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Two on a Tower

by Thomas Hardy · English · Gutenberg #3146 · 556,103 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Two on a Tower

Author: Thomas Hardy


        
Release date: March 1, 2002 [eBook #3146]
                Most recently updated: June 6, 2011

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3146

Credits: This etext was prepared from the 1923 Macmillan edition by Les Bowler


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWO ON A TOWER ***




This etext was prepared from the 1923 Macmillan edition by Les Bowler.





TWO ON A TOWER


BY
THOMAS HARDY.

   'Ah, my heart! her eyes and she
   Have taught thee new astrology.
   Howe'er Love's native hours were set,
   Whatever starry synod met,
   'Tis in the mercy of her eye,
   If poor Love shall live or die.'

   CRASHAW: _Love's Horoscope_.

WITH A MAP OF WESSEX.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1923

COPYRIGHT

_First published by Macmillan and Co._, _Crown_ 8_vo,_ 1902

_Reprinted_ 1907, 1911, 1916, 1923

_Pocket Edition_ 1906.  _Reprinted_ 1909, 1912, 1915, 1918 1919, 1920,
1922, 1923

_Wessex Edition_ (_8vo_) 1912

_Reprinted_ 1920

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




PREFACE.


This slightly-built romance was the outcome of a wish to set the
emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous
background of the stellar universe, and to impart to readers the
sentiment that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the
greater to them as men.

But, on the publication of the book people seemed to be less struck with
these high aims of the author than with their own opinion, first, that
the novel was an 'improper' one in its morals, and, secondly, that it was
intended to be a satire on the Established Church of this country.  I was
made to suffer in consequence from several eminent pens.

That, however, was thirteen years ago, and, in respect of the first
opinion, I venture to think that those who care to read the story now
will be quite astonished at the scrupulous propriety observed therein on
the relations of the sexes; for though there may be frivolous, and even
grotesque touches on occasion, there is hardly a single caress in the
book outside legal matrimony, or what was intended so to be.

As for the second opinion, it is sufficient to draw attention, as I did
at the time, to the fact that the Bishop is every inch a gentleman, and
that the parish priest who figures in the narrative is one of its most
estimable characters.

However, the pages must speak for themselves.  Some few readers, I
trust--to take a serious view--will be reminded by this imperfect story,
in a manner not unprofitable to the growth of the social sympathies, of
the pathos, misery, long-suffering, and divine tenderness which in real
life frequently accompany the passion of such a woman as Viviette for a
lover several years her junior.

The scene of the action was suggested by two real spots in the part of
the country specified, each of which has a column standing upon it.
Certain surrounding peculiarities have been imported into the narrative
from both sites.

T. H.

_July_ 1895.




TWO ON A TOWER.


I


On an early winter afternoon, clear but not cold, when the vegetable
world was a weird multitude of skeletons through whose ribs the sun shone
freely, a gleaming landau came to a pause on the crest of a hill in
Wessex.  The spot was where the old Melchester Road, which the carriage
had hitherto followed, was joined by a drive that led round into a park
at no great distance off.

The footman alighted, and went to the occupant of the carriage, a lady
about eight- or nine-and-twenty.  She was looking through the opening
afforded by a field-gate at the undulating stretch of country beyond.  In
pursuance of some remark from her the servant looked in the same
direction.

The central feature of the middle distance, as they beheld it, was a
circular isolated hill, of no great elevation, which placed itself in
strong chromatic contrast with a wide acreage of surrounding arable by
being covered with fir-trees.  The trees were all of one size and age, so
that their tips assumed the precise curve of the hill they grew upon.
This pine-clad protuberance was yet further marked out from the general
landscape by having on its summit a tower in the form of a classical
column, which, though partly immersed in the plantation, rose above the
tree-tops to a considerable height.  Upon this object the eyes of lady
and servant were bent.

'Then there is no road leading near it?' she asked.

'Nothing nearer than where we are now, my lady.'

'Then drive home,' she said after a moment.  And the carriage rolled on
its way.

A few days later, the same lady, in the same carriage, passed that spot
again.  Her eyes, as before, turned to the distant tower.

'Nobbs,' she said to the coachman, 'could you find your way home through
that field, so as to get near the outskirts of the plantation where the
column is?'

The coachman regarded the field.  'Well, my lady,' he observed, 'in dry
weather we might drive in there by inching and pinching, and so get
across by Five-and-Twenty Acres, all being well.  But the ground is so
heavy after these rains that perhaps it would hardly be safe to try it
now.'

'Perhaps not,' she assented indifferently.  'Remember it, will you, at a
drier time?'

And again the carriage sped along the road, the lady's eyes resting on
the segmental hill, the blue trees that muffled it, and the column that
formed its apex, till they were out of sight.

A long time elapsed before that lady drove over the hill again.  It was
February; the soil was now unquestionably dry, the weather and scene
being in other respects much as they had been before.  The familiar shape
of the column seemed to remind her that at last an opportunity for a
close inspection had arrived.  Giving her directions she saw the gate
opened, and after a little manoeuvring the carriage swayed slowly into
the uneven field.

Although the pillar stood upon the hereditary estate of her husband the
lady had never visited it, owing to its insulation by this well-nigh
impracticable ground.  The drive to the base of the hill was tedious and
jerky, and on reaching it she alighted, directing that the carriage
should be driven back empty over the clods, to wait for her on the
nearest edge of the field.  She then ascended beneath the trees on foot.

The column now showed itself as a much more important erection than it
had appeared from the road, or the park, or the windows of Welland House,
her residence hard by, whence she had surveyed it hundreds of times
without ever feeling a sufficient interest in its details to investigate
them.  The column had been erected in the last century, as a substantial
memorial of her husband's great-grandfather, a respectable officer who
had fallen in the American war, and the reason of her lack of interest
was partly owing to her relations with this husband, of which more anon.
It was little beyond the sheer desire for something to do--the chronic
desire of her curiously lonely life--that had brought her here now.  She
was in a mood to welcome anything that would in some measure disperse an
almost killing _ennui_.  She would have welcomed even a misfortune.  She
had heard that from the summit of the pillar four counties could be seen.
Whatever pleasurable effect was to be derived from looking into four
counties she resolved to enjoy to-day.

The fir-shrouded hill-top was (according to some antiquaries) an old
Roman camp,--if it were not (as others insisted) an old British castle,
or (as the rest swore) an old Saxon field of Witenagemote,--with remains
of an outer and an inner vallum, a winding path leading up between their
overlapping ends by an easy ascent.  The spikelets from the trees formed
a soft carpet over the route, and occasionally a brake of brambles barred
the interspaces of the trunks.  Soon she stood immediately at the foot of
the column.

It had been built in the Tuscan order of classic architecture, and was
really a tower, being hollow with steps inside.  The gloom and solitude
which prevailed round the base were remarkable.  The sob of the
environing trees was here expressively manifest; and moved by the light
breeze their thin straight stems rocked in seconds, like inverted
pendulums; while some boughs and twigs rubbed the pillar's sides, or
occasionally clicked in catching each other.  Below the level of their
summits the masonry was lichen-stained and mildewed, for the sun never
pierced that moaning cloud of blue-black vegetation.  Pads of moss grew
in the joints of the stone-work, and here and there shade-loving insects
had engraved on the mortar patterns of no human style or meaning; but
curious and suggestive.  Above the trees the case was different: the
pillar rose into the sky a bright and cheerful thing, unimpeded, clean,
and flushed with the sunlight.

The spot was seldom visited by a pedestrian, except perhaps in the
shooting season.  The rarity of human intrusion was evidenced by the
mazes of rabbit-runs, the feathers of shy birds, the exuviae of reptiles;
as also by the well-worn paths of squirrels down the sides of trunks, and
thence horizontally away.  The fact of the plantation being an island in
the midst of an arable plain sufficiently accounted for this lack of
visitors.  Few unaccustomed to such places can be aware of the insulating
effect of ploughed ground, when no necessity compels people to traverse
it.  This rotund hill of trees and brambles, standing in the centre of a
ploughed field of some ninety or a hundred acres, was probably visited
less frequently than a rock would have been visited in a lake of equal
extent.

She walked round the column to the other side, where she found the door
through which the interior was reached.  The paint, if it had ever had
any, was all washed from the wood, and down the decaying surface of the
boards liquid rust from the nails and hinges had run in red stains.  Over
the door was a stone tablet, bearing, apparently, letters or words; but
the inscription, whatever it was, had been smoothed over with a plaster
of lichen.

Here stood this aspiring piece of masonry, erected as the most
conspicuous and ineffaceable reminder of a man that could be thought of;
and yet the whole aspect of the memorial betokened forgetfulness.
Probably not a dozen people within the district knew the name of the
person commemorated, while perhaps not a soul remembered whether the
column were hollow or solid, whether with or without a tablet explaining
its date and purpose.  She herself had lived within a mile of it for the
last five years, and had never come near it till now.

She hesitated to ascend alone, but finding that the door was not fastened
she pushed it open with her foot, and entered.  A scrap of writing-paper
lay within, and arrested her attention by its freshness.  Some human
being, then, knew the spot, despite her surmises.  But as the paper had
nothing on it no clue was afforded; yet feeling herself the proprietor of
the column and of all around it her self-assertiveness was sufficient to
lead her on.  The staircase was lighted by slits in the wall, and there
was no difficulty in reaching the top, the steps being quite unworn.  The
trap-door leading on to the roof was open, and on looking through it an
interesting spectacle met her eye.

A youth was sitting on a stool in the centre of the lead flat which
formed the summit of the column, his eye being applied to the end of a
large telescope that stood before him on a tripod.  This sort of presence
was unexpected, and the lady started back into the shade of the opening.
The only effect produced upon him by her footfall was an impatient wave
of the hand, which he did without removing his eye from the instrument,
as if to forbid her to interrupt him.

Pausing where she stood the lady examined the aspect of the individual
who thus made himself so completely at home on a building which she
deemed her unquestioned property.  He was a youth who might properly have
been characterized by a word the judicious chronicler would not readily
use in such a connexion, preferring to reserve it for raising images of
the opposite sex.  Whether because no deep felicity is likely to arise
from the condition, or from any other reason, to say in these days that a
youth is beautiful is not to award him that amount of credit which the
expression would have carried with it if he had lived in the times of the
Classical Dictionary.  So much, indeed, is the reverse the case that the
assertion creates an awkwardness in saying anything more about him.  The
beautiful youth usually verges so perilously on the incipient coxcomb,
who is about to become the Lothario or Juan among the neighbouring
maidens, that, for the due understanding of our present young man, his
sublime innocence of any thought concerning his own material aspect, or
that of others, is most fervently asserted, and must be as fervently
believed.

Such as he was, there the lad sat.  The sun shone full in his face, and
on his head he wore a black velvet skull-cap, leaving to view below it a
curly margin of very light shining hair, which accorded well with the
flush upon his cheek.

He had such a complexion as that with which Raffaelle enriches the
countenance of the youthful son of Zacharias,--a complexion which, though
clear, is far enough removed from virgin delicacy, and suggests plenty of
sun and wind as its accompaniment.  His features were sufficiently
straight in the contours to correct the beholder's first impression that
the head was the head of a girl.  Beside him stood a little oak table,
and in front was the telescope.

His visitor had ample time to make these observations; and she may have
done so all the more keenly through being herself of a totally opposite
type.  Her hair was black as midnight, her eyes had no less deep a shade,
and her complexion showed the richness demanded as a support to these
decided features.  As she continued to look at the pretty fellow before
her, apparently so far abstracted into some speculative world as scarcely
to know a real one, a warmer wave of her warm temperament glowed visibly
through her, and a qualified observer might from this have hazarded a
guess that there was Romance blood in her veins.

But even the interest attaching to the youth could not arrest her
attention for ever, and as he made no further signs of moving his eye
from the instrument she broke the silence with--

'What do you see?--something happening somewhere?'

'Yes, quite a catastrophe!' he automatically murmured, without moving
round.

'What?'

'A cyclone in the sun.'

The lady paused, as if to consider the weight of that event in the scale
of terrene life.

'Will it make any difference to us here?' she asked.

The young man by this time seemed to be awakened to the consciousness
that somebody unusual was talking to him; he turned, and started.

'I beg your pardon,' he said.  'I thought it was my relative come to look
after me!  She often comes about this time.'

He continued to look at her and forget the sun, just such a reciprocity
of influence as might have been expected between a dark lady and a flaxen-
haired youth making itself apparent in the faces of each.

'Don't let me interrupt your observations,' said she.

'Ah, no,' said he, again applying his eye; whereupon his face lost the
animation which her presence had lent it, and became immutable as that of
a bust, though superadding to the serenity of repose the sensitiveness of
life.  The expression that settled on him was one of awe.  Not unaptly
might it have been said that he was worshipping the sun.  Among the
various intensities of that worship which have prevailed since the first
intelligent being saw the luminary decline westward, as the young man now
beheld it doing, his was not the weakest.  He was engaged in what may be
called a very chastened or schooled form of that first and most natural
of adorations.

'But would you like to see it?' he recommenced.  'It is an event that is
witnessed only about once in two or three years, though it may occur
often enough.'

She assented, and looked through the shaded eyepiece, and saw a whirling
mass, in the centre of which the blazing globe seemed to be laid bare to
its core.  It was a peep into a maelstrom of fire, taking place where
nobody had ever been or ever would be.

'It is the strangest thing I ever beheld,' she said.  Then he looked
again; till wondering who her companion could be she asked, 'Are you
often here?'

'Every night when it is not cloudy, and often in the day.'

'Ah, night, of course.  The heavens must be beautiful from this point.'

'They are rather more than that.'

'Indeed!  Have you entirely taken possession of this column?'

'Entirely.'

'But it is my column,' she said, with smiling asperity.

'Then are you Lady Constantine, wife of the absent Sir Blount
Constantine?'

'I am Lady Constantine.'

'Ah, then I agree that it is your ladyship's.  But will you allow me to
rent it of you for a time, Lady Constantine?'

'You have taken it, whether I allow it or not.  However, in the interests
of science it is advisable that you continue your tenancy.  Nobody knows
you are here, I suppose?'

'Hardly anybody.'

He then took her down a few steps into the interior, and showed her some
ingenious contrivances for stowing articles away.

'Nobody ever comes near the column,--or, as it's called here, Rings-Hill
Speer,' he continued; 'and when I first came up it nobody had been here
for thirty or forty years.  The staircase was choked with daws' nests and
feathers, but I cleared them out.'

'I understood the column was always kept locked?'

'Yes, it has been so.  When it was built, in 1782, the key was given to
my great-grandfather, to keep by him in case visitors should happen to
want it.  He lived just down there where I live now.'

He denoted by a nod a little dell lying immediately beyond the ploughed
land which environed them.

'He kept it in his bureau, and as the bureau descended to my grandfather,
my mother, and myself, the key descended with it.  After the first thirty
or forty years, nobody ever asked for it.  One day I saw it, lying rusty
in its niche, and, finding that it belonged to this column, I took it and
came up.  I stayed here till it was dark, and the stars came out, and
that night I resolved to be an astronomer.  I came back here from school
several months ago, and I mean to be an astronomer still.'

He lowered his voice, and added:

'I aim at nothing less than the dignity and office of Astronomer Royal,
if I live.  Perhaps I shall not live.'

'I don't see why you should suppose that,' said she.  'How long are you
going to make this your observatory?'

'About a year longer--till I have obtained a practical familiarity with
the heavens.  Ah, if I only had a good equatorial!'

'What is that?'

'A proper instrument for my pursuit.  But time is short, and science is
infinite,--how infinite only those who study astronomy fully realize,--and
perhaps I shall be worn out before I make my mark.'

She seemed to be greatly struck by the odd mixture in him of scientific
earnestness and melancholy mistrust of all things human.  Perhaps it was
owing to the nature of his studies.

'You are often on this tower alone at night?' she said.

'Yes; at this time of the year particularly, and while there is no moon.
I observe from seven or eight till about two in the morning, with a view
to my great work on variable stars.  But with such a telescope as
this--well, I must put up with it!'

'Can you see Saturn's ring and Jupiter's moons?'

He said drily that he could manage to do that, not without some contempt
for the state of her knowledge.

'I have never seen any planet or star through a telescope.'

'If you will come the first clear night, Lady Constantine, I will show
you any number.  I mean, at your express wish; not otherwise.'

'I should like to come, and possibly may at some time.  These stars that
vary so much--sometimes evening stars, sometimes morning stars, sometimes
in the east, and sometimes in the west--have always interested me.'

'Ah--now there is a reason for your not coming.  Your ignorance of the
realities of astronomy is so satisfactory that I will not disturb it
except at your serious request.'

'But I wish to be enlightened.'

'Let me caution you against it.'

'Is enlightenment on the subject, then, so terrible?'

'Yes, indeed.'

She laughingly declared that nothing could have so piqued her curiosity
as his statement, and turned to descend.  He helped her down the stairs
and through the briers.  He would have gone further and crossed the open
corn-land with her, but she preferred to go alone.  He then retraced his
way to the top of the column, but, instead of looking longer at the sun,
watched her diminishing towards the distant fence, behind which waited
the carriage.  When in the midst of the field, a dark spot on an area of
brown, there crossed her path a moving figure, whom it was as difficult
to distinguish from the earth he trod as the caterpillar from its leaf,
by reason of the excellent match between his clothes and the clods.  He
was one of a dying-out generation who retained the principle, nearly
unlearnt now, that a man's habiliments should be in harmony with his
environment.  Lady Constantine and this figure halted beside each other
for some minutes; then they went on their several ways.

The brown person was a labouring man known to the world of Welland as
Haymoss (the encrusted form of the word Amos, to adopt the phrase of
philologists).  The reason of the halt had been some inquiries addressed
to him by Lady Constantine.

'Who is that--Amos Fry, I think?' she had asked.

'Yes my lady,' said Haymoss; 'a homely barley driller, born under the
eaves of your ladyship's outbuildings, in a manner of speaking,--though
your ladyship was neither born nor 'tempted at that time.'

'Who lives in the old house behind the plantation?'

'Old Gammer Martin, my lady, and her grandson.'

'He has neither father nor mother, then?'

'Not a single one, my lady.'

'Where was he educated?'

'At Warborne,--a place where they draw up young gam'sters' brains like
rhubarb under a ninepenny pan, my lady, excusing my common way.  They hit
so much larning into en that 'a could talk like the day of Pentecost;
which is a wonderful thing for a simple boy, and his mother only the
plainest ciphering woman in the world.  Warborne Grammar School--that's
where 'twas 'a went to.  His father, the reverent Pa'son St. Cleeve, made
a terrible bruckle hit in 's marrying, in the sight of the high.  He were
the curate here, my lady, for a length o' time.'

'Oh, curate,' said Lady Constantine.  'It was before I knew the village.'

'Ay, long and merry ago!  And he married Farmer Martin's daughter--Giles
Martin, a limberish man, who used to go rather bad upon his lags, if you
can mind.  I knowed the man well enough; who should know en better!  The
maid was a poor windling thing, and, though a playward piece o' flesh
when he married her, 'a socked and sighed, and went out like a snoff!
Yes, my lady.  Well, when Pa'son St. Cleeve married this homespun woman
the toppermost folk wouldn't speak to his wife.  Then he dropped a cuss
or two, and said he'd no longer get his living by curing their twopenny
souls o' such d--- nonsense as that (excusing my common way), and he took
to farming straightway, and then 'a dropped down dead in a nor'-west
thunderstorm; it being said--hee-hee!--that Master God was in tantrums
wi'en for leaving his service,--hee-hee!  I give the story as I heard it,
my lady, but be dazed if I believe in such trumpery about folks in the
sky, nor anything else that's said on 'em, good or bad.  Well, Swithin,
the boy, was sent to the grammar school, as I say for; but what with
having two stations of life in his blood he's good for nothing, my lady.
He mopes about--sometimes here, and sometimes there; nobody troubles
about en.'

Lady Constantine thanked her informant, and proceeded onward.  To her, as
a woman, the most curious feature in the afternoon's incident was that
this lad, of striking beauty, scientific attainments, and cultivated
bearing, should be linked, on the maternal side, with a local
agricultural family through his father's matrimonial eccentricity.  A
more attractive feature in the case was that the same youth, so capable
of being ruined by flattery, blandishment, pleasure, even gross
prosperity, should be at present living on in a primitive Eden of
unconsciousness, with aims towards whose accomplishment a Caliban shape
would have been as effective as his own.



II


Swithin St. Cleeve lingered on at his post, until the more sanguine birds
of the plantation, already recovering from their midwinter anxieties,
piped a short evening hymn to the vanishing sun.

The landscape was gently concave; with the exception of tower and hill
there were no points on which late rays might linger; and hence the dish-
shaped ninety acres of tilled land assumed a uniform hue of shade quite
suddenly.  The one or two stars that appeared were quickly clouded over,
and it was soon obvious that there would be no sweeping the heavens that
night.  After tying a piece of tarpaulin, which had once seen service on
his maternal grandfather's farm, over all the apparatus around him, he
went down the stairs in the dark, and locked the door.

With the key in his pocket he descended through the underwood on the side
of the slope opposite to that trodden by Lady Constantine, and crossed
the field in a line mathematically straight, and in a manner that left no
traces, by keeping in the same furrow all the way on tiptoe.  In a few
minutes he reached a little dell, which occurred quite unexpectedly on
the other side of the field-fence, and descended to a venerable thatched
house, whose enormous roof, broken up by dormers as big as haycocks,
could be seen even in the twilight.  Over the white walls, built of chalk
in the lump, outlines of creepers formed dark patterns, as if drawn in
charcoal.

Inside the house his maternal grandmother was sitting by a wood fire.
Before it stood a pipkin, in which something was evidently kept warm.  An
eight-legged oak table in the middle of the room was laid for a meal.
This woman of eighty, in a large mob cap, under which she wore a little
cap to keep the other clean, retained faculties but little blunted.  She
was gazing into the flames, with her hands upon her knees, quietly re-
enacting in her brain certain of the long chain of episodes, pathetic,
tragical, and humorous, which had constituted the parish history for the
last sixty years.  On Swithin's entry she looked up at him in a sideway
direction.

'You should not have waited for me, granny,' he said.

''Tis of no account, my child.  I've had a nap while sitting here.  Yes,
I've had a nap, and went straight up into my old country again, as usual.
The place was as natural as when I left it,--e'en just threescore years
ago!  All the folks and my old aunt were there, as when I was a
child,--yet I suppose if I were really to set out and go there, hardly a
soul would be left alive to say to me, dog how art!  But tell Hannah to
stir her stumps and serve supper--though I'd fain do it myself, the poor
old soul is getting so unhandy!'

Hannah revealed herself to be much nimbler and several years younger than
granny, though of this the latter seemed to be oblivious.  When the meal
was nearly over Mrs. Martin produced the contents of the mysterious
vessel by the fire, saying that she had caused it to be brought in from
the back kitchen, because Hannah was hardly to be trusted with such
things, she was becoming so childish.

'What is it, then?' said Swithin.  'Oh, one of your special puddings.'  At
sight of it, however, he added reproachfully, 'Now, granny!'

Instead of being round, it was in shape an irregular boulder that had
been exposed to the weather for centuries--a little scrap pared off here,
and a little piece broken away there; the general aim being,
nevertheless, to avoid destroying the symmetry of the pudding while
taking as much as possible of its substance.

'The fact is,' added Swithin, 'the pudding is half gone!'

'I've only sliced off the merest paring once or twice, to taste if it was
well done!' pleaded granny Martin, with wounded feelings.  'I said to
Hannah when she took it up, "Put it here to keep it warm, as there's a
better fire than in the back kitchen."'

'Well, I am not going to eat any of it!' said Swithin decisively, as he
rose from the table, pushed away his chair, and went up-stairs; the
'other station of life that was in his blood,' and which had been brought
out by the grammar school, probably stimulating him.

'Ah, the world is an ungrateful place!  'Twas a pity I didn't take my
poor name off this earthly calendar and creep under ground sixty long
years ago, instead of leaving my own county to come here!' mourned old
Mrs. Martin.  'But I told his mother how 'twould be--marrying so many
notches above her.  The child was sure to chaw high, like his father!'

When Swithin had been up-stairs a minute or two however, he altered his
mind, and coming down again ate all the pudding, with the aspect of a
person undertaking a deed of great magnanimity.  The relish with which he
did so restored the unison that knew no more serious interruptions than
such as this.

'Mr. Torkingham has been here this afternoon,' said his grandmother; 'and
he wants me to let him meet some of the choir here to-night for practice.
They who live at this end of the parish won't go to his house to try over
the tunes, because 'tis so far, they say, and so 'tis, poor men.  So he's
going to see what coming to them will do.  He asks if you would like to
join.'

'I would if I had not so much to do.'

'But it is cloudy to-night.'

'Yes; but I have calculations without end, granny.  Now, don't you tell
him I'm in the house, will you? and then he'll not ask for me.'

'But if he should, must I then tell a lie, Lord forgive me?'

'No, you can say I'm up-stairs; he must think what he likes.  Not a word
about the astronomy to any of them, whatever you do.  I should be called
a visionary, and all sorts.'

'So thou beest, child.  Why can't ye do something that's of use?'

At the sound of footsteps Swithin beat a hasty retreat up-stairs, where
he struck a light, and revealed a table covered with books and papers,
while round the walls hung star-maps, and other diagrams illustrative of
celestial phenomena.  In a corner stood a huge pasteboard tube, which a
close inspection would have shown to be intended for a telescope.  Swithin
hung a thick cloth over the window, in addition to the curtains, and sat
down to his papers.  On the ceiling was a black stain of smoke, and under
this he placed his lamp, evidencing that the midnight oil was consumed on
that precise spot very often.

Meanwhile there had entered to the room below a personage who, to judge
from her voice and the quick pit-pat of her feet, was a maiden young and
blithe.  Mrs. Martin welcomed her by the title of Miss Tabitha Lark, and
inquired what wind had brought her that way; to which the visitor replied
that she had come for the singing.

'Sit ye down, then,' said granny.  'And do you still go to the House to
read to my lady?'

'Yes, I go and read, Mrs. Martin; but as to getting my lady to hearken,
that's more than a team of six horses could force her to do.'

The girl had a remarkably smart and fluent utterance, which was probably
a cause, or a consequence, of her vocation.

''Tis the same story, then?' said grandmother Martin.

'Yes.  Eaten out with listlessness.  She's neither sick nor sorry, but
how dull and dreary she is, only herself can tell.  When I get there in
the morning, there she is sitting up in bed, for my lady don't care to
get up; and then she makes me bring this book and that book, till the bed
is heaped up with immense volumes that half bury her, making her look, as
she leans upon her elbow, like the stoning of Stephen.  She yawns; then
she looks towards the tall glass; then she looks out at the weather,
mooning her great black eyes, and fixing them on the sky as if they stuck
there, while my tongue goes flick-flack along, a hundred and fifty words
a minute; then she looks at the clock; then she asks me what I've been
reading.'

'Ah, poor soul!' said granny.  'No doubt she says in the morning, "Would
God it were evening," and in the evening, "Would God it were morning,"
like the disobedient woman in Deuteronomy.'

Swithin, in the room overhead, had suspended his calculations, for the
duologue interested him.  There now crunched heavier steps outside the
door, and his grandmother could be heard greeting sundry local
representatives of the bass and tenor voice, who lent a cheerful and well-
known personality to the names Sammy Blore, Nat Chapman, Hezekiah Biles,
and Haymoss Fry (the latter being one with whom the reader has already a
distant acquaintance); besides these came small producers of treble, who
had not yet developed into such distinctive units of society as to
require particularizing.

'Is the good man come?' asked Nat Chapman.  'No,--I see we be here afore
him.  And how is it with aged women to-night, Mrs. Martin?'

'Tedious traipsing enough with this one, Nat.  Sit ye down.  Well, little
Freddy, you don't wish in the morning that 'twere evening, and at evening
that 'twere morning again, do you, Freddy, trust ye for it?'

'Now, who might wish such a thing as that, Mrs Martin?--nobody in this
parish?' asked Sammy Blore curiously.

'My lady is always wishing it,' spoke up Miss Tabitha Lark.

'Oh, she!  Nobody can be answerable for the wishes of that onnatural
tribe of mankind.  Not but that the woman's heart-strings is tried in
many aggravating ways.'

'Ah, poor woman!' said granny.  'The state she finds herself in--neither
maid, wife, nor widow, as you may say--is not the primest form of life
for keeping in good spirits.  How long is it since she has heard from Sir
Blount, Tabitha?'

'Two years and more,' said the young woman.  'He went into one side of
Africa, as it might be, three St. Martin's days back.  I can mind it,
because 'twas my birthday.  And he meant to come out the other side.  But
he didn't.  He has never come out at all.'

'For all the world like losing a rat in a barley-mow,' said Hezekiah.
'He's lost, though you know where he is.'

His comrades nodded.

'Ay, my lady is a walking weariness.  I seed her yawn just at the very
moment when the fox was halloaed away by Lornton Copse, and the hounds
runned en all but past her carriage wheels.  If I were she I'd see a
little life; though there's no fair, club-walking, nor feast to speak of,
till Easter week,--that's true.'

'She dares not.  She's under solemn oath to do no such thing.'

'Be cust if I would keep any such oath!  But here's the pa'son, if my
ears don't deceive me.'

There was a noise of horse's hoofs without, a stumbling against the door-
scraper, a tethering to the window-shutter, a creaking of the door on its
hinges, and a voice which Swithin recognized as Mr. Torkingham's.  He
greeted each of the previous arrivals by name, and stated that he was
glad to see them all so punctually assembled.

'Ay, sir,' said Haymoss Fry.  ''Tis only my jints that have kept me from
assembling myself long ago.  I'd assemble upon the top of Welland
Steeple, if 'tweren't for my jints.  I assure ye, Pa'son Tarkenham, that
in the clitch o' my knees, where the rain used to come through when I was
cutting clots for the new lawn, in old my lady's time, 'tis as if rats
wez gnawing, every now and then.  When a feller's young he's too small in
the brain to see how soon a constitution can be squandered, worse luck!'

'True,' said Biles, to fill the time while the parson was engaged in
finding the Psalms.  'A man's a fool till he's forty.  Often have I
thought, when hay-pitching, and the small of my back seeming no stouter
than a harnet's, "The devil send that I had but the making of labouring
men for a twelvemonth!"  I'd gie every man jack two good backbones, even
if the alteration was as wrong as forgery.'

'Four,--four backbones,' said Haymoss, decisively.

'Yes, four,' threw in Sammy Blore, with additional weight of experience.
'For you want one in front for breast-ploughing and such like, one at the
right side for ground-dressing, and one at the left side for turning
mixens.'

'Well; then next I'd move every man's wyndpipe a good span away from his
glutchpipe, so that at harvest time he could fetch breath in 's drinking,
without being choked and strangled as he is now.  Thinks I, when I feel
the victuals going--'

'Now, we'll begin,' interrupted Mr. Torkingham, his mind returning to
this world again on concluding his search for a hymn.

Thereupon the racket of chair-legs on the floor signified that they were
settling into their seats,--a disturbance which Swithin took advantage of
by going on tiptoe across the floor above, and putting sheets of paper
over knot-holes in the boarding at points where carpet was lacking, that
his lamp-light might not shine down.  The absence of a ceiling beneath
rendered his position virtually that of one suspended in the same
apartment.

The parson announced the tune, and his voice burst forth with 'Onward,
Christian soldiers!' in notes of rigid cheerfulness.

In this start, however, he was joined only by the girls and boys, the men
furnishing but an accompaniment of ahas and hems.  Mr. Torkingham
stopped, and Sammy Blore spoke,--

'Beg your pardon, sir,--if you'll deal mild with us a moment.  What with
the wind and walking, my throat's as rough as a grater; and not knowing
you were going to hit up that minute, I hadn't hawked, and I don't think
Hezzy and Nat had, either,--had ye, souls?'

'I hadn't got thorough ready, that's true,' said Hezekiah.

'Quite right of you, then, to speak,' said Mr. Torkingham.  'Don't mind
explaining; we are here for practice.  Now clear your throats, then, and
at it again.'

There was a noise as of atmospheric hoes and scrapers, and the bass
contingent at last got under way with a time of its own:

'Honwerd, Christen sojers!'

'Ah, that's where we are so defective--the pronunciation,' interrupted
the parson.  'Now repeat after me: "On-ward, Christ-ian, sol-diers."'

The choir repeated like an exaggerative echo: 'On-wed, Chris-ting, sol-
jaws!'

'Better!' said the parson, in the strenuously sanguine tones of a man who
got his living by discovering a bright side in things where it was not
very perceptible to other people.  'But it should not be given with quite
so extreme an accent; or we may be called affected by other parishes.
And, Nathaniel Chapman, there's a jauntiness in your manner of singing
which is not quite becoming.  Why don't you sing more earnestly?'

'My conscience won't let me, sir.  They say every man for himself: but,
thank God, I'm not so mean as to lessen old fokes' chances by being
earnest at my time o' life, and they so much nearer the need o't.'

'It's bad reasoning, Nat, I fear.  Now, perhaps we had better sol-fa the
tune.  Eyes on your books, please.  Sol-sol! fa-fa! mi--'

'I can't sing like that, not I!' said Sammy Blore, with condemnatory
astonishment.  'I can sing genuine music, like F and G; but not anything
so much out of the order of nater as that.'

'Perhaps you've brought the wrong book, sir?' chimed in Haymoss, kindly.
'I've knowed music early in life and late,--in short, ever since Luke
Sneap broke his new fiddle-bow in the wedding psalm, when Pa'son Wilton
brought home his bride (you can mind the time, Sammy?--when we sung "His
wife, like a fair fertile vine, her lovely fruit shall bring," when the
young woman turned as red as a rose, not knowing 'twas coming).  I've
knowed music ever since then, I say, sir, and never heard the like o'
that.  Every martel note had his name of A, B, C, at that time.'

'Yes, yes, men; but this is a more recent system!'

'Still, you can't alter a old-established note that's A or B by nater,'
rejoined Haymoss, with yet deeper conviction that Mr. Torkingham was
getting off his head.  'Now sound A, neighbour Sammy, and let's have a
slap at Christen sojers again, and show the Pa'son the true way!'

Sammy produced a private tuning-fork, black and grimy, which, being about
seventy years of age, and wrought before pianoforte builders had sent up
the pitch to make their instruments brilliant, was nearly a note flatter
than the parson's.  While an argument as to the true pitch was in
progress, there came a knocking without.

'Somebody's at the door!' said a little treble girl.

'Thought I heard a knock before!' said the relieved choir.

The latch was lifted, and a man asked from the darkness, 'Is Mr.
Torkingham here?'

'Yes, Mills.  What do you want?'

It was the parson's man.

'Oh, if you please,' said Mills, showing an advanced margin of himself
round the door, 'Lady Constantine wants to see you very particular, sir,
and could you call on her after dinner, if you ben't engaged with poor
fokes?  She's just had a letter,--so they say,--and it's about that, I
believe.'

Finding, on looking at his watch, that it was necessary to start at once
if he meant to see her that night, the parson cut short the practising,
and, naming another night for meeting, he withdrew.  All the singers
assisted him on to his cob, and watched him till he disappeared over the
edge of the Bottom.



III


Mr. Torkingham trotted briskly onward to his house, a distance of about a
mile, each cottage, as it revealed its half-buried position by its single
light, appearing like a one-eyed night creature watching him from an
ambush.  Leaving his horse at the parsonage he performed the remainder of
the journey on foot, crossing the park towards Welland House by a stile
and path, till he struck into the drive near the north door of the
mansion.

This drive, it may be remarked, was also the common highway to the lower
village, and hence Lady Constantine's residence and park, as is
occasionally the case with old-fashioned manors, possessed none of the
exclusiveness found in some aristocratic settlements.  The parishioners
looked upon the park avenue as their natural thoroughfare, particularly
for christenings, weddings, and funerals, which passed the squire's
mansion with due considerations as to the scenic effect of the same from
the manor windows.  Hence the house of Constantine, when going out from
its breakfast, had been continually crossed on the doorstep for the last
two hundred years by the houses of Hodge and Giles in full cry to dinner.
At present these collisions were but too infrequent, for though the
villagers passed the north front door as regularly as ever, they seldom
met a Constantine.  Only one was there to be met, and she had no zest for
outings before noon.

The long, low front of the Great House, as it was called by the parish,
stretching from end to end of the terrace, was in darkness as the vicar
slackened his pace before it, and only the distant fall of water
disturbed the stillness of the manorial precincts.

On gaining admittance he found Lady Constantine waiting to receive him.
She wore a heavy dress of velvet and lace, and being the only person in
the spacious apartment she looked small and isolated.  In her left hand
she held a letter and a couple of at-home cards.  The soft dark eyes
which she raised to him as he entered--large, and melancholy by
circumstance far more than by quality--were the natural indices of a warm
and affectionate, perhaps slightly voluptuous temperament, languishing
for want of something to do, cherish, or suffer for.

Mr. Torkingham seated himself.  His boots, which had seemed elegant in
the farm-house, appeared rather clumsy here, and his coat, that was a
model of tailoring when he stood amid the choir, now exhibited decidedly
strained relations with his limbs.  Three years had passed since his
induction to the living of Welland, but he had never as yet found means
to establish that reciprocity with Lady Constantine which usually grows
up, in the course of time, between parsonage and manor-house,--unless,
indeed, either side should surprise the other by showing respectively a
weakness for awkward modern ideas on landownership, or on church
formulas, which had not been the case here.  The present meeting,
however, seemed likely to initiate such a reciprocity.

There was an appearance of confidence on Lady Constantine's face; she
said she was so very glad that he had come, and looking down at the
letter in her hand was on the point of pulling it from its envelope; but
she did not.  After a moment she went on more quickly: 'I wanted your
advice, or rather your opinion, on a serious matter,--on a point of
conscience.'  Saying which she laid down the letter and looked at the
cards.

It might have been apparent to a more penetrating eye than the vicar's
that Lady Constantine, either from timidity, misgiving, or reconviction,
had swerved from her intended communication, or perhaps decided to begin
at the other end.

The parson, who had been expecting a question on some local business or
intelligence, at the tenor of her words altered his face to the higher
branch of his profession.

'I hope I may find myself of service, on that or any other question,' he
said gently.

'I hope so.  You may possibly be aware, Mr. Torkingham, that my husband,
Sir Blount Constantine, was, not to mince matters, a mistaken--somewhat
jealous man.  Yet you may hardly have discerned it in the short time you
knew him.'

'I had some little knowledge of Sir Blount's character in that respect.'

'Well, on this account my married life with him was not of the most
comfortable kind.'  (Lady Constantine's voice dropped to a more pathetic
note.)  'I am sure I gave him no cause for suspicion; though had I known
his disposition sooner I should hardly have dared to marry him.  But his
jealousy and doubt of me were not so strong as to divert him from a
purpose of his,--a mania for African lion-hunting, which he dignified by
calling it a scheme of geographical discovery; for he was inordinately
anxious to make a name for himself in that field.  It was the one passion
that was stronger than his mistrust of me.  Before going away he sat down
with me in this room, and read me a lecture, which resulted in a very
rash offer on my part.  When I tell it to you, you will find that it
provides a key to all that is unusual in my life here.  He bade me
consider what my position would be when he was gone; hoped that I should
remember what was due to him,--that I would not so behave towards other
men as to bring the name of Constantine into suspicion; and charged me to
avoid levity of conduct in attending any ball, rout, or dinner to which I
might be invited.  I, in some contempt for his low opinion of me,
volunteered, there and then, to live like a cloistered nun during his
absence; to go into no society whatever,--scarce even to a neighbour's
dinner-party; and demanded bitterly if that would satisfy him.  He said
yes, held me to my word, and gave me no loophole for retracting it.  The
inevitable fruits of precipitancy have resulted to me: my life has become
a burden.  I get such invitations as these' (holding up the cards), 'but
I so invariably refuse them that they are getting very rare. . . .  I ask
you, can I honestly break that promise to my husband?'

Mr. Torkingham seemed embarrassed.  'If you promised Sir Blount
Constantine to live in solitude till he comes back, you are, it seems to
me, bound by that promise.  I fear that the wish to be released from your
engagement is to some extent a reason why it should be kept.  But your
own conscience would surely be the best guide, Lady Constantine?'

'My conscience is quite bewildered with its responsibilities,' she
continued, with a sigh.  'Yet it certainly does sometimes say to me
that--that I ought to keep my word.  Very well; I must go on as I am
going, I suppose.'

'If you respect a vow, I think you must respect your own,' said the
parson, acquiring some further firmness.  'Had it been wrung from you by
compulsion, moral or physical, it would have been open to you to break
it.  But as you proposed a vow when your husband only required a good
intention, I think you ought to adhere to it; or what is the pride worth
that led you to offer it?'

'Very well,' she said, with resignation.  'But it was quite a work of
supererogation on my part.'

'That you proposed it in a supererogatory spirit does not lessen your
obligation, having once put yourself under that obligation.  St. Paul, in
his Epistle to the Hebrews, says, "An oath for confirmation is an end of
all strife."  And you will readily recall the words of Ecclesiastes, "Pay
that which thou hast vowed.  Better is it that thou shouldest not vow
than that thou shouldest vow and not pay."  Why not write to Sir Blount,
tell him the inconvenience of such a bond, and ask him to release you?'

'No; never will I.  The expression of such a desire would, in his mind,
be a sufficient reason for disallowing it.  I'll keep my word.'

Mr. Torkingham rose to leave.  After she had held out her hand to him,
when he had crossed the room, and was within two steps of the door, she
said, 'Mr. Torkingham.'  He stopped.  'What I have told you is only the
least part of what I sent for you to tell you.'

Mr. Torkingham walked back to her side.  'What is the rest of it, then?'
he asked, with grave surprise.

'It is a true revelation, as far as it goes; but there is something more.
I have received this letter, and I wanted to say--something.'

'Then say it now, my dear lady.'

'No,' she answered, with a look of utter inability.  'I cannot speak of
it now!  Some other time.  Don't stay.  Please consider this conversation
as private.  Good-night.'



IV


It was a bright starlight night, a week or ten days later.  There had
been several such nights since the occasion of Lady Constantine's promise
to Swithin St. Cleeve to come and study astronomical phenomena on the
Rings-Hill column; but she had not gone there.  This evening she sat at a
window, the blind of which had not been drawn down.  Her elbow rested on
a little table, and her cheek on her hand.  Her eyes were attracted by
the brightness of the planet Jupiter, as he rode in the ecliptic
opposite, beaming down upon her as if desirous of notice.

Beneath the planet could be still discerned the dark edges of the park
landscape against the sky.  As one of its features, though nearly
screened by the trees which had been planted to shut out the fallow
tracts of the estate, rose the upper part of the column.  It was hardly
visible now, even if visible at all; yet Lady Constantine knew from
daytime experience its exact bearing from the window at which she leaned.
The knowledge that there it still was, despite its rapid envelopment by
the shades, led her lonely mind to her late meeting on its summit with
the young astronomer, and to her promise to honour him with a visit for
learning some secrets about the scintillating bodies overhead.  The
curious juxtaposition of youthful ardour and old despair that she had
found in the lad would have made him interesting to a woman of
perception, apart from his fair hair and early-Christian face.  But such
is the heightening touch of memory that his beauty was probably richer in
her imagination than in the real.  It was a moot point to consider
whether the temptations that would be brought to bear upon him in his
course would exceed the staying power of his nature.  Had he been a
wealthy youth he would have seemed one to tremble for.  In spite of his
attractive ambitions and gentlemanly bearing, she thought it would
possibly be better for him if he never became known outside his lonely
tower,--forgetting that he had received such intellectual enlargement as
would probably make his continuance in Welland seem, in his own eye, a
slight upon his father's branch of his family, whose social standing had
been, only a few years earlier, but little removed from her own.

Suddenly she flung a cloak about her and went out on the terrace.  She
passed down the steps to the lower lawn, through the door to the open
park, and there stood still.  The tower was now discernible.  As the
words in which a thought is expressed develop a further thought, so did
the fact of her having got so far influence her to go further.  A person
who had casually observed her gait would have thought it irregular; and
the lessenings and increasings of speed with which she proceeded in the
direction of the pillar could be accounted for only by a motive much more
disturbing than an intention to look through a telescope.  Thus she went
on, till, leaving the park, she crossed the turnpike-road, and entered
the large field, in the middle of which the fir-clad hill stood like Mont
St. Michel in its bay.

The stars were so bright as distinctly to show her the place, and now she
could see a faint light at the top of the column, which rose like a
shadowy finger pointing to the upper constellations.  There was no wind,
in a human sense; but a steady stertorous breathing from the fir-trees
showed that, now as always, there was movement in apparent stagnation.
Nothing but an absolute vacuum could paralyze their utterance.

The door of the tower was shut.  It was something more than the
freakishness which is engendered by a sickening monotony that had led
Lady Constantine thus far, and hence she made no ado about admitting
herself.  Three years ago, when her every action was a thing of
propriety, she had known of no possible purpose which could have led her
abroad in a manner such as this.

She ascended the tower noiselessly.  On raising her head above the
hatchway she beheld Swithin bending over a scroll of paper which lay on
the little table beside him.  The small lantern that illuminated it
showed also that he was warmly wrapped up in a coat and thick cap, behind
him standing the telescope on its frame.

What was he doing?  She looked over his shoulder upon the paper, and saw
figures and signs.  When he had jotted down something he went to the
telescope again.

'What are you doing to-night?' she said in a low voice.

Swithin started, and turned.  The faint lamp-light was sufficient to
reveal her face to him.

'Tedious work, Lady Constantine,' he answered, without betraying much
surprise.  'Doing my best to watch phenomenal stars, as I may call them.'

'You said you would show me the heavens if I could come on a starlight
night.  I have come.'

Swithin, as a preliminary, swept round the telescope to Jupiter, and
exhibited to her the glory of that orb.  Then he directed the instrument
to the less bright shape of Saturn.

'Here,' he said, warming up to the subject, 'we see a world which is to
my mind by far the most wonderful in the solar system.  Think of streams
of satellites or meteors racing round and round the planet like a fly-
wheel, so close together as to seem solid matter!'  He entered further
and further into the subject, his ideas gathering momentum as he went on,
like his pet heavenly bodies.

When he paused for breath she said, in tones very different from his own,
'I ought now to tell you that, though I am interested in the stars, they
were not what I came to see you about. . . .  I first thought of
disclosing the matter to Mr. Torkingham; but I altered my mind, and
decided on you.'

She spoke in so low a voice that he might not have heard her.  At all
events, abstracted by his grand theme, he did not heed her.  He
continued,--

'Well, we will get outside the solar system altogether,--leave the whole
group of sun, primary and secondary planets quite behind us in our
flight, as a bird might leave its bush and sweep into the whole forest.
Now what do you see, Lady Constantine?'  He levelled the achromatic at
Sirius.

She said that she saw a bright star, though it only seemed a point of
light now as before.

'That's because it is so distant that no magnifying will bring its size
up to zero.  Though called a fixed star, it is, like all fixed stars,
moving with inconceivable velocity; but no magnifying will show that
velocity as anything but rest.'

And thus they talked on about Sirius, and then about other stars

      . . . in the scrowl
   Of all those beasts, and fish, and fowl,
   With which, like Indian plantations,
   The learned stock the constellations,

till he asked her how many stars she thought were visible to them at that
moment.

She looked around over the magnificent stretch of sky that their high
position unfolded.  'Oh, thousands, hundreds of thousands,' she said
absently.

'No.  There are only about three thousand.  Now, how many do you think
are brought within sight by the help of a powerful telescope?'

'I won't guess.'

'Twenty millions.  So that, whatever the stars were made for, they were
not made to please our eyes.  It is just the same in everything; nothing
is made for man.'

'Is it that notion which makes you so sad for your age?' she asked, with
almost maternal solicitude.  'I think astronomy is a bad study for you.
It makes you feel human insignificance too plainly.'

'Perhaps it does.  However,' he added more cheerfully, 'though I feel the
study to be one almost tragic in its quality, I hope to be the new
Copernicus.  What he was to the solar system I aim to be to the systems
beyond.'

Then, by means of the instrument at hand, they travelled together from
the earth to Uranus and the mysterious outskirts of the solar system;
from the solar system to a star in the Swan, the nearest fixed star in
the northern sky; from the star in the Swan to remoter stars; thence to
the remotest visible; till the ghastly chasm which they had bridged by a
fragile line of sight was realized by Lady Constantine.

'We are now traversing distances beside which the immense line stretching
from the earth to the sun is but an invisible point,' said the youth.
'When, just now, we had reached a planet whose remoteness is a hundred
times the remoteness of the sun from the earth, we were only a two
thousandth part of the journey to the spot at which we have optically
arrived now.'

'Oh, pray don't; it overpowers me!' she replied, not without seriousness.
'It makes me feel that it is not worth while to live; it quite
annihilates me.'

'If it annihilates your ladyship to roam over these yawning spaces just
once, think how it must annihilate me to be, as it were, in constant
suspension amid them night after night.'

'Yes. . . .  It was not really this subject that I came to see you upon,
Mr. St. Cleeve,' she began a second time.  'It was a personal matter.'

'I am listening, Lady Constantine.'

'I will tell it you.  Yet no,--not this moment.  Let us finish this grand
subject first; it dwarfs mine.'

It would have been difficult to judge from her accents whether she were
afraid to broach her own matter, or really interested in his.  Or a
certain youthful pride that he evidenced at being the elucidator of such
a large theme, and at having drawn her there to hear and observe it, may
have inclined her to indulge him for kindness' sake.

Thereupon he took exception to her use of the word 'grand' as descriptive
of the actual universe:

'The imaginary picture of the sky as the concavity of a dome whose base
extends from horizon to horizon of our earth is grand, simply grand, and
I wish I had never got beyond looking at it in that way.  But the actual
sky is a horror.'

'A new view of our old friends, the stars,' she said, smiling up at them.

'But such an obviously true one!' said the young man.  'You would hardly
think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be
discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those of
the oceans bear no sort of comparison.'

'What monsters may they be?'

'Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities.  Until a person has thought
out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there are
things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of
magnitude without known shape.  Such monsters are the voids and waste
places of the sky.  Look, for instance, at those pieces of darkness in
the Milky Way,' he went on, pointing with his finger to where the galaxy
stretched across over their heads with the luminousness of a frosted web.
'You see that dark opening in it near the Swan?  There is a still more
remarkable one south of the equator, called the Coal Sack, as a sort of
nickname that has a farcical force from its very inadequacy.  In these
our sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited.  Those
are deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone
the human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses to
right and left as you pass on!'

Lady Constantine was heedful and silent.

He tried to give her yet another idea of the size of the universe; never
was there a more ardent endeavour to bring down the immeasurable to human
comprehension!  By figures of speech and apt comparisons he took her mind
into leading-strings, compelling her to follow him into wildernesses of
which she had never in her life even realized the existence.

'There is a size at which dignity begins,' he exclaimed; 'further on
there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at
which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins;
further on, a size at which ghastliness begins.  That size faintly
approaches the size of the stellar universe.  So am I not right in saying
that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in
the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a new
horror?'

Standing, as she stood, in the presence of the stellar universe, under
the very eyes of the constellations, Lady Constantine apprehended
something of the earnest youth's argument.

'And to add a new weirdness to what the sky possesses in its size and
formlessness, there is involved the quality of decay.  For all the wonder
of these everlasting stars, eternal spheres, and what not, they are not
everlasting, they are not eternal; they burn out like candles.  You see
that dying one in the body of the Greater Bear?  Two centuries ago it was
as bright as the others.  The senses may become terrified by plunging
among them as they are, but there is a pitifulness even in their glory.
Imagine them all extinguished, and your mind feeling its way through a
heaven of total darkness, occasionally striking against the black,
invisible cinders of those stars. . . .  If you are cheerful, and wish to
remain so, leave the study of astronomy alone.  Of all the sciences, it
alone deserves the character of the terrible.'

'I am not altogether cheerful.'

'Then if, on the other hand, you are restless and anxious about the
future, study astronomy at once.  Your troubles will be reduced
amazingly.  But your study will reduce them in a singular way, by
reducing the importance of everything.  So that the science is still
terrible, even as a panacea.  It is quite impossible to think at all
adequately of the sky--of what the sky substantially is, without feeling
it as a juxtaposed nightmare.  It is better--far better--for men to
forget the universe than to bear it clearly in mind! . . .  But you say
the universe was not really what you came to see me about.  What was it,
may I ask, Lady Constantine?'

She mused, and sighed, and turned to him with something pathetic in her.

'The immensity of the subject you have engaged me on has completely
crushed my subject out of me!  Yours is celestial; mine lamentably human!
And the less must give way to the greater.'

'But is it, in a human sense, and apart from macrocosmic magnitudes,
important?' he inquired, at last attracted by her manner; for he began to
perceive, in spite of his prepossession, that she had really something on
her mind.

'It is as important as personal troubles usually are.'

Notwithstanding her preconceived notion of coming to Swithin as employer
to dependant, as _chatelaine_ to page, she was falling into confidential
intercourse with him.  His vast and romantic endeavours lent him a
personal force and charm which she could not but apprehend.  In the
presence of the immensities that his young mind had, as it were, brought
down from above to hers, they became unconsciously equal.  There was,
moreover, an inborn liking in Lady Constantine to dwell less on her
permanent position as a county lady than on her passing emotions as a
woman.

'I will postpone the matter I came to charge you with,' she resumed,
smiling.  'I must reconsider it.  Now I will return.'

'Allow me to show you out through the trees and across the fields?'

She said neither a distinct yes nor no; and, descending the tower, they
threaded the firs and crossed the ploughed field.  By an odd coincidence
he remarked, when they drew near the Great House--

'You may possibly be interested in knowing, Lady Constantine, that that
medium-sized star you see over there, low down in the south, is precisely
over Sir Blount Constantine's head in the middle of Africa.'

'How very strange that you should have said so!' she answered.  'You have
broached for me the very subject I had come to speak of.'

'On a domestic matter?' he said, with surprise.

'Yes.  What a small matter it seems now, after our astronomical
stupendousness! and yet on my way to you it so far transcended the
ordinary matters of my life as the subject you have led me up to
transcends this.  But,' with a little laugh, 'I will endeavour to sink
down to such ephemeral trivialities as human tragedy, and explain, since
I have come.  The point is, I want a helper: no woman ever wanted one
more.  For days I have wanted a trusty friend who could go on a secret
errand for me.  It is necessary that my messenger should be educated,
should be intelligent, should be silent as the grave.  Do you give me
your solemn promise as to the last point, if I confide in you?'

'Most emphatically, Lady Constantine.'

'Your right hand upon the compact.'

He gave his hand, and raised hers to his lips.  In addition to his
respect for her as the lady of the manor, there was the admiration of
twenty years for twenty-eight or nine in such relations.

'I trust you,' she said.  'Now, beyond the above conditions, it was
specially necessary that my agent should have known Sir Blount
Constantine well by sight when he was at home.  For the errand is
concerning my husband; I am much disturbed at what I have heard about
him.'

'I am indeed sorry to know it.'

'There are only two people in the parish who fulfil all the
conditions,--Mr. Torkingham, and yourself.  I sent for Mr. Torkingham,
and he came.  I could not tell him.  I felt at the last moment that he
wouldn't do.  I have come to you because I think you will do.  This is
it: my husband has led me and all the world to believe that he is in
Africa, hunting lions.  I have had a mysterious letter informing me that
he has been seen in London, in very peculiar circumstances.  The truth of
this I want ascertained.  Will you go on the journey?'

'Personally, I would go to the end of the world for you, Lady
Constantine; but--'

'No buts!'

'How can I leave?'

'Why not?'

'I am preparing a work on variable stars.  There is one of these which I
have exceptionally observed for several months, and on this my great
theory is mainly based.  It has been hitherto called irregular; but I
have detected a periodicity in its so-called irregularities which, if
proved, would add some very valuable facts to those known on this
subject, one of the most interesting, perplexing, and suggestive in the
whole field of astronomy.  Now, to clinch my theory, there should be a
sudden variation this week,--or at latest next week,--and I have to watch
every night not to let it pass.  You see my reason for declining, Lady
Constantine.'

'Young men are always so selfish!' she said.

'It might ruin the whole of my year's labour if I leave now!' returned
the youth, greatly hurt.  'Could you not wait a fortnight longer?'

'No,--no.  Don't think that I have asked you, pray.  I have no wish to
inconvenience you.'

'Lady Constantine, don't be angry with me!  Will you do this,--watch the
star for me while I am gone?  If you are prepared to do it effectually, I
will go.'

'Will it be much trouble?'

'It will be some trouble.  You would have to come here every clear
evening about nine.  If the sky were not clear, then you would have to
come at four in the morning, should the clouds have dispersed.'

'Could not the telescope be brought to my house?'

Swithin shook his head.

'Perhaps you did not observe its real size,--that it was fixed to a frame-
work?  I could not afford to buy an equatorial, and I have been obliged
to rig up an apparatus of my own devising, so as to make it in some
measure answer the purpose of an equatorial.  It _could_ be moved, but I
would rather not touch it.'

'Well, I'll go to the telescope,' she went on, with an emphasis that was
not wholly playful.  'You are the most ungallant youth I ever met with;
but I suppose I must set that down to science.  Yes, I'll go to the tower
at nine every night.'

'And alone?  I should prefer to keep my pursuits there unknown.'

'And alone,' she answered, quite overborne by his inflexibility.

'You will not miss the morning observation, if it should be necessary?'

'I have given my word.'

'And I give mine.  I suppose I ought not to have been so exacting!'  He
spoke with that sudden emotional sense of his own insignificance which
made these alternations of mood possible.  'I will go anywhere--do
anything for you--this moment--to-morrow or at any time.  But you must
return with me to the tower, and let me show you the observing process.'

They retraced their steps, the tender hoar-frost taking the imprint of
their feet, while two stars in the Twins looked down upon their two
persons through the trees, as if those two persons could bear some sort
of comparison with them.  On the tower the instructions were given.  When
all was over, and he was again conducting her to the Great House she
said--

'When can you start?'

'Now,' said Swithin.

'So much the better.  You shall go up by the night mail.'



V


On the third morning after the young man's departure Lady Constantine
opened the post-bag anxiously.  Though she had risen before four o'clock,
and crossed to the tower through the gray half-light when every blade and
twig were furred with rime, she felt no languor.  Expectation could
banish at cock-crow the eye-heaviness which apathy had been unable to
disperse all the day long.

There was, as she had hoped, a letter from Swithin St. Cleeve.

   'DEAR LADY CONSTANTINE,--I have quite succeeded in my mission, and
   shall return to-morrow at 10 p.m.  I hope you have not failed in the
   observations.  Watching the star through an opera-glass Sunday night,
   I fancied some change had taken place, but I could not make myself
   sure.  Your memoranda for that night I await with impatience.  Please
   don't neglect to write down _at the moment_, all remarkable
   appearances both as to colour and intensity; and be very exact as to
   time, which correct in the way I showed you.--I am, dear Lady
   Constantine, yours most faithfully,

   SWITHIN ST. CLEEVE.'

Not another word in the letter about his errand; his mind ran on nothing
but this astronomical subject.  He had succeeded in his mission, and yet
he did not even say yes or no to the great question,--whether or not her
husband was masquerading in London at the address she had given.

'Was ever anything so provoking!' she cried.

However, the time was not long to wait.  His way homeward would lie
within a stone's-throw of the manor-house, and though for certain reasons
she had forbidden him to call at the late hour of his arrival, she could
easily intercept him in the avenue.  At twenty minutes past ten she went
out into the drive, and stood in the dark.  Seven minutes later she heard
his footstep, and saw his outline in the slit of light between the avenue-
trees.  He had a valise in one hand, a great-coat on his arm, and under
his arm a parcel which seemed to be very precious, from the manner in
which he held it.

'Lady Constantine?' he asked softly.

'Yes,' she said, in her excitement holding out both her hands, though he
had plainly not expected her to offer one.

'Did you watch the star?'

'I'll tell you everything in detail; but, pray, your errand first!'

'Yes, it's all right.  Did you watch every night, not missing one?'

'I forgot to go--twice,' she murmured contritely.

'Oh, Lady Constantine!' he cried in dismay.  'How could you serve me so!
what shall I do?'

'Please forgive me!  Indeed, I could not help it.  I had watched and
watched, and nothing happened; and somehow my vigilance relaxed when I
found nothing was likely to take place in the star.'

'But the very circumstance of it not having happened, made it all the
more likely every day.'

'Have you--seen--' she began imploringly.

Swithin sighed, lowered his thoughts to sublunary things, and told
briefly the story of his journey.  Sir Blount Constantine was not in
London at the address which had been anonymously sent her.  It was a
mistake of identity.  The person who had been seen there Swithin had
sought out.  He resembled Sir Blount strongly; but he was a stranger.

'How can I reward you!' she exclaimed, when he had done.

'In no way but by giving me your good wishes in what I am going to tell
you on my own account.'  He spoke in tones of mysterious exultation.
'This parcel is going to make my fame!'

'What is it?'

'A huge object-glass for the great telescope I am so busy about!  Such a
magnificent aid to science has never entered this county before, you may
depend.'

He produced from under his arm the carefully cuddled-up package, which
was in shape a round flat disk, like a dinner-plate, tied in paper.

Proceeding to explain his plans to her more fully, he walked with her
towards the door by which she had emerged.  It was a little side wicket
through a wall dividing the open park from the garden terraces.  Here for
a moment he placed his valise and parcel on the coping of the stone
balustrade, till he had bidden her farewell.  Then he turned, and in
laying hold of his bag by the dim light pushed the parcel over the
parapet.  It fell smash upon the paved walk ten or a dozen feet beneath.

'Oh, good heavens!' he cried in anguish.

'What?'

'My object-glass broken!'

'Is it of much value?'

'It cost all I possess!'

He ran round by the steps to the lower lawn, Lady Constantine following,
as he continued, 'It is a magnificent eight-inch first quality object
lens!  I took advantage of my journey to London to get it!  I have been
six weeks making the tube of milled board; and as I had not enough money
by twelve pounds for the lens, I borrowed it of my grandmother out of her
last annuity payment.  What can be, can be done!'

'Perhaps it is not broken.'

He felt on the ground, found the parcel, and shook it.  A clicking noise
issued from inside.  Swithin smote his forehead with his hand, and walked
up and down like a mad fellow.

'My telescope!  I have waited nine months for this lens.  Now the
possibility of setting up a really powerful instrument is over!  It is
too cruel--how could it happen! . . .  Lady Constantine, I am ashamed of
myself,--before you.  Oh, but, Lady Constantine, if you only knew what it
is to a person engaged in science to have the means of clinching a theory
snatched away at the last moment!  It is I against the world; and when
the world has accidents on its side in addition to its natural strength,
what chance for me!'

The young astronomer leant against the wall, and was silent.  His misery
was of an intensity and kind with that of Palissy, in these struggles
with an adverse fate.

'Don't mind it,--pray don't!' said Lady Constantine.  'It is dreadfully
unfortunate!  You have my whole sympathy.  Can it be mended?'

'Mended,--no, no!'

'Cannot you do with your present one a little longer?'

'It is altogether inferior, cheap, and bad!'

'I'll get you another,--yes, indeed, I will!  Allow me to get you another
as soon as possible.  I'll do anything to assist you out of your trouble;
for I am most anxious to see you famous.  I know you will be a great
astronomer, in spite of this mishap!  Come, say I may get a new one.'

Swithin took her hand.  He could not trust himself to speak.

* * * * *

Some days later a little box of peculiar kind came to the Great House.  It
was addressed to Lady Constantine, 'with great care.'  She had it partly
opened and taken to her own little writing-room; and after lunch, when
she had dressed for walking, she took from the box a paper parcel like
the one which had met with the accident.  This she hid under her mantle,
as if she had stolen it; and, going out slowly across the lawn, passed
through the little door before spoken of, and was soon hastening in the
direction of the Rings-Hill column.

There was a bright sun overhead on that afternoon of early spring, and
its rays shed an unusual warmth on south-west aspects, though shady
places still retained the look and feel of winter.  Rooks were already
beginning to build new nests or to mend up old ones, and clamorously
called in neighbours to give opinions on difficulties in their
architecture.  Lady Constantine swerved once from her path, as if she had
decided to go to the homestead where Swithin lived; but on second
thoughts she bent her steps to the column.

Drawing near it she looked up; but by reason of the height of the parapet
nobody could be seen thereon who did not stand on tiptoe.  She thought,
however, that her young friend might possibly see her, if he were there,
and come down; and that he was there she soon ascertained by finding the
door unlocked, and the key inside.  No movement, however, reached her
ears from above, and she began to ascend.

Meanwhile affairs at the top of the column had progressed as follows.  The
afternoon being exceptionally fine, Swithin had ascended about two
o'clock, and, seating himself at the little table which he had
constructed on the spot, he began reading over his notes and examining
some astronomical journals that had reached him in the morning.  The sun
blazed into the hollow roof-space as into a tub, and the sides kept out
every breeze.  Though the month was February below it was May in the
abacus of the column.  This state of the atmosphere, and the fact that on
the previous night he had pursued his observations till past two o'clock,
produced in him at the end of half an hour an overpowering inclination to
sleep.  Spreading on the lead-work a thick rug which he kept up there, he
flung himself down against the parapet, and was soon in a state of
unconsciousness.

It was about ten minutes afterwards that a soft rustle of silken clothes
came up the spiral staircase, and, hesitating onwards, reached the
orifice, where appeared the form of Lady Constantine.  She did not at
first perceive that he was present, and stood still to reconnoitre.  Her
eye glanced over his telescope, now wrapped up, his table and papers, his
observing-chair, and his contrivances for making the best of a deficiency
of instruments.  All was warm, sunny, and silent, except that a solitary
bee, which had somehow got within the hollow of the abacus, was singing
round inquiringly, unable to discern that ascent was the only mode of
escape.  In another moment she beheld the astronomer, lying in the sun
like a sailor in the main-top.

Lady Constantine coughed slightly; he did not awake.  She then entered,
and, drawing the parcel from beneath her cloak, placed it on the table.
After this she waited, looking for a long time at his sleeping face,
which had a very interesting appearance.  She seemed reluctant to leave,
yet wanted resolution to wake him; and, pencilling his name on the
parcel, she withdrew to the staircase, where the brushing of her dress
decreased to silence as she receded round and round on her way to the
base.

Swithin still slept on, and presently the rustle began again in the far-
down interior of the column.  The door could be heard closing, and the
rustle came nearer, showing that she had shut herself in,--no doubt to
lessen the risk of an accidental surprise by any roaming villager.  When
Lady Constantine reappeared at the top, and saw the parcel still
untouched and Swithin asleep as before, she exhibited some
disappointment; but she did not retreat.

Looking again at him, her eyes became so sentimentally fixed on his face
that it seemed as if she could not withdraw them.  There lay, in the
shape of an Antinous, no _amoroso_, no gallant, but a guileless
philosopher.  His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of
millions of miles; those were eyes which habitually gazed, not into the
depths of other eyes, but into other worlds.  Within his temples dwelt
thoughts, not of woman's looks, but of stellar aspects and the
configuration of constellations.

Thus, to his physical attractiveness was added the attractiveness of
mental inaccessibility.  The ennobling influence of scientific pursuits
was demonstrated by the speculative purity which expressed itself in his
eyes whenever he looked at her in speaking, and in the childlike faults
of manner which arose from his obtuseness to their difference of sex.  He
had never, since becoming a man, looked even so low as to the level of a
Lady Constantine.  His heaven at present was truly in the skies, and not
in that only other place where they say it can be found, in the eyes of
some daughter of Eve.  Would any Circe or Calypso--and if so, what
one?--ever check this pale-haired scientist's nocturnal sailings into the
interminable spaces overhead, and hurl all his mighty calculations on
cosmic force and stellar fire into Limbo?  Oh, the pity of it, if such
should be the case!

She became much absorbed in these very womanly reflections; and at last
Lady Constantine sighed, perhaps she herself did not exactly know why.
Then a very soft expression lighted on her lips and eyes, and she looked
at one jump ten years more youthful than before--quite a girl in aspect,
younger than he.  On the table lay his implements; among them a pair of
scissors, which, to judge from the shreds around, had been used in
cutting curves in thick paper for some calculating process.

What whim, agitation, or attraction prompted the impulse, nobody knows;
but she took the scissors, and, bending over the sleeping youth, cut off
one of the curls, or rather crooks,--for they hardly reached a curl,--into
which each lock of his hair chose to twist itself in the last inch of its
length.  The hair fell upon the rug.  She picked it up quickly, returned
the scissors to the table, and, as if her dignity had suddenly become
ashamed of her fantasies, hastened through the door, and descended the
staircase.



VI


When his nap had naturally exhausted itself Swithin awoke.  He awoke
without any surprise, for he not unfrequently gave to sleep in the day-
time what he had stolen from it in the night watches.  The first object
that met his eyes was the parcel on the table, and, seeing his name
inscribed thereon, he made no scruple to open it.

The sun flashed upon a lens of surprising magnitude, polished to such a
smoothness that the eye could scarcely meet its reflections.  Here was a
crystal in whose depths were to be seen more wonders than had been
revealed by the crystals of all the Cagliostros.

Swithin, hot with joyousness, took this treasure to his telescope
manufactory at the homestead; then he started off for the Great House.

On gaining its precincts he felt shy of calling, never having received
any hint or permission to do so; while Lady Constantine's mysterious
manner of leaving the parcel seemed to demand a like mysteriousness in
his approaches to her.  All the afternoon he lingered about uncertainly,
in the hope of intercepting her on her return from a drive, occasionally
walking with an indifferent lounge across glades commanded by the
windows, that if she were in-doors she might know he was near.  But she
did not show herself during the daylight.  Still impressed by her playful
secrecy he carried on the same idea after dark, by returning to the house
and passing through the garden door on to the lawn front, where he sat on
the parapet that breasted the terrace.

Now she frequently came out here for a melancholy saunter after dinner,
and to-night was such an occasion.  Swithin went forward, and met her at
nearly the spot where he had dropped the lens some nights earlier.

'I have come to see you, Lady Constantine.  How did the glass get on my
table?'

She laughed as lightly as a girl; that he had come to her in this way was
plainly no offence thus far.

'Perhaps it was dropped from the clouds by a bird,' she said.

'Why should you be so good to me?' he cried.

'One good turn deserves another,' answered she.

'Dear Lady Constantine!  Whatever discoveries result from this shall be
ascribed to you as much as to me.  Where should I have been without your
gift?'

'You would possibly have accomplished your purpose just the same, and
have been so much the nobler for your struggle against ill-luck.  I hope
that now you will be able to proceed with your large telescope as if
nothing had happened.'

'O yes, I will, certainly.  I am afraid I showed too much feeling, the
reverse of stoical, when the accident occurred.  That was not very noble
of me.'

'There is nothing unnatural in such feeling at your age.  When you are
older you will smile at such moods, and at the mishaps that gave rise to
them.'

'Ah, I perceive you think me weak in the extreme,' he said, with just a
shade of pique.  'But you will never realize that an incident which
filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole
circumference of mine.  No person can see exactly what and where
another's horizon is.'

They soon parted, and she re-entered the house, where she sat reflecting
for some time, till she seemed to fear that she had wounded his feelings.
She awoke in the night, and thought and thought on the same thing, till
she had worked herself into a feverish fret about it.  When it was
morning she looked across at the tower, and sitting down, impulsively
wrote the following note:--

   'DEAR MR. ST. CLEEVE,--I cannot allow you to remain under the
   impression that I despised your scientific endeavours in speaking as I
   did last night.  I think you were too sensitive to my remark.  But
   perhaps you were agitated with the labours of the day, and I fear that
   watching so late at night must make you very weary.  If I can help you
   again, please let me know.  I never realized the grandeur of astronomy
   till you showed me how to do so.  Also let me know about the new
   telescope.  Come and see me at any time.  After your great kindness in
   being my messenger I can never do enough for you.  I wish you had a
   mother or sister, and pity your loneliness!  I am lonely too.--Yours
   truly,

   VIVIETTE CONSTANTINE.'

She was so anxious that he should get this letter the same day that she
ran across to the column with it during the morning, preferring to be her
own emissary in so curious a case.  The door, as she had expected, was
locked; and, slipping the letter under it, she went home again.  During
lunch her ardour in the cause of Swithin's hurt feelings cooled down,
till she exclaimed to herself, as she sat at her lonely table, 'What
could have possessed me to write in that way!'

After lunch she went faster to the tower than she had gone in the early
morning, and peeped eagerly into the chink under the door.  She could
discern no letter, and, on trying the latch, found that the door would
open.  The letter was gone, Swithin having obviously arrived in the
interval.

She blushed a blush which seemed to say, 'I am getting foolishly
interested in this young man.'  She had, in short, in her own opinion,
somewhat overstepped the bounds of dignity.  Her instincts did not square
well with the formalities of her existence, and she walked home
despondently.

Had a concert, bazaar, lecture, or Dorcas meeting required the patronage
and support of Lady Constantine at this juncture, the circumstance would
probably have been sufficient to divert her mind from Swithin St. Cleeve
and astronomy for some little time.  But as none of these incidents were
within the range of expectation--Welland House and parish lying far from
large towns and watering-places--the void in her outer life continued,
and with it the void in her life within.

The youth had not answered her letter; neither had he called upon her in
response to the invitation she had regretted, with the rest of the
epistle, as being somewhat too warmly informal for black and white.  To
speak tenderly to him was one thing, to write another--that was her
feeling immediately after the event; but his counter-move of silence and
avoidance, though probably the result of pure unconsciousness on his
part, completely dispersed such self-considerations now.  Her eyes never
fell upon the Rings-Hill column without a solicitous wonder arising as to
what he was doing.  A true woman, she would assume the remotest
possibility to be the most likely contingency, if the possibility had the
recommendation of being tragical; and she now feared that something was
wrong with Swithin St. Cleeve.  Yet there was not the least doubt that he
had become so immersed in the business of the new telescope as to forget
everything else.

On Sunday, between the services, she walked to Little Welland, chiefly
for the sake of giving a run to a house-dog, a large St. Bernard, of whom
she was fond.  The distance was but short; and she returned along a
narrow lane, divided from the river by a hedge, through whose leafless
twigs the ripples flashed silver lights into her eyes.  Here she
discovered Swithin, leaning over a gate, his eyes bent upon the stream.

The dog first attracted his attention; then he heard her, and turned
round.  She had never seen him looking so despondent.

'You have never called, though I invited you,' said Lady Constantine.

'My great telescope won't work!' he replied lugubriously.

'I am sorry for that.  So it has made you quite forget me?'

'Ah, yes; you wrote me a very kind letter, which I ought to have
answered.  Well, I _did_ forget, Lady Constantine.  My new telescope
won't work, and I don't know what to do about it at all!'

'Can I assist you any further?'

'No, I fear not.  Besides, you have assisted me already.'

'What would really help you out of all your difficulties?  Something
would, surely?'

He shook his head.

'There must be some solution to them?'

'O yes,' he replied, with a hypothetical gaze into the stream; '_some_
solution of course--an equatorial, for instance.'

'What's that?'

'Briefly, an impossibility.  It is a splendid instrument, with an object
lens of, say, eight or nine inches aperture, mounted with its axis
parallel to the earth's axis, and fitted up with graduated circles for
denoting right ascensions and declinations; besides having special eye-
pieces, a finder, and all sorts of appliances--clock-work to make the
telescope follow the motion in right ascension--I cannot tell you half
the conveniences.  Ah, an equatorial is a thing indeed!'

'An equatorial is the one instrument required to make you quite happy?'

'Well, yes.'

'I'll see what I can do.'

'But, Lady Constantine,' cried the amazed astronomer, 'an equatorial such
as I describe costs as much as two grand pianos!'

She was rather staggered at this news; but she rallied gallantly, and
said, 'Never mind.  I'll make inquiries.'

'But it could not be put on the tower without people seeing it!  It would
have to be fixed to the masonry.  And there must be a dome of some kind
to keep off the rain.  A tarpaulin might do.'

Lady Constantine reflected.  'It would be a great business, I see,' she
said.  'Though as far as the fixing and roofing go, I would of course
consent to your doing what you liked with the old column.  My workmen
could fix it, could they not?'

'O yes.  But what would Sir Blount say, if he came home and saw the
goings on?'

Lady Constantine turned aside to hide a sudden displacement of blood from
her cheek.  'Ah--my husband!' she whispered. . . .  'I am just now going
to church,' she added in a repressed and hurried tone.  'I will think of
this matter.'

In church it was with Lady Constantine as with the Lord Angelo of Vienna
in a similar situation--Heaven had her empty words only, and her
invention heard not her tongue.  She soon recovered from the momentary
consternation into which she had fallen at Swithin's abrupt query.  The
possibility of that young astronomer becoming a renowned scientist by her
aid was a thought which gave her secret pleasure.  The course of
rendering him instant material help began to have a great fascination for
her; it was a new and unexpected channel for her cribbed and confined
emotions.  With experiences so much wider than his, Lady Constantine saw
that the chances were perhaps a million to one against Swithin St. Cleeve
ever being Astronomer Royal, or Astronomer Extraordinary of any sort; yet
the remaining chance in his favour was one of those possibilities which,
to a woman of bounding intellect and venturesome fancy, are pleasanter to
dwell on than likely issues that have no savour of high speculation in
them.  The equatorial question was a great one; and she had caught such a
large spark from his enthusiasm that she could think of nothing so
piquant as how to obtain the important instrument.

When Tabitha Lark arrived at the Great House next day, instead of finding
Lady Constantine in bed, as formerly, she discovered her in the library,
poring over what astronomical works she had been able to unearth from the
worm-eaten shelves.  As these publications were, for a science of such
rapid development, somewhat venerable, there was not much help of a
practical kind to be gained from them.  Nevertheless, the equatorial
retained a hold upon her fancy, till she became as eager to see one on
the Rings-Hill column as Swithin himself.

The upshot of it was that Lady Constantine sent a messenger that evening
to Welland Bottom, where the homestead of Swithin's grandmother was
situated, requesting the young man's presence at the house at twelve
o'clock next day.

He hurriedly returned an obedient reply, and the promise was enough to
lend great freshness to her manner next morning, instead of the leaden
air which was too frequent with her before the sun reached the meridian,
and sometimes after.  Swithin had, in fact, arisen as an attractive
little intervention between herself and despair.



VII


A fog defaced all the trees of the park that morning, the white
atmosphere adhered to the ground like a fungoid growth from it, and made
the turfed undulations look slimy and raw.  But Lady Constantine settled
down in her chair to await the coming of the late curate's son with a
serenity which the vast blanks outside could neither baffle nor destroy.

At two minutes to twelve the door-bell rang, and a look overspread the
lady's face that was neither maternal, sisterly, nor amorous; but partook
in an indescribable manner of all three kinds.  The door was flung open
and the young man was ushered in, the fog still clinging to his hair, in
which she could discern a little notch where she had nipped off the curl.

A speechlessness that socially was a defect in him was to her view a
piquant attribute just now.  He looked somewhat alarmed.

'Lady Constantine, have I done anything, that you have sent--?' he began
breathlessly, as he gazed in her face, with parted lips.

'O no, of course not!  I have decided to do something,--nothing more,'
she smilingly said, holding out her hand, which he rather gingerly
touched.  'Don't look so concerned.  Who makes equatorials?'

This remark was like the drawing of a weir-hatch and she was speedily
inundated with all she wished to know concerning astronomical opticians.
When he had imparted the particulars he waited, manifestly burning to
know whither these inquiries tended.

'I am not going to buy you one,' she said gently.

He looked as if he would faint.

'Certainly not.  I do not wish it.  I--could not have accepted it,'
faltered the young man.

'But I am going to buy one for _myself_.  I lack a hobby, and I shall
choose astronomy.  I shall fix my equatorial on the column.'

Swithin brightened up.

'And I shall let you have the use of it whenever you choose.  In brief,
Swithin St. Cleeve shall be Lady Constantine's Astronomer Royal; and
she--and she--'

'Shall be his Queen.'  The words came not much the worse for being
uttered only in the tone of one anxious to complete a tardy sentence.

'Well, that's what I have decided to do,' resumed Lady Constantine.  'I
will write to these opticians at once.'

There seemed to be no more for him to do than to thank her for the
privilege, whenever it should be available, which he promptly did, and
then made as if to go.  But Lady Constantine detained him with, 'Have you
ever seen my library?'

'No; never.'

'You don't say you would like to see it.'

'But I should.'

'It is the third door on the right.  You can find your way in, and you
can stay there as long as you like.'

Swithin then left the morning-room for the apartment designated, and
amused himself in that 'soul of the house,' as Cicero defined it, till he
heard the lunch bell sounding from the turret, when he came down from the
library steps, and thought it time to go home.  But at that moment a
servant entered to inquire whether he would or would not prefer to have
his lunch brought in to him there; upon his replying in the affirmative a
large tray arrived on the stomach of a footman, and Swithin was greatly
surprised to see a whole pheasant placed at his disposal.

Having breakfasted at eight that morning, and having been much in the
open air afterwards, the Adonis-astronomer's appetite assumed grand
proportions.  How much of that pheasant he might consistently eat without
hurting his dear patroness Lady Constantine's feelings, when he could
readily eat it all, was a problem in which the reasonableness of a larger
and larger quantity argued itself inversely as a smaller and smaller
quantity remained.  When, at length, he had finally decided on a terminal
point in the body of the bird, the door was gently opened.

'Oh, you have not finished?' came to him over his shoulder, in a
considerate voice.

'O yes, thank you, Lady Constantine,' he said, jumping up.

'Why did you prefer to lunch in this awkward, dusty place?'

'I thought--it would be better,' said Swithin simply.

'There is fruit in the other room, if you like to come.  But perhaps you
would rather not?'

'O yes, I should much like to,' said Swithin, walking over his napkin,
and following her as she led the way to the adjoining apartment.

Here, while she asked him what he had been reading, he modestly ventured
on an apple, in whose flavour he recognized the familiar taste of old
friends robbed from her husband's orchards in his childhood, long before
Lady Constantine's advent on the scene.  She supposed he had confined his
search to his own sublime subject, astronomy?

Swithin suddenly became older to the eye, as his thoughts reverted to the
topic thus reintroduced.  'Yes,' he informed her.  'I seldom read any
other subject.  In these days the secret of productive study is to avoid
well.'

'Did you find any good treatises?'

'None.  The theories in your books are almost as obsolete as the
Ptolemaic System.  Only fancy, that magnificent Cyclopaedia,
leather-bound, and stamped, and gilt, and wide margined, and bearing the
blazon of your house in magnificent colours, says that the twinkling of
the stars is probably caused by heavenly bodies passing in front of them
in their revolutions.'

'And is it not so?  That was what I learned when I was a girl.'

The modern Eudoxus now rose above the embarrassing horizon of Lady
Constantine's great house, magnificent furniture, and awe-inspiring
footman.  He became quite natural, all his self-consciousness fled, and
his eye spoke into hers no less than his lips to her ears, as he said,
'How such a theory can have lingered on to this day beats conjecture!
Francois Arago, as long as forty or fifty years ago, conclusively
established the fact that scintillation is the simplest thing in the
world,--merely a matter of atmosphere.  But I won't speak of this to you
now.  The comparative absence of scintillation in warm countries was
noticed by Humboldt.  Then, again, the scintillations vary.  No star
flaps his wings like Sirius when he lies low!  He flashes out emeralds
and rubies, amethystine flames and sapphirine colours, in a manner quite
marvellous to behold, and this is only _one_ star!  So, too, do Arcturus,
and Capella, and lesser luminaries. . . .  But I tire you with this
subject?'

'On the contrary, you speak so beautifully that I could listen all day.'

The astronomer threw a searching glance upon her for a moment; but there
was no satire in the warm soft eyes which met his own with a luxurious
contemplative interest.  'Say some more of it to me,' she continued, in a
voice not far removed from coaxing.

After some hesitation the subject returned again to his lips, and he said
some more--indeed, much more; Lady Constantine often throwing in an
appreciative remark or question, often meditatively regarding him, in
pursuance of ideas not exactly based on his words, and letting him go on
as he would.

Before he left the house the new astronomical project was set in train.
The top of the column was to be roofed in, to form a proper observatory;
and on the ground that he knew better than any one else how this was to
be carried out, she requested him to give precise directions on the
point, and to superintend the whole.  A wooden cabin was to be erected at
the foot of the tower, to provide better accommodation for casual
visitors to the observatory than the spiral staircase and lead-flat
afforded.  As this cabin would be completely buried in the dense fir
foliage which enveloped the lower part of the column and its pedestal, it
would be no disfigurement to the general appearance.  Finally, a path was
to be made across the surrounding fallow, by which she might easily
approach the scene of her new study.

When he was gone she wrote to the firm of opticians concerning the
equatorial for whose reception all this was designed.

The undertaking was soon in full progress; and by degrees it became the
talk of the hamlets round that Lady Constantine had given up melancholy
for astronomy, to the great advantage of all who came in contact with
her.  One morning, when Tabitha Lark had come as usual to read, Lady
Constantine chanced to be in a quarter of the house to which she seldom
wandered; and while here she heard her maid talking confidentially to
Tabitha in the adjoining room on the curious and sudden interest which
Lady Constantine had acquired in the moon and stars.

'They do say all sorts of trumpery,' observed the handmaid.  'They
say--though 'tis little better than mischief, to be sure--that it isn't
the moon, and it isn't the stars, and it isn't the plannards, that my
lady cares for, but for the pretty lad who draws 'em down from the sky to
please her; and being a married example, and what with sin and shame
knocking at every poor maid's door afore you can say, "Hands off, my
dear," to the civilest young man, she ought to set a better pattern.'

Lady Constantine's face flamed up vividly.

'If Sir Blount were to come back all of a sudden--oh, my!'

Lady Constantine grew cold as ice.

'There's nothing in it,' said Tabitha scornfully.  'I could prove it any
day.'

'Well, I wish I had half her chance!' sighed the lady's maid.  And no
more was said on the subject then.

Tabitha's remark showed that the suspicion was quite in embryo as yet.
Nevertheless, saying nothing to reveal what she had overheard,
immediately after the reading Lady Constantine flew like a bird to where
she knew that Swithin might be found.

He was in the plantation, setting up little sticks to mark where the
wooden cabin was to stand.  She called him to a remote place under the
funereal trees.

'I have altered my mind,' she said.  'I can have nothing to do with this
matter.'

'Indeed?' said Swithin, surprised.

'Astronomy is not my hobby any longer.  And you are not my Astronomer
Royal.'

'O Lady Constantine!' cried the youth, aghast.  'Why, the work is begun!
I thought the equatorial was ordered.'

She dropped her voice, though a Jericho shout would not have been
overheard: 'Of course astronomy is my hobby privately, and you are to be
my Astronomer Royal, and I still furnish the observatory; but not to the
outer world.  There is a reason against my indulgence in such scientific
fancies openly; and the project must be arranged in this wise.  The whole
enterprise is yours: you rent the tower of me: you build the cabin: you
get the equatorial.  I simply give permission, since you desire it.  The
path that was to be made from the hill to the park is not to be thought
of.  There is to be no communication between the house and the column.
The equatorial will arrive addressed to you, and its cost I will pay
through you.  My name must not appear, and I vanish entirely from the
undertaking. . . .  This blind is necessary,' she added, sighing.  'Good-
bye!'

'But you _do_ take as much interest as before, and it _will_ be yours
just the same?' he said, walking after her.  He scarcely comprehended the
subterfuge, and was absolutely blind as to its reason.

'Can you doubt it?  But I dare not do it openly.'

With this she went away; and in due time there circulated through the
parish an assertion that it was a mistake to suppose Lady Constantine had
anything to do with Swithin St. Cleeve or his star-gazing schemes.  She
had merely allowed him to rent the tower of her for use as his
observatory, and to put some temporary fixtures on it for that purpose.

After this Lady Constantine lapsed into her former life of loneliness;
and by these prompt measures the ghost of a rumour which had barely
started into existence was speedily laid to rest.  It had probably
originated in her own dwelling, and had gone but little further.  Yet,
despite her self-control, a certain north window of the Great House, that
commanded an uninterrupted view of the upper ten feet of the column,
revealed her to be somewhat frequently gazing from it at a rotundity
which had begun to appear on the summit.  To those with whom she came in
contact she sometimes addressed such remarks as, 'Is young Mr. St. Cleeve
getting on with his observatory?  I hope he will fix his instruments
without damaging the column, which is so interesting to us as being in
memory of my dear husband's great-grandfather--a truly brave man.'

On one occasion her building-steward ventured to suggest to her that, Sir
Blount having deputed to her the power to grant short leases in his
absence, she should have a distinctive agreement with Swithin, as between
landlord and tenant, with a stringent clause against his driving nails
into the stonework of such an historical memorial.  She replied that she
did not wish to be severe on the last representative of such old and
respected parishioners as St. Cleeve's mother's family had been, and of
such a well-descended family as his father's; so that it would only be
necessary for the steward to keep an eye on Mr. St. Cleeve's doings.

Further, when a letter arrived at the Great House from Hilton and Pimm's,
the opticians, with information that the equatorial was ready and packed,
and that a man would be sent with it to fix it, she replied to that firm
to the effect that their letter should have been addressed to Mr. St.
Cleeve, the local astronomer, on whose behalf she had made the inquiries;
that she had nothing more to do with the matter; that he would receive
the instrument and pay the bill,--her guarantee being given for the
latter performance.



VIII


Lady Constantine then had the pleasure of beholding a waggon, laden with
packing-cases, moving across the field towards the pillar; and not many
days later Swithin, who had never come to the Great House since the
luncheon, met her in a path which he knew to be one of her promenades.

'The equatorial is fixed, and the man gone,' he said, half in doubt as to
his speech, for her commands to him not to recognize her agency or
patronage still puzzled him.  'I respectfully wish--you could come and
see it, Lady Constantine.'

'I would rather not; I cannot.'

'Saturn is lovely; Jupiter is simply sublime; I can see double stars in
the Lion and in the Virgin, where I had seen only a single one before.  It
is all I required to set me going!'

'I'll come.  But--you need say nothing about my visit.  I cannot come to-
night, but I will some time this week.  Yet only this once, to try the
instrument.  Afterwards you must be content to pursue your studies
alone.'

Swithin seemed but little affected at this announcement.  'Hilton and
Pimm's man handed me the bill,' he continued.

'How much is it?'

He told her.  'And the man who has built the hut and dome, and done the
other fixing, has sent in his.'  He named this amount also.

'Very well.  They shall be settled with.  My debts must be paid with my
money, which you shall have at once,--in cash, since a cheque would
hardly do.  Come to the house for it this evening.  But no, no--you must
not come openly; such is the world.  Come to the window--the window that
is exactly in a line with the long snowdrop bed, in the south front--at
eight to-night, and I will give you what is necessary.'

'Certainly, Lady Constantine,' said the young man.

At eight that evening accordingly, Swithin entered like a spectre upon
the terrace to seek out the spot she had designated.  The equatorial had
so entirely absorbed his thoughts that he did not trouble himself
seriously to conjecture the why and wherefore of her secrecy.  If he
casually thought of it, he set it down in a general way to an intensely
generous wish on her part not to lessen his influence among the poorer
inhabitants by making him appear the object of patronage.

While he stood by the long snowdrop bed, which looked up at him like a
nether Milky Way, the French casement of the window opposite softly
opened, and a hand bordered by a glimmer of lace was stretched forth,
from which he received a crisp little parcel,--bank-notes, apparently.  He
knew the hand, and held it long enough to press it to his lips, the only
form which had ever occurred to him of expressing his gratitude to her
without the incumbrance of clumsy words, a vehicle at the best of times
but rudely suited to such delicate merchandise.  The hand was hastily
withdrawn, as if the treatment had been unexpected.  Then seemingly moved
by second thoughts she bent forward and said, 'Is the night good for
observations?'

'Perfect.'

She paused.  'Then I'll come to-night,' she at last said.  'It makes no
difference to me, after all.  Wait just one moment.'

He waited, and she presently emerged, muffled up like a nun; whereupon
they left the terrace and struck across the park together.

Very little was said by either till they were crossing the fallow, when
he asked if his arm would help her.  She did not take the offered support
just then; but when they were ascending the prehistoric earthwork, under
the heavy gloom of the fir-trees, she seized it, as if rather influenced
by the oppressive solitude than by fatigue.

Thus they reached the foot of the column, ten thousand spirits in prison
seeming to gasp their griefs from the funereal boughs overhead, and a few
twigs scratching the pillar with the drag of impish claws as tenacious as
those figuring in St. Anthony's temptation.

'How intensely dark it is just here!' she whispered.  'I wonder you can
keep in the path.  Many ancient Britons lie buried there doubtless.'

He led her round to the other side, where, feeling his way with his
hands, he suddenly left her, appearing a moment after with a light.

'What place is this?' she exclaimed.

'This is the new wood cabin,' said he.

She could just discern the outline of a little house, not unlike a
bathing-machine without wheels.

'I have kept lights ready here,' he went on, 'as I thought you might come
any evening, and possibly bring company.'

'Don't criticize me for coming alone,' she exclaimed with sensitive
promptness.  'There are social reasons for what I do of which you know
nothing.'

'Perhaps it is much to my discredit that I don't know.'

'Not at all.  You are all the better for it.  Heaven forbid that I should
enlighten you.  Well, I see this is the hut.  But I am more curious to go
to the top of the tower, and make discoveries.'

He brought a little lantern from the cabin, and lighted her up the
winding staircase to the temple of that sublime mystery on whose
threshold he stood as priest.

The top of the column was quite changed.  The tub-shaped space within the
parapet, formerly open to the air and sun, was now arched over by a light
dome of lath-work covered with felt.  But this dome was not fixed.  At
the line where its base descended to the parapet there were half a dozen
iron balls, precisely like cannon-shot, standing loosely in a groove, and
on these the dome rested its whole weight.  In the side of the dome was a
slit, through which the wind blew and the North Star beamed, and towards
it the end of the great telescope was directed.  This latter magnificent
object, with its circles, axes, and handles complete, was securely fixed
in the middle of the floor.

'But you can only see one part of the sky through that slit,' said she.

The astronomer stretched out his arm, and the whole dome turned
horizontally round, running on the balls with a rumble like thunder.
Instead of the star Polaris, which had first been peeping in through the
slit, there now appeared the countenances of Castor and Pollux.  Swithin
then manipulated the equatorial, and put it through its capabilities in
like manner.

She was enchanted; being rather excitable she even clapped her hands just
once.  She turned to him: 'Now are you happy?'

'But it is all _yours_, Lady Constantine.'

'At this moment.  But that's a defect which can soon be remedied.  When
is your birthday?'

'Next month,--the seventh.'

'Then it shall all be yours,--a birthday present.'

The young man protested; it was too much.

'No, you must accept it all,--equatorial, dome stand, hut, and everything
that has been put here for this astronomical purpose.  The possession of
these apparatus would only compromise me.  Already they are reputed to be
yours, and they must be made yours.  There is no help for it.  If ever'
(here her voice lost some firmness),--'if ever you go away from me,--from
this place, I mean,--and marry, and settle in a new home elsewhere for
good, and forget me, you must take these things, equatorial and all, and
never tell your wife or anybody how they came to be yours.'

'I wish I could do something more for you!' exclaimed the much-moved
astronomer.  'If you could but share my fame,--supposing I get any, which
I may die before doing,--it would be a little compensation.  As to my
going away and marrying, I certainly shall not.  I may go away, but I
shall never marry.'

'Why not?'

'A beloved science is enough wife for me,--combined, perhaps, with a
little warm friendship with one of kindred pursuits.'

'Who is the friend of kindred pursuits?'

'Yourself I should like it to be.'

'You would have to become a woman before I could be that, publicly; or I
a man,' she replied, with dry melancholy.

'Why I a woman, or you a man, dear Lady Constantine?'

'I cannot explain.  No; you must keep your fame and your science all to
yourself, and I must keep my--troubles.'

Swithin, to divert her from melancholy--not knowing that in the
expression of her melancholy thus and now she found much
pleasure,--changed the subject by asking if they should take some
observations.

'Yes; the scenery is well hung to-night,' she said looking out upon the
heavens.

Then they proceeded to scan the sky, roving from planet to star, from
single stars to double stars, from double to coloured stars, in the
cursory manner of the merely curious.  They plunged down to that at other
times invisible multitude in the back rows of the celestial theatre:
remote layers of constellations whose shapes were new and singular;
pretty twinklers which for infinite ages had spent their beams without
calling forth from a single earthly poet a single line, or being able to
bestow a ray of comfort on a single benighted traveller.

'And to think,' said Lady Constantine, 'that the whole race of shepherds,
since the beginning of the world,--even those immortal shepherds who
watched near Bethlehem,--should have gone into their graves without
knowing that for one star that lighted them in their labours, there were
a hundred as good behind trying to do so! . . .  I have a feeling for
this instrument not unlike the awe I should feel in the presence of a
great magician in whom I really believed.  Its powers are so enormous,
and weird, and fantastical, that I should have a personal fear in being
with it alone.  Music drew an angel down, said the poet: but what is that
to drawing down worlds!'

'I often experience a kind of fear of the sky after sitting in the
observing-chair a long time,' he answered.  'And when I walk home
afterwards I also fear it, for what I know is there, but cannot see, as
one naturally fears the presence of a vast formless something that only
reveals a very little of itself.  That's partly what I meant by saying
that magnitude, which up to a certain point has grandeur, has beyond it
ghastliness.'

Thus the interest of their sidereal observations led them on, till the
knowledge that scarce any other human vision was travelling within a
hundred million miles of their own gave them such a sense of the
isolation of that faculty as almost to be a sense of isolation in respect
of their whole personality, causing a shudder at its absoluteness.  At
night, when human discords and harmonies are hushed, in a general sense,
for the greater part of twelve hours, there is nothing to moderate the
blow with which the infinitely great, the stellar universe, strikes down
upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder; and this was the
case now.  Having got closer to immensity than their fellow-creatures,
they saw at once its beauty and its frightfulness.  They more and more
felt the contrast between their own tiny magnitudes and those among which
they had recklessly plunged, till they were oppressed with the presence
of a vastness they could not cope with even as an idea, and which hung
about them like a nightmare.

He stood by her while she observed; she by him when they changed places.
Once that Swithin's emancipation from a trammelling body had been
effected by the telescope, and he was well away in space, she felt her
influence over him diminishing to nothing.  He was quite unconscious of
his terrestrial neighbourings, and of herself as one of them.  It still
further reduced her towards unvarnished simplicity in her manner to him.

The silence was broken only by the ticking of the clock-work which gave
diurnal motion to the instrument.  The stars moved on, the end of the
telescope followed, but their tongues stood still.  To expect that he was
ever voluntarily going to end the pause by speech was apparently futile.
She laid her hand upon his arm.

He started, withdrew his eye from the telescope, and brought himself back
to the earth by a visible--almost painful--effort.

'Do come out of it,' she coaxed, with a softness in her voice which any
man but unpractised Swithin would have felt to be exquisite.  'I feel
that I have been so foolish as to put in your hands an instrument to
effect my own annihilation.  Not a word have you spoken for the last ten
minutes.'

'I have been mentally getting on with my great theory.  I hope soon to be
able to publish it to the world.  What, are you going?  I will walk with
you, Lady Constantine.  When will you come again?'

'When your great theory is published to the world.'



IX


Lady Constantine, if narrowly observed at this time, would have seemed to
be deeply troubled in conscience, and particularly after the interview
above described.  Ash Wednesday occurred in the calendar a few days
later, and she went to morning service with a look of genuine contrition
on her emotional and yearning countenance.

Besides herself the congregation consisted only of the parson, clerk,
school-children, and three old people living on alms, who sat under the
reading-desk; and thus, when Mr. Torkingham blazed forth the denunciatory
sentences of the Commination, nearly the whole force of them seemed to
descend upon her own shoulders.  Looking across the empty pews she saw
through the one or two clear panes of the window opposite a youthful
figure in the churchyard, and the very feeling against which she had
tried to pray returned again irresistibly.

When she came out and had crossed into the private walk, Swithin came
forward to speak to her.  This was a most unusual circumstance, and
argued a matter of importance.

'I have made an amazing discovery in connexion with the variable stars,'
he exclaimed.  'It will excite the whole astronomical world, and the
world outside but little less.  I had long suspected the true secret of
their variability; but it was by the merest chance on earth that I hit
upon a proof of my guess.  Your equatorial has done it, my good, kind
Lady Constantine, and our fame is established for ever!'

He sprang into the air, and waved his hat in his triumph.

'Oh, I am so glad--so rejoiced!' she cried.  'What is it?  But don't stop
to tell me.  Publish it at once in some paper; nail your name to it, or
somebody will seize the idea and appropriate it,--forestall you in some
way.  It will be Adams and Leverrier over again.'

'If I may walk with you I will explain the nature of the discovery.  It
accounts for the occasional green tint of Castor, and every difficulty.  I
said I would be the Copernicus of the stellar system, and I have begun to
be.  Yet who knows?'

'Now don't be so up and down!  I shall not understand your explanation,
and I would rather not know it.  I shall reveal it if it is very grand.
Women, you know, are not safe depositaries of such valuable secrets.  You
may walk with me a little way, with great pleasure.  Then go and write
your account, so as to insure your ownership of the discovery. . . .  But
how you have watched!' she cried, in a sudden accession of anxiety, as
she turned to look more closely at him.  'The orbits of your eyes are
leaden, and your eyelids are red and heavy.  Don't do it--pray don't.  You
will be ill, and break down.'

'I have, it is true, been up a little late this last week,' he said
cheerfully.  'In fact, I couldn't tear myself away from the equatorial;
it is such a wonderful possession that it keeps me there till daylight.
But what does that matter, now I have made the discovery?'

'Ah, it _does_ matter!  Now, promise me--I insist--that you will not
commit such imprudences again; for what should I do if my Astronomer
Royal were to die?'

She laughed, but far too apprehensively to be effective as a display of
levity.

They parted, and he went home to write out his paper.  He promised to
call as soon as his discovery was in print.  Then they waited for the
result.

It is impossible to describe the tremulous state of Lady Constantine
during the interval.  The warm interest she took in Swithin St.
Cleeve--many would have said dangerously warm interest--made his hopes
her hopes; and though she sometimes admitted to herself that great
allowance was requisite for the overweening confidence of youth in the
future, she permitted herself to be blinded to probabilities for the
pleasure of sharing his dreams.  It seemed not unreasonable to suppose
the present hour to be the beginning of realization to her darling wish
that this young man should become famous.  He had worked hard, and why
should he not be famous early?  His very simplicity in mundane affairs
afforded a strong presumption that in things celestial he might be wise.
To obtain support for this hypothesis she had only to think over the
lives of many eminent astronomers.

She waited feverishly for the flourish of trumpets from afar, by which
she expected the announcement of his discovery to be greeted.  Knowing
that immediate intelligence of the outburst would be brought to her by
himself, she watched from the windows of the Great House each morning for
a sight of his figure hastening down the glade.

But he did not come.

A long array of wet days passed their dreary shapes before her, and made
the waiting still more tedious.  On one of these occasions she ran across
to the tower, at the risk of a severe cold.  The door was locked.

Two days after she went again.  The door was locked still.  But this was
only to be expected in such weather.  Yet she would have gone on to his
house, had there not been one reason too many against such precipitancy.
As astronomer and astronomer there was no harm in their meetings; but as
woman and man she feared them.

Ten days passed without a sight of him; ten blurred and dreary days,
during which the whole landscape dripped like a mop; the park trees
swabbed the gravel from the drive, while the sky was a zinc-coloured
archi-vault of immovable cloud.  It seemed as if the whole science of
astronomy had never been real, and that the heavenly bodies, with their
motions, were as theoretical as the lines and circles of a bygone
mathematical problem.

She could content herself no longer with fruitless visits to the column,
and when the rain had a little abated she walked to the nearest hamlet,
and in a conversation with the first old woman she met contrived to lead
up to the subject of Swithin St. Cleeve by talking about his grandmother.

'Ah, poor old heart; 'tis a bad time for her, my lady!' exclaimed the
dame.

'What?'

'Her grandson is dying; and such a gentleman through and through!'

'What! . . .  Oh, it has something to do with that dreadful discovery!'

'Discovery, my lady?'

She left the old woman with an evasive answer, and with a breaking heart
crept along the road.  Tears brimmed into her eyes as she walked, and by
the time that she was out of sight sobs burst forth tumultuously.

'I am too fond of him!' she moaned; 'but I can't help it; and I don't
care if it's wrong,--I don't care!'

Without further considerations as to who beheld her doings she
instinctively went straight towards Mrs. Martin's.  Seeing a man coming
she calmed herself sufficiently to ask him through her dropped veil how
poor Mr. St. Cleeve was that day.  But she only got the same reply: 'They
say he is dying, my lady.'

When Swithin had parted from Lady Constantine, on the previous
Ash-Wednesday, he had gone straight to the homestead and prepared his
account of 'A New Astronomical Discovery.'  It was written perhaps in too
glowing a rhetoric for the true scientific tone of mind; but there was no
doubt that his assertion met with a most startling aptness all the
difficulties which had accompanied the received theories on the phenomena
attending those changeable suns of marvellous systems so far away.  It
accounted for the nebulous mist that surrounds some of them at their
weakest time; in short, took up a position of probability which has never
yet been successfully assailed.

The papers were written in triplicate, and carefully sealed up with blue
wax.  One copy was directed to Greenwich, another to the Royal Society,
another to a prominent astronomer.  A brief statement of the essence of
the discovery was also prepared for the leading daily paper.

He considered these documents, embodying as they did two years of his
constant thought, reading, and observation, too important to be entrusted
for posting to the hands of a messenger; too important to be sent to the
sub-post-office at hand.  Though the day was wet, dripping wet, he went
on foot with them to a chief office, five miles off, and registered them.
Quite exhausted by the walk, after his long night-work, wet through, yet
sustained by the sense of a great achievement, he called at a
bookseller's for the astronomical periodicals to which he subscribed;
then, resting for a short time at an inn, he plodded his way homewards,
reading his papers as he went, and planning how to enjoy a repose on his
laurels of a week or more.

On he strolled through the rain, holding the umbrella vertically over the
exposed page to keep it dry while he read.  Suddenly his eye was struck
by an article.  It was the review of a pamphlet by an American
astronomer, in which the author announced a conclusive discovery with
regard to variable stars.

The discovery was precisely the discovery of Swithin St. Cleeve.  Another
man had forestalled his fame by a period of about six weeks.

Then the youth found that the goddess Philosophy, to whom he had vowed to
dedicate his whole life, would not in return support him through a single
hour of despair.  In truth, the impishness of circumstance was newer to
him than it would have been to a philosopher of threescore-and-ten.  In a
wild wish for annihilation he flung himself down on a patch of heather
that lay a little removed from the road, and in this humid bed remained
motionless, while time passed by unheeded.

At last, from sheer misery and weariness, he fell asleep.

The March rain pelted him mercilessly, the beaded moisture from the
heavily charged locks of heath penetrated him through back and sides, and
clotted his hair to unsightly tags and tufts.  When he awoke it was dark.
He thought of his grandmother, and of her possible alarm at missing him.
On attempting to rise, he found that he could hardly bend his joints, and
that his clothes were as heavy as lead from saturation.  His teeth
chattering and his knees trembling he pursued his way home, where his
appearance excited great concern.  He was obliged at once to retire to
bed, and the next day he was delirious from the chill.

It was about ten days after this unhappy occurrence that Lady Constantine
learnt the news, as above described, and hastened along to the homestead
in that state of anguish in which the heart is no longer under the
control of the judgment, and self-abandonment even to error, verges on
heroism.

On reaching the house in Welland Bottom the door was opened to her by old
Hannah, who wore an assiduously sorrowful look; and Lady Constantine was
shown into the large room,--so wide that the beams bent in the
middle,--where she took her seat in one of a methodic range of chairs,
beneath a portrait of the Reverend Mr. St. Cleeve, her astronomer's
erratic father.

The eight unwatered dying plants, in the row of eight flower-pots,
denoted that there was something wrong in the house.  Mrs. Martin came
downstairs fretting, her wonder at beholding Lady Constantine not
altogether displacing the previous mood of grief.

'Here's a pretty kettle of fish, my lady!' she exclaimed.

Lady Constantine said, 'Hush!' and pointed inquiringly upward.

'He is not overhead, my lady,' replied Swithin's grandmother.  'His
bedroom is at the back of the house.'

'How is he now?'

'He is better, just at this moment; and we are more hopeful.  But he
changes so.'

'May I go up?  I know he would like to see me.'

Her presence having been made known to the sufferer, she was conducted
upstairs to Swithin's room.  The way thither was through the large
chamber he had used as a study and for the manufacture of optical
instruments.  There lay the large pasteboard telescope, that had been
just such a failure as Crusoe's large boat; there were his diagrams,
maps, globes, and celestial apparatus of various sorts.  The absence of
the worker, through illness or death is sufficient to touch the prosiest
workshop and tools with the hues of pathos, and it was with a swelling
bosom that Lady Constantine passed through this arena of his youthful
activities to the little chamber where he lay.

Old Mrs. Martin sat down by the window, and Lady Constantine bent over
Swithin.

'Don't speak to me!' she whispered.  'It will weaken you; it will excite
you.  If you do speak, it must be very softly.'

She took his hand, and one irrepressible tear fell upon it.

'Nothing will excite me now, Lady Constantine,' he said; 'not even your
goodness in coming.  My last excitement was when I lost the battle. . . .
Do you know that my discovery has been forestalled?  It is that that's
killing me.'

'But you are going to recover; you are better, they say.  Is it so?'

'I think I am, to-day.  But who can be sure?'

'The poor boy was so upset at finding that his labour had been thrown
away,' said his grandmother, 'that he lay down in the rain, and chilled
his life out.'

'How could you do it?' Lady Constantine whispered.  'O, how could you
think so much of renown, and so little of me?  Why, for every discovery
made there are ten behind that await making.  To commit suicide like
this, as if there were nobody in the world to care for you!'

'It was done in my haste, and I am very, very sorry for it!  I beg both
you and all my few friends never, never to forgive me!  It would kill me
with self-reproach if you were to pardon my rashness!'

At this moment the doctor was announced, and Mrs. Martin went downstairs
to receive him.  Lady Constantine thought she would remain to hear his
report, and for this purpose withdrew, and sat down in a nook of the
adjoining work-room of Swithin, the doctor meeting her as he passed
through it into the sick chamber.

He was there a torturingly long time; but at length he came out to the
room she waited in, and crossed it on his way downstairs.  She rose and
followed him to the stairhead.

'How is he?' she anxiously asked.  'Will he get over it?'

The doctor, not knowing the depth of her interest in the patient, spoke
with the blunt candour natural towards a comparatively indifferent
inquirer.

'No, Lady Constantine,' he replied; 'there's a change for the worse.'

And he retired down the stairs.

Scarcely knowing what she did Lady Constantine ran back to Swithin's
side, flung herself upon the bed and in a paroxysm of sorrow kissed him.



X


The placid inhabitants of the parish of Welland, including warbling
waggoners, lone shepherds, ploughmen, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the
gardener at the Great House, the steward and agent, the parson, clerk,
and so on, were hourly expecting the announcement of St. Cleeve's death.
The sexton had been going to see his brother-in-law, nine miles distant,
but promptly postponed the visit for a few days, that there might be the
regular professional hand present to toll the bell in a note of due
fulness and solemnity; an attempt by a deputy, on a previous occasion of
his absence, having degenerated into a miserable stammering clang that
was a disgrace to the parish.

But Swithin St. Cleeve did not decease, a fact of which, indeed, the
habituated reader will have been well aware ever since the rain came down
upon the young man in the ninth chapter, and led to his alarming illness.
Though, for that matter, so many maimed histories are hourly enacting
themselves in this dun-coloured world as to lend almost a priority of
interest to narratives concerning those

   'Who lay great bases for eternity
   Which prove more short than waste or ruining.'

How it arose that he did not die was in this wise; and his example
affords another instance of that reflex rule of the vassal soul over the
sovereign body, which, operating so wonderfully in elastic natures, and
more or less in all, originally gave rise to the legend that supremacy
lay on the other side.

The evening of the day after the tender, despairing, farewell kiss of
Lady Constantine, when he was a little less weak than during her visit,
he lay with his face to the window.  He lay alone, quiet and resigned.  He
had been thinking, sometimes of her and other friends, but chiefly of his
lost discovery.  Although nearly unconscious at the time, he had yet been
aware of that kiss, as the delicate flush which followed it upon his
cheek would have told; but he had attached little importance to it as
between woman and man.  Had he been dying of love instead of wet weather,
perhaps the impulsive act of that handsome lady would have been seized on
as a proof that his love was returned.  As it was her kiss seemed but the
evidence of a naturally demonstrative kindliness, felt towards him
chiefly because he was believed to be leaving her for ever.

The reds of sunset passed, and dusk drew on.  Old Hannah came upstairs to
pull down the blinds and as she advanced to the window he said to her, in
a faint voice, 'Well, Hannah, what news to-day?'

'Oh, nothing, sir,' Hannah replied, looking out of the window with sad
apathy, 'only that there's a comet, they say.'

'A WHAT?' said the dying astronomer, starting up on his elbow.

'A comet--that's all, Master Swithin,' repeated Hannah, in a lower voice,
fearing she had done harm in some way.

'Well, tell me, tell me!' cried Swithin.  'Is it Gambart's?  Is it
Charles the Fifth's, or Halley's, or Faye's, or whose?'

'Hush!' said she, thinking St. Cleeve slightly delirious again.  ''Tis
God A'mighty's, of course.  I haven't seed en myself, but they say he's
getting bigger every night, and that he'll be the biggest one known for
fifty years when he's full growed.  There, you must not talk any more
now, or I'll go away.'

Here was an amazing event, little noise as it had made in the happening.
Of all phenomena that he had longed to witness during his short
astronomical career, those appertaining to comets had excited him most.
That the magnificent comet of 1811 would not return again for thirty
centuries had been quite a permanent regret with him.  And now, when the
bottomless abyss of death seemed yawning beneath his feet, one of these
much-desired apparitions, as large, apparently, as any of its tribe, had
chosen to show itself.

'O, if I could but live to see that comet through my equatorial!' he
cried.

Compared with comets, variable stars, which he had hitherto made his
study, were, from their remoteness, uninteresting.  They were to the
former as the celebrities of Ujiji or Unyamwesi to the celebrities of his
own country.  Members of the solar system, these dazzling and perplexing
rangers, the fascination of all astronomers, rendered themselves still
more fascinating by the sinister suspicion attaching to them of being
possibly the ultimate destroyers of the human race.  In his physical
prostration St. Cleeve wept bitterly at not being hale and strong enough
to welcome with proper honour the present specimen of these desirable
visitors.

The strenuous wish to live and behold the new phenomenon, supplanting the
utter weariness of existence that he had heretofore experienced, gave him
a new vitality.  The crisis passed; there was a turn for the better; and
after that he rapidly mended.  The comet had in all probability saved his
life.  The limitless and complex wonders of the sky resumed their old
power over his imagination; the possibilities of that unfathomable blue
ocean were endless.  Finer feats than ever he would perform were to be
achieved in its investigation.  What Lady Constantine had said, that for
one discovery made ten awaited making, was strikingly verified by the
sudden appearance of this splendid marvel.

The windows of St. Cleeve's bedroom faced the west, and nothing would
satisfy him but that his bed should be so pulled round as to give him a
view of the low sky, in which the as yet minute tadpole of fire was
recognizable.  The mere sight of it seemed to lend him sufficient
resolution to complete his own cure forthwith.  His only fear now was
lest, from some unexpected cause or other, the comet would vanish before
he could get to the observatory on Rings-Hill Speer.

In his fervour to begin observing he directed that an old telescope,
which he had used in his first celestial attempts, should be tied at one
end to the bed-post, and at the other fixed near his eye as he reclined.
Equipped only with this rough improvisation he began to take notes.  Lady
Constantine was forgotten, till one day, suddenly, wondering if she knew
of the important phenomenon, he revolved in his mind whether as a fellow-
student and sincere friend of his she ought not to be sent for, and
instructed in the use of the equatorial.

But though the image of Lady Constantine, in spite of her kindness and
unmistakably warm heart, had been obscured in his mind by the heavenly
body, she had not so readily forgotten him.  Too shy to repeat her visit
after so nearly betraying her secret, she yet, every day, by the most
ingenious and subtle means that could be devised by a woman who feared
for herself, but could not refrain from tampering with danger,
ascertained the state of her young friend's health.  On hearing of the
turn in his condition she rejoiced on his account, and became yet more
despondent on her own.  If he had died she might have mused on him as her
dear departed saint without much sin: but his return to life was a
delight that bewildered and dismayed.

One evening a little later on he was sitting at his bedroom window as
usual, waiting for a sufficient decline of light to reveal the comet's
form, when he beheld, crossing the field contiguous to the house, a
figure which he knew to be hers.  He thought she must be coming to see
him on the great comet question, to discuss which with so delightful and
kind a comrade was an expectation full of pleasure.  Hence he keenly
observed her approach, till something happened that surprised him.

When, at the descent of the hill, she had reached the stile that admitted
to Mrs. Martin's garden, Lady Constantine stood quite still for a minute
or more, her gaze bent on the ground.  Instead of coming on to the house
she went heavily and slowly back, almost as if in pain; and then at
length, quickening her pace, she was soon out of sight.  She appeared in
the path no more that day.



XI


Why had Lady Constantine stopped and turned?

A misgiving had taken sudden possession of her.  Her true sentiment
towards St. Cleeve was too recognizable by herself to be tolerated.

That she had a legitimate interest in him as a young astronomer was true;
that her sympathy on account of his severe illness had been natural and
commendable was also true.  But the superfluous feeling was what filled
her with trepidation.

Superfluities have been defined as things you cannot do without, and this
particular emotion, that came not within her rightful measure, was in
danger of becoming just such a superfluity with her.  In short, she felt
there and then that to see St. Cleeve again would be an impropriety; and
by a violent effort she retreated from his precincts, as he had observed.

She resolved to ennoble her conduct from that moment of her life onwards.
She would exercise kind patronage towards Swithin without once indulging
herself with his company.  Inexpressibly dear to her deserted heart he
was becoming, but for the future he should at least be hidden from her
eyes.  To speak plainly, it was growing a serious question whether, if he
were not hidden from her eyes, she would not soon be plunging across the
ragged boundary which divides the permissible from the forbidden.

By the time that she had drawn near home the sun was going down.  The
heavy, many-chevroned church, now subdued by violet shadow except where
its upper courses caught the western stroke of flame-colour, stood close
to her grounds, as in many other parishes, though the village of which it
formerly was the nucleus had become quite depopulated: its cottages had
been demolished to enlarge the park, leaving the old building to stand
there alone, like a standard without an army.

It was Friday night, and she heard the organist practising voluntaries
within.  The hour, the notes, the even-song of the birds, and her own
previous emotions, combined to influence her devotionally.  She entered,
turning to the right and passing under the chancel arch, where she sat
down and viewed the whole empty length, east and west.  The semi-Norman
arches of the nave, with their multitudinous notchings, were still
visible by the light from the tower window, but the lower portion of the
building was in obscurity, except where the feeble glimmer from the
candle of the organist spread a glow-worm radiance around.  The player,
who was Miss Tabitha Lark, continued without intermission to produce her
wandering sounds, unconscious of any one's presence except that of the
youthful blower at her side.

The rays from the organist's candle illuminated but one small fragment of
the chancel outside the precincts of the instrument, and that was the
portion of the eastern wall whereon the ten commandments were inscribed.
The gilt letters shone sternly into Lady Constantine's eyes; and she,
being as impressionable as a turtle-dove, watched a certain one of those
commandments on the second table, till its thunder broke her spirit with
blank contrition.

She knelt down, and did her utmost to eradicate those impulses towards
St. Cleeve which were inconsistent with her position as the wife of an
absent man, though not unnatural in her as his victim.

She knelt till she seemed scarcely to belong to the time she lived in,
which lost the magnitude that the nearness of its perspective lent it on
ordinary occasions, and took its actual rank in the long line of other
centuries.  Having once got out of herself, seen herself from afar off,
she was calmer, and went on to register a magnanimous vow.  She would
look about for some maiden fit and likely to make St. Cleeve happy; and
this girl she would endow with what money she could afford, that the
natural result of their apposition should do him no worldly harm.  The
interest of her, Lady Constantine's, life should be in watching the
development of love between Swithin and the ideal maiden.  The very
painfulness of the scheme to her susceptible heart made it pleasing to
her conscience; and she wondered that she had not before this time
thought of a stratagem which united the possibility of benefiting the
astronomer with the advantage of guarding against peril to both Swithin
and herself.  By providing for him a suitable helpmate she would preclude
the dangerous awakening in him of sentiments reciprocating her own.

Arrived at a point of exquisite misery through this heroic intention,
Lady Constantine's tears moistened the books upon which her forehead was
bowed.  And as she heard her feverish heart throb against the desk, she
firmly believed the wearing impulses of that heart would put an end to
her sad life, and momentarily recalled the banished image of St. Cleeve
to apostrophise him in thoughts that paraphrased the quaint lines of
Heine's _Lieb' Liebchen_:--

   'Dear my love, press thy hand to my breast, and tell
   If thou tracest the knocks in that narrow cell;
   A carpenter dwells there; cunning is he,
   And slyly he's shaping a coffin for me!'

Lady Constantine was disturbed by a break in the organist's meandering
practice, and raising her head she saw a person standing by the player.
It was Mr. Torkingham, and what he said was distinctly audible.  He was
inquiring for herself.

'I thought I saw Lady Constantine walk this way,' he rejoined to
Tabitha's negative.  'I am very anxious indeed to meet with her.'

She went forward.  'I am here,' she said.  'Don't stop playing, Miss
Lark.  What is it, Mr. Torkingham?'

Tabitha thereupon resumed her playing, and Mr. Torkingham joined Lady
Constantine.

'I have some very serious intelligence to break to your ladyship,' he
said.  'But--I will not interrupt you here.'  (He had seen her rise from
her knees to come to him.)  'I will call at the House the first moment
you can receive me after reaching home.'

'No, tell me here,' she said, seating herself.

He came close, and placed his hand on the poppy-head of the seat.

'I have received a communication,' he resumed haltingly, 'in which I am
requested to prepare you for the contents of a letter that you will
receive to-morrow morning.'

'I am quite ready.'

'The subject is briefly this, Lady Constantine: that you have been a
widow for more than eighteen months.'

'Dead!'

'Yes.  Sir Blount was attacked by dysentery and malarious fever, on the
banks of the Zouga in South Africa, so long ago as last October
twelvemonths, and it carried him off.  Of the three men who were with
him, two succumbed to the same illness, a hundred miles further on; while
the third, retracing his steps into a healthier district, remained there
with a native tribe, and took no pains to make the circumstances known.
It seems to be only by the mere accident of his having told some third
party that we know of the matter now.  This is all I can tell you at
present.'

She was greatly agitated for a few moments; and the Table of the Law
opposite, which now seemed to appertain to another dispensation,
glistened indistinctly upon a vision still obscured by the old tears.

'Shall I conduct you home?' asked the parson.

'No thank you,' said Lady Constantine.  'I would rather go alone.'



XII


On the afternoon of the next day Mr. Torkingham, who occasionally dropped
in to see St. Cleeve, called again as usual; after duly remarking on the
state of the weather, congratulating him on his sure though slow
improvement, and answering his inquiries about the comet, he said, 'You
have heard, I suppose, of what has happened to Lady Constantine?'

'No!  Nothing serious?'

'Yes, it is serious.'  The parson informed him of the death of Sir
Blount, and of the accidents which had hindered all knowledge of the
same,--accidents favoured by the estrangement of the pair and the
cessation of correspondence between them for some time.

His listener received the news with the concern of a friend, Lady
Constantine's aspect in his eyes depending but little on her condition
matrimonially.

'There was no attempt to bring him home when he died?'

'O no.  The climate necessitates instant burial.  We shall have more
particulars in a day or two, doubtless.'

'Poor Lady Constantine,--so good and so sensitive as she is!  I suppose
she is quite prostrated by the bad news.'

'Well, she is rather serious,--not prostrated.  The household is going
into mourning.'

'Ah, no, she would not be quite prostrated,' murmured Swithin,
recollecting himself.  'He was unkind to her in many ways.  Do you think
she will go away from Welland?'

That the vicar could not tell.  But he feared that Sir Blount's affairs
had been in a seriously involved condition, which might necessitate many
and unexpected changes.

Time showed that Mr. Torkingham's surmises were correct.

During the long weeks of early summer, through which the young man still
lay imprisoned, if not within his own chamber, within the limits of the
house and garden, news reached him that Sir Blount's mismanagement and
eccentric behaviour were resulting in serious consequences to Lady
Constantine; nothing less, indeed, than her almost complete
impoverishment.  His personalty was swallowed up in paying his debts, and
the Welland estate was so heavily charged with annuities to his distant
relatives that only a mere pittance was left for her.  She was reducing
the establishment to the narrowest compass compatible with decent
gentility.  The horses were sold one by one; the carriages also; the
greater part of the house was shut up, and she resided in the smallest
rooms.  All that was allowed to remain of her former contingent of male
servants were an odd man and a boy.  Instead of using a carriage she now
drove about in a donkey-chair, the said boy walking in front to clear the
way and keep the animal in motion; while she wore, so his informants
reported, not an ordinary widow's cap or bonnet, but something even
plainer, the black material being drawn tightly round her face, giving
her features a small, demure, devout cast, very pleasing to the eye.

'Now, what's the most curious thing in this, Mr. San Cleeve,' said Sammy
Blore, who, in calling to inquire after Swithin's health, had imparted
some of the above particulars, 'is that my lady seems not to mind being a
pore woman half so much as we do at seeing her so.  'Tis a wonderful
gift, Mr. San Cleeve, wonderful, to be able to guide yerself, and not let
loose yer soul in blasting at such a misfortune.  I should go and drink
neat regular, as soon as I had swallered my breakfast, till my innerds
was burnt out like a' old copper, if it had happened to me; but my lady's
plan is best.  Though I only guess how one feels in such losses, to be
sure, for I never had nothing to lose.'

Meanwhile the observatory was not forgotten; nor that visitant of
singular shape and habits which had appeared in the sky from no one knew
whence, trailing its luminous streamer, and proceeding on its way in the
face of a wondering world, till it should choose to vanish as suddenly as
it had come.

When, about a month after the above dialogue took place, Swithin was
allowed to go about as usual, his first pilgrimage was to the Rings-Hill
Speer.  Here he studied at leisure what he had come to see.

On his return to the homestead, just after sunset, he found his
grandmother and Hannah in a state of great concern.  The former was
looking out for him against the evening light, her face showing itself
worn and rutted, like an old highway, by the passing of many days.  Her
information was that in his absence Lady Constantine had called in her
driving-chair, to inquire for him.  Her ladyship had wished to observe
the comet through the great telescope, but had found the door locked when
she applied at the tower.  Would he kindly leave the door unfastened to-
morrow, she had asked, that she might be able to go to the column on the
following evening for the same purpose?  She did not require him to
attend.

During the next day he sent Hannah with the key to Welland House, not
caring to leave the tower open.  As evening advanced and the comet grew
distinct, he doubted if Lady Constantine could handle the telescope alone
with any pleasure or profit to herself.  Unable, as a devotee to science,
to rest under this misgiving, he crossed the field in the furrow that he
had used ever since the corn was sown, and entered the plantation.  His
unpractised mind never once guessed that her stipulations against his
coming might have existed along with a perverse hope that he would come.

On ascending he found her already there.  She sat in the observing-chair:
the warm light from the west, which flowed in through the opening of the
dome, brightened her face, and her face only, her robes of sable lawn
rendering the remainder of her figure almost invisible.

'You have come!' she said with shy pleasure.  'I did not require you.  But
never mind.'  She extended her hand cordially to him.

Before speaking he looked at her with a great new interest in his eye.  It
was the first time that he had seen her thus, and she was altered in more
than dress.  A soberly-sweet expression sat on her face.  It was of a
rare and peculiar shade--something that he had never seen before in
woman.

'Have you nothing to say?' she continued.  'Your footsteps were audible
to me from the very bottom, and I knew they were yours.  You look almost
restored.'

'I am almost restored,' he replied, respectfully pressing her hand.  'A
reason for living arose, and I lived.'

'What reason?' she inquired, with a rapid blush.

He pointed to the rocket-like object in the western sky.

'Oh, you mean the comet.  Well, you will never make a courtier!  You
know, of course, what has happened to me; that I have no longer a
husband--have had none for a year and a half.  Have you also heard that I
am now quite a poor woman?  Tell me what you think of it.'

'I have thought very little of it since I heard that you seemed to mind
poverty but little.  There is even this good in it, that I may now be
able to show you some little kindness for all those you have done me, my
dear lady.'

'Unless for economy's sake, I go and live abroad, at Dinan, Versailles,
or Boulogne.'

Swithin, who had never thought of such a contingency, was earnest in his
regrets; without, however, showing more than a sincere friend's
disappointment.

'I did not say it was absolutely necessary,' she continued.  'I have, in
fact, grown so homely and home-loving, I am so interested in the place
and the people here, that, in spite of advice, I have almost determined
not to let the house; but to continue the less business-like but
pleasanter alternative of living humbly in a part of it, and shutting up
the rest.'

'Your love of astronomy is getting as strong as mine!' he said ardently.
'You could not tear yourself away from the observatory!'

'You might have supposed me capable of a little human feeling as well as
scientific, in connection with the observatory.'

'Dear Lady Constantine, by admitting that your astronomer has also a part
of your interest--'

'Ah, you did not find it out without my telling!' she said, with a
playfulness which was scarcely playful, a new accession of pinkness being
visible in her face.  'I diminish myself in your esteem by reminding
you.'

'You might do anything in this world without diminishing yourself in my
esteem, after the goodness you have shown.  And more than that, no
misrepresentation, no rumour, no damning appearance whatever would ever
shake my loyalty to you.'

'But you put a very matter-of-fact construction on my motives sometimes.
You see me in such a hard light that I have to drop hints in quite a
manoeuvring manner to let you know I am as sympathetic as other people.  I
sometimes think you would rather have me die than have your equatorial
stolen.  Confess that your admiration for me was based on my house and
position in the county!  Now I am shorn of all that glory, such as it
was, and am a widow, and am poorer than my tenants, and can no longer buy
telescopes, and am unable, from the narrowness of my circumstances, to
mix in circles that people formerly said I adorned, I fear I have lost
the little hold I once had over you.'

'You are as unjust now as you have been generous hitherto,' said St.
Cleeve, with tears in his eyes at the gentle banter of the lady, which
he, poor innocent, read as her real opinions.  Seizing her hand he
continued, in tones between reproach and anger, 'I swear to you that I
have but two devotions, two thoughts, two hopes, and two blessings in
this world, and that one of them is yourself!'

'And the other?'

'The pursuit of astronomy.'

'And astronomy stands first.'

'I have never ordinated two such dissimilar ideas.  And why should you
deplore your altered circumstances, my dear lady?  Your widowhood, if I
may take the liberty to speak on such a subject, is, though I suppose a
sadness, not perhaps an unmixed evil.  For though your pecuniary troubles
have been discovered to the world and yourself by it, your happiness in
marriage was, as you have confided to me, not great; and you are now left
free as a bird to follow your own hobbies.'

'I wonder you recognize that.'

'But perhaps,' he added, with a sigh of regret, 'you will again fall a
prey to some man, some uninteresting country squire or other, and be lost
to the scientific world after all.'

'If I fall a prey to any man, it will not be to a country squire.  But
don't go on with this, for heaven's sake!  You may think what you like in
silence.'

'We are forgetting the comet,' said St. Cleeve.  He turned, and set the
instrument in order for observation, and wheeled round the dome.

While she was looking at the nucleus of the fiery plume, that now filled
so large a space of the sky as completely to dominate it, Swithin dropped
his gaze upon the field, and beheld in the dying light a number of
labourers crossing directly towards the column.

'What do you see?' Lady Constantine asked, without ceasing to observe the
comet.

'Some of the work-folk are coming this way.  I know what they are coming
for,--I promised to let them look at the comet through the glass.'

'They must not come up here,' she said decisively.

'They shall await your time.'

'I have a special reason for wishing them not to see me here.  If you ask
why, I can tell you.  They mistakenly suspect my interest to be less in
astronomy than in the astronomer, and they must have no showing for such
a wild notion.  What can you do to keep them out?'

'I'll lock the door,' said Swithin.  'They will then think I am away.'  He
ran down the staircase, and she could hear him hastily turning the key.
Lady Constantine sighed.

'What weakness, what weakness!' she said to herself.  'That envied power
of self-control, where is it?  That power of concealment which a woman
should have--where?  To run such risks, to come here alone,--oh, if it
were known!  But I was always so,--always!'

She jumped up, and followed him downstairs.



XIII


He was standing immediately inside the door at the bottom, though it was
so dark she could hardly see him.  The villagers were audibly talking
just without.

'He's sure to come, rathe or late,' resounded up the spiral in the vocal
note of Hezzy Biles.  'He wouldn't let such a fine show as the comet
makes to-night go by without peeping at it,--not Master Cleeve!  Did ye
bring along the flagon, Haymoss?  Then we'll sit down inside his little
board-house here, and wait.  He'll come afore bed-time.  Why, his spy-
glass will stretch out that there comet as long as Welland Lane!'

'I'd as soon miss the great peep-show that comes every year to Greenhill
Fair as a sight of such a immortal spectacle as this!' said Amos Fry.

'"Immortal spectacle,"--where did ye get that choice mossel, Haymoss?'
inquired Sammy Blore.  'Well, well, the Lord save good scholars--and take
just a bit o' care of them that bain't!  As 'tis so dark in the hut,
suppose we draw out the bench into the front here, souls?'

The bench was accordingly brought forth, and in order to have a back to
lean against, they placed it exactly across the door into the spiral
staircase.

'Now, have ye got any backy?  If ye haven't, I have,' continued Sammy
Blore.  A striking of matches followed, and the speaker concluded
comfortably, 'Now we shall do very well.'

'And what do this comet mean?' asked Haymoss.  'That some great tumult is
going to happen, or that we shall die of a famine?'

'Famine--no!' said Nat Chapman.  'That only touches such as we, and the
Lord only consarns himself with born gentlemen.  It isn't to be supposed
that a strange fiery lantern like that would be lighted up for folks with
ten or a dozen shillings a week and their gristing, and a load o' thorn
faggots when we can get 'em.  If 'tis a token that he's getting hot about
the ways of anybody in this parish, 'tis about my Lady Constantine's,
since she is the only one of a figure worth such a hint.'

'As for her income,--that she's now lost.'

'Ah, well; I don't take in all I hear.'

Lady Constantine drew close to St. Cleeve's side, and whispered,
trembling, 'Do you think they will wait long?  Or can we get out?'

Swithin felt the awkwardness of the situation.  The men had placed the
bench close to the door, which, owing to the stairs within, opened
outwards; so that at the first push by the pair inside to release
themselves the bench must have gone over, and sent the smokers sprawling
on their faces.  He whispered to her to ascend the column and wait till
he came.

'And have the dead man left her nothing?  Hey?  And have he carried his
inheritance into's grave?  And will his skeleton lie warm on account o't?
Hee-hee!' said Haymoss.

''Tis all swallered up,' observed Hezzy Biles.  'His goings-on made her
miserable till 'a died, and if I were the woman I'd have my randys now.
He ought to have bequeathed to her our young gent, Mr. St. Cleeve, as
some sort of amends.  I'd up and marry en, if I were she; since her
downfall has brought 'em quite near together, and made him as good as she
in rank, as he was afore in bone and breeding.'

'D'ye think she will?' asked Sammy Blore.  'Or is she meaning to enter
upon a virgin life for the rest of her days?'

'I don't want to be unreverent to her ladyship; but I really don't think
she is meaning any such waste of a Christian carcase.  I say she's rather
meaning to commit flat matrimony wi' somebody or other, and one young
gentleman in particular.'

'But the young man himself?'

'Planned, cut out, and finished for the delight of 'ooman!'

'Yet he must be willing.'

'That would soon come.  If they get up this tower ruling plannards
together much longer, their plannards will soon rule them together, in my
way o' thinking.  If she've a disposition towards the knot, she can soon
teach him.'

'True, true, and lawfully.  What before mid ha' been a wrong desire is
now a holy wish!'

The scales fell from Swithin St. Cleeve's eyes as he heard the words of
his neighbours.  How suddenly the truth dawned upon him; how it
bewildered him, till he scarcely knew where he was; how he recalled the
full force of what he had only half apprehended at earlier times,
particularly of that sweet kiss she had impressed on his lips when she
supposed him dying,--these vivid realizations are difficult to tell in
slow verbiage.  He could remain there no longer, and with an electrified
heart he retreated up the spiral.

He found Lady Constantine half way to the top, standing by a loop-hole;
and when she spoke he discovered that she was almost in tears.  'Are they
gone?' she asked.

'I fear they will not go yet,' he replied, with a nervous fluctuation of
manner that had never before appeared in his bearing towards her.

'What shall I do?' she asked.  'I ought not to be here; nobody knows that
I am out of the house.  Oh, this is a mistake!  I must go home somehow.'

'Did you hear what they were saying?'

'No,' said she.  'What is the matter?  Surely you are disturbed?  What
did they say?'

'It would be the exaggeration of frankness in me to tell you.'

'Is it what a woman ought not to be made acquainted with?'

'It is, in this case.  It is so new and so indescribable an idea to
me--that'--he leant against the concave wall, quite tremulous with
strange incipient sentiments.

'What sort of an idea?' she asked gently.

'It is--an awakening.  In thinking of the heaven above, I did not
perceive--the--'

'Earth beneath?'

'The better heaven beneath.  Pray, dear Lady Constantine, give me your
hand for a moment.'

She seemed startled, and the hand was not given.

'I am so anxious to get home,' she repeated.  'I did not mean to stay
here more than five minutes!'

'I fear I am much to blame for this accident,' he said.  'I ought not to
have intruded here.  But don't grieve!  I will arrange for your escape,
somehow.  Be good enough to follow me down.'

They redescended, and, whispering to Lady Constantine to remain a few
stairs behind, he began to rattle and unlock the door.

The men precipitately removed their bench, and Swithin stepped out, the
light of the summer night being still enough to enable them to
distinguish him.

'Well, Hezekiah, and Samuel, and Nat, how are you?' he said boldly.

'Well, sir, 'tis much as before wi' me,' replied Nat.  'One hour a week
wi' God A'mighty and the rest with the devil, as a chap may say.  And
really, now yer poor father's gone, I'd as lief that that Sunday hour
should pass like the rest; for Pa'son Tarkenham do tease a feller's
conscience that much, that church is no hollerday at all to the limbs, as
it was in yer reverent father's time!  But we've been waiting here, Mr.
San Cleeve, supposing ye had not come.'

'I have been staying at the top, and fastened the door not to be
disturbed.  Now I am sorry to disappoint you, but I have another
engagement this evening, so that it would be inconvenient to admit you.
To-morrow evening, or any evening but this, I will show you the comet and
any stars you like.'

They readily agreed to come the next night, and prepared to depart.  But
what with the flagon, and the pipes, and the final observations, getting
away was a matter of time.  Meanwhile a cloud, which nobody had noticed,
arose from the north overhead, and large drops of rain began to fall so
rapidly that the conclave entered the hut till it should be over.  St.
Cleeve strolled off under the firs.

The next moment there was a rustling through the trees at another point,
and a man and woman appeared.  The woman took shelter under a tree, and
the man, bearing wraps and umbrellas, came forward.

'My lady's man and maid,' said Sammy.

'Is her ladyship here?' asked the man.

'No.  I reckon her ladyship keeps more kissable company,' replied Nat
Chapman.

'Pack o' stuff!' said Blore.

'Not here?  Well, to be sure!  We can't find her anywhere in the wide
house!  I've been sent to look for her with these overclothes and
umbrella.  I've suffered horse-flesh traipsing up and down, and can't
find her nowhere.  Lord, Lord, where can she be, and two months' wages
owing to me!'

'Why so anxious, Anthony Green, as I think yer name is shaped?  You be
not a married man?' said Hezzy.

''Tis what they call me, neighbours, whether or no.'

'But surely you was a bachelor chap by late, afore her ladyship got rid
of the regular servants and took ye?'

'I were; but that's past!'

'And how came ye to bow yer head to 't, Anthony?  'Tis what you never was
inclined to.  You was by no means a doting man in my time.'

'Well, had I been left to my own free choice, 'tis as like as not I
should ha' shunned forming such kindred, being at that time a poor day
man, or weekly, at my highest luck in hiring.  But 'tis wearing work to
hold out against the custom of the country, and the woman wanting ye to
stand by her and save her from unborn shame; so, since common usage would
have it, I let myself be carried away by opinion, and took her.  Though
she's never once thanked me for covering her confusion, that's true!  But,
'tis the way of the lost when safe, and I don't complain.  Here she is,
just behind, under the tree, if you'd like to see her?--a very nice
homespun woman to look at, too, for all her few weather-stains. . . .
Well, well, where can my lady be?  And I the trusty jineral man--'tis
more than my place is worth to lose her!  Come forward, Christiana, and
talk nicely to the work-folk.'

While the woman was talking the rain increased so much that they all
retreated further into the hut.  St. Cleeve, who had impatiently stood a
little way off, now saw his opportunity, and, putting in his head, said,
'The rain beats in; you had better shut the door.  I must ascend and
close up the dome.'

Slamming the door upon them without ceremony he quickly went to Lady
Constantine in the column, and telling her they could now pass the
villagers unseen he gave her his arm.  Thus he conducted her across the
front of the hut into the shadows of the firs.

'I will run to the house and harness your little carriage myself,' he
said tenderly.  'I will then take you home in it.'

'No; please don't leave me alone under these dismal trees!'  Neither
would she hear of his getting her any wraps; and, opening her little
sunshade to keep the rain out of her face, she walked with him across the
insulating field, after which the trees of the park afforded her a
sufficient shelter to reach home without much damage.

Swithin was too greatly affected by what he had overheard to speak much
to her on the way, and protected her as if she had been a shorn lamb.
After a farewell which had more meaning than sound in it, he hastened
back to Rings-Hill Speer.  The work-folk were still in the hut, and, by
dint of friendly converse and a sip at the flagon, had so cheered Mr. and
Mrs. Anthony Green that they neither thought nor cared what had become of
Lady Constantine.

St. Cleeve's sudden sense of new relations with that sweet patroness had
taken away in one half-hour his natural ingenuousness.  Henceforth he
could act a part.

'I have made all secure at the top,' he said, putting his head into the
hut.  'I am now going home.  When the rain stops, lock this door and
bring the key to my house.'



XIV


The laboured resistance which Lady Constantine's judgment had offered to
her rebellious affection ere she learnt that she was a widow, now passed
into a bashfulness that rendered her almost as unstable of mood as
before.  But she was one of that mettle--fervid, cordial, and
spontaneous--who had not the heart to spoil a passion; and her affairs
having gone to rack and ruin by no fault of her own she was left to a
painfully narrowed existence which lent even something of rationality to
her attachment.  Thus it was that her tender and unambitious soul found
comfort in her reverses.

As for St. Cleeve, the tardiness of his awakening was the natural result
of inexperience combined with devotion to a hobby.  But, like a spring
bud hard in bursting, the delay was compensated by after speed.  At once
breathlessly recognizing in this fellow-watcher of the skies a woman who
loved him, in addition to the patroness and friend, he truly translated
the nearly forgotten kiss she had given him in her moment of despair.

Lady Constantine, in being eight or nine years his senior, was an object
even better calculated to nourish a youth's first passion than a girl of
his own age, superiority of experience and ripeness of emotion exercising
the same peculiar fascination over him as over other young men in their
first ventures in this kind.

The alchemy which thus transmuted an abstracted astronomer into an eager
lover--and, must it be said, spoilt a promising young physicist to
produce a common-place inamorato--may be almost described as working its
change in one short night.  Next morning he was so fascinated with the
novel sensation that he wanted to rush off at once to Lady Constantine,
and say, 'I love you true!' in the intensest tones of his mental
condition, to register his assertion in her heart before any of those
accidents which 'creep in 'twixt vows, and change decrees of kings,'
should occur to hinder him.  But his embarrassment at standing in a new
position towards her would not allow him to present himself at her door
in any such hurry.  He waited on, as helplessly as a girl, for a chance
of encountering her.

But though she had tacitly agreed to see him on any reasonable occasion,
Lady Constantine did not put herself in his way.  She even kept herself
out of his way.  Now that for the first time he had learnt to feel a
strong impatience for their meeting, her shyness for the first time led
her to delay it.  But given two people living in one parish, who long
from the depths of their hearts to be in each other's company, what
resolves of modesty, policy, pride, or apprehension will keep them for
any length of time apart?

One afternoon he was watching the sun from his tower, half echoing the
Greek astronomer's wish that he might be set close to that luminary for
the wonder of beholding it in all its glory, under the slight penalty of
being consumed the next instant.  He glanced over the high-road between
the field and the park (which sublunary features now too often distracted
his attention from his telescope), and saw her passing along that way.

She was seated in the donkey-carriage that had now taken the place of her
landau, the white animal looking no larger than a cat at that distance.
The buttoned boy, who represented both coachman and footman, walked
alongside the animal's head at a solemn pace; the dog stalked at the
distance of a yard behind the vehicle, without indulging in a single
gambol; and the whole turn-out resembled in dignity a dwarfed state
procession.

Here was an opportunity but for two obstructions: the boy, who might be
curious; and the dog, who might bark and attract the attention of any
labourers or servants near.  Yet the risk was to be run, and, knowing
that she would soon turn up a certain shady lane at right angles to the
road she had followed, he ran hastily down the staircase, crossed the
barley (which now covered the field) by the path not more than a foot
wide that he had trodden for himself, and got into the lane at the other
end.  By slowly walking along in the direction of the turnpike-road he
soon had the satisfaction of seeing her coming.  To his surprise he also
had the satisfaction of perceiving that neither boy nor dog was in her
company.

They both blushed as they approached, she from sex, he from inexperience.
One thing she seemed to see in a moment, that in the interval of her
absence St. Cleeve had become a man; and as he greeted her with this new
and maturer light in his eyes she could not hide her embarrassment, or
meet their fire.

'I have just sent my page across to the column with your book on Cometary
Nuclei,' she said softly; 'that you might not have to come to the house
for it.  I did not know I should meet you here.'

'Didn't you wish me to come to the house for it?'

'I did not, frankly.  You know why, do you not?'

'Yes, I know.  Well, my longing is at rest.  I have met you again.  But
are you unwell, that you drive out in this chair?'

'No; I walked out this morning, and am a little tired.'

'I have been looking for you night and day.  Why do you turn your face
aside?  You used not to be so.'  Her hand rested on the side of the
chair, and he took it.  'Do you know that since we last met, I have been
thinking of you--daring to think of you--as I never thought of you
before?'

'Yes, I know it.'

'How did you know?'

'I saw it in your face when you came up.'

'Well, I suppose I ought not to think of you so.  And yet, had I not
learned to, I should never fully have felt how gentle and sweet you are.
Only think of my loss if I had lived and died without seeing more in you
than in astronomy!  But I shall never leave off doing so now.  When you
talk I shall love your understanding; when you are silent I shall love
your face.  But how shall I know that you care to be so much to me?'

Her manner was disturbed as she recognized the impending self-surrender,
which she knew not how to resist, and was not altogether at ease in
welcoming.

'O, Lady Constantine,' he continued, bending over her, 'give me some
proof more than mere seeming and inference, which are all I have at
present, that you don't think this I tell you of presumption in me!  I
have been unable to do anything since I last saw you for pondering
uncertainly on this.  Some proof, or little sign, that we are one in
heart!'

A blush settled again on her face; and half in effort, half in
spontaneity, she put her finger on her cheek.  He almost devotionally
kissed the spot.

'Does that suffice?' she asked, scarcely giving her words voice.

'Yes; I am convinced.'

'Then that must be the end.  Let me drive on; the boy will be back again
soon.'  She spoke hastily, and looked askance to hide the heat of her
cheek.

'No; the tower door is open, and he will go to the top, and waste his
time in looking through the telescope.'

'Then you should rush back, for he will do some damage.'

'No; he may do what he likes, tinker and spoil the instrument, destroy my
papers,--anything, so that he will stay there and leave us alone.'

She glanced up with a species of pained pleasure.

'You never used to feel like that!' she said, and there was keen self-
reproach in her voice.  'You were once so devoted to your science that
the thought of an intruder into your temple would have driven you wild.
Now you don't care; and who is to blame?  Ah, not you, not you!'

The animal ambled on with her, and he, leaning on the side of the little
vehicle, kept her company.

'Well, don't let us think of that,' he said.  'I offer myself and all my
energies, frankly and entirely, to you, my dear, dear lady, whose I shall
be always!  But my words in telling you this will only injure my meaning
instead of emphasize it.  In expressing, even to myself, my thoughts of
you, I find that I fall into phrases which, as a critic, I should
hitherto have heartily despised for their commonness.  What's the use of
saying, for instance, as I have just said, that I give myself entirely to
you, and shall be yours always,--that you have my devotion, my highest
homage?  Those words have been used so frequently in a flippant manner
that honest use of them is not distinguishable from the unreal.'  He
turned to her, and added, smiling, 'Your eyes are to be my stars for the
future.'

'Yes, I know it,--I know it, and all you would say!  I dreaded even while
I hoped for this, my dear young friend,' she replied, her eyes being full
of tears.  'I am injuring you; who knows that I am not ruining your
future,--I who ought to know better?  Nothing can come of this, nothing
must,--and I am only wasting your time.  Why have I drawn you off from a
grand celestial study to study poor lonely me?  Say you will never
despise me, when you get older, for this episode in our lives.  But you
will,--I know you will!  All men do, when they have been attracted in
their unsuspecting youth, as I have attracted you.  I ought to have kept
my resolve.'

'What was that?'

'To bear anything rather than draw you from your high purpose; to be like
the noble citizen of old Greece, who, attending a sacrifice, let himself
be burnt to the bone by a coal that jumped into his sleeve rather than
disturb the sacred ceremony.'

'But can I not study and love both?'

'I hope so,--I earnestly hope so.  But you'll be the first if you do, and
I am the responsible one if you do not.'

'You speak as if I were quite a child, and you immensely older.  Why, how
old do you think I am?  I am twenty.'

'You seem younger.  Well, that's so much the better.  Twenty sounds
strong and firm.  How old do you think I am?'

'I have never thought of considering.'  He innocently turned to
scrutinize her face.  She winced a little.  But the instinct was
premature.  Time had taken no liberties with her features as yet; nor had
trouble very roughly handled her.

'I will tell you,' she replied, speaking almost with physical pain, yet
as if determination should carry her through.  'I am
eight-and-twenty--nearly--I mean a little more, a few months more.  Am I
not a fearful deal older than you?'

'At first it seems a great deal,' he answered, musing.  'But it doesn't
seem much when one gets used to it.'

'Nonsense!' she exclaimed.  'It _is_ a good deal.'

'Very well, then, sweetest Lady Constantine, let it be,' he said gently.

'You should not let it be!  A polite man would have flatly contradicted
me. . . .  O I am ashamed of this!' she added a moment after, with a
subdued, sad look upon the ground.  'I am speaking by the card of the
outer world, which I have left behind utterly; no such lip service is
known in your sphere.  I care nothing for those things, really; but that
which is called the Eve in us will out sometimes.  Well, we will forget
that now, as we must, at no very distant date, forget all the rest of
this.'

He walked beside her thoughtfully awhile, with his eyes also bent on the
road.  'Why must we forget it all?' he inquired.

'It is only an interlude.'

'An interlude!  It is no interlude to me.  O how can you talk so lightly
of this, Lady Constantine?  And yet, if I were to go away from here, I
might, perhaps, soon reduce it to an interlude!  Yes,' he resumed
impulsively, 'I will go away.  Love dies, and it is just as well to
strangle it in its birth; it can only die once!  I'll go.'

'No, no!' she said, looking up apprehensively.  'I misled you.  It is no
interlude to me,--it is tragical.  I only meant that from a worldly point
of view it is an interlude, which we should try to forget.  But the world
is not all.  You will not go away?'

But he continued drearily, 'Yes, yes, I see it all; you have enlightened
me.  It will be hurting your prospects even more than mine, if I stay.
Now Sir Blount is dead, you are free again,--may marry where you will,
but for this fancy of ours.  I'll leave Welland before harm comes of my
staying.'

'Don't decide to do a thing so rash!' she begged, seizing his hand, and
looking miserable at the effect of her words.  'I shall have nobody left
in the world to care for!  And now I have given you the great telescope,
and lent you the column, it would be ungrateful to go away!  I was wrong;
believe me that I did not mean that it was a mere interlude to _me_.  O
if you only knew how very, very far it is from that!  It is my doubt of
the result to you that makes me speak so slightingly.'

They were now approaching cross-roads, and casually looking up they
beheld, thirty or forty yards beyond the crossing, Mr. Torkingham, who
was leaning over a gate, his back being towards them.  As yet he had not
recognized their approach.

The master-passion had already supplanted St. Cleeve's natural
ingenuousness by subtlety.

'Would it be well for us to meet Mr. Torkingham just now?' he began.

'Certainly not,' she said hastily, and pulling the rein she instantly
drove down the right-hand road.  'I cannot meet anybody!' she murmured.
'Would it not be better that you leave me now?--not for my pleasure, but
that there may arise no distressing tales about us before we know--how to
act in this--this'--(she smiled faintly at him) 'heartaching extremity!'

They were passing under a huge oak-tree, whose limbs, irregular with
shoulders, knuckles, and elbows, stretched horizontally over the lane in
a manner recalling Absalom's death.  A slight rustling was perceptible
amid the leafage as they drew out from beneath it, and turning up his
eyes Swithin saw that very buttoned page whose advent they had dreaded,
looking down with interest at them from a perch not much higher than a
yard above their heads.  He had a bunch of oak-apples in one hand,
plainly the object of his climb, and was furtively watching Lady
Constantine with the hope that she might not see him.  But that she had
already done, though she did not reveal it, and, fearing that the latter
words of their conversation had been overheard, they spoke not till they
had passed the next turning.

She stretched out her hand to his.  'This must not go on,' she said
imploringly.  'My anxiety as to what may be said of such methods of
meeting makes me too unhappy.  See what has happened!'  She could not
help smiling.  'Out of the frying-pan into the fire!  After meanly
turning to avoid the parson we have rushed into a worse publicity.  It is
too humiliating to have to avoid people, and lowers both you and me.  The
only remedy is not to meet.'

'Very well,' said Swithin, with a sigh.  'So it shall be.'

And with smiles that might more truly have been tears they parted there
and then.



XV


The summer passed away, and autumn, with its infinite suite of tints,
came creeping on.  Darker grew the evenings, tearfuller the moonlights,
and heavier the dews.  Meanwhile the comet had waxed to its largest
dimensions,--so large that not only the nucleus but a portion of the tail
had been visible in broad day.  It was now on the wane, though every
night the equatorial still afforded an opportunity of observing the
singular object which would soon disappear altogether from the heavens
for perhaps thousands of years.

But the astronomer of the Rings-Hill Speer was no longer a match for his
celestial materials.  Scientifically he had become but a dim vapour of
himself; the lover had come into him like an armed man, and cast out the
student, and his intellectual situation was growing a life-and-death
matter.

The resolve of the pair had been so far kept: they had not seen each
other in private for three months.  But on one day in October he ventured
to write a note to her:--

   'I can do nothing!  I have ceased to study, ceased to observe.  The
   equatorial is useless to me.  This affection I have for you absorbs my
   life, and outweighs my intentions.  The power to labour in this
   grandest of fields has left me.  I struggle against the weakness till
   I think of the cause, and then I bless her.  But the very desperation
   of my circumstances has suggested a remedy; and this I would inform
   you of at once.

   'Can you come to me, since I must not come to you?  I will wait to-
   morrow night at the edge of the plantation by which you would enter to
   the column.  I will not detain you; my plan can be told in ten words.'

The night after posting this missive to her he waited at the spot
mentioned.

It was a melancholy evening for coming abroad.  A blusterous wind had
risen during the day, and still continued to increase.  Yet he stood
watchful in the darkness, and was ultimately rewarded by discerning a
shady muffled shape that embodied itself from the field, accompanied by
the scratching of silk over stubble.  There was no longer any disguise as
to the nature of their meeting.  It was a lover's assignation, pure and
simple; and boldly realizing it as such he clasped her in his arms.

'I cannot bear this any longer!' he exclaimed.  'Three months since I saw
you alone!  Only a glimpse of you in church, or a bow from the distance,
in all that time!  What a fearful struggle this keeping apart has been!'

'Yet I would have had strength to persist, since it seemed best,' she
murmured when she could speak, 'had not your words on your condition so
alarmed and saddened me.  This inability of yours to work, or study, or
observe,--it is terrible!  So terrible a sting is it to my conscience
that your hint about a remedy has brought me instantly.'

'Yet I don't altogether mind it, since it is you, my dear, who have
displaced the work; and yet the loss of time nearly distracts me, when I
have neither the power to work nor the delight of your company.'

'But your remedy!  O, I cannot help guessing it!  Yes; you are going
away!'

'Let us ascend the column; we can speak more at ease there.  Then I will
explain all.  I would not ask you to climb so high but the hut is not yet
furnished.'

He entered the cabin at the foot, and having lighted a small lantern,
conducted her up the hollow staircase to the top, where he closed the
slides of the dome to keep out the wind, and placed the observing-chair
for her.

'I can stay only five minutes,' she said, without sitting down.  'You
said it was important that you should see me, and I have come.  I assure
you it is at a great risk.  If I am seen here at this time I am ruined
for ever.  But what would I not do for you?  O Swithin, your remedy--is
it to go away?  There is no other; and yet I dread that like death!'

'I can tell you in a moment, but I must begin at the beginning.  All this
ruinous idleness and distraction is caused by the misery of our not being
able to meet with freedom.  The fear that something may snatch you from
me keeps me in a state of perpetual apprehension.'

'It is too true also of me!  I dread that some accident may happen, and
waste my days in meeting the trouble half-way.'

'So our lives go on, and our labours stand still.  Now for the remedy.
Dear Lady Constantine, allow me to marry you.'

She started, and the wind without shook the building, sending up a yet
intenser moan from the firs.

'I mean, marry you quite privately.  Let it make no difference whatever
to our outward lives for years, for I know that in my present position
you could not possibly acknowledge me as husband publicly.  But by
marrying at once we secure the certainty that we cannot be divided by
accident, coaxing, or artifice; and, at ease on that point, I shall
embrace my studies with the old vigour, and you yours.'

Lady Constantine was so agitated at the unexpected boldness of such a
proposal from one hitherto so boyish and deferential that she sank into
the observing-chair, her intention to remain for only a few minutes being
quite forgotten.

She covered her face with her hands.  'No, no, I dare not!' she
whispered.

'But is there a single thing else left to do?' he pleaded, kneeling down
beside her, less in supplication than in abandonment.  'What else can we
do?'

'Wait till you are famous.'

'But I cannot be famous unless I strive, and this distracting condition
prevents all striving!'

'Could you not strive on if I--gave you a promise, a solemn promise, to
be yours when your name is fairly well known?'

St. Cleeve breathed heavily.  'It will be a long, weary time,' he said.
'And even with your promise I shall work but half-heartedly.  Every hour
of study will be interrupted with "Suppose this or this happens;"
"Suppose somebody persuades her to break her promise;" worse still,
"Suppose some rival maligns me, and so seduces her away."  No, Lady
Constantine, dearest, best as you are, that element of distraction would
still remain, and where that is, no sustained energy is possible.  Many
erroneous things have been written and said by the sages, but never did
they float a greater fallacy than that love serves as a stimulus to win
the loved one by patient toil.'

'I cannot argue with you,' she said weakly.

'My only possible other chance would lie in going away,' he resumed after
a moment's reflection, with his eyes on the lantern flame, which waved
and smoked in the currents of air that leaked into the dome from the
fierce wind-stream without.  'If I might take away the equatorial,
supposing it possible that I could find some suitable place for observing
in the southern hemisphere,--say, at the Cape,--I _might_ be able to
apply myself to serious work again, after the lapse of a little time.  The
southern constellations offer a less exhausted field for investigation.  I
wonder if I might!'

'You mean,' she answered uneasily, 'that you might apply yourself to work
when your recollection of me began to fade, and my life to become a
matter of indifference to you? . .  Yes, go!  No,--I cannot bear it!  The
remedy is worse than the disease.  I cannot let you go away!'

'Then how can you refuse the only condition on which I can stay, without
ruin to my purpose and scandal to your name?  Dearest, agree to my
proposal, as you love both me and yourself!'

He waited, while the fir-trees rubbed and prodded the base of the tower,
and the wind roared around and shook it; but she could not find words to
reply.

'Would to God,' he burst out, 'that I might perish here, like Winstanley
in his lighthouse!  Then the difficulty would be solved for you.'

'You are so wrong, so very wrong, in saying so!' she exclaimed
passionately.  'You may doubt my wisdom, pity my short-sightedness; but
there is one thing you do know,--that I love you dearly!'

'You do,--I know it!' he said, softened in a moment.  'But it seems such
a simple remedy for the difficulty that I cannot see how you can mind
adopting it, if you care so much for me as I do for you.'

'Should we live . . . just as we are, exactly, . . . supposing I agreed?'
she faintly inquired.

'Yes, that is my idea.'

'Quite privately, you say.  How could--the marriage be quite private?'

'I would go away to London and get a license.  Then you could come to me,
and return again immediately after the ceremony.  I could return at
leisure and not a soul in the world would know what had taken place.
Think, dearest, with what a free conscience you could then assist me in
my efforts to plumb these deeps above us!  Any feeling that you may now
have against clandestine meetings as such would then be removed, and our
hearts would be at rest.'

There was a certain scientific practicability even in his love-making,
and it here came out excellently.  But she sat on with suspended breath,
her heart wildly beating, while he waited in open-mouthed expectation.
Each was swayed by the emotion within them, much as the candle-flame was
swayed by the tempest without.  It was the most critical evening of their
lives.

The pale rays of the little lantern fell upon her beautiful face, snugly
and neatly bound in by her black bonnet; but not a beam of the lantern
leaked out into the night to suggest to any watchful eye that human life
at its highest excitement was beating within the dark and isolated tower;
for the dome had no windows, and every shutter that afforded an opening
for the telescope was hermetically closed.  Predilections and misgivings
so equally strove within her still youthful breast that she could not
utter a word; her intention wheeled this way and that like the balance of
a watch.  His unexpected proposition had brought about the smartest
encounter of inclination with prudence, of impulse with reserve, that she
had ever known.

Of all the reasons that she had expected him to give for his urgent
request to see her this evening, an offer of marriage was probably the
last.  Whether or not she had ever amused herself with hypothetical
fancies on such a subject,--and it was only natural that she should
vaguely have done so,--the courage in her _protege_ coolly to advance it,
without a hint from herself that such a proposal would be tolerated,
showed her that there was more in his character than she had reckoned on:
and the discovery almost frightened her.  The humour, attitude, and tenor
of her attachment had been of quite an unpremeditated quality,
unsuggestive of any such audacious solution to their distresses as this.

'I repeat my question, dearest,' he said, after her long pause.  'Shall
it be done?  Or shall I exile myself, and study as best I can, in some
distant country, out of sight and sound?'

'Are those the only alternatives?  Yes, yes; I suppose they are!'  She
waited yet another moment, bent over his kneeling figure, and kissed his
forehead.  'Yes; it shall be done,' she whispered.  'I will marry you.'

'My angel, I am content!'

He drew her yielding form to his heart, and her head sank upon his
shoulder, as he pressed his two lips continuously upon hers.  To such had
the study of celestial physics brought them in the space of eight months,
one week, and a few odd days.

'I am weaker than you,--far the weaker,' she went on, her tears falling.
'Rather than lose you out of my sight I will marry without stipulation or
condition.  But--I put it to your kindness--grant me one little request.'

He instantly assented.

'It is that, in consideration of my peculiar position in this county,--O,
you can't understand it!--you will not put an end to the absolute secrecy
of our relationship without my full assent.  Also, that you will never
come to Welland House without first discussing with me the advisability
of the visit, accepting my opinion on the point.  There, see how a timid
woman tries to fence herself in!'

'My dear lady-love, neither of those two high-handed courses should I
have taken, even had you not stipulated against them.  The very essence
of our marriage plan is that those two conditions are kept.  I see as
well as you do, even more than you do, how important it is that for the
present,--ay, for a long time hence--I should still be but the curate's
lonely son, unattached to anybody or anything, with no object of interest
but his science; and you the recluse lady of the manor, to whom he is
only an acquaintance.'

'See what deceits love sows in honest minds!'

'It would be a humiliation to you at present that I could not bear if a
marriage between us were made public; an inconvenience without any
compensating advantage.'

'I am so glad you assume it without my setting it before you!  Now I kno

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