Two on a Tower
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