He should perhaps have entered politics long ago, instead of building his newspapers. This thought, disturbing him very much, caused him to sit down in his leather easy chair and close his eyes. His small hairy hands gripped the carved ends of the hand rests. He should not have been content with the power of shaping the minds of people by choosing what pictures they should see, what news they should read, what ideas, in short, should be offered to their minds. This was only passive government. There was nothing stable in America. This country which William longed to love and did love with fear and anger and contempt, had no bedrock of class, no governing element such as England had. Wealth was the only vantage. William despised charm and knew that he had none of it. And yet without it, he knew, he could never have won, not in America, not in this, his own country. Think of that fellow in the White House! He gave up the notion of politics and opened his eyes. He could not descend to the sordid race. Besides, what if he had been defeated? Folly, folly! He was pre-eminent as he was and without a rival in sight. What more did he want than he had? He wanted to be satisfied with himself and he was not.
A tap at his door made him get up and go to the window. “Come in!”
“Madame asks if you are ready, sir,” Henry said behind his back.
“I am coming down at once.”
He passed the man and went down the wide curving stairs, comforted for the moment as he often was by the vista of his home, the huge beautiful rooms spreading from the great entrance hall. He ought indeed to be satisfied with himself. Roger Cameron had been satisfied with half of this. Scrambling up that cliff, those years ago, he had not dreamed of such a vista, all his own.
He crossed the hall and went into the drawing room at the right. A tall figure rose at his entrance and stood with clasped hands. Emory spoke from a low rose-red velvet chair.
“William, this is Father Malone. He was in your office today with some pictures and Jeremy brought him along to the cocktail party, and I brought him home to you.”
The strong hands unclasped and the priest put out the right one, not speaking. William felt it powerfully about his own much smaller hand, and quickly withdrew it.
“I am sorry I was busy when you were announced in the office today,” he said, looking away. He took a glass of sherry from a silver tray presented now by the butler.
Father Malone sat down. A perfect quiet pervaded his being and from this quiet he looked at William so steadily that William felt himself compelled to respond, and turning he looked down into the profoundly dark and deep-set eyes.
“The reason I brought him home,” Emory went on, “is because Father Malone comes from some place quite near Peking and I thought you would enjoy one another.”
William sat down. “Indeed?”
“Your father was a missionary.”
“Yes.”
“I, too, am a missionary,” Father Malone said after a moment. “I have been recalled for a time to collect famine funds. I brought with me the pictures which you saw today. I hoped that you would want to print them for I am told your publications reach millions of Americans, and they might be moved to send me money for food.”
“Thousands of pictures come to me every week,” William said. “I may not be able to use many of yours. Besides, we have our own photographers who know exactly what I want.”
“You do not feel moved to present the appeal for the starving?” The priest’s deep voice was calm and inquiring.
“I hesitate to embark upon relief work,” William replied. “One doubts the basic efficacy of it in a country so vast as China. Famine is endemic there, as I remember.”
“You feel no duty toward those people?”
William looked at him again unwillingly. “Only in memory of my father.”
“You deny the memory,” Father Malone said. So positive was his voice that William was instantly angry.
“Dinner is served,” the butler announced at the door.
They rose, Emory first in her rose and gray taffeta, and behind her Father Malone, stark and severe in his black garments, and William a little distance behind him. The priest’s words had fallen upon his angry heart like a sword.
“You have been stifling your soul,” Father Malone said to William Lane. He was very tired. The special mission which he had assumed as he came to know William was nearly completed. It had not been easy, far more difficult indeed than feeding the starving children and praying for the ignorant peasants who were his flock in China. The Church there was gracious to the ignorant. It did not expect a peasant to understand the mysteries. To come to Mass, to wear an amulet, to know the name of the Virgin and one or two saints was as much as he insisted upon in his village. Even confession he did not press, for how could an old man or even a young woman confess when they did not know sin? The knowledge of sin was for their children, the second generation, and in that knowledge it was his duty to instruct them. By the fifth generation he expected a priest. The Church was infinitely patient.
“You have denied your Lord,” he said.
He had tarried for days in this vast and wicked city, for so he had felt he should do. Yet when he found that the wife of this rich and powerful man believed that her husband sought God, he had felt unable to undertake so vast a responsibility alone. He had gone immediately to his local superior, Monsignor John Lockhart, to ask for direction.
John Lockhart was an Englishman, a priest of high intellect and conviction, who might have become a Cardinal of the Church had he been ambitious. But he did not wish to enter into the higher arenas, where, he thought, though without disloyalty, the air was not so pure as it might have been. Princes of the Church were subject, perhaps, to some of the temptations of earthly kings. This did not keep him from believing that the Church was the best means yet devised and developed for the guidance and control of weak and faulty human nature. He listened carefully to the shabby priest from China who sat on the edge of his chair and talked diffidently about William Lane.
“A man stubborn in his own pride,” Monsignor Lockhart said after listening. “Nevertheless he has seen religious righteousness in his father and he cannot forget it. He was reared with a conscience. He has repudiated it until now. As you have told me, you have had only to look at his face to see it tortures him.”
“Does he know it?” Father Malone asked.
“No, and it is your duty to make it known to him,” Monsignor replied.
Father Malone did not answer this. He continued to sit on the edge of his chair, his hands clasped in front of him in his habitual manner. He knew what he was, a missionary priest, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water in the palaces of the Church.
“In famine times I know that many souls are driven to the Church,” Monsignor continued. “It is our duty to feed body and soul. But sometimes there is one man who can at a certain moment be worth more to the Church than ten thousand others, and William Lane is one of them. He is very powerful and he does not know what to do with his power. He seeks to direct but he himself needs direction. In his discontent he has married again, but he cannot be satisfied with women. His hunger is of the soul.”
Father Malone had listened, and had prayed, when he was alone again, that he might see clearly what he ought to do. He did not presume to approach God directly with his own words, but while his lips murmured the beautiful Latin syllables his heart poured into them his own desire to draw to God this singular and powerful man. The task was not easy and he knew, in his humility, that he could not complete it. It would be necessary for some higher priest, some more astute mind, to fulfill the mission, perhaps the Monsignor himself. There were distances in William Lane that a common priest like himself could not reach, and depths from which he shrank.