However, he felt no resentment toward her for going. How could he? Now that she was away, she seemed unspeakably dear, faultlessly perfect.
But, left behind, what was he? what did he have? what would become of him? To all those questions there was only one answer: Nothing. He was alone with a helpless, childish, old man and that other. "And I've tried 'n' tried!" he protested (he meant that he had tried to please Barber, tried to do his work better, tried to deserve more consideration from the longshoreman). And this was what had come of all his striving: Cis had been driven away.
"Oh, nothin' worse can happen t' me!" he declared despairingly. "Nothin'! nothin'!" What a staff she had always been, and how much he had leaned upon that staff, he did not suspect till now, when it was wrenched from under his hand. He had a fuller understanding, too, of what a comfort she had steadily been—she, the only bright and beautiful thing in the dark, poor flat! And to think that, boylike, he had ever shrunk out from under her caressing fingers, or fled from her proffered kiss! O his darling comrade and friend! O little mother and sister in one!
"Cis!" he faltered. "Cis!"
An almost intolerable sense of loss swept him, like a wave brimming the cup of his grief. His forehead seemed to be bulging, as if it would burst. His heart was bursting, too. And something was tearing, clawlike, at his throat and at his vitals. Just where the lower end of his breastbone left off was the old, awful, aching, gnawing, "gone" feeling. Much in his short life he had found hard to bear; but never anything so appalling as this! If only he might cry a little!
"Sir Gawain, he c-cried," he remembered, "when he found out he was f-fightin' his own b-brother. And Sir G-Gareth, he c-cried too." Also, no law of the twelve in the Handbook forbade a scout to weep.
His eyes closed, his mouth lengthened out pathetically, his cheeks puckered, his chin drew up grotesquely, trembling as if tortured; then he bent his head and began to sob, terribly, yet silently, for he feared to waken Grandpa. Down his hurt face streamed the tears, to fall on the big, old shirt, and on his feet, while he leaned against the door-jamb, a drooping, shaking, broken-hearted little figure.
"Oh, I can't git along without her!" he whispered. "I can't stand it! Oh, I want her back! I want her back!"
When he had cried away the sharp edge of his grief, a deliciously sad mood came over him. In The Legends of King Arthur, more than one grieving person had succumbed to sorrow. He wondered if he would die of his; and he saw himself laid out, stricken, on a barge, attended by three Queens, who were putting to sea to take him to the Vale of Avilion.
The picture brought him peace.