"I forced my acquaintance upon you at the very beginning; I watched you like a detective; I beset you wherever you went; I pestered you with my visits. Jim always told me that it was not the conduct of a gentleman, but I would not believe him—not even when"—how difficult it is! he finds it almost as hard work as his mother had done upon the Mole—"not even when, by my importunities, I had driven you away—obliged you to rush away almost by night from a place you liked—a place you were happy in—to escape me. And I have no excuse to offer you—none; unless, indeed, as I sometimes think, my mind was off its balance even then. I express myself wretchedly!"—in a tone of deep distress—"but you will overlook that, will not you? You will—will understand what I mean?"
She makes an assenting motion with her head. At this moment she cannot speak: she will be able to do so again directly, but she must have just a minute or two. Yet she must not leave him for an instant in doubt that she understands him. Oh yes, she understands him—understands that he is apologizing for having ever loved her; that he is awkwardly trying to draw the mantle of insanity over even the Vallombrosan wood. It is true that he does it with every sign of discomfort and pain; and he looks away from her, as Mrs. Byng, too, had found it pleasanter to do.
"Do you remember what Schiller said when he was dying? 'Many things are growing clearer to me.' I thought a good deal of those words as I lay over there"—glancing towards the now neatly-arranged and empty bed. "One night they thought it was all up with me—I heard them say so. They did not think I was conscious, but I was; and it did strike me that I had made a poor thing of it, and that if ever I was given the chance I would make a new start."
Again that little assenting movement of her fair head. How perfectly comprehensible he still is! How well she understands that he is renouncing her among the other follies of his "salad days"—college bear-fights, music-halls, gambling clubs. Well, why should not he? Has not she come here on purpose to renounce him? Can she quarrel with him for having saved her the trouble?
"And I thought that I could not begin better than by falling on my knees to you. I wish I could fall on my real knees to you!"—with a momentary expression of extreme impatience at his own bodily weakness—"and ask you most humbly and tenderly and reverently to pardon me."
She looks at him, and sees his wasted face flushing with fatigue and worry and mental suffering. Oh, what a bitter wave of desolateness rolls over her! But she smiles.
"I still do not understand what I am to forgive you for. I suppose that you could no more help having once thought you loved me, than you can help"—she stops abruptly in compassion for the look of acute regret, shame and remorse that crosses his sharp features, and, in her mercy to him, gives a different close to her phrase from that which its beginning had seemed to bespeak—"than you can help having been so ill."
Her tone, quite unconsciously to herself is inexpressibly touching; and Byng, weakened by illness, turns his face upon the pillow, and breaks into violent weeping. His mother had cried too. It seems to be in the family.
She has risen—what further is there for her to stay for?—and pauses quietly at his side till the paroxysm is past. Her standing posture tells him that she is going, and he consequently struggles to recover himself in some degree; but having never cultivated self-control when he was in health, it declines to come at his enfeebled bidding now.
"Forgive me! forgive me!" is all he can stammer.