“They would murder me,” he muttered absently. “I must swing it more than ever alone—from the edges and alone.”
A woman’s hand touched the sleeve of the great frieze coat, and Routledge jerked about in a startled way. Men and wars were obliterated like dry leaves in a flame.... The launch whistled a last time.
TWELFTH CHAPTER
JOHNNY BRODIE OF BOOKSTALLS IS INVITED TO CHEER STREET, AND BOLTS, PERCEIVING A CONSPIRACY FORMED AGAINST HIM
Jerry Cardinegh experienced a very swift and remarkable transition. All the red-blooded hatred with which he had executed his coup in India was drained from the man sitting in London. His gigantic scheme accomplished, Cardinegh withered like a plant overturned in a furrow. Instead of facing the consequences with the same iron humor that he had faced the wars of his time—as he had planned for months, in the event of discovery—his great mad zeal had burned him out. He found himself old, run-down, pitiful, hungering for peace, when his young Messiah had come—praying for the imperial stimulus of English hatred in order to write a great book of the craft. In his weakness and in the powerful attraction of home and Noreen, Cardinegh had not analyzed the idea seized at random by Routledge. Later he was incapable. Always the young man had been strange in his ways and startling in his achievements. Jerry had sensed the crush of this thing which the other demanded for a stimulant. Vaguely, the old man pictured from time to time the “mystic of the wars” sunk and steeped somewhere in India, turning out stupendous narratives under the goad of secrecy and peril.
Even the swiftest physical changes are more or less imperceptible to the victim, whose body is gently numbed, and mind shadowed by a merciful cloud. The veteran felt his years, and talked much of their weight, but he alone was incapable of perceiving the extent of his ruin. And what desperate irony was there in the trick which Nature played upon him! His brain held fast to the exciting minutiæ of Plevna, and the elder services, but lost entirely his latest and crowning strategy to encompass British disaster. He had conceived and carried out a plan to force a Russo-Indian alliance against England—and had practically forgotten it. More than that, the fact that his work had been foiled by England’s counter-alliance with Japan seemed scarcely to touch his mind after his last talk with Routledge. Memory served him mightily from her treasures of old actions, but the record of his awful lone war and its dreams had been writ in water.
Cardinegh gradually grew more and more content as the silence from abroad endured and his own forces failed. Many Londoners came to pay him homage; and with a single glance, the visitors understood that it were wiser to talk of El Obeid and the Chinese Gordon rather than of the new century. So the old campaigner, busy with his callers, his pipes and Latakia mixtures, his whiskies, white and red, finally came to forget for weeks at a time that the honor of his days was not his own.
Only occasionally, between long periods of serenity, there would come a stirring tumult to his brain. At such times he was frightened and speechless. Nameless fears pulsated through him like the rise and fall of a tempest. Once when the old man thought he was alone, Noreen heard him mutter at the fireside: “He’s lost in India somewhere—working and brooding, the young devil,—but war will bring him out of his lair.”
He was as usual the next morning. Had Noreen not been altogether in the dark in regard to the specific charge against Routledge, she could have put this and other fragments together into a rough form of truth. The few who knew all, imparted nothing. To the rest, the name of Routledge was attached to a certain unspeakable atrocity, and was thus whispered wherever Englishmen roved and strived. The man’s mysterious figure had been in the London press for years. England makes much of her correspondents, and Routledge, the Review man, had aroused comment from Auckland to Winnipeg—familiar comment, like the record of a general. A curse had fallen upon the name now, and it was none the less heinous because the reason, so far as the multitude was concerned, was a historical mystery. Articles like Finacune’s from the field in Bhurpal had given Englishmen everywhere an idea of the personality of this arch-enemy; and the fact that Routledge was still alive, and miraculously unpunished, was a covert challenge to the British around the world.... Noreen despaired of learning the truth. The merest mention of the subject harrowed and discountenanced her father, and netted no revelation whatsoever.
Hers were stern, hard-checked days, full of heart-hunger. It seemed to her sometimes as if her individuality must perish in the midst of this interminable system of agonies. That last hour in the carriage had left her thrilling, burning. She wished she had said even more to show her loyalty.... She thought of Routledge out on God’s great windy seas—always alone, always on deck in storms that drove others below; she thought of him moving in the hidden slums of India, native of the natives, eternally shadowed from his kind—alone, wasted, accursed.... Once—it was the same night that he had slipped from a noose in the house at Madras—she woke with a scream to find that it was only a dream—that he was being murdered. Yet she was terrified for days, as only one can be terrified whose brain is fine enough to respond to the immaterial currents, molding and weaving behind all scenes and things.
Often it came to her, “This is my battle. I must fight it cleanly and without a cry. It is hard for him and hard for me—as much as we can bear. Only Routledge-san and I can know how hard—and God, who measures our strength. But I shall see him again. I shall see him again. I shall see him again.”