The Cole family did not fall asleep. They sat with pale faces and stiff backs staring at their father and thinking about their mother. Mary and Helen were frightened; the house was so strange, everyone spoke in whispers, and, on the way into church, many ladies had asked them how their mother was.
They felt important as well as sad. But Jeremy did not feel important. He had not heard the ladies and their questions--he would not have cared if he had. People had always called him “a queer little boy,” simply because he was independent and thought more than he spoke. Nevertheless, he had always in reality been normal enough until now. To-day he was really “queer,” was conscious for the first time of the existence of a world whose adjacence to the real world was, in after days, to trouble him so often and to complicate life for him so grievously. The terror that had come down upon him when his father had left him seemed to-day utterly to soak through into the very heart of him. His mother was going to die unless something or somebody saved her. What was dying? Going away, he had always been told, with a golden harp, to sing hymns in a foreign country. But to-day the picture would not form so easily. There was silence and darkness and confusion about this Death. His mother was going, against her will, and no one could tell him whither she was going. If he could only stop her dying, force God to leave her alone, to leave her with them all as she had been before...
He fixed his eyes upon his father, who climbed slowly into his pulpit and gave out the text of his sermon. To-day he would talk about the sacrifice of Isaac. “Abraham, as his hearers would remember...” and so on.
Jeremy listened, and gradually there grew before his eyes the figure of a strange and terrible God. This was no new figure. He had never thought directly about God, but for a very long time now he had had Him in the background of his life as Polchester Town Hall was in the background. But now he definitely and actively figured to himself this God, this God Who was taking his mother away and was intending apparently to put her into some dark place where she would know nobody. It must be some horrible place, because his father looked so frightened, which he would not look if his mother was simply going, with a golden harp, to sing hymns. Jeremy had always heard that this God was loving and kind and tender, but the figure whom his father was now drawing for the benefit of the congregation was none of these things.
