“And his master?”
“Yes.... It was far north of Sironcha, on the Penganga, and he had been hurrying, hurrying, for days. I was to leave him at Ahiri for the service in two days more. At nightfall, we came to the little village, with the Penganga sweeping about it like a rusty sickle. ‘It is the place—I know the place,’ he kept repeating.... Even I was not surprised, Noreen, to see the aged Sannyasi sitting in the doorway, his lips moving with the Ineffable Name.... And so our bravest man found the master he had earned; the old master who had come down from his lodge in the goodly mountains to take back the purest man-soul I have ever known.”
“Then you—then you will never see him again?” the woman cried.
“That is what is strange to me, Noreen. He said I should see him again in India this year. He said I would know the time and the place. They are journeying northward toward the hills on foot and very slowly. One might travel around the world, and, returning, find them only three or four latitudes northward from the place of parting. And so I left him very happy, learning Tibetan and Chinese, and the ancient wisdom, happily helping in the midst of the world’s direst poverty.”
“And you have no thought to return to India so far, Routledge-san?”
“No.”
The tea was perfect. The carrier came and took the trunks and boxes. They sat together in the stripped studio while the twilight hushed the distances. The street below lost its look of idling, and the figures moved quickly.... There were no lights. The man thrilled in the black hallway as the woman whispered an adieu to her little Paris place; then shut the door, and, feeling for his hand, led him to the stairs.
FOURTH CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE CONTEMPLATES THE PAST, IN THE MIDST OF A SHADOW FORECAST BY LARGE EVENTS
They dined at the Seville, took a night-train for Calais, and talked on the steamer’s deck in the Channel. It was a night of stars and cold gusts of wind. The lights of France died out behind. A ship appeared ahead like a faint, low-swinging star, loomed mightily, her great form pricked in light, and passed swiftly by, so near that they heard her crushing the seas, and the throb of her iron heart.... Noreen was saying:
“It’s so good not to have to travel alone. I have been so much alone. I seem to tell you things quite amazingly.... I must be intensely strange in some way, possibly psychic, because I dream so many things which remain vividly afterward.”