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!”