Paul said, "Mother, Ralph says he hates God, and isn't going to say his prayers to him any more. He says God let his father and mother both get killed, and he don't know what the devil could do any worse than that. He said he started in having an altar to idols because he thought from what the Bible said that if you did you'd be so wicked lightning would strike you dead. But it didn't, and now he doesn't believe anything. So he's going on, having idols because the Bible says not to."
Marise's first rounded and exclusive emotion was of immense relief. Nothing had happened to her own son, and beside this relief, nothing for the moment seemed of any consequence. She drew Paul to her with a long breath of what was, she recognized it the moment afterward, her old, clear, undiluted, ferocious, hateful mother-egotism. For that instant she had not cared an atom what happened to another woman's child, so long as hers was safe.
But the next instant, the awareness of her hard heart cut across her like the lash of a whip. She shrank under it, horrified. She hung her head guilty and ashamed, divining the extremity of the other child's misery.
As she sat there, with her living arms around her own little son, the boy whose mother was dead came and stood before her in imagination, showing those festering, uncared-for wounds of sorrow and bitterness and loneliness, and furious, unavailing revolt from suffering too great to be borne.
She felt the guilt driven out from her narrow heart as it swelled larger to take him in. Any child who needed a mother so much, was her own child. He had no longer any mother who would care enough to try to understand, but she would care enough.
"He bowed down and worshiped," said Paul, in a shocked, frightened voice. "He knocked his head on the stones and cried like anything. He said he hated God."
"Oh!" cried Marise, intolerably stung by sympathy and pity. She started up to her feet, her heart burning, the tears on her cheeks. Her arms ached with emptiness till she should have drawn that suffering into them.
Paul said shyly, "Say, Mother, it's awful hard on those Powers kids, isn't it, not having anybody but their grandmother. Say, Mother, don't you think maybe we could . . . we could . . ." He turned his freckled, tanned, serious little face up to hers.
His mother stooped to kiss him, furiously, burningly, passionately, as she did not often kiss Paul, and he clung to her with all the strength of his strong little arms. "Yes, yes, you darling, you darling," she told him brokenly. "Yes, yes, yes."
II
September 10.