“Jerry, Jerry,” whispered old Feeney, who was stricken, “did Ireland get the best of you at the last?”
Finacune nudged him angrily. “Jerry,” he exclaimed, “don’t go out with this stuff on your lips. We know you’re doing it for Routledge——”
The woman turned upon him, but did not speak.
“I did it for Ireland—but it failed!” Cardinegh answered. “These brown mongrels are fighting in Manchuria the Russians that England should have fought on the Indian border!... Eh, Gawd!—the dark has been long a-liftin’, deere—but it’s gone—and you know from me, without the papers!... Ah, Nory, child of my heart——” He was straining upward toward her face, as if he could not see her well. “... ’Tis your mother—’tis your mother—I’m off, darlin’——”
“The old toast,” Feeney muttered. “It came true—the toast we all stood to in Calcutta!”
The woman held but the ashes of a man in her arms, and they drew her away at last. They thought from the look of her face that she would fall, but she did not. Instead, she said with sudden swiftness:
“Here are the papers. He told me all, just before I called for you. I wanted you both to hear. It is true. You must cable to-night to the war-office in London—to the owners of your papers—to all those who know the story. Then the secret service must be told—lest they do Routledge-san further hurt. It must be done now. Tell the other men to cable before they go out. I will cable, too.... My father is guilty. We went back to Tyrone before the Bhurpal trouble—to the little town where he found my mother, in Tyrone. When he saw the British troops quartered on that starving, sunken little place—his mind gave way. He had the papers then, which he gave afterward to the Russian spies!”
All this the woman spoke before she wept.
SIXTEENTH CHAPTER
CERTAIN CIVILIANS SIT TIGHT WITH KUROKI, WHILE THE BLOOD-FLOWER PUTS FORTH HER BRIGHT LITTLE BUDS
They were in a troop-train at last, down the Tokaido, the old cedar-lined highway of the daimios,—Feeney, Finacune, Trollope, Bingley, other English and as many more Americans. The road was a brown streak of troop-laden trains off to embarkation ports. Japan was sending out her willing wealth of men to a brown and sullen land of such distances as would balk the short-sighted Japanese eye, so used to toy sizes in all things—toy trees, terraces, hills, and roads, whose ends are mostly in view. These men were off to fight now in the outer court of “the last and the largest empire, whose map is but half unrolled.”