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.
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.'