And now, hunger’s pangs having been fairly well appeased by the remnant of the sponge loaf, Paul had time to surrender himself to the thought of impending starvation. He convinced himself that a boy could die of starvation in two days. Morrow at noontide would see him stark and cold. He grew newly holy at this reflection, and forgave everybody afresh with flattering tears. It became a sort of essential that he should leave a memorial on the wall of the cell in which he was about to perish, and so he got out the broken knife from under the mattress, and carved a big cross in the papered plaster of the wall. It was less artistic in its outline than he could have hoped; but its symbolism, at least, was clear, and he wept and exulted as he worked at it.
The heavy day went by and the heavy night, and he began to be really hollow, and to believe with less than his original sense of comfort that his end was near. With the morning came his father with yesterday’s question. Paul broke into wild tears and protests. He wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t guilty.
‘Vary good. Yell just stay there.’
Dick, touched by the agony of despair with which Paul threw himself upon the bed, advised surrender.
‘What’s a lickin’?’ said Dick. ‘Have it over.’
‘Oh, Dick,’ cried Paul, clipping at the air between them, ‘plead for me!’
‘Not me,’ said Dick, who was less literary than Paul, and misunderstood the unfamiliar word—‘bleed for yourself.’
And again the heavy day went on, and Paul wept and wept alone. But it happened that this was scouring day; and a sort of wooden fender which fenced in the foot of the eight-day clock being moved, the missing bit of silver was found behind it, and the martyr was released. There were no apologies; but Paul was told to clean himself, and was whispered by Dick that there was a tea-party that afternoon, and that he was to be allowed to be present at it.
Then fell misery. He knew why the sponge loaf had been saved, and though everybody was kind now, and seemed to feel in an unspeaking way that he had been ill-used, he foresaw the near future and trembled.
He had been made to black his Sunday boots, he had been washed with such desperate earnestness that his face and neck tingled, and he diffused an atmosphere of yellow soap as he walked. He was in his best clothes, which fitted him as a sausage is fitted by its skin; he was guillotined in a white collar with a serrated inside edge, and guilt filled every crevice of his soul.