Two on a Tower
to entertain fancies instead of theories, air-castles instead of
intentions, qualms instead of opinions, sickly prepossessions instead
of reasoned conclusions. Your wide heaven of study, young man, will
soon reduce itself to the miserable narrow expanse of her face, and
your myriad of stars to her two trumpery eyes.
'A woman waking a young man's passions just at a moment when he is
endeavouring to shine intellectually, is doing little less than
committing a crime.
'Like a certain philosopher I would, upon my soul, have all young men
from eighteen to twenty-five kept under barrels; seeing how often, in
the lack of some such sequestering process, the woman sits down before
each as his destiny, and too frequently enervates his purpose, till he
abandons the most promising course ever conceived!
'But no more. I now leave your fate in your own hands. Your well-
wishing relative,
'JOCELYN ST. CLEEVE,
_Doctor in Medicine_.'
As coming from a bachelor and hardened misogynist of seventy-two, the
opinions herein contained were nothing remarkable: but their practical
result in restricting the sudden endowment of Swithin's researches by
conditions which turned the favour into a harassment was, at this unique
moment, discomfiting and distracting in the highest degree.
Sensational, however, as the letter was, the passionate intention of the
day was not hazarded for more than a few minutes thereby. The truth was,
the caution and bribe came too late, too unexpectedly, to be of
influence. They were the sort of thing which required fermentation to
render them effective. Had St. Cleeve received the exhortation a month
earlier; had he been able to run over in his mind, at every wakeful hour
of thirty consecutive nights, a private catechism on the possibilities
opened up by this annuity, there is no telling what might have been the
stress of such a web of perplexity upon him, a young man whose love for
celestial physics was second to none. But to have held before him, at
the last moment, the picture of a future advantage that he had never once
thought of, or discounted for present staying power, it affected him
about as much as the view of horizons shown by sheet-lightning. He saw
an immense prospect; it went, and the world was as before.
He caught the train at Warborne, and moved rapidly towards Bath; not
precisely in the same key as when he had dressed in the hut at dawn, but,
as regarded the mechanical part of the journey, as unhesitatingly as
before.
And with the change of scene even his gloom left him; his bosom's lord
sat lightly in his throne. St. Cleeve was not sufficiently in mind of
poetical literature to remember that wise poets are accustomed to read
that lightness of bosom inversely. Swithin thought it an omen of good
fortune; and as thinking is causing in not a few such cases, he was
perhaps, in spite of poets, right.
XIX
At the station Lady Constantine appeared, standing expectant; he saw her
face from the window of the carriage long before she saw him. He no
sooner saw her than he was satisfied to his heart's content with his
prize. If his great-uncle had offered him from the grave a kingdom
instead of her, he would not have accepted it.
Swithin jumped out, and nature never painted in a woman's face more
devotion than appeared in my lady's at that moment. To both the
situation seemed like a beautiful allegory, not to be examined too
closely, lest its defects of correspondence with real life should be
apparent.
They almost feared to shake hands in public, so much depended upon their
passing that morning without molestation. A fly was called and they
drove away.
'Take this,' she said, handing him a folded paper. 'It belongs to you
rather than to me.'
At crossings, and other occasional pauses, pedestrians turned their faces
and looked at the pair (for no reason but that, among so many, there were
naturally a few of the sort who have eyes to note what incidents come in
their way as they plod on); but the two in the vehicle could not but fear
that these innocent beholders had special detective designs on them.
'You look so dreadfully young!' she said with humorous fretfulness, as
they drove along (Swithin's cheeks being amazingly fresh from the morning
air). 'Do try to appear a little haggard, that the parson mayn't ask us
awkward questions!'
Nothing further happened, and they were set down opposite a shop about
fifty yards from the church door, at five minutes to eleven.
'We will dismiss the fly,' she said. 'It will only attract idlers.'
On turning the corner and reaching the church they found the door ajar;
but the building contained only two persons, a man and a woman,--the
clerk and his wife, as they learnt. Swithin asked when the clergyman
would arrive.
The clerk looked at his watch, and said, 'At just on eleven o'clock.'
'He ought to be here,' said Swithin.
'Yes,' replied the clerk, as the hour struck. 'The fact is, sir, he is a
deppity, and apt to be rather wandering in his wits as regards time and
such like, which hev stood in the way of the man's getting a benefit. But
no doubt he'll come.'
'The regular incumbent is away, then?'
'He's gone for his bare pa'son's fortnight,--that's all; and we was
forced to put up with a weak-talented man or none. The best men goes
into the brewing, or into the shipping now-a-days, you see, sir;
doctrines being rather shaddery at present, and your money's worth not
sure in our line. So we church officers be left poorly provided with men
for odd jobs. I'll tell ye what, sir; I think I'd better run round to
the gentleman's lodgings, and try to find him?'
'Pray do,' said Lady Constantine.
The clerk left the church; his wife busied herself with dusting at the
further end, and Swithin and Viviette were left to themselves. The
imagination travels so rapidly, and a woman's forethought is so
assumptive, that the clerk's departure had no sooner doomed them to
inaction than it was borne in upon Lady Constantine's mind that she would
not become the wife of Swithin St. Cleeve, either to-day or on any other
day. Her divinations were continually misleading her, she knew: but a
hitch at the moment of marriage surely had a meaning in it.
'Ah,--the marriage is not to be!' she said to herself. 'This is a
fatality.'
It was twenty minutes past, and no parson had arrived. Swithin took her
hand.
'If it cannot be to-day, it can be to-morrow,' he whispered.
'I cannot say,' she answered. 'Something tells me _no_.'
It was almost impossible that she could know anything of the deterrent
force exercised on Swithin by his dead uncle that morning. Yet her
manner tallied so curiously well with such knowledge that he was struck
by it, and remained silent.
'You have a black tie,' she continued, looking at him.
'Yes,' replied Swithin. 'I bought it on my way here.'
'Why could it not have been less sombre in colour?'
'My great-uncle is dead.'
'You had a great-uncle? You never told me.'
'I never saw him in my life. I have only heard about him since his
death.'
He spoke in as quiet and measured a way as he could, but his heart was
sinking. She would go on questioning; he could not tell her an untruth.
She would discover particulars of that great-uncle's provision for him,
which he, Swithin, was throwing away for her sake, and she would refuse
to be his for his own sake. His conclusion at this moment was precisely
what hers had been five minutes sooner: they were never to be husband and
wife.
But she did not continue her questions, for the simplest of all reasons:
hasty footsteps were audible in the entrance, and the parson was seen
coming up the aisle, the clerk behind him wiping the beads of
perspiration from his face. The somewhat sorry clerical specimen shook
hands with them, and entered the vestry; and the clerk came up and opened
the book.
'The poor gentleman's memory is a bit topsy-turvy,' whispered the latter.
'He had got it in his mind that 'twere a funeral, and I found him
wandering about the cemetery a-looking for us. However, all's well as
ends well.' And the clerk wiped his forehead again.
'How ill-omened!' murmured Viviette.
But the parson came out robed at this moment, and the clerk put on his
ecclesiastical countenance and looked in his book. Lady Constantine's
momentary languor passed; her blood resumed its courses with a new
spring. The grave utterances of the church then rolled out upon the
palpitating pair, and no couple ever joined their whispers thereto with
more fervency than they.
Lady Constantine (as she continued to be called by the outside world,
though she liked to think herself the Mrs. St. Cleeve that she legally
was) had told Green that she might be expected at Welland in a day, or
two, or three, as circumstances should dictate. Though the time of
return was thus left open it was deemed advisable, by both Swithin and
herself, that her journey back should not be deferred after the next day,
in case any suspicions might be aroused. As for St. Cleeve, his comings
and goings were of no consequence. It was seldom known whether he was at
home or abroad, by reason of his frequent seclusion at the column.
Late in the afternoon of the next day he accompanied her to the Bath
station, intending himself to remain in that city till the following
morning. But when a man or youth has such a tender article on his hands
as a thirty-hour bride it is hardly in the power of his strongest reason
to set her down at a railway, and send her off like a superfluous
portmanteau. Hence the experiment of parting so soon after their union
proved excruciatingly severe to these. The evening was dull; the breeze
of autumn crept fitfully through every slit and aperture in the town; not
a soul in the world seemed to notice or care about anything they did.
Lady Constantine sighed; and there was no resisting it,--he could not
leave her thus. He decided to get into the train with her, and keep her
company for at least a few stations on her way.
It drew on to be a dark night, and, seeing that there was no serious risk
after all, he prolonged his journey with her so far as to the junction at
which the branch line to Warborne forked off. Here it was necessary to
wait a few minutes, before either he could go back or she could go on.
They wandered outside the station doorway into the gloom of the road, and
there agreed to part.
While she yet stood holding his arm a phaeton sped towards the station-
entrance, where, in ascending the slope to the door, the horse suddenly
jibbed. The gentleman who was driving, being either impatient, or
possessed with a theory that all jibbers may be started by severe
whipping, applied the lash; as a result of it, the horse thrust round the
carriage to where they stood, and the end of the driver's sweeping whip
cut across Lady Constantine's face with such severity as to cause her an
involuntary cry. Swithin turned her round to the lamplight, and
discerned a streak of blood on her cheek.
By this time the gentleman who had done the mischief, with many words of
regret, had given the reins to his man and dismounted.
'I will go to the waiting-room for a moment,' whispered Viviette
hurriedly; and, loosing her hand from his arm, she pulled down her veil
and vanished inside the building.
The stranger came forward and raised his hat. He was a slightly built
and apparently town-bred man of twenty-eight or thirty; his manner of
address was at once careless and conciliatory.
'I am greatly concerned at what I have done,' he said. 'I sincerely
trust that your wife'--but observing the youthfulness of Swithin, he
withdrew the word suggested by the manner of Swithin towards Lady