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 God, 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 assures 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!"