The silence of Swithin was to be accounted for by the circumstance that

neither to the Mediterranean nor to America had he in the first place

directed his steps. Feeling himself absolutely free he had, on arriving

at Southampton, decided to make straight for the Cape, and hence had not

gone aboard the Occidental at all. His object was to leave his heavier

luggage there, examine the capabilities of the spot for his purpose, find

out the necessity or otherwise of shipping over his own equatorial, and

then cross to America as soon as there was a good opportunity. Here he

might inquire the movements of the Transit expedition to the South

Pacific, and join it at such a point as might be convenient.

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Thus, though wrong in her premisses, Viviette had intuitively decided

with sad precision. There was, as a matter of fact, a great possibility

of her not being able to communicate with him for several months,

notwithstanding that he might possibly communicate with her.

This excursive time was an awakening for Swithin. To altered

circumstances inevitably followed altered views. That such changes

should have a marked effect upon a young man who had made neither grand

tour nor petty one--who had, in short, scarcely been away from home in

his life--was nothing more than natural. New ideas struggled to disclose

themselves and with the addition of strange twinklers to his southern

horizon came an absorbed attention that way, and a corresponding

forgetfulness of what lay to the north behind his back, whether human or

celestial. Whoever may deplore it few will wonder that Viviette, who

till then had stood high in his heaven, if she had not dominated it,

sank, like the North Star, lower and lower with his retreat southward.

Master of a large advance of his first year's income in circular notes,

he perhaps too readily forgot that the mere act of honour, but for her

self-suppression, would have rendered him penniless.

Meanwhile, to come back and claim her at the specified time, four years

thence, if she should not object to be claimed, was as much a part of his

programme as were the exploits abroad and elsewhere that were to prelude

it. The very thoroughness of his intention for that advanced date

inclined him all the more readily to shelve the subject now. Her unhappy

caution to him not to write too soon was a comfortable license in his

present state of tension about sublime scientific things, which knew not

woman, nor her sacrifices, nor her fears. In truth he was not only too

young in years, but too literal, direct, and uncompromising in nature to

understand such a woman as Lady Constantine; and she suffered for that

limitation in him as it had been antecedently probable that she would do.

He stayed but a little time at Cape Town on this his first reconnoitring

journey; and on that account wrote to no one from the place. On leaving

he found there remained some weeks on his hands before he wished to cross

to America; and feeling an irrepressible desire for further studies in

navigation on shipboard, and under clear skies, he took the steamer for

Melbourne; returning thence in due time, and pursuing his journey to

America, where he landed at Boston.

Having at last had enough of great circles and other nautical reckonings,

and taking no interest in men or cities, this indefatigable scrutineer of

the universe went immediately on to Cambridge; and there, by the help of

an introduction he had brought from England, he revelled for a time in

the glories of the gigantic refractor (which he was permitted to use on

occasion), and in the pleasures of intercourse with the scientific group

around. This brought him on to the time of starting with the Transit

expedition, when he and his kind became lost to the eye of civilization

behind the horizon of the Pacific Ocean.

To speak of their doings on this pilgrimage, of ingress and egress, of

tangent and parallax, of external and internal contact, would avail

nothing. Is it not all written in the chronicles of the Astronomical

Society? More to the point will it be to mention that Viviette's letter

to Cambridge had been returned long before he reached that place, while

her missive to Marseilles was, of course, misdirected altogether. On

arriving in America, uncertain of an address in that country at which he

would stay long, Swithin wrote his first letter to his grandmother; and

in this he ordered that all communications should be sent to await him at

Cape Town, as the only safe spot for finding him, sooner or later. The

equatorial he also directed to be forwarded to the same place. At this

time, too, he ventured to break Viviette's commands, and address a letter

to her, not knowing of the strange results that had followed his absence

from home.

It was February. The Transit was over, the scientific company had broken

up, and Swithin had steamed towards the Cape to take up his permanent

abode there, with a view to his great task of surveying, charting and

theorizing on those exceptional features in the southern skies which had

been but partially treated by the younger Herschel. Having entered Table

Bay and landed on the quay, he called at once at the post-office.

Two letters were handed him, and he found from the date that they had

been waiting there for some time. One of these epistles, which had a

weather-worn look as regarded the ink, and was in old-fashioned

penmanship, he knew to be from his grandmother. He opened it before he

had as much as glanced at the superscription of the second.

Besides immaterial portions, it contained the following:-'J reckon you know by now of our main news this fall, but lest you should not have heard of it J send the exact thing snipped out of the

newspaper. Nobody expected her to do it quite so soon; but it is said

hereabout that my lord bishop and my lady had been drawing nigh to an

understanding before the glum tidings of Sir Blount's taking of his

own life reached her; and the account of this wicked deed was so sore

afflicting to her mind, and made her poor heart so timid and low, that

in charity to my lady her few friends agreed on urging her to let the

bishop go on paying his court as before, notwithstanding she had not

been a widow-woman near so long as was thought. This, as it turned

out, she was willing to do; and when my lord asked her she told him

she would marry him at once or never. That's as J was told, and J had

it from those that know.' The cutting from the newspaper was an ordinary announcement of marriage between the Bishop of Melchester and Lady Constantine.

Swithin was so astounded at the intelligence of what for the nonce seemed

Viviette's wanton fickleness that he quite omitted to look at the second

letter; and remembered nothing about it till an hour afterwards, when

sitting in his own room at the hotel.

It was in her handwriting, but so altered that its superscription had not

arrested his eye. It had no beginning, or date; but its contents soon

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.'




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