Bit by bit I told him my story. I was in the temper for a confession, and ready to tell my tale to anyone with wit enough to coax it from me. Perhaps it did not seem so much of a tale in the telling, though to my mind it was then as terrible as the end of the world itself and the unloosening of the great deep.
So I hunched myself up on my left elbow, and, staring drearily at Lancelot through my tears, I whimpered out my sorrows; and he listened with a smileless face.
When I had done, and my quavering broke off with a sob, he was silent for a while, looking straight before him beyond the meadow edges into the yellowing sky. Then he turned and looked at me with a brotherly pity that was soothing to my troubled senses, and he spoke to me with a softness of voice that seemed in tune with the dying day and my drooping spirits.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘you have not lost much, Raphael. She is but a light o’ love, and you were built for a better mate.’
Truly, though I scarcely noted it at the time, it was gracious and quick-witted of him to assume that I was of a lover’s age with the great lass of the Skull and Spectacles, and unconsciously it tickled my torn vanity. But part of his speech angered me, and I took fire like tinder.
Swinging myself round on my elbow, I glanced savagely into Lancelot’s face of compassion.
‘You lie!’ I growled, ‘you lie! She is a queen among women, and there is no man in all the world worthy of her!’
Then—for I saw him smile a little—I struck out at him. I am thankful to think that I was too wild and weary to strike either true or hard, and my foolish hand just grazed his cheek and touched his shoulder as he stooped; and then, turning away again, I fell into a fresh storm of sobbing. Lancelot remained by my side, gently indifferent to my fury, gently tender with my sorrow. After a while he turned me round reluctant, and looked very gravely into my tear-stained face. We were but a brace of lads, each on the edge of life, and as I look back on that page of my history I cannot help but shudder at the contrast between us, I bellowing like a gaby at the ache of my first calf-love—and yet indeed I was hurt, and hardly—and he so sweet and restrained and sane, weighing the world so wisely in his young hands.
‘I am very sorry for you, Raphael,’ he said, and his voice was so clear and strong that for the moment it comforted me as a cordial will comfort a sick man, against my will. ‘I am very sorry for you, and because of my sorrow for you and because of my love for you I will give you a gift that I would part with to no other in the world. Women are not all alike, and therefore I will give you a talisman to help you to think well of women.’