He temporized.
"I've no doubt he believed it," he said, unwilling to speak Tenney's name. It was doubly hateful to him at the moment of her being so patently undone. He could only think she was trying to reconcile the ugly contrast between her husband's expressed faith and his insane action. "I'm sure he thought so."
"That ain't what I mean," she hesitated, and he began to see how her mind was striving in an anguish of interrogation. "What he thinks—that's neither here nor there. What I want to know is whether it's so. If there's Somebody"—she clasped her hands on her knees and looked up at him, mutely imploring him who was so wise in books and life to help her striving mind—"if there's Somebody that cares—that died over it, He cared so much—if He's round here everywhere—if He sees it all—an' feels terrible, same as we do ourselves—why, then it's different."
"What's different?" Raven asked, out of his fog.
She was demanding something of him and he felt, in a sickness of despair, that it was something he couldn't give her because he hadn't it himself. Tenney could read her the alphabet of comfort, though he was piling on her those horrors of persecution that made her hungry for it.
"Why," she said, and the light and a bloom of something ineffable swept over her face, changing its tragic mystery from the somberness of the Fates to the imagined youthful glory of the angels, "if He's here all the time, if He's in the room when things happen to us, an' wishes He could stop it an' can't because"—again her mind labored and she saw she had come up against the mysterious negatives of destiny—"anyways, He would if He could—an' He knows how we feel inside when we feel the worst, an' cares, cares same as——" here she was inarticulate. But she turned for an instant toward the couch where the child lay, and her face was the mother face. She meant, he knew, as she cared for her child. "Why, then," she continued, "there wouldn't be anything to fret about, ever. You never'd be afraid, not if you was killed, you wouldn't. You'd know there was Somebody in the room."
This was the most deeply considered speech of her whole life. The last words, ingenuous as a child's unconscious betrayal, tore at him as, he suddenly thought, it would be if he saw a child tortured and in fear: as if he saw Nan. They told him how desperately lonesome and undefended she had felt.
"An' don't you see," she concluded, with the brightness of happy discovery, "even if you was killed, what harm would it do you? He'd be waitin'. You'd go with Him. Wherever it is He lives, you'd go."
Raven turned abruptly, walked to a window and stood there looking into the dark. The challenge of her face was impossible to bear. Suppose she asked him again if he believed it? Did he believe in a God made man? By no means. He believed in one God, benevolent, he had once assumed, but in these latter years too well hidden behind His cloud for man to say. Did the old story of a miraculous birth and an atonement move him even to a desire to believe? It repelled him rather? What, to his honest apprehension, was the God made man? An exemplar, a light upon the path of duty, as others also had been. Had the world gone wrong, escaped from its mysterious Maker, and did it need to be redeemed by any such dramatic remedy? No, his God, the God who made, could not botch a job and be disconcerted at the continuing bad results of His handiwork. The only doubt about his God was whether He was in any degree benevolent. When he reflected that He had made a world full to the brim of its cup of bitterness, he sometimes, nowadays, thought not. All this swept through his mind in a race of thoughts that had run on that course before, and again he heard her and knew she was pulling him back to the actual issue as it touched herself.
"You tell me," she was calling him. Her voice insisted. He did not turn, but he knew her face insisted even more commandingly. "You know. There's nothin' you don't know. Is it true?"