“Did he tell you where?”
Rawder bowed his head. His fingers trembled upon his knee.
“In the Leper Valley,” he said.
“Must you still go to the Leper Valley?”
“It is there I am to meet that which you once called ‘The Dweller of the Threshold,’” Rawder said.
In the silence of a moment the men regarded each other. From the ancient Hindu came the majestic Name, intoned as from a sea-beaten cavern—deep, distant, portentous. The chela bowed in spirit, closing his eyes. Routledge was lost to the world for an instant—hung breathless in space, as if the world were flinging back from him like a receding wave.
“I was hoping that Sekar would not always lead you through the slums and hells of the world, Rawder,” Routledge said at last. “You caught full in the face all the perfected venoms of a New England country town, even to the persecutions of your church. You had to learn Boston under the flare of the torch. The grisly humor of American troops was your portion in the cavalry, and godless Minday your first mission. Hong Kong gave you her loathsome water-front to sweep, and you were all but murdered there, as in Minday. India has led you into the midst of her plagues and famines. You have toiled in the forefront of her misery. No brow has been too degraded by disease for your hand to cool; no death has been so triumphant that you would not bend to cover it. I thought at the last you might taste just a morsel, perhaps, of the beauty and sweetness of things, before you were lost to us beyond the Hills.... Instead, you go to the Leper Valley.”
Rawder regarded him with a grateful smile, in which there was wonderment that his friend should have remembered all this, but he spoke with gentle remonstrance, “My little services have been for the least of men because they needed them most. It did not happen that way; it was intended so. From the beginning, the only men who would listen to me were those humbled by great pain, or lost in great darkness. I do not understand even now why I should have earned the boon of a Master to abide with me. Yet he has come—and I am the happiest of men. The Leper Valley—that is but a halt on heaven’s highway.... I am the happiest of men, Routledge, my brother, yet the mightiest pain of my life has fallen upon me——”
Rawder went to the door and stood silent for several moments; then turned back to the light, his face calmer.
“I have loved you strongly, Routledge. You have been to me—the representative man. I have never known the touch of a woman’s hand, nor the eye of a woman—but for you I have felt all the great love of a man for a man. To-night, before you came, Sekar told me that only once again in this life I am to see you. It is to be after my trial in the Leper Valley. After that, I am to put away all love for you in the flesh, since it binds me to the Wheel.... This is harder for me than many Mindays, harder than service through interminable famines, harder than blows and revilings from multitudes of men, harder than any trial in the Leper Valley. To think that you must descend again into battle—you who know so well the awful sin of war—that I should have a fore-knowledge of you being maimed in the body, and to be unable to go to you—ah, nothing that I must face in the Leper Valley can haunt and torture the soul of your friend like this.”