Two on a Tower
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,