IV
It was a bright starlight night, a week or ten days later. There hadbeen several such nights since the occasion of Lady Constantine's promiseto Swithin St. Cleeve to come and study astronomical phenomena on theRings-Hill column; but she had not gone there. This evening she sat at awindow, the blind of which had not been drawn down. Her elbow rested ona little table, and her cheek on her hand. Her eyes were attracted bythe brightness of the planet Jupiter, as he rode in the eclipticopposite, beaming down upon her as if desirous of notice.
Beneath the planet could be still discerned the dark edges of the parklandscape against the sky. As one of its features, though nearlyscreened by the trees which had been planted to shut out the fallowtracts of the estate, rose the upper part of the column. It was hardlyvisible now, even if visible at all; yet Lady Constantine knew fromdaytime experience its exact bearing from the window at which she leaned.The knowledge that there it still was, despite its rapid envelopment bythe shades, led her lonely mind to her late meeting on its summit withthe young astronomer, and to her promise to honour him with a visit forlearning some secrets about the scintillating bodies overhead. Thecurious juxtaposition of youthful ardour and old despair that she hadfound in the lad would have made him interesting to a woman ofperception, apart from his fair hair and early-Christian face. But suchis the heightening touch of memory that his beauty was probably richer inher imagination than in the real. It was a moot point to considerwhether the temptations that would be brought to bear upon him in hiscourse would exceed the staying power of his nature. Had he been awealthy youth he would have seemed one to tremble for. In spite of hisattractive ambitions and gentlemanly bearing, she thought it wouldpossibly be better for him if he never became known outside his lonelytower,--forgetting that he had received such intellectual enlargement aswould probably make his continuance in Welland seem, in his own eye, aslight upon his father's branch of his family, whose social standing hadbeen, only a few years earlier, but little removed from her own.
Suddenly she flung a cloak about her and went out on the terrace. Shepassed down the steps to the lower lawn, through the door to the openpark, and there stood still. The tower was now discernible. As thewords in which a thought is expressed develop a further thought, so didthe fact of her having got so far influence her to go further. A personwho had casually observed her gait would have thought it irregular; andthe lessenings and increasings of speed with which she proceeded in thedirection of the pillar could be accounted for only by a motive much moredisturbing than an intention to look through a telescope. Thus she wenton, till, leaving the park, she crossed the turnpike-road, and enteredthe large field, in the middle of which the fir-clad hill stood like MontSt. Michel in its bay.
The stars were so bright as distinctly to show her the place, and now shecould see a faint light at the top of the column, which rose like ashadowy finger pointing to the upper constellations. There was no wind,in a human sense; but a steady stertorous breathing from the fir-treesshowed that, now as always, there was movement in apparent stagnation.Nothing but an absolute vacuum could paralyze their utterance.
The door of the tower was shut. It was something more than thefreakishness which is engendered by a sickening monotony that had ledLady Constantine thus far, and hence she made no ado about admittingherself. Three years ago, when her every action was a thing ofpropriety, she had known of no possible purpose which could have led herabroad in a manner such as this.
She ascended the tower noiselessly. On raising her head above thehatchway she beheld Swithin bending over a scroll of paper which lay onthe little table beside him. The small lantern that illuminated itshowed also that he was warmly wrapped up in a coat and thick cap, behindhim standing the telescope on its frame.
What was he doing? She looked over his shoulder upon the paper, and sawfigures and signs. When he had jotted down something he went to thetelescope again.
'What are you doing to-night?' she said in a low voice.
Swithin started, and turned. The faint lamp-light was sufficient toreveal her face to him.
'Tedious work, Lady Constantine,' he answered, without betraying muchsurprise. 'Doing my best to watch phenomenal stars, as I may call them.'
'You said you would show me the heavens if I could come on a starlightnight. I have come.'
Swithin, as a preliminary, swept round the telescope to Jupiter, andexhibited to her the glory of that orb. Then he directed the instrumentto the less bright shape of Saturn.
'Here,' he said, warming up to the subject, 'we see a world which is tomy mind by far the most wonderful in the solar system. Think of streamsof satellites or meteors racing round and round the planet like a fly-wheel, so close together as to seem solid matter!' He entered furtherand further into the subject, his ideas gathering momentum as he went on,like his pet heavenly bodies.
When he paused for breath she said, in tones very different from his own,'I ought now to tell you that, though I am interested in the stars, theywere not what I came to see you about. . . . I first thought ofdisclosing the matter to Mr. Torkingham; but I altered my mind, anddecided on you.'
She spoke in so low a voice that he might not have heard her. At allevents, abstracted by his grand theme, he did not heed her. Hecontinued,--
'Well, we will get outside the solar system altogether,--leave the wholegroup of sun, primary and secondary planets quite behind us in ourflight, as a bird might leave its bush and sweep into the whole forest.Now what do you see, Lady Constantine?' He levelled the achromatic atSirius.
She said that she saw a bright star, though it only seemed a point oflight now as before.
'That's because it is so distant that no magnifying will bring its sizeup to zero. Though called a fixed star, it is, like all fixed stars,moving with inconceivable velocity; but no magnifying will show thatvelocity as anything but rest.'
And thus they talked on about Sirius, and then about other stars
. . . in the scrowl Of all those beasts, and fish, and fowl, With which, like Indian plantations, The learned stock the constellations,
till he asked her how many stars she thought were visible to them at thatmoment.
She looked around over the magnificent stretch of sky that their highposition unfolded. 'Oh, thousands, hundreds of thousands,' she saidabsently.
'No. There are only about three thousand. Now, how many do you thinkare brought within sight by the help of a powerful telescope?'
'I won't guess.'
'Twenty millions. So that, whatever the stars were made for, they werenot made to please our eyes. It is just the same in everything; nothingis made for man.'
'Is it that notion which makes you so sad for your age?' she asked, withalmost maternal solicitude. 'I think astronomy is a bad study for you.It makes you feel human insignificance too plainly.'
'Perhaps it does. However,' he added more cheerfully, 'though I feel thestudy to be one almost tragic in its quality, I hope to be the newCopernicus. What he was to the solar system I aim to be to the systemsbeyond.'
Then, by means of the instrument at hand, they travelled together fromthe earth to Uranus and the mysterious outskirts of the solar system;from the solar system to a star in the Swan, the nearest fixed star inthe northern sky; from the star in the Swan to remoter stars; thence tothe remotest visible; till the ghastly chasm which they had bridged by afragile line of sight was realized by Lady Constantine.
'We are now traversing distances beside which the immense line stretchingfrom the earth to the sun is but an invisible point,' said the youth.'When, just now, we had reached a planet whose remoteness is a hundredtimes the remoteness of the sun from the earth, we were only a twothousandth part of the journey to the spot at which we have opticallyarrived now.'
'Oh, pray don't; it overpowers me!' she replied, not without seriousness.'It makes me feel that it is not worth while to live; it quiteannihilates me.'
'If it annihilates your ladyship to
roam over these yawning spaces justonce, think how it must annihilate me to be, as it were, in constantsuspension amid them night after night.'
'Yes. . . . It was not really this subject that I came to see you upon,Mr. St. Cleeve,' she began a second time. 'It was a personal matter.'
'I am listening, Lady Constantine.'
'I will tell it you. Yet no,--not this moment. Let us finish this grandsubject first; it dwarfs mine.'
It would have been difficult to judge from her accents whether she wereafraid to broach her own matter, or really interested in his. Or acertain youthful pride that he evidenced at being the elucidator of sucha large theme, and at having drawn her there to hear and observe it, mayhave inclined her to indulge him for kindness' sake.
Thereupon he took exception to her use of the word 'grand' as descriptiveof the actual universe:
'The imaginary picture of the sky as the concavity of a dome whose baseextends from horizon to horizon of our earth is grand, simply grand, andI wish I had never got beyond looking at it in that way. But the actualsky is a horror.'
'A new view of our old friends, the stars,' she said, smiling up at them.
'But such an obviously true one!' said the young man. 'You would hardlythink, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to bediscovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those ofthe oceans bear no sort of comparison.'
'What monsters may they be?'
'Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thoughtout the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there arethings much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters ofmagnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and wasteplaces of the sky. Look, for instance, at those pieces of darkness inthe Milky Way,' he went on, pointing with his finger to where the galaxystretched across over their heads with the luminousness of a frosted web.'You see that dark opening in it near the Swan? There is a still moreremarkable one south of the equator, called the Coal Sack, as a sort ofnickname that has a farcical force from its very inadequacy. In theseour sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited. Thoseare deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alonethe human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses toright and left as you pass on!'
Lady Constantine was heedful and silent.
He tried to give her yet another idea of the size of the universe; neverwas there a more ardent endeavour to bring down the immeasurable to humancomprehension! By figures of speech and apt comparisons he took her mindinto leading-strings, compelling her to follow him into wildernesses ofwhich she had never in her life even realized the existence.
'There is a size at which dignity begins,' he exclaimed; 'further onthere is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size atwhich solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins;further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintlyapproaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in sayingthat those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves inthe depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a newhorror?'
Standing, as she stood, in the presence of the stellar universe, underthe very eyes of the constellations, Lady Constantine apprehendedsomething of the earnest youth's argument.
'And to add a new weirdness to what the sky possesses in its size andformlessness, there is involved the quality of decay. For all the wonderof these everlasting stars, eternal spheres, and what not, they are noteverlasting, they are not eternal; they burn out like candles. You seethat dying one in the body of the Greater Bear? Two centuries ago it wasas bright as the others. The senses may become terrified by plungingamong them as they are, but there is a pitifulness even in their glory.Imagine them all extinguished, and your mind feeling its way through aheaven of total darkness, occasionally striking against the black,invisible cinders of those stars. . . . If you are cheerful, and wish toremain so, leave the study of astronomy alone. Of all the sciences, italone deserves the character of the terrible.'
'I am not altogether cheerful.'
'Then if, on the other hand, you are restless and anxious about thefuture, study astronomy at once. Your troubles will be reducedamazingly. But your study will reduce them in a singular way, byreducing the importance of everything. So that the science is stillterrible, even as a panacea. It is quite impossible to think at alladequately of the sky--of what the sky substantially is, without feelingit as a juxtaposed nightmare. It is better--far better--for men toforget the universe than to bear it clearly in mind! . . . But you saythe universe was not really what you came to see me about. What was it,may I ask, Lady Constantine?'
She mused, and sighed, and turned to him with something pathetic in her.
'The immensity of the subject you have engaged me on has completelycrushed my subject out of me! Yours is celestial; mine lamentably human!And the less must give way to the greater.'
'But is it, in a human sense, and apart from macrocosmic magnitudes,important?' he inquired, at last attracted by her manner; for he began toperceive, in spite of his prepossession, that she had really something onher mind.
'It is as important as personal troubles usually are.'
Notwithstanding her preconceived notion of coming to Swithin as employerto dependant, as _chatelaine_ to page, she was falling into confidentialintercourse with him. His vast and romantic endeavours lent him apersonal force and charm which she could not but apprehend. In thepresence of the immensities that his young mind had, as it were, broughtdown from above to hers, they became unconsciously equal. There was,moreover, an inborn liking in Lady Constantine to dwell less on herpermanent position as a county lady than on her passing emotions as awoman.
'I will postpone the matter I came to charge you with,' she resumed,smiling. 'I must reconsider it. Now I will return.'
'Allow me to show you out through the trees and across the fields?'
She said neither a distinct yes nor no; and, descending the tower, theythreaded the firs and crossed the ploughed field. By an odd coincidencehe remarked, when they drew near the Great House--
'You may possibly be interested in knowing, Lady Constantine, that thatmedium-sized star you see over there, low down in the south, is preciselyover Sir Blount Constantine's head in the middle of Africa.'
'How very strange that you should have said so!' she answered. 'You havebroached for me the very subject I had come to speak of.'
'On a domestic matter?' he said, with surprise.
'Yes. What a small matter it seems now, after our astronomicalstupendousness! and yet on my way to you it so far transcended theordinary matters of my life as the subject you have led me up totranscends this. But,' with a little laugh, 'I will endeavour to sinkdown to such ephemeral trivialities as human tragedy, and explain, sinceI have come. The point is, I want a helper: no woman ever wanted onemore. For days I have wanted a trusty friend who could go on a secreterrand for me. It is necessary that my messenger should be educated,should be intelligent, should be silent as the grave. Do you give meyour solemn promise as to the last point, if I confide in you?'
'Most emphatically, Lady Constantine.'
'Your right hand upon the compact.'
He gave his hand, and raised hers to his lips. In addition to hisrespect for her as the lady of the manor, there was the admiration oftwenty years for twenty-eight or nine in such relations.
'I trust you,' she said. 'Now, beyond the above conditions, it wasspecially necessary that my agent should have known Sir BlountConstantine well by sight when he was at home. For the errand isconcerning my husband; I am much disturbed at what I have heard abouthim.'
'I am indeed sorry to know it.'
'There are only two people in the parish who fulfil all theconditions,--Mr. Torkingham, and yourself. I sent for Mr. Torkingham,and he came. I could not tell him. I felt at the last moment that hewouldn't do. I have come to you because I think you will do.
This isit: my husband has led me and all the world to believe that he is inAfrica, hunting lions. I have had a mysterious letter informing me thathe has been seen in London, in very peculiar circumstances. The truth ofthis I want ascertained. Will you go on the journey?'
'Personally, I would go to the end of the world for you, LadyConstantine; but--'
'No buts!'
'How can I leave?'
'Why not?'
'I am preparing a work on variable stars. There is one of these which Ihave exceptionally observed for several months, and on this my greattheory is mainly based. It has been hitherto called irregular; but Ihave detected a periodicity in its so-called irregularities which, ifproved, would add some very valuable facts to those known on thissubject, one of the most interesting, perplexing, and suggestive in thewhole field of astronomy. Now, to clinch my theory, there should be asudden variation this week,--or at latest next week,--and I have to watchevery night not to let it pass. You see my reason for declining, LadyConstantine.'
'Young men are always so selfish!' she said.
'It might ruin the whole of my year's labour if I leave now!' returnedthe youth, greatly hurt. 'Could you not wait a fortnight longer?'
'No,--no. Don't think that I have asked you, pray. I have no wish toinconvenience you.'
'Lady Constantine, don't be angry with me! Will you do this,--watch thestar for me while I am gone? If you are prepared to do it effectually, Iwill go.'
'Will it be much trouble?'
'It will be some trouble. You would have to come here every clearevening about nine. If the sky were not clear, then you would have tocome at four in the morning, should the clouds have dispersed.'
'Could not the telescope be brought to my house?'
Swithin shook his head.
'Perhaps you did not observe its real size,--that it was fixed to a frame-work? I could not afford to buy an equatorial, and I have been obligedto rig up an apparatus of my own devising, so as to make it in somemeasure answer the purpose of an equatorial. It _could_ be moved, but Iwould rather not touch it.'
'Well, I'll go to the telescope,' she went on, with an emphasis that wasnot wholly playful. 'You are the most ungallant youth I ever met with;but I suppose I must set that down to science. Yes, I'll go to the towerat nine every night.'
'And alone? I should prefer to keep my pursuits there unknown.'
'And alone,' she answered, quite overborne by his inflexibility.
'You will not miss the morning observation, if it should be necessary?'
'I have given my word.'
'And I give mine. I suppose I ought not to have been so exacting!' Hespoke with that sudden emotional sense of his own insignificance whichmade these alternations of mood possible. 'I will go anywhere--doanything for you--this moment--to-morrow or at any time. But you mustreturn with me to the tower, and let me show you the observing process.'
They retraced their steps, the tender hoar-frost taking the imprint oftheir feet, while two stars in the Twins looked down upon their twopersons through the trees, as if those two persons could bear some sortof comparison with them. On the tower the instructions were given. Whenall was over, and he was again conducting her to the Great House shesaid--
'When can you start?'
'Now,' said Swithin.
'So much the better. You shall go up by the night mail.'