* * * * *

And this was the man, thought Percy, Papa Angelicus, whom he was to see in a minute or two.

The Cardinal put his hand on the priest’s knee as the door opened, and a purple prelate appeared, bowing.

“Only this,” he said.  “Be absolutely frank.”

Percy stood up, trembling.  Then he followed his patron towards the inner door.

IV

A white figure sat in the green gloom, beside a great writing-table, three or four yards away, but with the chair wheeled round to face the door by which the two entered.  So much Percy saw as he performed the first genuflection.  Then he dropped his eyes, advanced, genuflected again with the other, advanced once more, and for the third time genuflected, lifting the thin white hand, stretched out, to his lips.  He heard the door close as he stood up.

“Father Franklin, Holiness,” said the Cardinal’s voice at his ear.

A white-sleeved arm waved to a couple of chairs set a yard away, and the two sat down.

* * * * *

While the Cardinal, talking in slow Latin, said a few sentences, explaining that this was the English priest whose correspondence had been found so useful, Percy began to look with all his eyes.

He knew the Pope’s face well, from a hundred photographs and moving pictures; even his gestures were familiar to him, the slight bowing of the head in assent, the tiny eloquent movement of the hands; but Percy, with a sense of being platitudinal, told himself that the living presence was very different.

It was a very upright old man that he saw in the chair before him, of medium height and girth, with hands clasping the bosses of his chair-arms, and an appearance of great and deliberate dignity.  But it was at the face chiefly that he looked, dropping his gaze three or four times, as the Pope’s blue eyes turned on him.  They were extraordinary eyes, reminding him of what historians said of Pius X.; the lids drew straight lines across them, giving him the look of a hawk, but the rest of the face contradicted them.  There was no sharpness in that.  It was neither thin nor fat, but beautifully modelled in an oval outline:  the lips were clean-cut, with a look of passion in their curves; the nose came down in an aquiline sweep, ending in chiselled nostrils; the chin was firm and cloven, and the poise of the whole head was strangely youthful.  It was a face of great generosity and sweetness, set at an angle between defiance and humility, but ecclesiastical from ear to ear and brow to chin; the forehead was slightly compressed at the temples, and beneath the white cap lay white hair.  It had been the subject of laughter at the music-halls nine years before, when the composite face of well-known priests had been thrown on a screen, side by side with the new Pope’s, for the two were almost indistinguishable.

Percy found himself trying to sum it up, but nothing came to him except the word “priest.”  It was that, and that was all. Ecce sacerdos magnus! He was astonished at the look of youth, for the Pope was eighty-eight this year; yet his figure was as upright as that of a man of fifty, his shoulders unbowed, his head set on them like an athlete’s, and his wrinkles scarcely perceptible in the half light. Papa Angelicus! reflected Percy.