Hermione was a woman who clung to no special religion, but she had always, all her life, had a very strong personal consciousness of a directing Power in the world, had always had an innate conviction that this directing Power followed with deep interest the life of each individual in the scheme of His creation. She had always felt, she felt now, that God knew everything about her and her life, was aware of all her feelings, was constantly intent upon her.
He was intent. But was He kindly or was He cruelly intent?
Surely He had been dreadfully cruel to her!
Only yesterday she had been wondering what bereaved women felt about God. Now she was one of these women.
"Was Maurice dead?" she thought—"was he already dead when I was praying before the shrine of the Madonna della Rocca?"
She longed to know. Yet she scarcely knew why she longed. It was like a strange, almost unnatural curiosity which she could not at first explain to herself. But presently her mind grew clearer and she connected this question with that other question—of God and what He really was, what He really felt towards His creatures, towards her.
Had God allowed her to pray like that, with all her heart and soul, and then immediately afterwards deliberately delivered her over to the fate of desolate women, or had Maurice been already dead? If that were so, and it must surely have been so, for when she prayed it was already night, she had been led to pray for herself ignorantly, and God had taken away her joy before He had heard her prayer. If He had heard it first He surely could not have dealt so cruelly with her—so cruelly! No human being could have, she thought, even the most hard-hearted.
But perhaps God was not all-powerful.
She remembered that once in London she had asked a clever and good clergyman if, looking around upon the state of things in the world, he was able to believe without difficulty that the world was governed by an all-wise, all-powerful, and all-merciful God. And his reply to her had been, "I sometimes wonder whether God is all-powerful—yet." She had not pursued the subject, but she had not forgotten this answer; and she thought of it now.
Was there a conflict in the regions beyond the world which was the only one she knew? Had an enemy done this thing, an enemy not only of hers, but of God's, an enemy who had power over God?