When he clasped his hands frantically and prayed—“O God, my beautiful God, my sweet God, once, only once, let me feel you near me tonight!” he could not feel him. He prayed aloud, very loud, and he got no answer; when he listened it was all quite quiet—like when the priests of Baal cried aloud to their god—“Oh, Baal, hear us! Oh, Baal, hear us! But Baal was gone a-hunting.”
That was a long wild night, and wild thoughts came and went in it; but they left their marks behind them forever: for, as years cannot pass without leaving their traces behind them, neither can nights into which are forced the thoughts and sufferings of years. And now the dawn was coming, and at last he was very tired. He shivered and tried to draw the shirt up over his shoulders. They were getting stiff. He had never known they were cut in the night. He looked up at the white light that came in through the hole at the top of the door and shuddered. Then he turned his face back to the ground and slept again.
Some hours later Bonaparte came toward the fuel-house with a lump of bread in his hand. He opened the door and peered in; then entered, and touched the fellow with his boot. Seeing that he breathed heavily, though he did not rouse, Bonaparte threw the bread down on the ground. He was alive, that was one thing. He bent over him, and carefully scratched open one of the cuts with the nail of his forefinger, examining with much interest his last night’s work. He would have to count his sheep himself that day; the boy was literally cut up. He locked the door and went away again.
“Oh, Lyndall,” said Em, entering the dining room, and bathed in tears, that afternoon, “I have been begging Bonaparte to let him out, and he won’t.”
“The more you beg the more he will not,” said Lyndall.
She was cutting out aprons on the table.
“Oh, but it’s late, and I think they want to kill him,” said Em, weeping bitterly; and finding that no more consolation was to be gained from her cousin, she went off blubbering—“I wonder you can cut out aprons when Waldo is shut up like that.”
For ten minutes after she was gone Lyndall worked on quietly; then she folded up her stuff, rolled it tightly together, and stood before the closed door of the sitting room with her hands closely clasped. A flush rose to her face: she opened the door quickly, and walked in, went to the nail on which the key of the fuel-room hung. Bonaparte and Tant Sannie sat there and saw her.
“What do you want?” they asked together.
“This key,” she said, holding it up, and looking at them.