Routledge walked the full distance to his lodgings. Sometimes he smiled; sometimes he found himself striding forward with mad swiftness; then he would smile again, and pull up to the pace of a leisurely gentleman enjoying the night air. Entering his stairway in Bookstalls, he just avoided stumbling over a little figure curled up asleep. His heart went out to the street-waif. Here was one, at least, in London who had no hate nor insult for him. The impulse came to carry the little one up into the warmth. Without waking, the child was placed in a big chair before the grate-fire in the lodgings upstairs. Then Routledge sat down to meditate.
“This is a merry old trail—God knows I love it!” he muttered. “I have had what the good gray poet would call a night of ‘richness and variety.’... Perhaps I would be less happy did I know the breed of incubus which has fallen upon me.... I shall probably be turned out of here in the morning—perhaps be cast into stone and steel. It is strange, strange, that I, Routledge, whose business it is to tell the world the gossip of inner courts and the issue of open fields—that the point of my own fate should be buried in me before I get a look at it!... And that wondrous girl! Why did I not know her when the dust of the world had not fallen upon me; when I had not looked upon the world’s red wines—because they were red!... Routledge, old wanderer, how often has some woman arisen to save you from death—and now a woman arises to save you from your friends!”
A watcher would have thought, for a long time afterward, that Routledge dozed, with the stem of a nargileh between his teeth, except for the soft bubbling in the bottle and the tiny puffs of smoke at long intervals. The dawn came in, graduated from gloomy gray to the dead-white of a sunless morning.... The bell aroused him. He arose and opened the door. Jerry Cardinegh was on the stairs.
SIXTH CHAPTER
A GRIM AND TERRIBLE TRADITION IS TOUCHED UPON FOR THE RELATION IT BEARS TO THE TREACHERY IN INDIA
Routledge stepped back from the open door. He was afraid to extend his hand, lest it be repelled. When the old man rushed across the landing and gripped him, he felt a rather novel kindling of gladness.
“God, son!” Cardinegh muttered, sinking into a chair. “I thought you had slipped London. This is the third time I’ve been here the last ten hours.”
“It must have been three this morning when I came in, Jerry, and I left about nine last night.”
“I was here between nine and ten, and again at midnight.”
“Then you didn’t stay long at the Armory? You don’t mean to say that the boys gave you an ovation—of my kind? Miss Noreen must have told you.”
“Routledge,” the other said slowly, struggling to get a tight rein upon a herd of flying faculties, “they welcomed me in the old way, but the place was disordered. You had been gone only a moment or two. Noreen was waiting for me in the ladies’ room—ready for the street. She would have gone home alone had I not arrived just then. Hurrying me away, she told me how you had been received. After that, she insisted upon coming here with me, though I told her I wanted to talk with you alone. Give me some whiskey.”