“We all understand that—even those who do not understand all that happened.”
“The tragedy is the same.... Ah, God, how I wish all the fruits might be mine—not Japan’s, not Russia’s!”
He started to speak, to uproot from her mind this crippling conception, but she raised her hand.
“You cannot make me see it differently, Mr. Talliaferro,” she said tensely. “I have had much time to think—to see it all! You are very good—all of you. One thing, I pray you will do for me.”
“You have but to speak it, Miss Cardinegh.”
“When you take the field—all of you, wherever you go—watch and listen for any word of Mr. Routledge.... He may be the last to hear that he is vindicated. Follow any clue to find him. Tell him the truth—tell him to come to me!”
Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur” accepted the mission, declaring that he would faithfully impress it upon the others with the second army, shortly to leave; as Feeney and Finacune certainly would do with the first. And so he left her, one of the coldest and dryest men out of London; and yet, just now, he carried himself under a stiff curb, lest he forget his war....
“And that’s the end of the man who lowered the fluids in the British barometer, like a typhoon in the China Sea,” he observed in solitude. “And the Japanese buried him in the Kameido, in cherry-blossom time—buried him for money—the man who opened the veins of their Empire!”
The work all done, Noreen Cardinegh met the deluge. The elements had been forming for three days. She had sensed them vaguely in sudden shivers of dread. Her soul was bared now to the primal terror, the psychic terror, of the outcast, against which seasoned valor quails.... By the window, she sat dry-eyed, in the midst of her father’s possessions! From the street, over the hotel-gardens, came to her ears the screaming of children. Japanese schoolboys were passing, a procession of them. They were playing soldier—marching very erect and proudly, with sticks for guns.
“My father did this!”... Upon such a sentence the whole dreadful structure was built. Thoughts of her childhood had their significance in the breaking of this horrid storm of war. Aye, and the little house in Tyrone before her coming! It was there that the black shadow, falling upon his country, crept into the brain of Jerry Cardinegh. The shadow grew, was identified with her earliest memories. Into her father’s mortal wound, inflicted by the passing of the sweetest woman, the shadow had sunk with all its Tartarean blackness. She saw it all now—the sinister, mysterious passion which had rivalled even his love for her. The wars had deepened, blackened it. The last visit to Ireland had turned it into hideous, tossing night. And this was the beating storm—babes with sticks for guns, companies of soldiers in the Fukiage, the wailing “Banzai Niphon” from Shimbashi station, where the regiments entrained for the southern ports of mobilization; and on the lower floor of the hotel, where still were gathering the war-experts from all the earth.... The strength ran from her limbs, and her heart cried out.