Japan, which she had loved, became like a haunted house to her; yet she could not hope to find Routledge without some word concerning him, and Tokyo was the natural base of her search operations. All the correspondents going out with the different armies were pledged to communicate with her any word they might receive regarding him. The correspondents, unsecured to any of the four armies, and destined to work from the outside—at Chifu, Newchwang, Chemulpo, Shanhaikwan or Shanghai—even these had promised her a cable-flash at the sight of Routledge. Through an agent in New York she learned that the name “Routledge” was not attached for work in the Orient to any newspaper on the Atlantic seaboard; still, by cable she subscribed for the chief American newspapers. Tokyo was her address.
She could not stay longer at the Imperial, which had become a sort of civilian war headquarters. All was war in its corridors. In the Minimasacuma-cho of the Shiba district, she took a small house, establishing herself in the native style, but she could not escape the agony. Japan was burning with war-lust from end to end; whetted of tooth, talon-fingered, blood-mad. Her fighting force, one of the most formidable masses that ever formed on the planet’s curve, was landing in Korea and Liaotung. What meant the battle of the Yalu to her; the tragedy of the Petropavlovsk, sunk off the tip of the fortress with Makaroff, the great Verestchagin, and five hundred officers and men? Not a distant calamity of foreign powers, but Tyrone—Shubar Khan—Cardinegh—madness—treachery. What meant the constant tension of Tokyo, singing in her ears like wires stretched tight—like the high-pitched, blood-hungry song of insects in the night? It meant the work of her own blood, her own accursed heritage.... She was called to the Imperial often for the mails, but she avoided the Englishmen there, and admitted none to the little house in Shiba. Always, when there were white men about, she fancied a whispering behind her; as, indeed, there was—the whispers that are incited by the passing of an exquisite woman.
In the early days following her father’s death, Noreen was besieged by men who appeared suddenly, quietly—men unknown in Japan—who demanded with seeming authority all the documents in her father’s effects which pertained to the treachery in India. These were agents of the great British secret service—men of mystery to all save those who threatened England’s inner wall. Noreen gave all that they asked, convinced them of her sincerity. They impressed upon her the needs of utter secrecy, and assured her that the name of Routledge was being purified to the farthest ends of the service. It was intimated, however, that this would require much time; as, indeed, it had to fix the crime upon him. These men worked but little with cables and mails.
So the wire-ends held her to Tokyo through Yalu and Nanshan to the middle of June. She was returning from the Imperial at early evening with a bundle of American newspapers. She knew by the hushed streets that another battle was in progress; and she felt with the people the dreadful tension of waiting, as she hurried swiftly along the wide, dirt-paved Shiba road. Tokyo was all awake and ominously still. A rickshaw-coolie darted out from a dark corner with his cart, and accosted her in a low, persistent way. He wheeled his cart in front of her, as he would not have dared with a native or a male foreigner—and all in a silent, alien fashion. She could not sit still to ride—pushed the rickshaw aside and sped on in the dusk. She was ill, her throat parched with waiting, her face white with waiting. The founts of her life were dry, her heart thralled with famine. Where was he for this new battle?... She passed knots of women in the streets. They talked softly as she passed and laughed at her, held up their boy-babes and laughed. She knew something of the language, and caught their whispering—the laughing, child-like women of Japan, in whom transient foreigners delight. They breathed world-conquest into the ears of their men-children; and were more horrible far in their whispering and laughing, to Noreen now, than tigresses yammering in the jungle-dark.
She faltered before the door of her house, afraid. The servants had not yet lighted the lamps, and within it was darker than the street.... There, among the densest shadows, he sat—there, by the covered easel in a low chair. He was smiling at her, a white and a weary smile. His long, thin hands were locked above his head; his lean limbs stretched out in tired fashion, the puttee leggings worn dull from the saddle fenders; his chest gaunt, the leather-belt pulled tight.
Noreen sank to her knees before the empty chair, her face, her arms, in the seat where the mist of a man had been!... How long she remained there she never knew; but it was some time before light when she was aroused by a far, faint roar beating toward her, across the city. The roar quickened, broke into a great, throbbing, coherent shout, and swept by like a hurricane, leaving a city awake and thrown wide open to exultation. The battle of Telissu had been won. Only defeats are mourned in Japan, not the slain of a victory. Dawn broke, and Noreen looked out on an altered Tokyo—loathsome to her as a gorging reptile.
“You are intensely psychic, Miss Cardinegh,” the English doctor said. “This ‘vision,’ as you call it, means nothing in itself—that is, so far as concerns the man you say you saw—but it signifies that you are on the verge of a nervous break-down. You must cease all worry and work, eat plenty of meat, and take long walks. It’s all nerves, just nerves.”
“No, it does not mean that your lover is dead,” said Asia, through the lips of the old Buddhist priest who had buried her father. “Such things happen this way. He may have been sleeping, dreaming of you, when the strength of your heart’s desire rose to the point of calling his form-body to your house for an instant. It might have happened before in the daylight, and you did not know—save that you felt restless possibly, and filled with strange anguish. Had there been light, you would not have seen him.”
“But,” she faltered, “I have heard at the moment of death—such things happen——”