Two on a Tower
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.