from Hong Kong to Vladivostok and had challenged the world to war; another that Russian armies were swarming over the Himalayas, and that all India stood ready to back the Russian Bear against the British Lion; that England would call upon Japan and the United States, and Russia demand the alliance of the French and Germans; in short, that there would be a merry manifestation of hell around the world.

Routledge tarried but one day with the civilian outfit. He had been gone but forty-eight hours, with Bulwer-Shinn’s cavalry, when the rousing mystery which he had intimated to Jerry Cardinegh in their brief night walk, began to be felt by the army and its followers. That which was known in the secret councils of Calcutta and London never reached the field, but the results did. The campaign came to an abrupt close. The hand behind history beckoned; and arteries of horse, guns, and infantry, running like lines of red ink over the map of Bhurpal, were bottled up into garrisons to _wait_. The petty insurrection in the hills, which had called the soldiers and scribes to action after a bleak stretch of peace, was as remotely forgotten as the vagaries of a fever past.

One after another the correspondents were recalled--uneasy, irritable, their work half-done and wholly lustreless. All their cables of the last days (messages that hinted some grave international lesion; the strained, dwarfed results of minds that searched the stars and the soil for truth) were either stopped in the sending or answered by a crisp word that nothing more of the sort was wanted. This was heart-breaking.

Feeney, Finacune, Trollope, and Talliaferro had fore-gathered on the veranda of the Bengal Hotel in Calcutta. They were awaiting ship for Madras, Bombay, and Home. It was ten days after the big social night in Bhurpal, and early in January, 1902. Trollope had promulgated a theory. It was a full-rigged, painstakingly-ballasted theory, involving hours of heavy work in a smutty, sweltering coach on the way down from Madirabad, and Trollope was a heavy man who drew heat--“the Blue Boar,” a few intimates dared to call him. The theory contained a discriminating opinion, weighed to a dram, on the cause of the sudden scatter of troops from field to garrison, and undertook to interpret the pregnant undertone of disorder which whispered across the empire. A cablegram from his paper, the _Examiner_, had just been delivered, and was spread out upon the table before the others. Trollope was breathing hard.

“Can’t use theory matter,” the dispatch read. “Campaign closed issue.”

Trollope looked up presently and found awaiting his eyes three wide, indulgent smiles. Trollope was so seldom disconcerted that he now furnished an enjoyable moment for the others.

“Cheer up, fat boy,” observed Finacune. “Your old man always was a ruffian. The _Word_ handed me the same thing when I undertook to explain to the boarding-schools of London what this reverse was all about, only the _Word_ did it in a refined, delicate way. You know I dreamed it all out that Russia had come to pay court to Mother India, and that there was a hitch about Tommy Atkins acting the best man----”

“It was the only decent thing I sent in from the campaign,” Trollope growled.

“They know more about it at Home than we do,” said Feeney, the saturnine, a confirmed wanderer, next to Cardinegh in years of service. He had searched the world for forty years to watch the crises of human events.

Finacune inquired with a trace of animation, “We’ve all four been recalled, haven’t we?”

The others disdained to answer, but Finacune went on airily. “We are experts--picked men--the choice of Europe to cover the turmoils of India and elsewhere. None stand beside us. Is this the truth or not?”

It was acclaimed that this was plucked from the original garland of truth.

“Now,” the _Word_ man asserted, “we find our cables, our expert and expensive cables, not cut, not filed for reference, not even trusted to the janitor’s basket, but, so far as we know, _burned unborn!_... We have received no explanation. We are not even told that we have done well or ill.”

“I was told to shut up and come home,” drawled Trollope.

“The same pellet in different coatings is being absorbed in the systems of three of us present,” Finacune added. “Listen. I’ve got a theory. England is menaced by her logical enemy from the North. Some brilliant _coup_ has been executed by the Russian spies, or else there has been treachery. I make no pretension of knowing just what has happened. Any way, it is big enough to make our native rebellion look like a flicker in a holocaust. The trouble is so big that it must be kept from the world, from the English people, from all but the Engine-room of England! We are muzzled, and our papers are muzzled. In a word, the crisis is so big that _the Press has rallied around the Throne_--to keep the matter dark!”

There was considerable comment after this. The atmosphere was charged with earnestness. The belief grew that the clear-headed little humorist, Finacune, had pricked the pith of the question. The situation furnished certain gorgeous playthings for discussion. The idea that the Czar’s secret service, either through the purchase of a traitor or some miraculous thievery, had secured information explosive enough to blow out the British underpinnings from India, amounted to a huge and awful conception in the English mind. Even the pale, listless Talliaferro, the stately _Commonwealth’s_ “Excalibur,” stirred restlessly.

There was sharp scattering of gravel along the driveway, and the four turned to see Jerry Cardinegh riding out on a gray gelding of splendid style and power. He sped by at a fast rack, bending forward in the saddle, his white, haggard face in vivid profile against the vine-hung wall to his right. His gloved left hand held the bridle-rein with the rigidity of an artificial member. His shoulders did not seem to fill the coat he wore; his body looked little and shrunken on the huge beast; his lips moved.... In the mind of each one of the four, queerly enough, was lastingly imprinted this flying glimpse of the well-loved dean as he swung out of the drive on to the Jasper Road.

“Speaking of wanting to know a thing,” observed Trollope, “I should like to know what is pulling down the old man.”

“We’ve all got to break,” said Feeney gloomily. “Jerry’s breaking the approved way like a good machine whose parts are of equal tensile strength.”

“I wonder if it is possible,” came from Finacune slowly, “for the dean to have a line on the mystery, and that it is so desperate--you know there are some situations so desperate--that if one looks them straight in the face he is never the same afterward.”

“Any international disturbance that could throw old Jerry Cardinegh off his feet, or off his feed, would have to concern Ireland,” observed Feeney.

Trollope took up the subject. “It was after that night that Routledge dropped in upon us in Bhurpal--that Jerry began really to tear down. They had a talk together after we turned in.”

“Who should know the real thing--if not that demon Routledge, who rides alone?” Feeney questioned.

“Gentlemen,” said Trollope, clapping his hands for a servant, “we sail to-night for Home. By the grace of the weird god of wars, we’ll be in London, at the Army and Navy Reception, within a month. Possibly then we shall be trusted with the secret which our papers dare not trust to the cable--the secret that is gnawing at the vitals of who shall say how many Powers? In the meantime, let us all drink to the man who wrote of England’s wars--save the deathless Feeney here--when we were just learning to read fairy-tales--drink to the man who just rode by!”

“May I add a line, Trollope?” Finacune asked, as the pegs were brought.

The “Blue Boar” nodded.

“When it comes time,” said Finacune, “for the man who just rode by to finish his last battle--which we all lose--may he pass out from the arms of the most beautiful woman in London--his daughter!”

They drank standing.

Old Feeney broke the silence which followed. They saw in an instant that he had something big to impart--and that there was joy in the telling.

“The Pan-Anglo Agency of stripped news which I have the honor to represent, sent me a little story this morning,” he declared, with the thin, cold smile which they all knew.

“Feeney, you dead planet, do you mean to say that you have got a ray of light left?” Finacune asked. The two were very hearty friends.

“The Press has rallied about the Throne, as you say, my emotional young friend,” Feeney went on blandly, “but the Throne in the interim has turned one of the smoothest tricks known to diplomacy--all in the dark, mind you--one of the deepest diplomatic inspirations ever sprung in the law and gospel of empire-building. Let us say that some one, by a bit of treachery, has thrown Afghanistan’s fighting power to the Russians, lifting it out of the English control. Also let us grant that Russia, confident of this bulk, is waving the fire-brand along the whole northern border of British India--plunging those sullen native states into rebellion--and telling them why! All lower India, people of the plains, will respond to the disorder. It has been a case of waiting for a full century--waiting for the exact moment for insurrection. India is the prize waiting people. They build for eternity. In a word, my sweet children of a battle or two, England faces a great war--with all India energized by Russia--a ten-to-one shot!”

Feeney sat back and smiled at the vine which had been the background for Jerry Cardinegh’s passing. The others squirmed impatiently.

“What does England do in a case like this?” old Feeney requested at length.... “O glorious England--O my England of wisdom and inspiration! Does England say, ‘Let us fight Russia if we must’?... No, my fellow-sufferers; England looks at the map of the world. The heads of her various top-departments in London draw together. I mean her Home, Colonial, and Foreign offices. One of those mute inglorious Gladstones finds an old petition that has been laughed at and thrust aside for months. It is from Japan. It is read and re-read aloud. The unsung Gladstone of the outfit makes a sizzling suggestion. Japan has asked for an Anglo-Japanese alliance. With a turn of a pen it is done. What does this mean, my brothers?”

The thoughtful Talliaferro deigned to speak: “Japan committed _harakiri_--that is, many of the young, impulsive flowers of the army and navy did--seven years ago, when Russia led the Triple Alliance and looted the trophies, including Port Arthur, from Japan’s victory over China. With England’s moral support in an alliance, Japan will start a war with Russia to get her trophies back. I’ve got an idea that Japan thinks she can whip Russia.”

Talliaferro talked so seldom that he was well listened to.

The ancient Feeney clapped his hands. “If you had the nerve to follow troops in action, that you have in world-politics, Talliaferro, you’d have us all whipped,” he said. “You’ve got it exactly. The insulation has long been worn off between Russia and Japan, specifically between Korea and Manchuria. Japan, looted of her spoils from the Chinese war, is one vast serpent’s tooth for Russia. With England’s moral support--I say _moral_ support--Japan will tackle Russia and sing anthems for the chance.”

“You don’t mean that such an alliance is signed?” Finacune asked excitedly, and Trollope was leaning forward.

“Exactly,” said Feeney quietly. “The Pan-Anglo wired me the story to-day, and the _Pioneer_ here will print it to-morrow morning. Japan will now make demands of Russia that will force a war. That will pull Russia up from England’s India borders. Some diplomacy, that alliance, my boys! England has jockeyed Russia out of her aggression; rendered helpless the idea of rebellion in India because Russian support is needed there; England has put half of Asia between her boundaries and the possibility of war! The absolute splendor of the whole matter is that England calls her unheard-of alliance with Japan--a movement for the preservation of Chinese and Korean integrity! I ask you in all truth and soberness--as Saint Paul said--isn’t this humor for the high and lonely gods?”

THIRD CHAPTER

ROUTLEDGE RELATES HOW A MASTER CAME DOWN FROM THE GOODLY MOUNTAINS TO FIND HIS _CHELA_ IN THE BURNING PLAINS

Routledge parted from Bulwer-Shinn’s cavalry at Madirabad and reached Calcutta two days before the others, except Bingley, who was but a couple of hours behind him--just enough for the latter to miss the boat Routledge had taken to Bombay. The “Horse-killer” took himself mighty seriously in this just-miss matter, and was stirred core-deep. He wanted to have the first word in London as well as the last word in India. He had studied the matter of the mystery with his peculiar zeal, cabling his point of view in full. So rapidly had he moved down, however, that he missed a cable from the _Thames_, hushing further theories. It was with rage that he determined to railroad across India and regain the lost time, possibly catch a ship ahead of Routledge at Bombay. This was the man he feared at home and afield, in work and play.