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.