Gods Men (38 page)

Face to face with Henrietta, he reached for the telegram which she gave him and then he saw that it was not what he thought.

The telegram was signed by Mrs. Lane.
YOUR DEAR FATHER PASSED ON LAST NIGHT. FUNERAL WILL BE THURSDAY. PROSTRATED WITH GRIEF. WILLIAM WONDERFUL. LOVE MOTHER.
Instantly Clem forgot the crowds and the great success of his day. There was no spot in the huge cheap building where he could draw his beloved aside into privacy. Glass and brick pillars gave only the illusion of shelter. But he made of himself a shelter for the tears now rising slowly to her eyes.

“Hon, you go to the hotel right away. I'll send Wong with you. He has his little tin lizzie here. He'll put you on the train for New York. If you need anything in clothes, you can buy it there—a black dress or so. I'll be there tomorrow. I hate to have you alone tonight without me, but you'll not blame me for that.”

“I wish I could have seen him just once,” Henrietta murmured, wiping her eyes behind the shelter of his shoulders. She was taller than he and yet just now he managed to stand a little above her upon a collapsed cardboard box. “I ought to have made William tell me. Ruth ought to have written—no, it was my own fault.”

For she had been cool to her parents when she got home because they had gone to William and had not thought of coming to her. No one had told her how ill her father was. Even the letters from her mother had not said he might die. She might have known when she had no letter from him, except that he seldom wrote to his daughters, and always to William. And Ruth would never face the worst.

“It's a shame,” Clem muttered. “It does seem as though your folks could have sent word.”

“I may not see him even now,” she went on. “It would be just like William to go straight on with everything, as though no one else existed.”

“You go along quick,” he advised.

Stepping back he motioned to Wong, one of the Chinese students. He was a tall slender fellow from a town near Peking.

Clem said in Chinese, too low for anyone to hear or wonder at the strange tongue, “Wong, you take Mrs. Miller please to the hotel to get her bag and then to the railway station and buy her a Pullman ticket to New York on the first train. Her honored father has just died.”

Wong had heard of the venerable Dr. Lane, the mildest of missionaries, and he clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “The day of a father's death is worse than any yet known in a person's life,” he said gently.

He slipped off his white coat and changed to the one he wore outside the market. In half an hour Henrietta was on the way to the station in his old Ford car. Driving nimbly between the trolley cars and the traffic, Wong tried in his courteous fashion to comfort Henrietta by all that he had heard about Dr. Lane.

“We heard even in our town that it was your honored Old One who did not fear to approach that Devil Female King, the Empress, and tell her that she did ill to favor the Boxers. Again we heard, I from my father, since I was then very young, that when she came back again to the city, pretending that no evil had been done, your honored Old One would not follow the other foreigners to her feasts. He held himself aloof. Your Old One loved the people and not the rulers.”

“I have not seen my father for all these years,” Henrietta said. “Now I shall never see him again.”

“It was for our sakes that he cut himself off even from his own country,” Wong said in a heartbroken voice.

At the station he bought her tickets and a small basket of fruit. When he had seen her into her seat, had adjusted the window shade, had said good-by, he went outside on the platform and there he stood, his hat held against his breast until the train pulled out.

Henrietta had never been in William's new home. Since she had sent no telegram to announce her coming, she took a cab and arrived at the door of the handsome house of gray stone, which stood between two smaller ones on upper Fifth Avenue. She rang the bell and the door was opened by an English manservant.

“I am Mr. Lane's elder sister,” she said in her somewhat cold voice.

The man looked surprised and she saw that he had not known of her existence. “Please come in, Madame.”

He ushered her into a large room and disappeared, his footsteps silenced by thick carpets. Henrietta sat down in a deep chair covered with coral-colored velvet. The room astonished her. Gray, coral, smoke blue were mingled in velvet hangings and carpets. It was a room too soft, too rich, too opulently beautiful. Candace had thus surrounded the heavy furniture William had bought and which she disliked. In the center of the room upon a round mahogany table stood a vast Chinese bowl of silver-gray pottery, crackled with deeper gray veins. It was full of pale yellow roses. This then was the way William lived. He must be monstrously rich. Or perhaps it was only the way Candace lived, and perhaps it was she who was too rich.

Henrietta reflected upon William as she had remembered him in Peking. The memory was not dimmed by the image of what he now was. A sulky, dark-browed boy, who snarled when she spoke to him! Why had he been always unhappy? At school in Chefoo he had seldom spoken to her, even when they passed in the corridors. If her mother sent a message to them both in a letter to her, she had to send it to him in a note by a Chinese servant. Ruth had been too young to go away to school and so she had never seen the worst of William, for if he was unpleasant at home he was unbearable at school.

Henrietta had a vague understanding of him, nevertheless, as she sat thoughtfully by the window of this room. William could not endure to be outdone by anyone, but at school no American could be as the English were and there William felt himself unjustly surpassed. Moreover she herself surpassed him in their studies, and she had gone to some pains as she had grown older to hide from him the marks which made him hate her, too. And why should this only brother of hers suffer so much when, had he been content with himself, he might have been very happy? A handsome boy he had been, and his mind, developing more slowly than hers, was a good and even brilliant mind, likely now to have gone far ahead of hers. His intolerable, bitter, burning pride had poisoned him to the soul, a pride begun by their foolish old Chinese amah, who because he was a boy among girls, had loved him best and praised him most and made them all worship him as the young prince of the family—a pride fostered, certainly, by being an American among Chinese. But here in America itself there were no princes.

The door opened and Candace came in, trailing the lace ruffles of her negligee. It was almost noon and she had not yet dressed herself for the day. But so immaculate, so exquisite was she in her rose and lace, her fair hair so curled and smoothed and waved, that Henrietta felt dingy after her night on the train.

Candace held out her hands and her rings glittered. “Not to tell us that you were coming, you naughty thing!”

She had grown soft and was prettier than ever, slender but rounded and feminine and too tender in voice and eyes.

“I thought you would expect me to come at once,” Henrietta said. She submitted to a scented embrace and sat down again.

Candace sighed. The tears came to her violet eyes. “William is not to be consoled. He sits there beside his father day and night. He will neither eat nor rest. Your mother is sleeping. She is very tired. Ruth has gone home for a bit to be with her children. There is nothing to do here but wait.”

“Clem will be here tomorrow,” Henrietta said.

“How good of him to get away,” Candace said.

“It is not good of him,” Henrietta replied. “He does it for me.”

She found herself with nothing to say and so she sat for a moment in silence while Candace twisted the rings on her fingers. Then Henrietta made up her mind. She did not intend to be cowed by this house or by any of William's belongings or indeed by William himself.

“I would like to go to my father, please, Candace. I have not seen him at all, you know.”

Candace looked distressed. Her mouth, soft and full and red, looked suddenly childish and she bit her lower lip. “I don't know if William will—”

“William knows me,” Henrietta said. “He will not blame you.”

She rose and Candace, as though she submitted by habit, rose too, and in silent doubtfulness she led Henrietta across the hall through another large room—a music room, Henrietta saw, since it contained a grand piano and a gramophone set into a carved cabinet, and then across a hall which ended in a conservatory, and at last to heavy closed doors of polished oak. Here Candace paused and then she slid the doors a small distance apart. Over her shoulder Henrietta looked into an immense library, in the center of which stood a bier. There William sat. He had drawn a leather armchair close enough to see his father's face. A tall pot of lilies stood at the foot of the bier. Upon this scene the sunshine of the morning streamed through high southern windows.

Henrietta gently put Candace aside and entered the room. “William, I have come.”

William looked at her startled. Then he rose. “You came early, Henrietta.” His voice, deep and always harsh, was composed.

“I came as soon as I had Mother's telegram.”

Candace had closed the doors and gone away and they were alone. She went to the bier and looked down upon her father's face. It was as white as an image of snow. The long thin hands folded upon the breast were of the same deadly whiteness.

“I am glad you have not sent him away,” Henrietta said.

“Whatever had to be done was done here.”

“He is desperately thin.”

“He was ill for two years,” William said. “Of course Mother did not realize it, nor did he complain. His intestines were eaten away by the wretched disease. There was no hope.”

Neither of them wept, and neither expected weeping of the other.

“I am glad he did not die over there,” William said.

“Perhaps he would rather have died there. He loved the Chinese so much,” Henrietta said.

“He wasted his life upon them,” said William.

He spoke without emotion, yet she felt his absolute grief. He revealed himself in this grief as she had never seen him, a gaunt lonely man, still young, and his pride was bitter in his face, in his haughty bearing, in the abrupt movements of his hands.

“It is a comfort to you that he came here to die.” This she added in sudden pity for him.

“It is more than a comfort,” he replied. “It was his last mission.”

She turned her gaze then from the calm dead face to look at William and perceived in his stone-gray eyes a look so profoundly strange, for that was the word which came to her mind, that she was for the first time in her life half frightened of him.

William had no impulse to tell her of those last words which his father had spoken. For him they had indeed taken on the importance of prophecy. His father, he had learned from his mother, had a premonition of approaching death during the last year in Peking. He had long refused to come back to America because, he said simply, he wanted to die in China and be buried there. Yet when he felt death imminent he changed his mind. “I must see William,” he had told her one night when he woke as he often did long before dawn. “I must see my son. I want to talk with him. I have things to tell him.”

Here his mother had paused to wipe her eyes and also to ask him in curiosity, “What things did he tell you, William?”

He could not share even with her the solemnity of those last words his father had been able to speak. They were few, far fewer than he had meant to speak, William felt sure, had he not been so ill in the last weeks before the end. And yet in few words all was said. He understood that his father had come thousands of miles by land and sea to speak them to his dear and only son, and so he forgave his father everything, all the shame of being his son, the disgrace of the lowliness of being the son of a poor man and a missionary. By his love for his son and by his death his father had lifted himself up into sainthood. There was symbolism here which in its way was as great as that of the Cross. He was his father's only begotten son, whom his father so loved. …

“William, are you sure you feel well?”

Henrietta's anxious voice flung ice upon his burning heart.

His old irritation flared at her. “Of course I am well! Naturally I am tired. I don't expect to rest until after the funeral tomorrow. I think you ought to go and see Mother.”

“Candace said she was sleeping.”

“Then it is time she woke.”

He took her elbow and led her out of the room. In the hall he pressed a button and the man appeared again. “Take my sister upstairs to my mother's room,” William ordered.

“Yes, sir. This way if you please, Madame.”

The sliding doors closed behind Henrietta and she was compelled to follow the man, her footsteps sinking again into heavy carpets across the hall and up the stairs and down another hall to one of a half dozen closed doors. Here the man knocked. She heard her mother's voice. “Who is it?”

“Thank you,” Henrietta said, dismissing the man with a nod. She opened the door. There her mother sat at a small desk, fully dressed, her steel-gray hair swept up into a thick knot on top of her head. She was writing and she lifted her pen and turned her head.

“Henrietta, my dear!” She rose, majestic, and held out her arms. “My dear daughter!”

Henrietta allowed herself to be enveloped and she kissed her mother's dry cheek. She saw in the first glance that although her mother had aged or weathered into a dry ruddiness in the years since they had last met, she was not changed. Neither life nor death could change her. There was nothing new here. Her mother planned what to do, how to behave, what to say. Henrietta withdrew herself and sat down and took off her hat and coat.

“Mother, it was so strange to find you and Father gone away when we got to Peking.”

“You should have told us you were coming,” Mrs. Lane said, “then you needn't have come all that way.”