Hai, Johnny Brodie of Bookstalls, there’s a sweet lady looking for you! Possibly you know it, scamp, and are tricking from doorway to doorway behind her carriage, and grinning because those of whom she inquires don’t know a little maverick like you.... You think she is out to do harm to the Man; and you won’t be caught with her elbows on your knees again, and her great gold-brown eyes boring into your hard head where the Man’s sacred secrets are!... Perhaps you will, after all, Johnny Brodie, but it will be after this narrative (when there are lights again in that room of mystery and enchantment across the hall), and the Man is back in Bookstalls, there being no further need of secrets.... The Hate of London will never change direction by reason of gossip of yours, Johnny Brodie, because “the best fellows in this world are those strong enough to hold their tongues at the right time.” You learned that lesson, Manikin. Did you learn the other so well—about it not being good to do a thing alone, which you wouldn’t do if the one you liked best in the world were watching? That’s a harder lesson.... No, it won’t be your revelation of that impregnable night which brings the outcast into love and laurels, but so badly have you frightened a poor old man that he is about to rush half around the world to avoid meeting you again—instead of dying in Cheer Street.... Your short-trousered part in these events ended with the slam of the Cheer Street door, Johnny Brodie—but God love you, little boy, and Johnny Brodies everywhere!...

The next morning, and thrice in the week following, Noreen Cardinegh drove to Bookstalls and threaded the unkempt way up and down in vain for the boy. She had failed to learn the name of the pastry-cook who employed him, and it would have been her last thought to seek him in the house of Routledge’s lodgings. Though a familiar in Bookstalls, he was an unfiled human document of the ancient highway; and always she returned to Cheer Street profitless.... It would be merciless to question her father; and yet he seemed to divine her anxiety to find the boy, and to fear her success as a visitation of death. It was hard for her to see him, the man whose courage had been a point of British comment for forty years, white, shaken, and exhausted from suspense when she returned from Bookstalls. Still, he dared not ask if she had seen the boy; and she did not confess that she had been searching.

Her only line on the mystery was to this effect: Routledge, though innocent, was blamed by England for some appalling, unmentionable crime, openly unpunishable. Her father and a few others knew the specific charge. Routledge had not known this at the Armory, but knew it the morning afterward. Meanwhile, her father and Johnny Brodie had been with him. All the boy’s actions denoted that he knew something, possibly a great deal in a fragmentary way, which she might be able to piece together into an illumination. He must have known something, since he apparently had been pledged to silence. At all events, he was lost.

It must be understood that Noreen’s conviction of her father’s integrity had never been shaken. It was more than a family faith. His life had been as a record accessible to all men. It did not even occur to her to build a system of reasoning upon the hypothesis of any guilt of his, even though much was strange and foreboding. She had heard her father mutter that a war would bring Routledge out of his lair. She could not forget that her father had come back from India on the day of the Reception, all consumed and brain-numbed from strain. For a moment in her arms he had broken completely—acting like one who was to be dragged from her to the gallows. The next morning, after his return to Cheer Street from Routledge, the tension was gone.

Comparative peace had endured, with only an occasional restless interval, until the sight of the Bookstalls boy had filled him with inexplicable dread. His condition when she returned from her fourth journey to Bookstalls was such that she determined not to go again. One of two results was inevitable if this devouring tension was not speedily relaxed—utter insanity or swift death. One more circumstance in this connection intensified the mystery, even though it gave her gladness—her father’s toast to the outcast, the toast that was drunk alone. He was without that poisonous personal hatred which the others manifested toward Routledge. All these thoughts had worn grooves in her mind from much passing, but they did not evolve her father’s shame.

Throughout the week, the correspondents had dropped in by twos and threes to bid them good-by. Negotiations were at a dead-lock, and the London dailies wanted their men on the spot for eventualities. Most of the men were going west to the Far East—the twenty-five day route, via America. Some one, however, mentioned Suez, and the name was on Jerry Cardinegh’s lips for an entire afternoon. At dinner his idea broke into words:

“Come, deere, we must pack to-night. We’re off to-morrow for Japan on the P. & O. liner, Carthusian. We can smell the ruction in Japan—and it’s a good place to live. London—aye, God, the old town is murdering me!”

She had thought of it many times, but until last week her father had been happy in Cheer Street, entirely immune to the war ferment. Noreen understood what had turned London into an iron pressure—one little boy, lost in din and fog and multitudes. She was glad to go away.

The first few days at sea helped her father, but the improvement did not last. They travelled very leisurely, sometimes stopping over a ship in different ports. It was with a quickened heart that the woman saw the Indian coast again after several years. Routledge was intricately identified with the India of her mind now, and she knew that somewhere in India he was living out his exile. Always in those days and nights of watching and labor with the sleepless old man who was leaving her hourly, with the accelerated speed of a river that nears its falls, she was thrilled with the hope that Bombay or Madras or Calcutta would give her some living word of the outcast. She hardly hoped to see Routledge; but with a triple hunger she yearned to hear that he lived, even to hear his name uttered by some one in whom the mystery had inspired hatred.... But the Indian ports furnished nothing concerning Routledge. They revived, however (and in her maturity), the half-formed impressions of her girlhood on the Anglo-Indians and their life. To observe and despise certain aspects of the ruling people was as certain a heritage from her father as was that fairer evolution of the spirit with which she had been blest by some elder lineage.

The English at Home, Noreen had ever regarded with a mental reservation, or two; and with those telling, divining eyes which are not rarely filled with Irish light. She had repressed and even tried to root out an instinctive animus for certain monuments and institutions large in British life; she tried constantly to shut her eyes to that quarry of self-infatuation, perdition deep, from which these monuments and institutions were carved. She came to triumph over her critical impulses at home, partly because her incisive barbs were dulled by constant contact and repetition—but India again after the few vital years of growth!... Londoners might forget themselves for an hour or two a day on the Thames. They allowed it to be taken for granted an hour or two a day at Home that they were English. In India, they were more English than the English.

It must not be forgotten that Noreen Cardinegh’s mind was the arena of interminable rebellion against the banishment of Routledge. All Englishmen of rank arrayed themselves in contrast to him. She knew that this was wrong, useless; that the energy which spent itself in contrasting to the disfavor of the English, reacted with a hurt to her own finest nature, but she could not help it now. As a daughter of Jerry Cardinegh, she could not be free from something of his passion; moreover, body and brain, she was spent in his service. There were vast areas of unhealed tissue within her—the agony of a daughter of strong devotion, and the agony of a woman whose romance is mined and countermined. So it was a weary and supersensitive nature that caught its new series of impressions of Anglo-Indian life—the life of pegs and chits; men moving in a circle like those lost in the woods; men speaking of their livers as of members of the family; hot, heavy dinners; the religious, life-and-death ceremony of eating and drinking; the arrogant assumption of superiority over the native, and each separate foreigner a cyst of the great British drain! Such were the men of the Indian ports to whom the name of Cosmo Routledge was as black magic. It all came back to her like an ugly dream, and it is not strange that she returned speedily to her ships to cleanse herself from her thoughts in the prophylactic sea-winds.

A day north out of Hong Kong on one of the Empress steamers, Noreen drew her chair to a sheltered place on the promenade to rest an hour. The afternoon was keen and renovating after the slow days of heat in the Indian Ocean. Two Americans were standing at a little distance, and one was speaking with animation. A sentence of his reached the woman’s ears from time to time, between boisterous rushes of wind.... “One of the best talkers I ever heard in my life.”... “No personal hate about it.”... “Literally quartered England and fed her to the pigs.”... “No, wouldn’t give me his name, but I learned it.”... “When I mentioned his name afterward to an Englishman, he turned pale, as if I had turned loose the devil.”... “Speaking of famine conditions, this Routledge——”

Mr. Jasper, whose Indian studies had been put aside for the time by the pressing call of human interest to Tokyo, turned quickly just now at the touch of a hand upon his sleeve, and found a woman whose face he is still remembering—even as he enjoys recalling all the words and phrases of the mysterious stranger of Rydamphur.

“Forgive me, sir,” Noreen panted, “but I could not help overhearing something you said. You—you mentioned a name that is very dear to me—Routledge!”

“I did—yes. A man I met in Rydamphur, of the Central Provinces of India. Excuse me, did you say he was dear to you?”

“Yes.”

“That is so queer—a rather pleasant surprise for me. Others have felt differently about Routledge. Are you sure you mean this man—a very tall fellow of thirty-three or thirty-four, with a thin, dark, striking face, and a striking way of putting things in words?”

“Yes,” she said breathlessly.

Jasper offered his card.

“I am Miss Cardinegh, Mr. Jasper. Won’t you please tell me all that you can about him. It means so much to me.... Shall we go into the reading-room?”

Jasper assented, begging leave from his companion.... They sat down together, and the American restored Rydamphur from memory. Since he had thought much of his day and night in that little centre of suffering, he built the picture rather well. He described the manner of Routledge, and related a few of the famine facts as he had drawn them in that evening-hour at the Rest House.

“As I look back on it all, there is a queer atmosphere about the whole affair,” said Jasper. “Such a place I never have known, as that little dining-room in Rydamphur. Mr. Routledge seemed to grasp at once that my interest was sincere. His mind was filled with the pith of things I wanted to learn. No Englishman seemed to be able to talk impersonally on the famine.... I’ll never forget the baking night in that house. The punkahs jerked every moment or so, as if the coolie had stopped to scratch himself. There was a cat-footed servant hanging about, and the lamps were turned low—as if a bright flame could not live in that burned air.”

Mr. Jasper took evident pleasure in the intensity of interest his narrative inspired. “But first I must tell you, Miss Cardinegh,” he went on, “that just as I entered the town in the afternoon, I passed a little hut with an open door. The breath that came out to me, I’ll not attempt to describe: only to say that there was in it more than realism. I had come far to see a real famine, and this was my first lesson. A few steps on from the hut, I turned to see a white man coming out. It was not Mr. Routledge, but a smaller man, dressed in native garb. I have thought much of his face. It had a look as if all the tragedies that a man can know had beaten upon it; and yet it was so strong and so calm.... It was all like a dream to me. Then this wonderful talk with Mr. Routledge at dinner. Afterward, I asked his name, but he withheld it laughingly—in such a way that I took no offense—only wondered at it.”

“But you learned his name——”

“Yes, I will tell you. That night after he left me, I went to my room and thought a long time on the things he had said. I remember one of his sayings impressed me greatly—that we of the occident had learned to suffer only through our excesses—but India through her famines. He intimated that the latter process is better for the soul.... It was too hot to think of sleep, so I went out to walk in that still, stricken place. At the far end of the street, I saw a candle-light and heard the voice of a white man. And that voice I shall never forget—so low was it, so thrilling and gentle. I remember the words—they were printed on some inner wall of my brain. This is what the voice said:

“‘... Night and morning, I shall send you my blessing, Routledge, my brother. Morning and evening, until we meet again in the Leper Valley, you shall know that there is a heart that longs for the good of your life and your soul. Good-by.’... I hurried back, lest it be thought that I was eavesdropping. The man who spoke was the white man in native garb who had emerged in the afternoon from that hut of unburied dead. The man whom he addressed as ‘Routledge’—and thus I learned his name—was the one who had talked to me so brilliantly at dinner. A third sat in the candle-light—a very aged Hindu.... It is all very memorable to me, Miss Cardinegh.”

Again and again he told the story, or parts of it, to the woman; also of the doings of Routledge the next morning, before the English came. Noreen thanked him brokenly at last and hurried back to her father’s state-room. Mr. Jasper saw very little of the lady during the rest of the voyage, and lost her entirely at Shanghai, where in stopping over he is left behind the movement of the present narrative—a worthy, growing American who will have much to tell his sister of Madras and the interior, in spite of missing the illustrious Annie Besant, pronounced “Bessant” for esoteric reasons.

The incident was like oxygen to the tired woman. Nearing Shanghai, the Empress steamer nosed the winter zone, and Jerry Cardinegh was not well enough to go ashore. Noreen had shopping to do, and took the afternoon launch up the river for an hour in the city. Snow was falling. On the Bund, Noreen encountered Finacune, who had come down from Tokyo to get a glance at affairs from the outside. He declared that little or nothing was to be learned in the Japanese capital. Already the nation was constructing an impenetrable atmosphere about her great war. Finacune was going back on the Empress. As the time was short, they parted to attend their several errands, planning to meet at the launch later.

With her parcels, Noreen hurried back from the shops to the Bund in the winter twilight. Finacune, who had not seen her, was fifty feet ahead, also making for the water-front. She saw him stop short, stare for an instant at the profile of a huge, gaunt figure—in the great frieze coat! It was then that the mighty leap of her heart forced a cry from her throat.... Routledge, staring out over the darkening river, started at her voice and the touch of her hand. For a moment he pressed his fingers against his eyes as if trying to shut out some haunt from his brain. Then he, spoke slowly:

“I did not think that there were substances fine enough in the world to make a woman so beautiful——”

“Routledge-san! Oh, God, there is only a moment or two!”

“I should not have been here,” he began vaguely. “Some one may see you talking with me.”

“Don’t speak of that!... Oh, words are such puny things now! I thought we understood each other about that. Tell me, are you ill? You look——”

“No, not ill, Noreen. I shall be tiptop when I get up yonder into the field.... You startled me. I think I was in a kind of dream about you, and then you——” The old dread returned to his mind. He wondered if the man who had passed had been Finacune. “Are you alone? I wouldn’t have anybody see you talking to me.”

All that was in her heart was called forth by the spectacle of her giant’s pallor and seeming weakness. Proudly she put all this into words:

“I would not care if the whole world saw me with you. It is the same with me—as I told you on the way to Charing Cross! What you may think—does not make me afraid. You have done no wrong. I want to be with you—but the time is not yet come. It is dreadful. Why do you forget all that we told each other—all that I told you?”

“I have not forgotten,” he said huskily. “The scars of that hour in the carriage—leaving you that hour—would not suffer me to forget, but I should not speak this way. I wrong you speaking this way. I am only a world-tramp between wars.... And this war I must watch alone—from the edge where the others do not go. God, what a coward I should be—to chance your happiness——”

The launch whistled—a tearing in her brain. The call to her father was instant and inexorable.... But she clung to Routledge—drew him to the very edge of the stone-pier, blind to the glances of men and women who brushed by.

“Quick, tell me of Jerry!” he said. “Is he out for the war?”

“My father is dying a slow death out yonder on the ship. I must go to him. Already he is dead to wars and friends—all but dead to me!” She added imperiously, “When my work is finished with him, I shall keep my promise, Routledge-san. I shall come to you!”

“No—I’m going where you could not follow——”

“I shall find you!”

“But I have nothing between wars—no British press now, Noreen—only a begging-bowl in India. Why, my name is a whispered hate!... Just a begging-bowl in India, Noreen—and your sweet faith in me.”

She was splendid in the ardor of her answer:

“That begging-bowl in India—I shall carry and share with you! I shall take for mine—that name of whispered hate!... Routledge-san, you have done no wrong—but I should love you, if you led the armies of the world—to burn London!”

He helped her aboard, as the bow was putting out into the river. “In a time like this there are not big enough words for you, Noreen Cardinegh.”

“Oh, Routledge-san,—until I come, take care of your life for me!” she called.... Then, fearless, full-voiced, she added, standing in the snowy dusk: “And when I come—I shall take care of your life for you—even in the Leper Valley!”

He watched her through the big, slow-falling flakes, until the launch disappeared behind the white stern of an American gunboat.