Two on a Tower
acquainted him with her motive for the precipitate act. The few
concluding sentences are all that it will be necessary to quote here:--
'There was no way out of it, even if I could have found you, without
infringing one of the conditions I had previously laid down. The long
desire of my heart has been not to impoverish you or mar your career.
The new desire was to save myself and, still more, another yet unborn.
. . . I have done a desperate thing. Yet for myself I could do no
better, and for you no less. I would have sacrificed my single self
to honesty, but I was not alone concerned. What woman has a right to
blight a coming life to preserve her personal integrity? . . . The
one bright spot is that it saves you and your endowment from further
catastrophes, and preserves you to the pleasant paths of scientific
fame. I no longer lie like a log across your path, which is now as
open as on the day before you saw me, and ere I encouraged you to win
me. Alas, Swithin, I ought to have known better. The folly was
great, and the suffering be upon my head! I ought not to have
consented to that last interview: all was well till then! . . . Well,
I have borne much, and am not unprepared. As for you, Swithin, by
simply pressing straight on your triumph is assured. Do not
communicate with me in any way--not even in answer to this. Do not
think of me. Do not see me ever any more.--Your unhappy
'VIVIETTE.'
Swithin's heart swelled within him in sudden pity for her, first; then he
blanched with a horrified sense of what she had done, and at his own
relation to the deed. He felt like an awakened somnambulist who should
find that he had been accessory to a tragedy during his unconsciousness.
She had loosened the knot of her difficulties by cutting it
unscrupulously through and through.
The big tidings rather dazed than crushed him, his predominant feeling
being soon again one of keenest sorrow and sympathy. Yet one thing was
obvious; he could do nothing--absolutely nothing. The event which he now
heard of for the first time had taken place five long months ago. He
reflected, and regretted--and mechanically went on with his preparations
for settling down to work under the shadow of Table Mountain. He was as
one who suddenly finds the world a stranger place than he thought; but is
excluded by age, temperament, and situation from being much more than an
astonished spectator of its strangeness.
* * * * *
The Royal Observatory was about a mile out of the town, and hither he
repaired as soon as he had established himself in lodgings. He had
decided, on his first visit to the Cape, that it would be highly
advantageous to him if he could supplement the occasional use of the
large instruments here by the use at his own house of his own equatorial,
and had accordingly given directions that it might be sent over from
England. The precious possession now arrived; and although the sight of
it--of the brasses on which her hand had often rested, of the eyepiece
through which her dark eyes had beamed--engendered some decidedly bitter
regrets in him for a time, he could not long afford to give to the past
the days that were meant for the future.
Unable to get a room convenient for a private observatory he resolved at
last to fix the instrument on a solid pillar in the garden; and several
days were spent in accommodating it to its new position. In this
latitude there was no necessity for economizing clear nights as he had
been obliged to do on the old tower at Welland. There it had happened
more than once, that after waiting idle through days and nights of cloudy
weather, Viviette would fix her time for meeting him at an hour when at
last he had an opportunity of seeing the sky; so that in giving to her
the golden moments of cloudlessness he was losing his chance with the
orbs above.
Those features which usually attract the eye of the visitor to a new
latitude are the novel forms of human and vegetable life, and other such
sublunary things. But the young man glanced slightingly at these; the
changes overhead had all his attention. The old subject was imprinted
there, but in a new type. Here was a heaven, fixed and ancient as the
northern; yet it had never appeared above the Welland hills since they
were heaved up from beneath. Here was an unalterable circumpolar region;
but the polar patterns stereotyped in history and legend--without which
it had almost seemed that a polar sky could not exist--had never been
seen therein.
St. Cleeve, as was natural, began by cursory surveys, which were not
likely to be of much utility to the world or to himself. He wasted
several weeks--indeed above two months--in a comparatively idle survey of
southern novelties; in the mere luxury of looking at stellar objects
whose wonders were known, recounted, and classified, long before his own
personality had been heard of. With a child's simple delight he allowed
his instrument to rove, evening after evening, from the gorgeous glitter
of Canopus to the hazy clouds of Magellan. Before he had well finished
this optical prelude there floated over to him from the other side of the
Equator the postscript to the epistle of his lost Viviette. It came in
the vehicle of a common newspaper, under the head of 'Births:'--
'April 10th, 18--, at the Palace, Melchester, the wife of the Bishop of
Melchester, of a son.'
XLI
Three years passed away, and Swithin still remained at the Cape, quietly
pursuing the work that had brought him there. His memoranda of
observations had accumulated to a wheelbarrow load, and he was beginning
to shape them into a treatise which should possess some scientific
utility.
He had gauged the southern skies with greater results than even he
himself had anticipated. Those unfamiliar constellations which, to the
casual beholder, are at most a new arrangement of ordinary points of
light, were to this professed astronomer, as to his brethren, a far
greater matter.
It was below the surface that his material lay. There, in regions
revealed only to the instrumental observer, were suns of hybrid kind--fire-
fogs, floating nuclei, globes that flew in groups like swarms of bees,
and other extraordinary sights--which, when decomposed by Swithin's
equatorial, turned out to be the beginning of a new series of phenomena
instead of the end of an old one.
There were gloomy deserts in those southern skies such as the north shows
scarcely an example of; sites set apart for the position of suns which
for some unfathomable reason were left uncreated, their places remaining
ever since conspicuous by their emptiness.
The inspection of these chasms brought him a second pulsation of that old
horror which he had used to describe to Viviette as produced in him by
bottomlessness in the north heaven. The ghostly finger of limitless
vacancy touched him now on the other side. Infinite deeps in the north
stellar region had a homely familiarity about them, when compared with
infinite deeps in the region of the south pole. This was an even more
unknown tract of the unknown. Space here, being less the historic haunt
of human thought than overhead at home, seemed to be pervaded with a more
lonely loneliness.
Were there given on paper to these astronomical exercitations of St.
Cleeve a space proportionable to that occupied by his year with Viviette
at Welland, this narrative would treble its length; but not a single
additional glimpse would be afforded of Swithin in his relations with old
emotions. In these experiments with tubes and glasses, important as they
were to human intellect, there was little food for the sympathetic
instincts which create the changes in a life. That which is the
foreground and measuring base of one perspective draught may be the
vanishing-point of another perspective draught, while yet they are both
draughts of the same thing. Swithin's doings and discoveries in the
southern sidereal system were, no doubt, incidents of the highest
importance to him; and yet from an intersocial point of view they served
but the humble purpose of killing time, while other doings, more nearly
allied to his heart than to his understanding, developed themselves at
home.
In the intervals between his professional occupations he took walks over
the sand-flats near, or among the farms which were gradually
overspreading the country in the vicinity of Cape Town. He grew familiar
with the outline of Table Mountain, and the fleecy 'Devil's Table-Cloth'
which used to settle on its top when the wind was south-east. On these
promenades he would more particularly think of Viviette, and of that
curious pathetic chapter in his life with her which seemed to have wound
itself up and ended for ever. Those scenes were rapidly receding into
distance, and the intensity of his sentiment regarding them had
proportionately abated. He felt that there had been something wrong
therein, and yet he could not exactly define the boundary of the wrong.
Viviette's sad and amazing sequel to that chapter had still a fearful,
catastrophic aspect in his eyes; but instead of musing over it and its
bearings he shunned the subject, as we shun by night the shady scene of a
disaster, and keep to the open road.
He sometimes contemplated her apart from the past--leading her life in
the Cathedral Close at Melchester; and wondered how often she looked
south and thought of where he was.
On one of these afternoon walks in the neighbourhood of the Royal
Observatory he turned and gazed towards the signal-post on the Lion's
Rump. This was a high promontory to the north-west of Table Mountain,
and overlooked Table Bay. Before his eyes had left the scene the signal
was suddenly hoisted on the staff. It announced that a mail steamer had
appeared in view over the sea. In the course of an hour he retraced his
steps, as he had often done on such occasions, and strolled leisurely
across the intervening mile and a half till he arrived at the post-office
door.
There was no letter from England for him; but there was a newspaper,
addressed in the seventeenth century handwriting of his grandmother, who,
in spite of her great age, still retained a steady hold on life. He
turned away disappointed, and resumed his walk into the country, opening
the paper as he went along.
A cross in black ink attracted his attention; and it was opposite a name
among the 'Deaths.' His blood ran icily as he discerned the words 'The
Palace, Melchester.' But it was not she. Her husband, the Bishop of
Melchester, had, after a short illness, departed this life at the
comparatively early age of fifty years.
All the enactments of the bygone days at Welland now started up like an
awakened army from the ground. But a few months were wanting to the time
when he would be of an age to marry without sacrificing the annuity which
formed his means of subsistence. It was a point in his life that had had
no meaning or interest for him since his separation from Viviette, for
women were now no more to him than the inhabitants of Jupiter. But the
whirligig of time having again set Viviette free, the aspect of home
altered, and conjecture as to her future found room to work anew.
But beyond the simple fact that she was a widow he for some time gained
not an atom of intelligence concerning her. There was no one of whom he
could inquire but his grandmother, and she could tell him nothing about a
lady who dwelt far away at Melchester.
Several months slipped by thus; and no feeling within him rose to
sufficient strength to force him out of a passive attitude. Then by the
merest chance his granny stated in one of her rambling epistles that Lady