None might call me friend--I
was alone. These words brought it home to me more clearly than before,
and the loneliness of it sank into my heart, and my pride fled, and I
told the good man all, looking to see him shrink from me.
But he did not, hearing me patiently to the end. I think if he had
shrunk from me, the telling had left me worse than when I kept it hid
from him.
When I ended, he laid his hand on my shoulder--even as the bishop had
laid his, and said:
"Vengeance is mine. I will repay, saith the Lord."
And I, who had never heard those words before, thought them a promise
sent by the mouth of this prophet, as it were, to me, and wondered. Then
he went on:
"Surely, my son, I believe you to be true, and that you suffer
wrongfully, for never one who would lie told the evil of himself as you
have told me. Foolish you have been, indeed, as is the way of youth, but
disloyal you were not."
I was silent, and waited for him to speak such words again. And he, too,
was silent for a little, looking out over the marsh, and rocking himself
to and fro as he sat on the tree trunk beside me.
"Watching and praying and fasting alone, there has been given me some
little gift of prophecy, my son; now and then it comes, but never with
light cause.
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