“I am saved all the trouble of thinking about it. There he is, looking hard at us!”
“Oh no, papa, he is not looking hard at us. He is looking most softly and sadly. What a darling donkey! and his nose is like a snowdrop!”
Clearly in the moonlight shone, on the opposite bank of the Woeburn, the nose of Jack the donkey. His wailings had been coming long, and his supplications rising; he was cut off from his home, and fodder, and wholly beloved Bonny. And the wail inside a wail—as Alice had described it—was the sound of the poor boy’s woe, responsive to the forlorn appeal of Jack. On the brink of the cruel dividing water they must have been for a long time striding up and down, over against each other, stretching fond noses vainly forward, and outvying one another in the luxury of poetic woe.
“Don’t say a word, papa,” whispered Alice; “the boy cannot see us here behind this bush, and we can see him beautifully in the moonlight. I want to know what he will do, so much.”
“I don’t see what he can do except howl,” Sir Roland answered quietly: “and certainly he seems to possess remarkable powers in that way.”
“Bo-hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo!” wept Bonny in confirmation of this opinion; and “eke-haw, eke-haw,” from a nose of copious pathos, formed the elegiac refrain. Then having exhausted the well of weeping, the boy became fitter for reasoning. He wiped his eyes with his scarlet sleeves, and stretched forth his arms reproachfully.
“Oh Jack, Jack, Jack, whatever have I done to you? all the crumb of the loaf you had, and the half of the very last orchard I run, and the prime of old Nanny’s short-horns, and if you wasn’t pleased, you might a’ said so all the morning, Jack. There’s none in all the world as knoweth what you and I be, but one another. And there is none as careth for either on us, only you and me, Jack. Don’t ’ee, Jack, don’t ’ee go and run away. If ’ee do, I’ll give the thieves all as we’ve collected, and the rogues as calls us two waggabones.”
“My poor boy,” said Sir Roland Lorraine, suddenly parting the bush between them, in fear of another sad boo-hoo—for Bonny had stirred his own depths, so that he was quite ready to start again—“my poor boy, you seem to be very unhappy about your donkey.”
Bonny made answer to never a word. This woe belonged only to Jack and himself. They could never think of being meddled with.
“Bonny,” said Alice, in her soft sweet voice, and kindly touching him, as he turned away, “do you wish to know how to recover your Jack? Would you go a long way to get him back again?”