‘Whatever wilto ax me next, lad?’ cried the worn-out and perplexed old woman. ‘Come, shut up th' Bible, and eat thi pasty.’
But the little fellow's appetite was gone, and as he fell asleep on the settle his slumber was fitful, for dark dreams disturbed him—he had felt the first awful shadow of a dogmatic faith.
Nor was old Deborah less disturbed. Sitting by the fire, with one eye on the child and the other on her Bible, the gloomy shadows of a shortening day creeping around her, she, too, with her mind's eye, saw the regions of woe—the flaming deeps where hope comes never. What if that were her grandchild's doom!—her grandchild, whose father she would smite if even for a moment he shut his little son up in the cellar of his home! How her heart loathed the passion, the cruelty, that would wreak such an act! And yet He whom she called God had reserved blackness and darkness for ever for the disobedient and rebellious.
Horror took hold of her, and the sweat moistened her brow. The firelight played on the curls of the sleeping boy, and she started as she thought of that other fire that was never quenched, and she rose and shook her clenched hand at heaven as the possibility of the singeing of a single hair of the child passed through her mind.
For a time Deborah stood alone, without a God, the faith in which she had been trained, and in which she had sheltered in righteous security, shrinking into space until she found herself in the void of a darkness more terrible than that of the pit which she had been speaking of to the child. She saw how that hitherto she had only believed she believed, and that now, when her soul was touched in its nether deeps, she had never believed at all in the creed which she had fought for and upheld with such bitterness. There, in the twilight of that Sabbath evening, she uttered what, to Rehoboth, would have been a terrible renunciation, just as a lurid beam shot its level fire across the moors, and as the sun went down, leaving her in the horror of a great darkness.
And then, in the gathering gloom, was heard the voice of the child calling:
‘Gronny! Gronny!’
‘Well, mi lad, what is't?’
‘Gronny, I don't believe i' th' hoile.’