He had tried over and over again to pray for Elizabeth, to call to the seat where God was, that He might save the dear child from these torments unspeakable.
But there was always the silence, the dead physical blackness and silence. He beat his hands upon the stone wall; he bruised his head upon the roof of darkness which would not let him stand upright, and he knew—as it is appointed to some chosen men to know—that unutterable, unthinkable despair of travail which made Our Lord Himself call out in the last hour of His passion, [Greek: Êli, Êli lamà sabachthaní]
There was no response to his prayers. Into his heart came no answering message of hope.
And then the mind of this man, which had borne so much, and suffered so greatly, began to become powerless to feel. A bottle can only hold a certain amount of water, the strings of an instrument be plucked to a certain measure of sound, the brain of a man can endure up to a certain strain, and then it snaps entirely, or is drowsed with misery.
Physically, the young man was in perfect health when they had taken him to his prison. He had lived always a cleanly and athletic life. No sensual ease had ever dimmed his faculties. And therefore, though he knew it not, the frightful mental agony he had undergone had but drawn upon the reserve of his physical forces, and had hardly injured his body at all. The food they gave him, at any rate for the time of his disappearance from the world of sentient beings, was enough to support life. And while he lay in dreadful hopelessness, while his limbs were racked with pain, and it seemed to him that he stood upon the very threshold of death, he was in reality physically competent, and a few hours of relief would bring his body back to its pristine strength.
There came a time when he lay upon his stone floor perfectly motionless. The merciful anodyne that comes to all tortured people when either the brain or body can bear no more, had come to him now.
It seemed but a short moment—in reality it was several hours—since his jailors, those masked still-moving figures, had brought him a renewal of his food. He could not eat the bread, but two figs upon the platter were grateful and cooling to his throat, though he was unconscious of any physical gratification. He knew, sometime after, that sustenance had been brought to him, and that he had a great thirst. He stretched out his hand mechanically for the pitcher, rising from the floor and pressing the brim to his lips.
He drank deeply, and as he drank became suddenly aware that this was not the lukewarm water of the past darkness, but something that ran through his veins, that swiftly ran through them, and as the blood mounted to his brain gave him courage, awoke him, fed the starved nerves. It was wine he was drinking! wine that perhaps would be red in the light; wine that once more filled him with endeavour, and a desperate desire which was not hope but the last protest against his fate.
He lay back once more, by no means the same man he had been some little time agone, and as he reclined in a happy physical stupor—the while his brain was alive again and began to work—he said many times to himself the name of Jesus.
"Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!"—it was all he could say; it was all he could think of, it was his last prayer. Just the name alone.