“Good-night,” she said.
“Good-night, miss!” answered Richard, and walked away, with a loss at his heart. The poem has already ceased to please her! He had made the lovely lady more thoughtful, and less happy than before!
“She has been taught to believe in a God,” he said to himself. “She is afraid he will be angry with her, because, in her company, I dared question his existence! A generous God—isn't he! If he be anywhere, why don't he let us see him? How can he expect us to believe in him, if he never shows himself? But if he did, why should I worship him for being, or for making me? If I didn't want him, and I don't, I certainly shouldn't worship him because I saw him. I couldn't. If Nature is cruel, as she certainly is, and he made her, then he is cruel too! There cannot be such a God, or, if there be, it cannot be right to worship him!”
He did not reflect that if he had wanted him, he would not have waited to see him before he worshipped him.
But Barbara was saying to herself—
“What if he has shown himself to me some time—one of those nights, perhaps, when I was out till the sun rose—and I didn't know him!—How frightful if there should be nobody at all up there—nobody anywhere all round!”
She stared into the milky, star-sapphire-like blue, as if, out of the sweetly veiled terror-gulf, she would, by very gazing, draw the living face of God.
Verily the God that knows how not to reveal himself, must also know how best to reveal himself! If there be a calling child, there must be an answering father!