Part 7

“Suddenly Cantrell arose and staggered to his safe, glancing at the shut door and the open windows of the office. He fumbled with the knob for a long time before the big door swung open. Then with small keys which he found inside he got into the inner compartment and drew forth a fat envelope.

“‘Speaking of Colonel Hammond,’ Cantrell said, with a drunken smile, ‘I’ve got the whole documents here. They were never trusted to the mails, but they trusted me. I’ve never brought them out before--but we have fallen into the arms of our friends. Isn’t it so?’

“We all acquiesced, and then there was interesting reading. Routledge, it was the great story I had been looking for--all that I wanted to know about one of the most damnable military expeditions ever transacted. I said to myself the world ought to know about this. That was because I was a newspaper man. Then I said again, ‘The world ought to know about this,’ and that was the humanitarian end. I was thinking of Ireland and India.

“Two of the secret-service men were asleep finally. Cantrell moved about and served on legs of hot wax.

“‘I’m glad you put that back in the safe, Cantrell,’ I said, when the envelope was safely in my pocket. ‘You could do a lot of damage to England with that just now.’

“I glanced at the secret agent who was awake, and found that he was not in on my steal. I should have made a joke of it, if he had been. The fact is, I did not really have the idea of stealing the papers until I found that I had done it.... Cantrell locked the safe, and the world was mine--all in a coat pocket!... You mind, when Cantrell was killed, or assassinated, the safe was blown open--quite a while afterward? I had been back to England and to Ireland with Noreen in the meantime.

“God, how I have whipped the English!... When your name was spoken last night at the Armory, the faces about me were like a lot of blood-mad dogs--nostrils dilated and hackles up. I had to love you, Routledge, to turn loose upon you--the Hate of London!”

“And you had the Hammond papers all the time you were in England and Ireland?” Routledge inquired.

“Of course. I had only a few weeks in Europe before I was called back to the Bhurpal skirmish-stuff. You had stayed in India----”

“But when and where did you get the papers to the Russian spies, Jerry?”

“In Bhurpal--as that affair opened. It was weeks before I met you that night of the gathering when the two British forces came together. I stopped at the Rest House in Sarjilid, on the way by train from Calcutta to the front. It was there I heard a Russian sentence from an alleged Parsee. I was onto the spy in a moment, but first I want to tell you why I turned over the papers to him. First, rather, I want a drink of whiskey. I’m talking thick and fast, and it burns out the energy.”

Routledge served him. “Why you gave Cantrell’s papers to the first Russian spy you met in India is what I want to know,” he said carelessly.

“Listen, then. The idea came to me before I went out to India on that Bhurpalese mix-up. I told you that Noreen and I took a little trip to Ireland. I shouldn’t have gone back to Tyrone--where her mother bloomed--where I was a boy. I shouldn’t have gone back!”

The old man’s voice trembled, but he did not lose his point.

“As it was, my son, the thoughts of Noreen’s mother and Ireland were burning too deep in memory.... But we went back. The sun was going down on the little town. It was dirty, shrunken, decayed--that old stone city--and the blithest place a youth ever met a maiden, or passed his boyhood.... Ah, the mothers and youths and maidens and the memories of old Tyrone always sung in my heart--when I could forget England!”

Routledge lit a cigarette over the lamp and handed it to Cardinegh without speaking. Jerry did not continue for a moment. Then followed the impression his birthplace made upon him--the veteran with his daughter:

“I can’t forget our last look--the old town, shrunken and silent in the midst of her quarries. I heard the muttering in the doorways, as we have heard it in India. The best blood had gone to America; the knitting-works were shut down--the remnant starving. It was like India in plague and famine, but I could have borne that.... It was the next morning when I saw the British garrison quartered upon the town----”

“You know how Colonel Hammond felt when something sprung a leak in his brain,” Routledge suggested.

“You’ve hit it, boy.... There was the old town, starving at best, with three hundred British soldiers devouring its substance! It made me think of a fallen camel--with a red-necked vulture for every bone in the carcass. And that’s Ireland and that’s India!”

The whiskey was bright in the old man’s eyes. “Look out, Routledge, when you hear a snap in your brain! You said something to that effect.... I went back to India, as you know, up from Calcutta to Sarjilid, where I met the Russo-Parsee. I thought of Noreen and her mother, and Tyrone, and the service of England, which I know as well as you. I thought of India.

“What did I find in Sarjilid? There was a famine there, too, and a garrison of red-necked vultures; sand blowing down from the windy hills; stench from the huts; voices from the doorways; a salt-tax that augmented the famine because the people needed but could not buy their own product; naked brown children, fleshless as empty snake-skins--but I won’t go on! I must go to the war-office presently.... It was at Sarjilid that I met the Russian.... It may be that I am another Colonel Hammond, but I gave the documents away. He was an enchanting chap--that Russian!”

Cardinegh here whispered the details of his treachery. The politics of the world would not be cleaned by the dialogue, but the big fact remains that the documents concerning Colonel Hammond’s dynamite went into Russian hands--a fire-brand for her to ignite Afghanistan, the Indian Border, and British mutinies.

“Then I went back into the field to watch. Weeks passed,” he continued hastily. “We met in Bhurpal, and you told me what you had discovered. I knew. Each day was a brimming beaker of joy to me then. I saw British India shudder at the broken vessel of her secrets.

“Routledge, it was as if you struck a viper in the spine. British India curled up. I had struck her in the spine. She writhed and curled up!”

Cardinegh laughed again. “Ireland will be rid of British garrisons. They will travel oversea to fight the Afghans and the Russians now. The red-necks at Sarjilid won’t have to travel so far! There’ll be a fifty-mile battle-front, as you said--you ‘amateur prophet’! You and the other boys will campaign--but old Jerry won’t be there. I’ve had my day--and this is another one. I’m off to lift your load, my son.”

The veteran campaigner arose and donned his coat. Routledge was pacing up and down the room. Cardinegh reached the door, and, holding to the knob, spoke again:

“I know what you think, my son. You think that my plan miscarried. You think that England spoiled my work--that her treaty with Japan was my answer. You think that England will rub away the rest of the insulation between Russia and Japan, and that the Bear will fuse into the Rising-Sun--that all this will pull Russia up from the border of British India. Ah! ... and you think well. I can’t see it all as clear as I did once. I can’t feel the thought of failure as I did once. England has time to strengthen her borders and cover her nakedness if Russia and Japan fight--but the story of Shubar Khan is told and my work done! It’s the initial lesion, Routledge, and the veins of British India are running with the toxin of a disease--sometimes amenable to heroic treatment--like the Anglo-Japanese Alliance--but always incurable!”

SEVENTH CHAPTER

ROUTLEDGE BEGS FOR A STIMULANT--THE STUFF THAT SINGS IN THE VEINS OF KINGS

Rain upon the windows. The atmosphere was heavy in the lodging, heavy from a sleepless night. Tobacco ash upon the floor; white embers in the grate; the finer ash of burned emotions in the eyes of the men. Neither had spoken for several moments.... Whose was to be the desolation of war? Was North China or China South soon to rumble with the tramp of foreign armies? Routledge put the question away among the far concerns of his mind. It was a moment now to mourn the man before him. There never had been an instant of hate for Jerry Cardinegh--perhaps, a full sweep of horror, at first, but that was gone, and in its wake was a pity of permanence.

He mourned his friend who was mad, dead. The years had wrought a ghastly trick here. Under many constellations, he had heard Cardinegh whisper his passionate hatred for England and her relation to Ireland and to India. Not a little of it Routledge himself shared. He perceived now that this passion had devoured the reason and sweetness of the old man’s mind. The Cardinegh of old days looked no longer out of these hunted, red-lit eyes. A pestilence had deranged the well-loved face. It was evil now in the fire-light--like a tampered chart. A life of brooding had vanquished the excellent humor at the last. Oppression had nursed a demon to obsess the brain and make a shudder of a good name.

“I must go,” Cardinegh said roughly. “It is my last day. This morning my final arrangements for Noreen. An hour with her--then to the war-office with the revelation. You’ll stay here, son. Stick to these walls--until Dartmore and the boys bring your glory back to you.... I can see them trooping in!... And Noreen--ah, the gladness of her!”

Routledge opened wide the windows and stood by while the morning swept in, damp, chill, but cleansing.

“Sit down a moment more, Jerry,” he said finally. “I want to ask a favor of you. It is a hard thing, a delicate thing--harder and more delicate than the thing you trusted to me, without asking. There is no other white man whom I would dare ask such a favor.”

“Out with it, son.” Cardinegh watched him wonderingly. Routledge sat down and leaned forward, a fine light in his big, calm eyes.

“I told you I had passed an interesting night, Jerry. It was more than that--a wonderful night. Thoughts have come to me that never squirmed in mortal brain before. I felt this vast moil of London--my enemy! I felt it gathering about my ears like the _Tai Fung_ in the China sea. It was rich, incomparably rich, the stimulus of a Cæsar--this Herod-hate of seven million souls! I’ve been thinking for hours, Jerry--and I should have been writing--stuff for glory--the great book! Whiskey wouldn’t bring out such work, nor drugs, nor Yogi asceticism. I have glimpsed such work in stars, in battle-smoke, in bivouac fires, in the calm and distances of the monster Himalayas; perhaps in the eyes of women--but glimpses only, Jerry! To-night it came like a steady stream of empyrean fire. I want months of it--months! I would pay half my life to have London and the army hating me this way until the work is done. It’s the stuff that sings in the veins of kings. Give it to me--for the book!”

“Wake up! You fool--wake up!”

“Listen, old champion,” Routledge went on passionately: “I have spent this life gathering the data of experience. I have crossed the Sahara in the hue and garb of a camel driver; I have lain months a yellow Mohammedan in the huts of Lahore; as a Sannyasi, I have trudged up to the roof of the world. And the fighting, Jerry--Pathan, Zulu, and Burmese; and the revolts--Afghan, Balkan, Manipur, African, Philippine--all these came back, vivid, splendid last night--pictures fit to gild and garnish the Romance of the Open. And, Jerry, I have peered into the mystic lore of India, the World’s Mother--subtly and enticingly to color it all! I want to do this, Jerry, the Book of our Tribe! I shall write it in blood, with pillars of fire leaping up for chapter-heads--if you will only leave this flood of power in my veins--the Hate of London!”

Cardinegh, gasping, clutched his hand. “One of us--you or I--is mad----”

“Mad, of course,” laughed Routledge. “A man must be a little mad with the inspiration of Keats and the punch of Carlyle banging together in his brain.”

Hope lived wildly now in Cardinegh’s eyes. “And while you are doing the book,” he muttered, “I am to live out your tinsel and truffles here, play the grizzled warrior--led about by the child of her mother.... Routledge--Routledge, your brand of stimulus is new and raw.”

“I’m tolerated to ordinary poisons, Jerry. A man immersed in gentle azure can’t get the other pigments out of his brain.”

Cardinegh arose. “It’s sweet heaven to me,” he murmured strangely, with quivering lips. “It is a rest such as I have never known. I never was ready to rest until now, until to-day--when I thought the chance was burned away. You want to take this?”

“Yes.”

“Months of life--Home, Noreen!... Damme, Routledge--I’m broken! It’s like you, Routledge--it’s like you----”

“To me it’s a gift of the gods! Hold on, Jerry, until I bring back the Book--hold on and sit tight!”

Cardinegh left the lodging and Bookstalls, bewildered by his new possession of days. The strain that had kept him afoot until the end; that had stiffened his body and faculties for the end itself; carrying him step by step from the Khyber Hills, through the Bhurpal campaign (the days in which he had watched the results of the fire he had started); the strain that had roused his personal craft to baffle and disarm those men of uncanny keenness at Naples, and pulled him up for a last rally in London--was lifted now, and with it relaxed the substance of his brain and body. Doubtless, he would have preserved his acumen upstanding, and an unsnapped nerve, to bid Noreen farewell and make his confession at the War-Office to-day--but there was no need!

The old man walked along mumbling, forgetting the while to hail a cab. The miracle of it all, though it did not appeal to him, was that he had lost his ruling, destroying hatred for England. Cheer Street and Noreen--the blessedness of her hand to help him; her touch so like her mother’s upon his brow; the eyes of her mother across the table--months of life, of rest, of Home and Noreen!... These were his thoughts. There was no room for world-politics, for war, for passion. Even the thing which Routledge had done hovered in the background. It was a piece of inhuman valor, almost too big to hold fast to. Routledge was identified in his brain now with the stirring braveries of days long gone; with other sunlights in which men met the shock of things in full manhood; it was of another, of a ruddier, world to old Jerry’s eyes to-day.... In a remote way, he felt that once _he_ might have revelled in the hate of London. Perhaps it was one of the things peculiar to the middle distances of manhood--as far from the comprehension of the elders as of the children. That there was an element of sacrifice in the action of Routledge was not entirely lost to Cardinegh, but he put it away among the misty glories of memory--days when manhood was in its zenith of light and power. It was not of the present; it had nothing to do with the numbness and the swift, painless softening of to-day.

“Noreen!” he called, at the front door in Cheer Street.

A servant told him that Noreen had been away for an hour.... With a startled look, the servant drew a chair close to the fire for the old man, poured a grog for him, set his smoking things to hand, and backed staring out of the room.... Hours afterward, Noreen found him there--the glass, the pipes, the daily papers untouched. His smile was like something which the wind had blown awry. His eyes were depleted of fire, of fury. Even the starry worship which her presence had reflected in them yesterday was dimmed--as were the mighty images of the wars in his brain.... He roused at the sight of her, started to speak of Routledge, halted, reflected, then drank.

“Hold a match to my pipe, child. It was your mother’s way. You’ve been gone the long while, deere.”

She obeyed. The majesty of pain was upon her face as she hurried away. Locked in her own room, long afterward, she heard him humming quaveringly an old Irish folk-song--lost from her brain a dozen years.

EIGHTH CHAPTER

THE SUPERLATIVE WOMAN EMPTIES HER HEART OF ITS TREASURES FOR THE OUTCAST, AND THEY PART AT CHARING CROSS

After taking the hand of Jerry Cardinegh at the stairs, Routledge returned to his room, smiling a trifle bitterly.

“That was certainly a fragile underpinning to rear a great lie upon,” he mused. “I couldn’t have made old Jerry swallow that a year ago.... But there’s good humor in the idea--the book of Routledge energized by the dynamos of British hate--a book of wars from a man who rather likes to promote the ranking rottenness of war.... But the name of Cardinegh cannot go down just yet with that of Colonel Hammond, and the Lotus Expedition; with treachery.... Living God, how that sweet girl haunts me!... I must put her away--far back among the cold, closed things. It isn’t fair to use her as a trellis for thought-vines like mine. She is just psychic enough to know, without words----”

He thought presently of what Rawder had told him about returning to India this year; also of Noreen’s amendment--that he was to go very quickly. How far off it had seemed yesterday!... Routledge was standing at the window. Though his active mind was filled with sadder, finer matters, a process of unconscious cerebration was alert for the White Mustache in the street below. This certain secret agent was not in sight, but there was not a single individual of the throng who _might not_ be identified with that silent, fameless department--the men who had kept the secret of Shubar Khan in spite of Colonel Hammond’s regiment, which knew all.... London was running with its sordid morning business--grinding by in the gray morn and the rain.

“London,” he exclaimed softly, marvelling at the great thing which had befallen him, “the keyboard of the planet! How the Excellent Operator hungers to turn the full voltage on me now!”

Routledge was hard-hit, and made no pretenses to himself otherwise. He did not want to go back to India to-day. The thing he had managed to pray for--the Hate of London--was a crippling horror. It tore down the inner life of him. He felt already the encompassing loneliness of an expatriate; worse, he felt against him the gigantic massed soul of the English. It peopled the shadows of the room and the street and his brain, filling him with weakness and faltering. It was not that the idea of death hung to the flanks of his being. He could laugh at death with a sterling principle. Rather, it was that all that had bound him to life was dead--work and play and light. He was chained to a corpse--the hate of London. It was an infectious corrosion which broke his own spirit, as no physical dread had ever done; yet, stricken as he was, he felt himself torn in the counter-attraction of two great passions--between his sweetest woman and his bravest man.... A light rapping at his inner door startled him. It was the Bookstalls boy.

“Kin I come out now, Mister?”

With a gasp of relief, Routledge turned to the door; but, on the way, his eyes fell upon the two worn, fallen-in shoes, set so evenly before the fire.

“Bless you, lad--just a minute,” he said.

He gathered up all the change his pockets had held, big and little pieces of silver, and dropped them softly into the shoes, now stiffly dried,--then opened the door. The small, draggled chap emerged briskly, took in his host from head to foot with a quick, approving look, then glanced out of the window to locate himself. It was all coming back to him apparently.

“I was sleepin’ in yer street-stairs,” he explained, as if to get it straight in his own mind. “Then I didn’t know nothink till I ’eerd woices.”

“What’s your name, little soul?”

“Johnny Brodie.”

“Did the voices bother you, Johnny?” Routledge asked.

“Naw. I was too warm. Nothink like woices never bothers when you’re warm. Is them your stairs? Nobody never come up them stairs late afore.”

“Have you slept there often, Johnny?”

“Not wery,” the boy said nervously.

He had given Routledge a start for a moment. It was not past the White Mustache to have used a lad of this size, but, once used, the lad would never have spoken of “woices.” Besides, he had slept on the stairs before. Johnny was looking about the walls with covert appreciation. Guns, saddles, and soldier-pictures appealed to him. They were proper man-things.

“How long have you been in Bookstalls, and around here?”

“Allus.”

“But haven’t you any place to sleep?”

“Lots.” It wasn’t said with humorous intent. Johnny Brodie was struggling with his shoes.

Routledge regarded him with joy.

“Lor-gordy,” muttered Johnny, in an awed voice. “Wishermay die if you ain’t tipped over a bank in me boots!... Mine?”

Routledge nodded.

“Well, I’m chivvied! I ’ont be safe nowheres wit all this.”

“Johnny, are all your places to sleep like my stairs? I mean, haven’t you any regular place?”

The boy gave him a quick glance and decided that this was not the time for lies.

“Lor-gordy--them stairs ain’t bad--on’y wen it’s wery cold. Naw, I ain’t got nothink reg’lar.”

“There’s a bit of a room just your size, Johnny, in the back-hall,” the man said. “I’m going away again to-day, and these rooms will be locked up for a long time, but I’ll be back, I think. If I were to fix it with the good landlady for you to have that little room--and I’ll give you a regular army blanket like the soldiers have, to curl up in when it’s cold, and a little cot, and all the things you need--would you use it every night?”

“Lor’! Say, Mister, honest?”

He nodded. “Run along then, Johnny, and get a good breakfast, and I’ll have it arranged when you get back.”

Routledge came to an agreement with the woman of the house; carried from his own rooms blankets, soap, towels, pictures, a pair of military brushes, an unused pocket-knife, a package of candles, and many other little things to the wee box of a room in the hall, taking much pleasure in the outfitting.... He had not yet brought his own baggage from Charing Cross, and was glad now. London had become to him like a plague quarantine, a smothering menace. He would leave London to-day, and Noreen Cardinegh, without daring to see her again. His every movement, he realized, was watched. Even to take her hand for a moment would reflect evil upon her. The White Mustache, or one of his kind, would observe, and a lasting record would be made. He paced the floor swiftly, murdering the biggest thing in his life.

... He could go to Rawder. There was healing in that. Perhaps the old Sannyasi would take him for the _chela_ of his _chela_. He could hide in England’s India, which only a few of the secret service knew so well as he.... Could he put all the wars and illusions of matter away, drink of the ancient wisdom, wander beneficently until the end, with two holy men, in the midst of God’s humblest poor? Could he put behind him all that was supreme and lovely of his life this hour, sink it in the graveyard of his past with other dead desires?

It was just a rush of vague, vain thoughts. Had he been pure as the boy, twelve years ago, and wise as the man now, _and if he had never known Noreen Cardinegh_, possibly then the old Sannyasi might say, “Be the disciple of my disciple; and, free from all the illusions of the flesh, journey with us up into the silence of the goodly mountains.”...