When the car drew up at the door he got out first and with the tenderness so strange to himself he helped his father up the steps and into the hall. The butler was waiting and took their hats and coats. At the foot of the great stairway he saw his father stand back and look up as though at a mountain he could not climb.
“I will carry you up,” William muttered.
“Oh no!” Dr. Lane gasped. “I shall be quite able in a moment.”
William did not hear him. In a daze of love such as he had never felt for any human creature, he lifted his father into his arms and, horrified at the lightness of the frame he held, he mounted the stairs. The old man, feeling his son’s arms about him, gave himself up with a sigh and closed his eyes.
What befell William in the weeks that followed he was never able himself to understand. Its effects did not appear fully for many years. He seemed to be alone in the world with his father, and yet the dying saint was someone far beyond being only his father. For the time during which this presence was in his house William scarcely left his father’s room. He discerned with new perception that this spirit, preparing for departure, was ill at ease except alone and he was therefore brutal with his mother. He said to Candace and Ruth, “Mother must not come near him. It is your business to see that she is taken out of the house on any pretext you can think of.”
He bullied the American doctors cruelly, declaring them incompetent. He himself cabled to the great English specialist in tropical diseases, Sir Henry Lampheer, demanding his instant attendance. Under the roaring waves of the Atlantic Ocean this communication went on, hour after hour.
Sir Henry’s reply to William’s command was British and stubborn. HAVE CONSULTED WITH YOUR DR. BARTRAM. OBVIOUS MY SERVICES TOO LATE. STARVATION RESULT OF DESTROYED TISSUE. INJECTIONS MAY PROLONG LIFE.
William was imperious with the Englishman, SET YOUR OWN PRICE.
Sir Henry lost patience and his haughty irritation carried clear beneath the raging Atlantic tides. NO PRICE POSSIBLE FOR FOLLY OF LEAVING IMPORTANT PATIENTS HERE, ADVISE DEPENDING UPON YOUR OWN PHYSICIANS.
YOU PROPOSE TO LET MY FATHER DIE?
GOD DECREES, Sir Henry cabled, refusing blame, YOUR FATHER AN OLD MAN GRIPPED BY FATAL DISEASE.
MY FATHER COMES OF LONG-LIVED FAMILY, ALSO GREAT RESISTANCE OF SPIRIT, William retorted.
To this affirmation Sir Henry replied coldly, DIAGNOSIS CLEAR. INJECTIONS EMETINE, BLAND DIET, MILK, BANANAS, POSSIBLY STRAWBERRIES, CERTAINLY LIVER ESSENCE, ABSOLUTE REST, CONSULT BARTRAM.
The cables ticked themselves into hundreds of dollars, and after their futility William felt all the old rage of his boyhood mount into his blood. The damned superiority of the Englishman, the calm determination not to yield, the rigid heartless courtesy — he knew it all in Chefoo when the British Consul General’s son was at the top of the top form.
Blind with fury, William shut off the Atlantic Ocean and the British Isles and all the rest of the world. He was in his office, having left his father for an hour with two trained nurses, and Ruth to see that the fools did not neglect him. Now he called in his chief editor, keeping his finger on the electric button until Brownell came in on the run, his eyes terrified.
“Hold up the new dummy,” William ordered. “My father is very ill. I can’t get Lampheer to come over, he’s determined to let my father die — just another American, I suppose — typical British! I don’t know when I shall be back. I shall have to leave you in charge. If it’s absolutely essential call me, but if it’s not essential, I’ll fire you.”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. Lane.”
“Very well.”
William was putting on his overcoat and hat. Brownell sprang to his aid.
“Here, let me help.”
“Get back to your job,” William ordered, and hastened from the room.
Yet he knew Sir Henry was right. That was the worst of all, next to the fact of death itself. Now day by day he sat beside his father’s bed, silent in the silence of his house, having ordered the nurses to stay in his dressing room unless they were needed and forbidding any others except Dr. Bartram. Sir Henry would have been foolish to come and yet he ought to have set a price. Every man had his price and William could have paid it. His father was a man of importance, the father of William Lane, a rising power in America. It was an insult he would not forgive, and he added it to the mountain of insults he had taken in his boyhood. Sitting beside his dying father he brooded upon the mountain and how he would level it, by what means and with what purpose. Those tiny islands, clutching at half the world, those arrogant men sitting in their dinner coats at solitary tables in jungles, served by millions of dark men — it was monstrous. His country, his beautiful youthful America, despised and laughed at, even as he himself had been laughed at by stupid English boys who could not spell! In those days he had been ashamed of his father because he was only a missionary, but now that missionary was the father of William Lane. The missionary was lifted up out of his humility and poverty. He had become the father of a man whose first million was doubling itself.
Tears stung William’s eyes. Money could not delay by one hour the death of his father, even his. He leaned toward the bed and took his father’s hand in his own. The hands were not alike. He had his small dark hands from his mother. His father’s were big and bony, and now how thin and helpless.
“Father—” he whispered. For a moment he thought him dead.
But Dr. Lane was not dead. He turned his head slowly, the same nobly shaped head that he had given to his son when he begot him.
“Yes, William?” The voice was faint but clear.
“You know I am doing everything I can?”
“Yes, my son. … It is quite all right. … I must die, you know.”
“I can’t let you die.”
“That is very good of you, William. … I appreciate it. … To want me to live—”
“Because I need you, Father.”
The words broke from him and the moment he had spoken them he knew them true. He had never really talked with his father and now it seemed to him that to his father alone could he speak of himself and the immense restlessness that filled him day and night. Now that he had set up this vast successful machine that brought money rolling in whether he was there or not, then what next? Now that he had power, millions of people his, too, looking at the pictures he chose, reading the words he wrote or permitted to be written, what next?
“Father, if you leave me — if you really think—”
“I know God has told me.”
“Then tell me before you go — what am I to do?”
“Do?”
“With myself.”
He saw his father’s dark eyes open wide with final energy.
“William, you must listen to your own conscience. … It is the voice of God … in your breast. ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.’ All that you have — all your great gifts, my son … dedicate them to God. Oh God — I thank thee — thou hast — brought me to my son in time—”
The faint voice died away and the old man fell into sudden sleep as he did after the least exertion. He did not speak again.
William sat beside him through the hours. The nurses came and went, doing their duty. The doctor came, spoke a few words. “It can’t last, Mr. Lane. Any moment, I am afraid.”
William did not reply. That night, twenty minutes after midnight, his father without waking ceased to breathe.
Clem had plunged himself again into his own country. He had failed in China but he was not discouraged. Such was his faith in that which he believed. He had said very little to Henrietta about the brief visit to the shack in San Francisco, but she comprehended the refusal and perceived that as usual Clem had only been strengthened by it.