“Hush!” said Abby.
“Hush!” said the tulip tree, as always, and kept reiterating its watchword at the window of the library where RoBards sought the dark quiet and paced the floor, wringing his hands and beating back into his mouth the mad yelping atheisms that came up as vainly as the bayings of a hound against the imperturbable moon.
He did not see his boy hiding among the young tulip trees about the children’s graves. There was a little hillock there and Keith could see into the library and see his father weaving to and fro like a caged fox. He wondered what it was all about. There was something terrible beyond the terrible fact that Jud Lasher had hurt Immy. But the mystery was impenetrable to his little mind. And his father would not tell him.
Keith wanted to go to him and help him, but he knew that he wanted to be alone. Fathers did not call for little boys to help them at such times.
It might have aided poor RoBards a little to feel that he himself was at just such a distance from his own heavenly Father, and He as helpless to explain. But that would not comport with any theology he understood. And he paced his cage.
CHAPTER XX
When RoBards had cried out all the blasphemy in his heart he fell to praying for some divine miracle to undo the past, to erase the truth and turn it into a nightmare. But soon he was put into God’s place and proved himself as adamant to prayer.
He had walked until he fell upon the old sofa. He rose from that, remembering that Harry Chalender had lain there when he was wounded. He went to a big chair and sank into it, a mere heap of weary bones and flaccid muscles.
Then his eyes paced the room, walking along the shelves, reading the names of books: lawbooks, philosophies, fiction, poetry—all of them records of the vanity of human efforts to conquer the storms that swept spirit and flesh. Every title was a monument of defeat.
To escape these reminders, his eyes went longingly to the window where they could release their vision like the raven set free upon the flooded world.