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 lead
up 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 the
dame.
'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 heart
crept along the road. Tears brimmed into her eyes as she walked, and by
the 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't
care if it's wrong,--I don't care!' Without further considerations as to who beheld her doings she
instinctively went straight towards Mrs. Martin's. Seeing a man coming
she calmed herself sufficiently to ask him through her dropped veil how
poor Mr. St. Cleeve was that day. But she only got the same reply: 'They
say he is dying, my lady.' When Swithin had parted from Lady Constantine, on the previous
Ash-Wednesday, he had gone straight to the homestead and prepared his
account of 'A New Astronomical Discovery.' It was written perhaps in too
glowing a rhetoric for the true scientific tone of mind; but there was no
doubt that his assertion met with a most startling aptness all the
difficulties which had accompanied the received theories on the phenomena
attending those changeable suns of marvellous systems so far away. It
accounted for the nebulous mist that surrounds some of them at their
weakest time; in short, took up a position of probability which has never
yet been successfully assailed.
The papers were written in triplicate, and carefully sealed up with blue
wax. One copy was directed to Greenwich, another to the Royal Society,
another to a prominent astronomer. A brief statement of the essence of
the discovery was also prepared for the leading daily paper.
He considered these documents, embodying as they did two years of his
constant thought, reading, and observation, too important to be entrusted
for posting to the hands of a messenger; too important to be sent to the
sub-post-office at hand. Though the day was wet, dripping wet, he went
on 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, yet
sustained by the sense of a great achievement, he called at a
bookseller'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 his
laurels of a week or more.