IX
Lady Constantine, if narrowly observed at this time, would have seemed tobe deeply troubled in conscience, and particularly after the interviewabove described. Ash Wednesday occurred in the calendar a few dayslater, and she went to morning service with a look of genuine contritionon her emotional and yearning countenance.
Besides herself the congregation consisted only of the parson, clerk,school-children, and three old people living on alms, who sat under thereading-desk; and thus, when Mr. Torkingham blazed forth the denunciatorysentences of the Commination, nearly the whole force of them seemed todescend upon her own shoulders. Looking across the empty pews she sawthrough the one or two clear panes of the window opposite a youthfulfigure in the churchyard, and the very feeling against which she hadtried to pray returned again irresistibly.
When she came out and had crossed into the private walk, Swithin cameforward to speak to her. This was a most unusual circumstance, andargued a matter of importance.
'I have made an amazing discovery in connexion with the variable stars,'he exclaimed. 'It will excite the whole astronomical world, and theworld outside but little less. I had long suspected the true secret oftheir variability; but it was by the merest chance on earth that I hitupon a proof of my guess. Your equatorial has done it, my good, kindLady Constantine, and our fame is established for ever!'
He sprang into the air, and waved his hat in his triumph.
'Oh, I am so glad--so rejoiced!' she cried. 'What is it? But don't stopto tell me. Publish it at once in some paper; nail your name to it, orsomebody will seize the idea and appropriate it,--forestall you in someway. It will be Adams and Leverrier over again.'
'If I may walk with you I will explain the nature of the discovery. Itaccounts for the occasional green tint of Castor, and every difficulty. Isaid I would be the Copernicus of the stellar system, and I have begun tobe. Yet who knows?'
'Now don't be so up and down! I shall not understand your explanation,and I would rather not know it. I shall reveal it if it is very grand.Women, you know, are not safe depositaries of such valuable secrets. Youmay walk with me a little way, with great pleasure. Then go and writeyour account, so as to insure your ownership of the discovery. . . . Buthow you have watched!' she cried, in a sudden accession of anxiety, asshe turned to look more closely at him. 'The orbits of your eyes areleaden, and your eyelids are red and heavy. Don't do it--pray don't. Youwill be ill, and break down.'
'I have, it is true, been up a little late this last week,' he saidcheerfully. 'In fact, I couldn't tear myself away from the equatorial;it is such a wonderful possession that it keeps me there till daylight.But what does that matter, now I have made the discovery?'
'Ah, it _does_ matter! Now, promise me--I insist--that you will notcommit such imprudences again; for what should I do if my AstronomerRoyal were to die?'
She laughed, but far too apprehensively to be effective as a display oflevity.
They parted, and he went home to write out his paper. He promised tocall as soon as his discovery was in print. Then they waited for theresult.
It is impossible to describe the tremulous state of Lady Constantineduring the interval. The warm interest she took in Swithin St.Cleeve--many would have said dangerously warm interest--made his hopesher hopes; and though she sometimes admitted to herself that greatallowance was requisite for the overweening confidence of youth in thefuture, she permitted herself to be blinded to probabilities for thepleasure of sharing his dreams. It seemed not unreasonable to supposethe present hour to be the beginning of realization to her darling wishthat this young man should become famous. He had worked hard, and whyshould he not be famous early? His very simplicity in mundane affairsafforded a strong presumption that in things celestial he might be wise.To obtain support for this hypothesis she had only to think over thelives of many eminent astronomers.
She waited feverishly for the flourish of trumpets from afar, by whichshe expected the announcement of his discovery to be greeted. Knowingthat immediate intelligence of the outburst would be brought to her byhimself, she watched from the windows of the Great House each morning fora sight of his figure hastening down the glade.
But he did not come.
A long array of wet days passed their dreary shapes before her, and madethe waiting still more tedious. On one of these occasions she ran acrossto the tower, at the risk of a severe cold. The door was locked.
Two days after she went again. The door was locked still. But this wasonly to be expected in such weather. Yet she would have gone on to hishouse, had there not been one reason too many against such precipitancy.As astronomer and astronomer there was no harm in their meetings; but aswoman and man she feared them.
Ten days passed without a sight of him; ten blurred and dreary days,during which the whole landscape dripped like a mop; the park treesswabbed the gravel from the drive, while the sky was a zinc-colouredarchi-vault of immovable cloud. It seemed as if the whole science ofastronomy had never been real, and that the heavenly bodies, with theirmotions, were as theoretical as the lines and circles of a bygonemathematical problem.
She could content herself no longer with fruitless visits to the column,and when the rain had a little abated she walked to the nearest hamlet,and in a conversation with the first old woman she met contrived to leadup to the subject of Swithin St. Cleeve by talking about his grandmother.
'Ah, poor old heart; 'tis a bad time for her, my lady!' exclaimed thedame.
'What?'
'Her grandson is dying; and such a gentleman through and through!'
'What! . . . Oh, it has something to do with that dreadful discovery!'
'Discovery, my lady?'
She left the old woman with an evasive answer, and with a breaking heartcrept along the road. Tears brimmed into her eyes as she walked, and bythe time that she was out of sight sobs burst forth tumultuously.
'I am too fond of him!' she moaned; 'but I can't help it; and I don'tcare if it's wrong,--I don't care!'
Without further considerations as to who beheld her doings sheinstinctively went straight towards Mrs. Martin's. Seeing a man comingshe calmed herself sufficiently to ask him through her dropped veil howpoor Mr. St. Cleeve was that day. But she only got the same reply: 'Theysay he is dying, my lady.'
When Swithin had parted from Lady Constantine, on the previousAsh-Wednesday, he had gone straight to the homestead and prepared hisaccount of 'A New Astronomical Discovery.' It was written perhaps in tooglowing a rhetoric for the true scientific tone of mind; but there was nodoubt that his assertion met with a most startling aptness all thedifficulties which had accompanied the received theories on the phenomenaattending those changeable suns of marvellous systems so far away. Itaccounted for the nebulous mist that surrounds some of them at theirweakest time; in short, took up a position of probability which has neveryet been successfully assailed.
The papers were written in triplicate, and carefully sealed up with bluewax. One copy was directed to Greenwich, another to the Royal Society,another to a prominent astronomer. A brief statement of the essence ofthe discovery was also prepared for the leading daily paper.
He considered these documents, embodying as they did two years of hisconstant thought, reading, and observation, too important to be entrustedfor posting to the hands of a messenger; too important to be sent to thesub-post-office at hand. Though the day was wet, dripping wet, he wenton foot with them to a chief office, five miles off, and registered them.Quite exhausted by the walk, after his long night-work, wet through, yetsustained by the sense of a great achievement, he called at abookseller's for the astronomical periodicals to which he subscribed;then, resting for a short time at an inn, he plodded his way homewards,reading his papers as he went, and planning how to enjoy a repose on hislaurels of a week or more.
On he strolled through the rain, holding the umbrella vertically over theexposed page to keep it dry while he read. Suddenly his eye was struckby an article
. It was the review of a pamphlet by an Americanastronomer, in which the author announced a conclusive discovery withregard to variable stars.
The discovery was precisely the discovery of Swithin St. Cleeve. Anotherman had forestalled his fame by a period of about six weeks.
Then the youth found that the goddess Philosophy, to whom he had vowed todedicate his whole life, would not in return support him through a singlehour of despair. In truth, the impishness of circumstance was newer tohim than it would have been to a philosopher of threescore-and-ten. In awild wish for annihilation he flung himself down on a patch of heatherthat lay a little removed from the road, and in this humid bed remainedmotionless, 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 theheavily charged locks of heath penetrated him through back and sides, andclotted 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, andthat his clothes were as heavy as lead from saturation. His teethchattering and his knees trembling he pursued his way home, where hisappearance excited great concern. He was obliged at once to retire tobed, and the next day he was delirious from the chill.
It was about ten days after this unhappy occurrence that Lady Constantinelearnt the news, as above described, and hastened along to the homesteadin that state of anguish in which the heart is no longer under thecontrol of the judgment, and self-abandonment even to error, verges onheroism.
On reaching the house in Welland Bottom the door was opened to her by oldHannah, who wore an assiduously sorrowful look; and Lady Constantine wasshown into the large room,--so wide that the beams bent in themiddle,--where she took her seat in one of a methodic range of chairs,beneath a portrait of the Reverend Mr. St. Cleeve, her astronomer'serratic father.
The eight unwatered dying plants, in the row of eight flower-pots,denoted that there was something wrong in the house. Mrs. Martin camedownstairs fretting, her wonder at beholding Lady Constantine notaltogether 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. 'Hisbedroom is at the back of the house.'
'How is he now?'
'He is better, just at this moment; and we are more hopeful. But hechanges so.'
'May I go up? I know he would like to see me.'
Her presence having been made known to the sufferer, she was conductedupstairs to Swithin's room. The way thither was through the largechamber he had used as a study and for the manufacture of opticalinstruments. There lay the large pasteboard telescope, that had beenjust such a failure as Crusoe's large boat; there were his diagrams,maps, globes, and celestial apparatus of various sorts. The absence ofthe worker, through illness or death is sufficient to touch the prosiestworkshop and tools with the hues of pathos, and it was with a swellingbosom that Lady Constantine passed through this arena of his youthfulactivities to the little chamber where he lay.
Old Mrs. Martin sat down by the window, and Lady Constantine bent overSwithin.
'Don't speak to me!' she whispered. 'It will weaken you; it will exciteyou. 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 yourgoodness in coming. My last excitement was when I lost the battle. . . .Do you know that my discovery has been forestalled? It is that that'skilling 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 thrownaway,' said his grandmother, 'that he lay down in the rain, and chilledhis life out.'
'How could you do it?' Lady Constantine whispered. 'O, how could youthink so much of renown, and so little of me? Why, for every discoverymade there are ten behind that await making. To commit suicide likethis, 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 bothyou and all my few friends never, never to forgive me! It would kill mewith self-reproach if you were to pardon my rashness!'
At this moment the doctor was announced, and Mrs. Martin went downstairsto receive him. Lady Constantine thought she would remain to hear hisreport, and for this purpose withdrew, and sat down in a nook of theadjoining work-room of Swithin, the doctor meeting her as he passedthrough it into the sick chamber.
He was there a torturingly long time; but at length he came out to theroom she waited in, and crossed it on his way downstairs. She rose andfollowed 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, spokewith the blunt candour natural towards a comparatively indifferentinquirer.
'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'sside, flung herself upon the bed and in a paroxysm of sorrow kissed him.