"For look at it, Billy. First there was my faulty nature and little experience. No experience of life—an only son, kept close by loving parents—and with the awful proneness to be jealous hid in me, like poison in a root. Then fate, or chance, to play trick after trick upon me after marriage and build up, little by little, the signs of my great, fancied wrong. Signs that another man would have laughed at, but proofs—deadly proofs of ruin to my jaundiced sight. And the cunning, the craft to heap these things on my head—all shadows to a sane man; but real as death to me! First one, then another—each a grain of sand in itself, but growing, growing, till the heap was too heavy for me to bear.
"And whose work was it? 'God' you say, since He's responsible for all and willed it so. God, to plan a faulty man and start him to his own destruction; God, to make me love a woman with a mother like Margery's, so that, when the wounds might be healed, there was that fiend ever ready and willing and watchful to keep 'em open. God, to will that I should never hear my wife forgive me, though she had forgiven me; God, to let her die before I could get to her and kneel at her feet!
"No, William, a tale like this leaves a man honest, or else mad. And I'll be honest and say that no loving, merciful, all-powerful Father ever treated his children so. Mark how calm I am—no fury, no lamentation, no rage now. Just clear sight to see and show the way of my downfall. Your God could have given me a pinch of fine character to save me. He could have made me more generous, more understanding of my pure wife, less suspicious, less secret, less proud, less mean. He could have built me not to head myself off from everything and bring back night and ruin on my head. But no.
"We'll allow I got all I deserved—we'll confess that as I was made cracked, I had to break. But what about Margery? Did she get what she deserved? Did she earn what she was called to suffer—a creature, sweet as an open bud, to be drawn through dirt and horror and things evil and foul to early death? Was that the work of the all powerful and all just?"
"Always remember there's the next world, Jacob."
"Can fifty next worlds undo the work of this one? Can eternity alter what I did and what she suffered here? The next world's no way out, William. The balance isn't struck there, because evil never can turn into good, either in earth, or heaven. You can wipe away tears, but you can't wipe away what caused them to flow. And where have I come to now, think you? Another great light I've seen, like the light that blazed to Paul; but it blazed a different story to me. When I see a man praising God, I'm reminded of a mouse that runs to hide in the fur of the cat that's killing it. I no longer believe in God, William, and I'll tell you why. Because I think too well of God to believe in Him. D'you understand that? I wish He existed; I wish we could see His handicraft and feel His love; but let us be brave and not pretend. The sight of my little life and the greater sight of the whole world as it is—these things would drive God's self into hell if He was just. He'd tumble out of His heaven and call on the smoke of the pit to hide Him and His horrible works. And so I've come to the blessed, grey calm of knowing that what I suffered there was none to save me from. It's a sign of the greatness of man that he could give all his hard-won credit to God, William, and invent a place where justice would be done by a Being far nobler, finer, truer and stronger than himself. But proofs against are too many and too fearful. The world's waiting now for another Christ to wake us to the glory of Man, William, because the time has come when we're old enough to trust ourselves, and walk alone, and put away childish things. We deserve a good God—or none."
The ancient listened patiently.
"Your mind is working like a river—I see that," he answered. "But be patient still, Jacob. Keep yourself in hand. You'll find yourself yet; you be on the right road I expect; and when you do find yourself, you'll find your God was only hid, not dead."
He uttered kindly thoughts and they talked for an hour together. Then Auna and William descended to the kitchen and he ate with her. He was happy at what he had seen rather than at what he had heard.
"Forget all your father says," begged William. "He's going to be a strong and healthy man. I mark the promise in him. A great victory for doctor and you and nurse. There's a bit of fever in his mind yet; but the mind be always the last to clean up again after a great illness. His talk be only the end of his torments running away—like dirty water after a freshet."