“Noreen!” he called, at the front door in Cheer Street.
A servant told him that Noreen had been away for an hour.... With a startled look, the servant drew a chair close to the fire for the old man, poured a grog for him, set his smoking things to hand, and backed staring out of the room.... Hours afterward, Noreen found him there—the glass, the pipes, the daily papers untouched. His smile was like something which the wind had blown awry. His eyes were depleted of fire, of fury. Even the starry worship which her presence had reflected in them yesterday was dimmed—as were the mighty images of the wars in his brain.... He roused at the sight of her, started to speak of Routledge, halted, reflected, then drank.
“Hold a match to my pipe, child. It was your mother’s way. You’ve been gone the long while, deere.”
She obeyed. The majesty of pain was upon her face as she hurried away. Locked in her own room, long afterward, she heard him humming quaveringly an old Irish folk-song—lost from her brain a dozen years.
EIGHTH CHAPTER
THE SUPERLATIVE WOMAN EMPTIES HER HEART OF ITS TREASURES FOR THE OUTCAST, AND THEY PART AT CHARING CROSS
After taking the hand of Jerry Cardinegh at the stairs, Routledge returned to his room, smiling a trifle bitterly.
“That was certainly a fragile underpinning to rear a great lie upon,” he mused. “I couldn’t have made old Jerry swallow that a year ago.... But there’s good humor in the idea—the book of Routledge energized by the dynamos of British hate—a book of wars from a man who rather likes to promote the ranking rottenness of war.... But the name of Cardinegh cannot go down just yet with that of Colonel Hammond, and the Lotus Expedition; with treachery.... Living God, how that sweet girl haunts me!... I must put her away—far back among the cold, closed things. It isn’t fair to use her as a trellis for thought-vines like mine. She is just psychic enough to know, without words——”
He thought presently of what Rawder had told him about returning to India this year; also of Noreen’s amendment—that he was to go very quickly. How far off it had seemed yesterday!... Routledge was standing at the window. Though his active mind was filled with sadder, finer matters, a process of unconscious cerebration was alert for the White Mustache in the street below. This certain secret agent was not in sight, but there was not a single individual of the throng who might not be identified with that silent, fameless department—the men who had kept the secret of Shubar Khan in spite of Colonel Hammond’s regiment, which knew all.... London was running with its sordid morning business—grinding by in the gray morn and the rain.
“London,” he exclaimed softly, marvelling at the great thing which had befallen him, “the keyboard of the planet! How the Excellent Operator hungers to turn the full voltage on me now!”
Routledge was hard-hit, and made no pretenses to himself otherwise. He did not want to go back to India to-day. The thing he had managed to pray for—the Hate of London—was a crippling horror. It tore down the inner life of him. He felt already the encompassing loneliness of an expatriate; worse, he felt against him the gigantic massed soul of the English. It peopled the shadows of the room and the street and his brain, filling him with weakness and faltering. It was not that the idea of death hung to the flanks of his being. He could laugh at death with a sterling principle. Rather, it was that all that had bound him to life was dead—work and play and light. He was chained to a corpse—the hate of London. It was an infectious corrosion which broke his own spirit, as no physical dread had ever done; yet, stricken as he was, he felt himself torn in the counter-attraction of two great passions—between his sweetest woman and his bravest man.... A light rapping at his inner door startled him. It was the Bookstalls boy.