"_Good-bye, I was mad yesterday. I shall never marry you; I have no right to marry anyone. For G.o.d's sake do not ask me what I mean; and oh! don't, don't, DON'T come after me!_"

There is neither date nor signature. As Jim stands staring at the five crooked, straggling sentences, a great swelling compa.s.sion fills his heart. Did ever poor little scribble make it so easy to construct the small shaking hand, and the tender breaking heart that penned it? An immense pity fills his soul; yet does it quite fill it? Is there room besides, in one corner, for a small pinch of devilish joy?

"There's many a slip 'Twixt the cup and the lip."

His own words of ill-natured croaking, uttered not an hour ago, to Cecilia Wilson, recur to his mind. How little he thought that that prophecy would so soon be fulfilled! He remains so long motionless and silent, his fingers still holding the paper, whose contents he has long ago mastered, that Byng--the violence of his paroxysm of grief at length exhausted--struggles to his feet and speaks--speaks as well as the catch in his sobbing breath and his quivering lips will let him.

"It is not her doing! You may think it is her doing, but I know it is not! I know her better than you do."

"I never made any pretensions to knowing her well," replies the other sadly, and relinquishing as he speaks the note to its owner.

"Is it likely, I ask you?" cries Byng excitedly. "I put it to you fairly: is it likely that she, with her seraph nature, all love and burning, she that is tender over drowning flies, would have put me to this horrible pain?--O G.o.d, you do not know what pain it is" ["Do not I?" aside]--"of her own free will?"

"I do not know; as you say, I do not know her well."

"'Then tell, oh tell! how thou didst murder me?'"

says Byng, beginning to walk up and down the room with the tears still rolling down his cheeks, but in his spouting voice--a voice which at once a.s.sures Jim of an amelioration in his friend's condition, and hardens his heart against him. As a broad rule, indeed, it may be laid down that that sorrow which courses through one of the numberless channels cut by the poets for it will not bring its owner to Waterloo Bridge.

"But what am I saying?" lapsing out of his quotation into broken-hearted prose again. "It was not she! If I thought it were she, could I live a moment? It is her mother; no sane person can doubt that it is her mother's doing! She was always so sweetly docile, and her mother has conceived some prejudice against me. Did not I tell you how barbarously she shut the door upon me last night?--shut the door of my heaven in my face just as I thought I had won the right to enter it. Who would not have thought that it was won who had seen us together in the wood?"

Jim writhes.

"Oh, never mind the wood now!"

"Someone has prejudiced her against me, but who? I did not know that I had an enemy in the world. Someone has told her about--about Oxford--about my being sent down."

Jim is silent.

"If it is only that----" a tearful buoyancy beginning to pierce through his despair.

"It is not that."

"Someone has put a spoke in my wheel; but who? You are the only person who could, and you, dear old chap, are the last person who would, though you were not very encouraging to me last night! _You_ did not?"

There is so direct an interrogation in the last words, accompanied by so confiding a look of affection, that yet has an uneasy touch of doubt in it, that Jim is obliged to answer.

"No, I did not put a spoke in your wheel; but"--his honesty forcing the admission--"I am not at all so sure that I am the last person who would have done so, if I could."

Byng has wiped his eyes to clear his vision of the blinding tears, and has again directed them to the note, which he has all this while been alternately pressing against his heart, laying upon his forehead, and crushing against his mouth.

"It seems blasphemy to say so of anything that came from her hand," he says, poring for the hundredth time over each obscure word, "but it reads like nonsense, does it not? '_I shall never marry you! I have no right to marry anyone!_' No right? what does she mean?"

Jim shakes his head sadly.

"How can I tell?"

"Do you think it is possible"--lifting his disfigured eyes in horrified appeal to his friend--"it is a dreadful hypothesis, but I can think of no other--that that bright intelligence was clouded--that--that her dear little wits were touched when she wrote this?"

"No, I do not think so."

"You--you are not keeping anything from me?"--coming a step nearer, and convulsively clutching his friend's arm--"you--you do not know anything--anything that could throw light upon--upon this? I do not know whether you are conscious of it, but there is something in your manner that might lead me to that conclusion. Do you know--have you heard anything?"

"I know nothing," replies Jim slowly, and looking uncomfortably away from the questioner, "but I conjecture, I fear, I believe that--that----"

"That what? For G.o.d's sake, be a little quicker!"

"That--that--there is a--a--something in her past."

Byng falls back a pace or two, and puts up his hand to his head.

"What--what do you mean? What are you talking about? Her past?

What"--soaring into extravagance again--"what can there be written on that white page?--so white that it bedazzles the eyes of even the angels who read it."

"I do not know what there is," replies Jim miserably, irritated almost beyond endurance by this poetic flight, and rendered even more wretched than he was before by the _role_ that seems to be forced upon him, of conjecturally blackening Elizabeth's character. "How many times must I tell you that I _know_ no more than you, only from--from various indications I have been led to believe that she has _something_--some great sorrow behind her?"

There is a silence, and when it is broken it is infringed by what is not much more than a whisper.

"What--what do you mean; what--what sort of a sorrow?"

"I tell you, I do not know."

Byng's tears have stopped flowing, and he now lifts his eyes, full of a madness of exaltation, to the ceiling.

"I will go to her," he cries; "if sorrow has the audacity to approach her again, it will have to reckon with me. There is no sorrow, none, in the whole long gamut of woe, for which love such as mine is not a balm.

Reciprocal love!"--trailing the words in a sort of slow rapture--"no one that had seen her in the wood could have doubted that it _was_ reciprocal."

"No doubt, no doubt."

"I will go to her!"--clasping his hands high in the air--"I will pour the oil and spikenard of my adoration into her gaping wounds! I will kiss the rifts together, though they yawn as wide as h.e.l.l--yes, I will."

"For heaven's sake, do not talk such dreadful gibberish," breaks in Jim, at length at the end of his patience, which had run quite to the extreme of its tether indeed at the last mention of that ever-recurring wood.

"It _is_ a knockdown blow for you, I own, and I would do what I could to help you; but if you will keep on spouting and talking such terrible bosh----"

"I suppose I am making an a.s.s of myself," replies Byng, thus brought down with a run from his heroics. "I beg your pardon, I am sure, old man. I have no right to victimize you," his sweet nature a.s.serting itself even at this bitter moment; "but you see it is so horribly sudden. If you had seen her when I parted from her last night at the door! She lingered a moment behind Mrs. Le Marchant--just a moment, just time enough to give me one look, one wordless look. She did not speak; she was so divinely dutiful and submissive that nothing would have persuaded her by the lightest word to imply any censure of her mother; but she gave me just a look, which said plainly, 'It is not _my_ fault that you are turned away! _I_ would have welcomed you in!' Upon that look I banqueted in heaven all night."

He stops, choked.

"Well?"

"And then this morning, when I got here--I think I ran all the way; I am sure I did, for I saw people staring at me as I pa.s.sed--to be met by Annunziata with the news that they were _gone_! I did not believe her; I laughed in her face, and then she grew angry, and bid me come in and see for myself! And I rushed past her, in here, with my arms stretched out, confident that in one short moment more _she_ would be filling them, and instead of her"--dropping upon his knees by the table with a groan--"I find this!"--dashing the note upon the floor--"all that she leaves me to fill my embrace instead of her is this poor little pillow, that still seems to keep a faint trace of the perfume of her delicate head!"

He buries his own in it again as he speaks, beginning afresh to sob loudly.

Jim stands beside him, his mind half full of compa.s.sion and half of a burning exasperation, and his body wholly rigid.

"When did they go? at what hour? last night or this morning?"