Chapter VIII: Part 8

The chief of his troubles was that Liaoyang still held. He had always laughed at the Russians, and looked forward to the time when he should watch the British beat them back forever from India. The valor of the stolid, ox-like holding angered him now. Suppose Liaoyang should not be taken! It would spoil his story and hold him in the field longer than he cared to stay. He had but scant provisions for two days. He planned to be off for the free cable to-morrow night.

“It’s going to rain,” he gasped, as he let himself down at nightfall into his ravine. He heard the nicker of the horse below. It did not come to him with any spirit of welcome, for Bingley was sufficient unto himself, but with the thought that he must keep the beast alive for the race to the cable after the battle.

“Yes, it’s going to rain,” he repeated. “You can count on rain after artillery like to-day.... Living God! I thought I knew war before, but it was all sparrow-squabbling until to-day!”

He found his saddle-bags safely in the _cache_ where he had left them--this with a gulp of joy, for the little food he had was in them. Crackers, sardines, a drink of brandy that set his empty organism to drumming like a partridge. It also whetted his appetite to a paring edge, but he spared his ration and smoked his hunger away. Then in the last drab of day, and in the rain, he cut grasses and branches, piling them within the reach of his horse. A stream of water began to trickle presently down the rocks when the shower broke. Bingley drank deeply, and caught many _ponchos_ full afterward for his mount. Later he fell asleep, shivering, and dreamed that the devil was lashing the world’s people--a nation at a time--into pits of incandescence. The savagery of the dream aroused him, and he became conscious of a strangeness in his ears. It was the _silence_, and it pained like rarefied air. Wet, stiffened, deathly cold, he fell asleep again.

The next day, the thirty-first, and the worst of the battle, Bingley curved about Oku’s rear to the railroad which marked for him a short cut to the outer world. Another, that day, watched Oku closely as he forced the Russian right wing to face the Japanese, but Bingley, even from a distance, was charged and maddened by the dynamics of the action....

Late in the afternoon, a little to the west of the railway, he stopped to finish his food and gather forage for his horse, when over the crest of a low hill appeared a tall human figure. The Japanese put no such giants in the field, and Bingley was startled by a certain familiarity of movement.

The man approached, a white man. Chill, weakness, and hatred welled suddenly in Bingley’s veins. He was not alone on the road to a free cable. The man he feared most in the world was entered in the race with him--the man he had seen last at the Army and Navy reception, and roughed and insulted, nearly three years before.

Routledge smiled, but spoke no word. Bingley regarded the strong, strange profile, haggard, darkened as a storm arena. He saddled savagely and rode after the other. It was fifty-five miles to Wangcheng, where he meant to catch the _Chinese Eastern_ for Shanhaikwan to-morrow morning--fifty-five miles in the dark, over rain-softened roads.

“Hell! he can’t make it on foot,” Bingley muttered. “I’ll beat him to the train.”

And yet he was angered and irritated with the reflection that the man ahead had never yet been beaten.

NINETEENTH CHAPTER

NOREEN CARDINEGH, ENTERING A JAPANESE HOUSE AT EVENTIDE, IS CONFRONTED BY THE VISIBLE THOUGHT-FORM OF HER LOVER

Noreen Cardinegh buried her father alone. At least, those besides herself who took any part in the last service for the famous correspondent were only Japanese hired for the manual labor. To the English who were still at the hotel, eager to assist the woman, and charged to do so by Feeney, Finacune, and Trollope before they left, the morning was sensational. In spite of the fact that scarcely any one had been admitted to the Cardinegh room for the past two days, Talliaferro and others had arranged for the funeral. They were abroad at nine o’clock in the morning, and found the formality over.... The Japanese clerk told them all. At her request, he had made arrangements with a Tokyo director of such affairs. The body had been taken out at dawn. Miss Cardinegh had followed in her rickshaw. A place had been secured in the Kameido gardens--very beautiful now in the cloud of cherry blossoms. She had preferred a Buddhist to a Shinto priest; refusing the services of an American or English missionary. The clerk explained that he was permitted to tell these things now.... Possibly Miss Cardinegh would see one or two of her friends at this time.... Yes, she was in her room.

* * * * *

“Come,” she said in a low trailing tone, in response to Talliaferro’s knock.

Noreen was sitting by the window. The big room had been put in order. The morning was very still. The woman was dry-eyed, but white as a flower. She held out her hand to Talliaferro and tried to smile.... Strangely, he thought of her that moment as one of the queens of the elder drama--a queen of stirring destiny, whose personal history was all interpenetrated with national life, and whom some pretender had caused to be imprisoned in a tower. This was like Talliaferro.

“We were all ready and so eager to help you, Miss Cardinegh,” he began. “You know, some of the older of the British correspondents have dared to feel a proprietary interest in all that concerns you. Why did you disappoint us so?”

“I did not want anything done for him--that would be done on my account,” she said slowly. “It was mine to do--as his heritage is mine. I only ask you to think--not that anything can extenuate--but I want you to think that it was not my father, but his madness.”

“We all understand that--even those who do not understand _all_ that happened.”

“The tragedy is the same.... Ah, God, how I wish all the fruits might be mine--not Japan’s, not Russia’s!”

He started to speak, to uproot from her mind this crippling conception, but she raised her hand.

“You cannot make me see it differently, Mr. Talliaferro,” she said tensely. “I have had much time to think--to see it all! You are very good--all of you. One thing, I pray you will do for me.”

“You have but to speak it, Miss Cardinegh.”

“When you take the field--all of you, wherever you go--watch and listen for any word of Mr. Routledge.... He may be the last to hear that he is vindicated. Follow any clue to find him. Tell him the truth--tell him to come to me!”

Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur” accepted the mission, declaring that he would faithfully impress it upon the others with the second army, shortly to leave; as Feeney and Finacune certainly would do with the first. And so he left her, one of the coldest and dryest men out of London; and yet, just now, he carried himself under a stiff curb, lest he forget his war....

“And that’s the end of the man who lowered the fluids in the British barometer, like a typhoon in the China Sea,” he observed in solitude. “And the Japanese buried him in the Kameido, in cherry-blossom time--buried him for money--the man who opened the veins of their Empire!”

The work all done, Noreen Cardinegh met the deluge. The elements had been forming for three days. She had sensed them vaguely in sudden shivers of dread. Her soul was bared now to the primal terror, the psychic terror, of the outcast, against which seasoned valor quails.... By the window, she sat dry-eyed, in the midst of her father’s possessions! From the street, over the hotel-gardens, came to her ears the screaming of children. Japanese schoolboys were passing, a procession of them. They were playing soldier--marching very erect and proudly, with sticks for guns.

“My father did this!”... Upon such a sentence the whole dreadful structure was built. Thoughts of her childhood had their significance in the breaking of this horrid storm of war. Aye, and the little house in Tyrone before her coming! It was there that the black shadow, falling upon his country, crept into the brain of Jerry Cardinegh. The shadow grew, was identified with her earliest memories. Into her father’s mortal wound, inflicted by the passing of the sweetest woman, the shadow had sunk with all its Tartarean blackness. She saw it all now--the sinister, mysterious passion which had rivalled even his love for her. The wars had deepened, blackened it. The last visit to Ireland had turned it into hideous, tossing night. And this was the beating storm--babes with sticks for guns, companies of soldiers in the _Fukiage_, the wailing “Banzai Niphon” from Shimbashi station, where the regiments entrained for the southern ports of mobilization; and on the lower floor of the hotel, where still were gathering the war-experts from all the earth.... The strength ran from her limbs, and her heart cried out.

Japan, which she had loved, became like a haunted house to her; yet she could not hope to find Routledge without some word concerning him, and Tokyo was the natural base of her search operations. All the correspondents going out with the different armies were pledged to communicate with her any word they might receive regarding him. The correspondents, unsecured to any of the four armies, and destined to work from the outside--at Chifu, Newchwang, Chemulpo, Shanhaikwan or Shanghai--even these had promised her a cable-flash at the sight of Routledge. Through an agent in New York she learned that the name “Routledge” was not attached for work in the Orient to any newspaper on the Atlantic seaboard; still, by cable she subscribed for the chief American newspapers. Tokyo was her address.

She could not stay longer at the Imperial, which had become a sort of civilian war headquarters. All was war in its corridors. In the _Minimasacuma-cho_ of the _Shiba_ district, she took a small house, establishing herself in the native style, but she could not escape the agony. Japan was burning with war-lust from end to end; whetted of tooth, talon-fingered, blood-mad. Her fighting force, one of the most formidable masses that ever formed on the planet’s curve, was landing in Korea and Liaotung. What meant the battle of the Yalu to her; the tragedy of the _Petropavlovsk_, sunk off the tip of the fortress with Makaroff, the great Verestchagin, and five hundred officers and men? Not a distant calamity of foreign powers, but _Tyrone_--_Shubar Khan_--_Cardinegh_--_madness_--_treachery_. What meant the constant tension of Tokyo, singing in her ears like wires stretched tight--like the high-pitched, blood-hungry song of insects in the night? It meant the work of her own blood, her own accursed heritage.... She was called to the Imperial often for the mails, but she avoided the Englishmen there, and admitted none to the little house in Shiba. Always, when there were white men about, she fancied a whispering behind her; as, indeed, there was--the whispers that are incited by the passing of an exquisite woman.

In the early days following her father’s death, Noreen was besieged by men who appeared suddenly, quietly--men unknown in Japan--who demanded with seeming authority all the documents in her father’s effects which pertained to the treachery in India. These were agents of the great British secret service--men of mystery to all save those who threatened England’s inner wall. Noreen gave all that they asked, convinced them of her sincerity. They impressed upon her the needs of utter secrecy, and assured her that the name of Routledge was being purified to the farthest ends of the service. It was intimated, however, that this would require much time; as, indeed, it had to fix the crime upon him. These men worked but little with cables and mails.

So the wire-ends held her to Tokyo through Yalu and Nanshan to the middle of June. She was returning from the Imperial at early evening with a bundle of American newspapers. She knew by the hushed streets that another battle was in progress; and she felt with the people the dreadful tension of waiting, as she hurried swiftly along the wide, dirt-paved Shiba road. Tokyo was all awake and ominously still. A rickshaw-coolie darted out from a dark corner with his cart, and accosted her in a low, persistent way. He wheeled his cart in front of her, as he would not have dared with a native or a male foreigner--and all in a silent, alien fashion. She could not sit still to ride--pushed the rickshaw aside and sped on in the dusk. She was ill, her throat parched with waiting, her face white with waiting. The founts of her life were dry, her heart thralled with famine. Where was _he_ for this new battle?... She passed knots of women in the streets. They talked softly as she passed and laughed at her, held up their boy-babes and laughed. She knew something of the language, and caught their whispering--the laughing, child-like women of Japan, in whom transient foreigners delight. They breathed world-conquest into the ears of their men-children; and were more horrible far in their whispering and laughing, to Noreen now, than tigresses yammering in the jungle-dark.

She faltered before the door of her house, afraid. The servants had not yet lighted the lamps, and within it was darker than the street.... There, among the densest shadows, _he_ sat--there, by the covered easel in a low chair. He was smiling at her, a white and a weary smile. His long, thin hands were locked above his head; his lean limbs stretched out in tired fashion, the puttee leggings worn dull from the saddle fenders; his chest gaunt, the leather-belt pulled tight.

Noreen sank to her knees before the empty chair, her face, her arms, in the seat where the mist of a man had been!... How long she remained there she never knew; but it was some time before light when she was aroused by a far, faint roar beating toward her, across the city. The roar quickened, broke into a great, throbbing, coherent shout, and swept by like a hurricane, leaving a city awake and thrown wide open to exultation. The battle of Telissu had been won. Only defeats are mourned in Japan, not the slain of a victory. Dawn broke, and Noreen looked out on an altered Tokyo--loathsome to her as a gorging reptile.

* * * * *

“You are intensely psychic, Miss Cardinegh,” the English doctor said. “This ‘vision,’ as you call it, means nothing in itself--that is, so far as concerns the man you say you saw--but it signifies that you are on the verge of a nervous break-down. You must cease all worry and work, eat plenty of meat, and take long walks. It’s all nerves, just nerves.”

“No, it does not mean that your lover is dead,” said Asia, through the lips of the old Buddhist priest who had buried her father. “Such things happen this way. He may have been sleeping, dreaming of you, when the strength of your heart’s desire rose to the point of calling his form-body to your house for an instant. It might have happened before in the daylight, and you did not know--save that you felt restless possibly, and filled with strange anguish. Had there been light, you would not have seen him.”

“But,” she faltered, “I have heard at the moment of death--such things happen----”

“Yes, but he did not need to die to be called to you.”

Yet she was deathly afraid. It had been the same after the night of her dream in Cheer Street--the night that Routledge had slipped from a noose in Madras. If Noreen had known that!... It is well that she did not, for she could have borne but little more.

Further weeks ground by. Only in the sense that she did not die, Noreen lived, moving about her little house, in daylight and lamp-light, without words, but with many fears. She tried to paint a little in those wonderful summer days--days of flashing light, and nights all lit with divinity--but between her eyes and the canvas, films of memory forever swung: Routledge-san in Cheer Street; in the golden stillness of the Seville; the little Paris studio; in the carriage from Bookstalls to Charing Cross; in the snowy twilight on the Bund in Shanghai--yes, and the mist of the man here by the easel!... Always he was with her, in her heart and in her mind.

Not a word concerning Routledge, from the least or greatest of the men who had promised to watch for him! Often it came to her now that he had either allied himself with the Russians or avoided the war entirely. Could it be that he had already followed the prophecy which Mr. Jasper had repeated for her, and gone to join Rawder a last time in the Leper Valley?... No one in Japan had ever heard of the Leper Valley.

There was little mercy in the thought of him being with the Russians; and yet such a service might have appealed to a man who desired to remain apart from the English. If he were in Liaoyang or Mukden, there was no hope of reaching him, until winter closed the campaign, at least. Only a few hundred miles away, as the crow flies, and yet Mukden and Liaoyang could be approached only from around the world. The valley between two armies is impassable, indeed--unwired, untracked, and watched so that a beetle cannot cross unseen.... The general receives a dispatch at dawn containing the probable movements of the enemy for this day. One of his spies in the hostile camp which faces him, less than two miles away, has secured the information and sent it in--not across the impassable valley, but around the world.... If Routledge had known that the curse had been lifted from him, would he not have rushed back to her? It seemed so, but with the Russians, he would have been last to learn what had befallen.

Just once--and it marked the blackest hour of that black summer in Japan--the thought flooded upon her that Routledge knew, but purposely remained apart; that he was big enough to make the great sacrifice for her, but not to return to the woman whose heritage, in turn, was the Hate of London. That hour became a life-long memory, even though the thought was whipped and shamed and beaten away.

It was late in July when certain sentences in an American newspaper rose with a thrilling welcome to her eyes. There was an intimate familiarity, even in the heading, which he might not have written, but which reflected the movement and color of his work. It was in the _World-News_ of New York, and signed “A. V. Weed.”... A rather long feature cable dated at Chifu shortly after the battle of Nanshan. A number of Russian prisoners had been taken by the Japanese, and with them was a certain Major Volbars, said to be the premier swordsman of the Russian Empire. The Japanese heard of his fame; and, as it appears, became at once eager to learn if Russian civilization produced sword-arms equal to those of her own Samurai. The prisoner was asked to meet one Watanabe, a young infantry captain, and of that meeting the _World-News_ published the following:

... Here was armistice, the nucleus of which was combat. There was
a smile upon the face of Watanabe, a snarling smile, for his lips
were drawn back, showing irregular teeth, glistening white. His
low brow was wrinkled and his close-cropped, bristling hair looked
dead-black in the vivid noon. The hilt of his slim blade was polished
like lacquer from the nimble hands of his Samurai fathers. This was
Watanabe of Satsuma, whose wrist was a dynamo and whose thrusts were
sparks. The devil looked out from his fighting-face.

Volbars compelled admiration--a conscienceless man, from his eyes,
but courageous. He was small, heavy-shouldered, and quick of
movement, with nervous eyes and hands. His left cheek was slashed
with many scars, and his head inclined slightly to the right, through
a certain muscular contraction of the neck or shoulder. This master
of the archaic art had the love of his soldiers.

“In the name of God, let him take the attack, Major!” Volbars’ second
whispered. “His style may disconcert you.”

The Russian waved the man away, and faced the Japanese swordsman.
His head seemed to lie upon his right shoulder, and his cruel,
sun-darkened face shone with joy. His thick, gleaming white arm
was bare. His blade, which had opened the veins of a half-hundred
Europeans, screamed like a witch as the master-hand tried it in thin
air.

The weapons touched. The styles of the antagonists were different,
but genius met genius on its own high ground. Each blade was a quiver
of arrows, each instant of survival due to devilish cunning or the
grace of God. In spite of his warning, Volbars took the attack and
forced it tigerishly. Some demon purpose was in his brain, for he
shot his volleys high. A marvelous minute passed, and a fountain of
crimson welled from Watanabe, where his neck and shoulder met. The
heavy breathing of the Russian was heard now back among his fellow
prisoners. The Japanese, sheeted with blood from his wound, defended
himself silently. He was younger, lighter, superbly conditioned.

The face of Volbars changed hideously. Sweat ran into his eyes, where
the desperation of fatigue was plain. His lips were stiff white
cords. Patches of grayish white shone in his cheeks and temples....
For a second his shoulders lifted; then an exultant gasp was heard
from his dry throat.

That which had been the left eye in the face of Watanabe burst like
a bubble and ran down. Yet not for the fraction of a second did the
Japanese lose his guard. Though a window of his throne-room was
broken, the kingdom of his courage still endured. The Russian second
heard his man gasp, “I’m spent. I can’t kill him!”

The grin upon the awful face of the One-eyed became more tense. He
seized the aggressive, and the Japanese lines greeted the change
with a high-strung, ripping shout. Watanabe bored in, stabbing like
a viper, his head twisted to spare his dark side. Volbars’ limbs
were stricken of power. He saw the end, as he was backed toward the
prisoners. A tuft of grass unsteadied him for a second--and the
Japanese lightning struck.

The sword of the Russian quivered to the earth and the master fell
upon it, his face against the ground, his naked sword-arm shaking,
the hand groping blindly for the faithless hilt. Watanabe bowed to
the prisoners, and walked unassisted back to his own roaring lines.
His seconds followed closely, one of them wiping the sword of the
Samurai with a wisp of grass.... It appears that Volbars had the
audacity to attempt to blind his opponent before killing him. It was
like the battle of the Yalu. Volbars, as did General Zassulitch,
looked too lightly on the foe....

“A. V. Weed”--what blessings fell upon the name that moment!... He was not with the Russians! Not in the Leper Valley! A cable to the _World-News_ that night brought a reply the next day, to the effect that “A. V. Weed” had never been in touch with the office; that he was the freest of free lances, and brought his messages from time to time to one of the free cables outside the war-zone.... The free cable nearest to Liaoyang--already granted to be the next scene of conflict--was at Shanhaikwan, at the end of the Great Wall. Noreen arranged for mail and dispatches to follow her, and went down the Tokaido, overtaking at Nagasaki a ship which had sailed from Yokohama three days before she left.

TWENTIETH CHAPTER

ROUTLEDGE IS SEEN BY NOREEN CARDINEGH, BUT AT AN EXCITING MOMENT IN WHICH SHE DARE NOT CALL HIS NAME

Noreen breathed sweeter with the shores of Japan behind. The Pacific liner, _Manchu_, was crossing the Yellow Sea for Shanghai. An evening in early August, and the tropic breeze came over the moon-flecked water, from the spicy archipelagoes below. It was late, and she was sitting alone, forward on the promenade-deck. The thought thralled, possessed her completely, that she was drawing nearer, nearer her soul’s mate. Might it not be given to her to keep the covenant--to find him, though all others had failed?... There was a high light over Asia for her inner eye, this memorable night of her romance. The crush of Japan was gone, and in the great hour of emancipation her love for Routledge, hardiest of perennials, burst into a delicate glory of blossoming--countless blooms of devotion, pure white; and in all honor she could not deny--rare fragrant flowerings of passional crimson....

At Shanghai she sought the office of the _North China News_, to learn what the war had done during her three days at sea. The Japanese armies were panting--inside the passes which had recently protected Liaoyang. Any day might begin the battle with which Japan intended forever to end Russia’s hold in Liaotung peninsula. The _News_ stated blithely that there was no doubt of the war being over by September.... There was another story in the files of early August, and in the silent office the woman bent long over the sheet, huge as a luncheon-cover. This was an Indian exchange with a Simla mark. An English correspondent, wandering somewhere in the Hills, had run across a white man travelling with an old Hindu lama. A weird mad pair, the story said, half-starving, but they asked no alms. Whither they were going, they would not say, nor from whence they had come. The natives seemed to understand the wanderers, and possibly filled the lama’s bowl. The feet of the white man were bare and travel-bruised, his clothing a motley of Hindu and Chinese garments. The article intimated that he was a “gone-wrong missionary,” but its whole purport and excuse was to point out the menace to British India from unattached white men, mad or apparently mad, moving where they willed, in and out of restless States, especially at such a time as now, when the activity of foreign agents, etc., etc....

The article was rock-tight and bitter with the Dead Sea bitterness. The pressure of the whole senile East was in it. The woman quivered from a pain the prints had given her, and moved out of the darkened office into the strange road, thick and yellow with heat.... Could this be Rawder and his Hindu master?... It occurred to her suddenly that the men of the newspaper might be able to tell her of the Leper Valley. She turned back to the office, was admitted to the editor.... No, he had not heard of the Leper Valley. There were leper colonies scattered variously throughout the interior. It might be one of them.... She thanked him and went away, leaving a problem to mystify many sleepy, sultry days.... That night, Noreen engaged passage in a coasting steamer for Tongu, and on the morning of the third day thereafter boarded the Peking-Shanhaikwan train on the Chinese Eastern.

Alone in a first-class compartment, she watched the snaky furrows of maize throughout seven eternities of daylight, until her eyes stung and her brain revolted at the desolate, fenceless levels of sun-deadened brown. Out of a pent and restless doze, at last she found that a twilight film had cooled the distance; she beheld the sea on her right hand, and before her the Great Wall--that gray welt on the Eastern world, conceived centuries before the Christ, rising into the dim mountains and jutting down into the sea. In an inexplicable moment of mental abstraction, as the train drew up to Shanhaikwan, the soul of the weary woman whispered to her that she had seen it all before.

At the Rest House, Noreen ventured to inquire of a certain agent of a big British trading company if he knew any of the English or American war-correspondents who had come recently to Shanhaikwan to file their work on the uncensored cable. This man was an unlovely Englishman poisoned by China and drink.... Oh, yes, some of the men had come in from the field or from Wangcheng with big stories, but had trouble getting back to their lines, it was said.

“Have you heard--or do you know--if Mr. Routledge has been here?”

His face filled with an added inflammation, and he mumbled something which had to do with Routledge and the treachery in India.

“Do you mean to say,” she demanded hopelessly, “that you--that Shanhaikwan has not heard that Mr. Routledge had nothing to do with the treachery in India--that another, Cardinegh of the _Witness_, confessed the crime on his death-bed?”

The Englishman had not heard. He bent toward her with a quick, aroused look and wanted to know all, but she fled to her room.... It was not strange if Routledge failed to hear of his vindication, when this British agent had not.... By the open window she sat for hours staring at the Great Wall in the moonlight. She saw it climb through the white sheen which lay upon the mountains, and saw it dip into the twinkling sea, like a monster that has crawled down to drink. There were intervals when Shanhaikwan was still as the depths of the ocean. The whole landscape frightened her with its intimate reality. The thought came again that this had once been _her_ country, that she had seen the Mongol builders murdered by the lash and the toil.

The purest substance of tragedy evolved in her brain. There had been something abhorrent in contact with the Englishman below. She had seen a hate for Routledge like that before--at the Army and Navy reception! And then, the sinister narrative of the white man in India, as it had been set down by the English correspondent!... Could this be “their bravest man”? Was he, too, attracting hatred and suspicion in India, as a result of the excitement into which her father’s work had thrown the English? Could not poor Rawder, barefoot, travel-bruised, and wearing a motley of native garments, be free from this world-havoc which was her heritage?... That instant in the supremacy of pain she could not feel in her heart that Routledge wanted her--or that he was in the world!... Could he be dead, or in the Leper Valley? Had his mind gone back to dust--burned out by these terrible currents of hatred?...

The pictured thought drew forth a stifled scream. The lamp in her room was turned low, and the still, windless night was a pitiless oppression. Crossing the room to open the door, in agony for air, she passed the mirror and saw a dim reflection--white arms, white throat, white face. She turned the knob.

The clink of glasses on a tin-tray reached her from below, with the soft tread of a native servant; then from farther, the clink of billiard-balls and a man’s voice, low but insinuating, its very repression an added vileness:

“Dam’ me, but she was a stunning woman, a ripping woman--and out after----”

She crashed the door shut and bolted it against the pestilence.... Had the powers of evil this night consummated a heinous mockery to test her soul, because her soul was strong?... In terror and agony, she knelt by the open window. The Wall was still there, sleeping in the moonlight--the biggest man-made thing in the world, and the quietest. It steadied her, and the stuff of martyrs came back.

* * * * *

The man in charge of the cable-office in Shanhaikwan told her the next morning that a correspondent who signed himself “A. V. Weed” had brought in a long message for New York, just after the Yalu battle, but had not tarried even a night in town. “A tall, haggard stranger with a low voice,” the man described him.... There was little more to be learned, but this was life to her, and the first tangible word, that he lived, since her father’s death. Noreen spent the day walking alone on the beaches and through the foreign concession.

From the top of the Wall in the afternoon, she stared down at the little walled city which grew out of the great masonry. There she could see a bit of living China--all its drones and workers and sections and galleries, as in a glass bee-hive. Big thoughts took the breath from her. Europe seemed young and tawdry beside this. She picked up one of the loose stones--touched the hem of the Wall’s garment, as it were--and again she had but to close her eyes and look back centuries into the youth of time, when the Wall was building, to see the Mongols swarming like ants over the raw, half-done thing.... There was a little French garrison in the town; and the Sikh infantry, at target-practice on the beach, brought India back. The day was not without fascination to her relieved mind.

The evening train from Peking brought a white man who added to the stability of Shanhaikwan--Talliaferro of the _Commonwealth_. The dry little man was greatly disturbed in heart. He had deliberately given up his place with Oku’s second army, choosing to miss the smoky back-thresh of future actions in the field, in order to get what he could out on the free cable. Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur,” credited with acumen, flying and submarine, had broken under the Japanese pressure.

“Have you seen or heard of Mr. Routledge?” she whispered at dinner.

“No,” he replied. “In the field we never got a whisper from him. The Pan-Anglo man in Shanghai told me, however, that he thought Routledge was playing the Chinese end--that is, living just outside the war-zone and making sallies in, from time to time, when things are piping hot. The reason he thought Routledge was working this game was the fact that New York has sprung three or four great stories which London has missed entirely. It’s all a guess, Miss Cardinegh, but somebody is doing it, and it’s his kind of service--the perilous, hard-riding kind. Nobody but a man on the _Inside_ of Asia would attempt it. There was an American, named Butzel, shot by the Chinese on the Liao River ten days ago. He was not an accredited correspondent, as I understand it, but was using the war for a living. Butzel’s death was wired in from the interior somewhere, and they had it back from New York in Shanghai when I was there. Did you hear?”

“No.”

“It appears that Butzel planned to get into Liaoyang for the battle,” Talliaferro went on, “whether the Japanese liked it or not. About the place where the Taitse flows into the Liao, the river-pirates murdered him----”

Talliaferro stopped, startled by the look in the face of the woman. Her eyes were wide, almost electric with suffering, her face colorless. The lamp-light heightened the effects; also her dress, which was of black entire. Talliaferro noted such things. He always remembered her hand that moment, as it was raised to check him, white, fragile, emotional.

“What is it, Miss Cardinegh?” he asked quickly.

“I was thinking,” she replied steadily, “that Mr. Routledge is there in all likelihood--‘playing the Chinese end,’ as you call it. I was thinking that he might not have heard that he is vindicated--that he might be murdered before he learned that my father had confessed.”

She hurried away before the dinner was half through, and Talliaferro was left to dislike himself, for a short period, for bringing up the Butzel murder.... Noreen sat again by the window in her room. The story had frightened her, so that she felt the need of being alone to think. The dreadfulness of the night before did not return, however.... The moon rose high to find the Wall again--every part of it, winding in the mountains.... Was it not possible that Talliaferro was over-conscious of the dangers of the Chinese end? Routledge had been up there, possibly since the Yalu battle, and he had proved a master in these single-handed services of his.... She had heard of Talliaferro’s capacity to command the highest price, heard of him as an editorial dictator and of his fine grasp on international affairs, but her father had once remarked that the Excalibur “did not relish dangling his body in the dirty area between two firing lines.”... There was hope in her heart, and she slept.

“Please don’t apologize, Mr. Talliaferro,” she said the next morning, when he met her sorrowfully. “It is I who should apologize. For a moment you made me see vividly the dangers up yonder, but I put it all away and had a real rest. Tell me about the field and Oku.”

Talliaferro was inclined to talk very little, as a rule, but he had brooded deeply upon his failure in this service, and it was rather a relief to speak--with Noreen Cardinegh to listen.

“At least, we have added to the gaiety of nations with our silence in the field,” he said. “It has been the silence of the Great Wall yonder. We knew nothing even of the main strategy, which was familiar to all outside who cared to follow the war. Japanese officers were assigned to overhear what we said to one another. They even opened our personal mail. The field-telegraph was hot day and night with the war-business, so that our messages were hung up for days, even with the life cut out of them. And then when Oku drove into action we were always back with the reserves--not that I think a correspondent can do a battle classic for his cable-editor, simply because he mingles first hand with shrapnel; but we had only the sun and stars to go by as to which was north and south. Think of it, and the man who writes a war-classic must have a conception of the whole land and sea array, and an inner force of his own, to make his sentences shine----”

She smiled a little and straightened her shoulders to breathe deeply the good sea air. They were walking out toward the Wall.

“But suppose he has the big conception, as you say, and then goes into the heart of the thing”--her voice became tense--“where the poor brave brutes are coming together to die?”

“He’ll unquestionably do it better,” said Talliaferro, regarding her blowing hair with satisfaction to the artistic sense he cultivated. “Physical heroism is cheap--the cheapest utility of the nations--but it is not without inspiration to watch.... We had neither--neither facts nor blood with Oku.”

* * * * *

Long and weary were those August days in Shanhaikwan. Noreen lived for the end of the battle, and with a prayer that it would end the war and bring in--all the correspondents. Over and over she mapped the war-country in her mind, with a lone horseman shutting out her view of armies. There were moments at night in which she felt that Routledge-san was not far away--even Liaoyang was less than three hundred miles away.... Those last days of the month--only a woman can bear such terrors of tension. Each night-train now brought vagrant sentences from the field, bearing upon the unparalleled sacrifices of men by the Japanese. Throughout August thirty-first, Shanhaikwan waited expectantly for a decision from the battle, but when the night-train was in the Russians were still holding. Late in the afternoon of September first, Talliaferro sought Miss Cardinegh bringing an exciting rumor that the Japanese had won the battle and the city.

“There’s another thing,” he added. “The English agent of the trading company here--the man of whom you don’t approve--has heard from Bingley. He will be in from Wangcheng to-night, and something big is up. Bingley has called for a horse to meet him at the train--a fast horse. I’ll wager there’s an American correspondent on the train, Miss Cardinegh, and that the ‘Horse-killer’ plans to beat him to the cable-office in the half-mile from the station. He wouldn’t wire for a horse if he were alone. Another matter. Borden, the American Combined Press man here, looks to have something big under cover. Altogether, I think there’ll be great stuff on the cable to-night. The chief trouble is, there won’t be any core--to Bingley’s apple.... I’ll call for you in a half-hour--if I may--and we’ll walk down to the train together.”

“Thank you. Of course,” she answered.... That half-hour pulled a big tribute of nervous energy. Noreen did not know what to think, but she fought back hope with all the strength which months of self-war had given....

The train appeared at last through the gap in the Great Wall--cleared torturingly slow in the twilight. Talliaferro directed her eyes to two saddle-horses on the platform. Borden, the American, was in touch with a China-boy who held a black stallion of notorious prowess.... She hardly noted. The train held her eyes. Her throat was dry--her heart stormed with emotion.... She did not scream. Routledge hung far out from the platform--searching to locate his mount. She covered her face in her parasol.... This was the end of a race from the field with Bingley.... She choked back her heart’s cry, lest it complicate.

Routledge sped past her--leaped with a laugh into the saddle of the black stallion. His eye swept the crowd--but the yellow silk of the parasol shielded her face. He spurred off toward the cable-office--with Bingley thundering behind on a gray mount.... Not till then did she dare to scream:

“Win! Ride to win, Routledge-san!”

Out of the shouting crowd, she ran after the horsemen--past the Rest House, through the mud-huts of the native quarter.... On she sped, the night filled with glory for her eyes.... Suddenly there was a shot--then four more--from ahead. Fear bound her limbs, and she struggled on--as in the horrid weights of an evil dream.

TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER

ROUTLEDGE, BROODING UPON THE MIGHTY SPECTACLE OF A JAPANESE BIVOUAC, TRACES A WORLD-WAR TO THE LEAK IN ONE MAN’S BRAIN

Parting from Noreen Cardinegh on the Bund at Shanghai, Routledge walked back through the darkness to the German Inn far out on the Hankow road. He was not conscious of the streets, nor of time passed. Not a word he had spoken to the woman could he remember, but all that she had said recurred again and again. He was torn within. The wound was too deep for heavy pain at first--that would come later with the drawing-together--but he was dazed, weakened. He turned into the door of the hostelry and recalled that he had nothing to do there. He had engaged passage on the _Sungkiang_ for Chifu that afternoon. His baggage was aboard, and the ship lying on the water-front which he had left. He turned back, without any particular emotion at his absentmindedness, but he charged himself with an evil recklessness for tarrying on the Bund in the afternoon.... Finacune had seen him, and Noreen....

Jerry Cardinegh was still alive--lost to wars, lost to friends, but still alive. He was close to death, his brain probably already dead to big things, and he had not told! Noreen would never know. Routledge tried to be glad. All his praying, hiding, and suffering had been to save her from knowing. His lips formed a meaningless declarative sentence to the effect that he was glad; meaningless, because there was no sanction in his heart. He was ill and very weary. He wished it were time for the prophesied wound, and for Noreen to come to him. He was not powerful enough that moment, walking back to the Bund, to face the future, and hold the thought that he was to remain an outcast....

“She will come to me when Jerry is dead,” he repeated, and for the time he could not fight it.... He went aboard, forgetting dinner, and dropped upon his berth. The _Sungkiang_ put off, out into the river, and long afterward lifted to the big swell in the offing. These were but faint touches of consciousness. His mind held greater matters--the strength of her hand, the breath, the fragrance, the vehemence, the glory of the woman in the wintry dusk, as she rushed back to her work--the tearing tragedy of parting; again the pitiless mountains of separation....

Loose articles were banging about the floor; the pendent oil-lamp creaked with the pitching of the ship. It was after midnight. Routledge caught up the great frieze coat and went out on the main-deck. It was a cold ruffian of a night, but it restored his strength.

She would keep her promise and come to him, when her father was dead. He faced the thought now that she would never know the truth; that Jerry Cardinegh would have spoken long since, if he could.... In some deep dark place of the earth, she would find him; and some British eye, ever keen, would see them together--the lady and the outcast.... He would send her away--put on a martyrdom of frost and steel--and send her away.... If he lied, saying that he wanted no woman--she would go back.... But Noreen was to find him wounded, fallen. Might he not, in delirium, utter the truth that her father failed to confess? No, the human will could prevent that! He would go down close to the very Gates with his lips locked.

“... I shall take care of your life for you--even in the Leper Valley!” Routledge thought he must be mad to imagine those words. Her face--as the words came to him--had been blotted out in the snow and the dark; yet it was her voice, and the words rang through his soul. She could not have seen Rawder nor the Hindu. They were lost in Northern India. He knew nothing of Jasper having passed the hut in Rydamphur that night, nor of his meeting with Noreen on ship-board. The Leper Valley, hidden in the great mountains of Southern China, was scarcely a name to the world. Could Noreen have heard the name, and used it merely as a symbol of speech for the uttermost parts of the earth? This was the only adjustment of the mystery upon a material basis.

He fought it all out that night in the icy gale on the main-deck of the _Sungkiang_, and entered upon the loneliest, harshest campaign and the bleakest season of his life.... Often it came to him with a great, almost an overpowering surge--the passion to look into the eyes of Noreen Cardinegh again and to stand among men, but he fought it with the grim, immutable fact that he had taken her father’s crime and must keep it, stand by it, with his dearest efforts until the end. If fate destined some time to lift the burden--that was resistless.... Except in bringing in his stories to the cables, he passed the spring and summer in the deepest seclusion.

This he knew: if he were seen by any of his old friends among the English, the word would be carried to Jerry Cardinegh, who, if still alive, might be stirred to confession. To save Noreen from this was the first point of his sacrifice. If her father were dead, unconfessed, and word reached her that the outcast had been seen in a certain part of Manchuria, she would come to share his hell-haunted-life--a thought which his whole manhood shunned. Moreover, if he were seen by the British, the sinister powerful fingers of the secret service would stretch toward him; in which case, if nothing worse happened, he would be driven from the terrain of war. Work was his only boon--furious, unabating, world-rousing work. God so loved the world that he gave unto poor forlorn man his work.... No more loitering on Bunds or Foreign Concessions for Cosmo Routledge.

From various Chinese bases, he made flying incursions into the war-belt for the _World-News_--a lonely, perilous, hard-shipping, and hard-riding service, but astonishingly successful. It was his flash from Chifu which told New York that the war was on before the declaration. This was on the night of February eighth. A strong but not a roaring west wind brought Togo’s firing across the gulf. He chanced a message and verified it before dawn by an incoming German ship, which had steamed past the fortress when the Russian fleet was attacked.

Again, he was with the Russians at Wangcheng before the port was closed, and got the story of the Yalu fight. This through John Milner, the American consul at Wangcheng, in whom he made a staunch and valued friend, regretting that it was necessary to do so under the name of “A. V. Weed.” Milner was an old _World-News_ editor, a man of stirring energy, and strong in the graces of the Russians at his post. He was ardent to serve all American interests, and the _World-News_ in particular. He presented Routledge to General Borodoffsky, who told the story of the battle; and there was a fine touch in the fact that the general wept as he related the Russian defeat. The story proved more complete and accurate than any which the correspondents with Kuroki managed to get through the Japanese censor. Kuroki’s great losses by drowning were for the first time brought out. Borodoffsky declared with tears that the future of the war must not be judged by this battle, as the Russian defeat was due entirely to an error of judgment. Routledge was leaving Wangcheng with the story when two British correspondents arrived. This prevented his return. The Borodoffsky story was filed in Shanhaikwan.

In a sea-going junk, the third week of May, Routledge crossed the Liaotung Gulf, hoping to get into Port Arthur, which was not yet invested. Instead, he stumbled onto the Nanshan story. From the northern promontory of Kinchow he caught a big and valuable conception of this literatesque engagement of the land and sea forces, and returned with it to Chifu for filing.

Back to lower Liaotung again, in early June. In spite of every precaution, one of Togo’s gunboats ran him down in Society Bay, and he was sent ashore under a guard. Great luck served him, inasmuch as there were no English with the Japanese at this place, Pulatien, where he was held for ten days, while the officers debated upon his credentials. It was here that Routledge encountered the prettiest feature-story of the war--the duel of Watanabe and Major Volbars, a prisoner from Nanshan. The Japanese escorted him to his junk at last, and he put off with orders from one of Togo’s ensigns to return no more to Kwantung waters. The battle of Telissu was fought on this day at sea, and he missed it entirely. With English now in Wangcheng and Chifu, Routledge ordered his Chinese to sail north, and to put him ashore at Yuenchen, a little port twenty miles to the west of the Liao’s mouth.

It was only by a squeak that the order was carried out. That was a night of furies on the yellow gulf. Bent in the hold, thigh-deep in tossing water, Routledge recalled the hovel in Rydamphur with a sorry smile. It did not seem at that moment that the storm would ever permit him to be maimed on land--or a woman to come to him. The old craft was beaten about under bare poles in a roaring black that seemed to drop from chaos. The Chinese fought for life, but the gray of death-fear was upon them. Bruised, almost strangled, Routledge crouched in the musty hold, until his mind fell at last into a strange abstraction, from which he aroused after an unknown time. His physical weariness was extreme, but it did not seem possible that he could have slept, standing in black, foaming water, and with a demoniacal gale screeching outside. Yet certainly something had gone from him and had taken his consciousness, or the better part of it.... It was this night that Noreen Cardinegh had entered at dusk her little house in Minimasacuma-cho and met by the easel the visible thought-form of her lover.