 CHAPTER 35 Lady Constantine crossed the field and the park beyond, and found on passing the church that the congregation was still inside. There was no hurry for getting indoors, the open windows enabling her to hear that Mr. Torquium had only just given out his text, so instead of entering the house she went through the garden door to the old bowling-green, and sat down in the arbor that Louie had occupied when he overheard the interview between Swithin and the bishop. Not until then did she find the courage to draw out the letter and papers relating to the bequest which Swithin in a critical moment had handed to her. Had he been ever so little older he would not have placed that unconsidered confidence in Viviet, which had led him to give way to her curiosity. But the influence over him, which eight or nine outnumbering years lent her, was immensely increased by her higher position and wider experiences, and he had yielded the point, as he had yielded all social points, while the same conditions exempted him from any deep consciousness that it was his duty to protect her, even from herself. The preamble of Dr. St. Cleave's letter, in which he referred to his pleasure at hearing of the young man's promise as an astronomer, disturbed her not at all, indeed somewhat prepossessed her in favour of the old gentleman who had written it. The first item of what he called unfavourable news, namely the allusion to the inadequacy of Swithin's income to the wants of a scientific man, whose lines of work were not calculated to produce pecuniary emuluments for many years, deepened the cast of her face to concern. She reached the second item of the so-called unfavourable news, and her face flushed, as she read how the doctor had learnt that there was something in your path worse than narrow means, and that something is a woman. To save you of possible from ruin on these heads, she read on, I take the preventative measures entailed below. And then followed the announcement of the six hundred pounds a year, settled on the youth for life, on the single condition that he remained unmarried until the age of twenty-five, just as Swithin had explained to her. She next learnt that the bequest was for a definite object, that he might have resources sufficient to enable him to travel in an inexpensive way, and begin a study of the southern constellations which, according to the shrewd old man's judgment, were the mine not so thoroughly worked as the northern, and therefore to be recommended. This was followed by some sentences which hit her in the face like a switch. The only other preventative step in my power is that of exhortation. Swithin St. Cleave, don't make a fool of yourself as your father did, if your studies are to be worth anything. Believe me that they must be carried on without the help of a woman. Enter, and every one of her sex, if you mean to achieve any worthy thing, eschew all of that sort for many a year yet. Moreover I say, the lady of your acquaintance avoid in particular. She has in addition to her original disqualification as a companion for you, that is, that of sex. These two special drawbacks. She is much older than yourself. Lady Constantine's indignant flush for succour, and pale despair succeeded in its stead. Alas it was true, handsome, and in her prime she might be, but she was too old for Swithin. Then she is also impoverished. Beyond this frankly I don't think well of her. I don't think well of any woman who dotes upon a man younger than herself. To care to be the first fancy of a young fellow like you shows no great common sense in her. If she were worth her salt she would have too much pride to be intimate with the youth in your unassured position to say no more. Viviette's face by this time tingled hot again. She is old enough to know that a liaison with her may, and almost certainly would, be your ruin, none of the other hand, that a marriage would be preposterous, unless she is a complete fool, and in that case there is even more reason for avoiding her than if she were in her few senses. A woman of honourable feeling, Nephew, would be careful to do nothing to hinder you in your career, as this putting of herself in your way almost certainly well. Yet I hear that she professes a great anxiety on this same future of yours as a physicist. The best way which she can show the reality of her anxiety is by leaving you to herself. Leaving him to himself. She paled again, as if chilled by a conviction that in this the old man was right. Should blab your most secret plans and theories to every one of her acquaintance, and make you appear ridiculous by announcing them before they are matured. Nephew, attempt to study with a woman you'll be ruled by her to entertain fancies instead of theories, air castles instead of intentions, qualms instead of opinions, sickly prepossessions instead of reasoned conclusions. An experienced woman, waking a young man's passions, just at a moment when he is endeavouring to shine intellectually, is doing little less than committing a crime. Thus much the letter, and it was enough for her indeed, the flushes of indignation which had passed over her as she gathered this man's opinion of herself, combined with flushes of grief and shame when she considered that swithin, her dear swithin, was perfectly acquainted with this cynical view of her nature, that rejected as he might, and as he unquestionably did, such thoughts of her had been implanted in him, and lay in him. Stifled as they were, they lay in him like seeds too deep for germination, which accident might some day bring their disservice and aerate into life. The humiliation of such a possibility was almost too much to endure. The mortification, she had known nothing like it till now. But this was not all. The succeeded of feeling in comparison with which resentment and mortification were happy moods, a miserable conviction that this old man who spoke from the grave was not altogether wrong in his speaking, that he was only half wrong, that he was perhaps virtually right. Only those persons who are by nature affected, with that ready esteem for others' positions which induces an undervaluing of their own, fully experienced the deep smart of such convictions against self, the wish for annihilation that is engendered in the moment of despair, that feeling that at length we, our best and firmest friend, cease to believe in our cause. Riviette could hear the people coming out of church on the other side of the garden wall, their footsteps and their cheerful voices died away. The bell rang for lunch, and she went in. But her life during that morning and afternoon was wholly introspective, knowing the full circumstances of the situation, as she knew them now, as she had never known them before, ought she to make herself the legal wife of Swith and St. Cleave, and so secure her own honour at any price to him? Such was the formidable question which Lady Constantine propounded to her startled understanding. As a subjectively honest woman alone, beginning her charity at home, there was no doubt that she ought. Say thyself was sound Old Testament doctrine, and not altogether discountenanced in the new. But was there a line of conduct which transcended mere self-preservation, and would it not be an excellent thing to put it into practice now? That she had wronged St. Cleave by marrying him, that she would wrong him infinitely more by completing the marriage, there was in her opinion no doubt. She and her experience had sought out him in his inexperience, and had led him like a child. She remembered, as if it had been her fault, though it was in fact only her misfortune, that she had been the one to go for the license and to take up residence in the parish in which they were wedded. He was now just one and twenty. Without her he had all the world before him, six hundred a year, and leave to cut as straight a row to fame as he should choose. With her this story was negative. No money from his uncle, no power of advancement, but a bondage with a woman whose disparity of years, though immaterial just now, would operate in the future as a wet blanket upon his social ambitions. And that content with life, as it was which she had noticed more than once in him laterally, a content imperiling his scientific spirit by abstracting his zeal for progress. It was impossible in short to blind herself to the inference that marriage with her had not benefited him. Matters might improve in the future, but to take upon herself the whole liability of Swithin's life, as she would do by depriving him of the help his uncle had offered, was a fearful responsibility. How could she, an unendowed woman, replace such assistance? His recent visit to Greenwich, which had momentarily revived that zest for his pursuit, that was now less constant than here to fore, should by rights be supplemented by other such expeditions. It would be true benevolence not to deprive him of the means to continue them, so as to keep his ardour alive, regardless of the cost to herself. It could be done. By the extraordinary favour of a unique accident, she had now an opportunity of redeeming Swithin's seriously compromised future, and restoring him to a state no worse than his first. His annuity could be enjoyed by him, his travels undertaken, his studies pursued, his high vocation initiated, by one little sacrifice, that of herself. She had only to refuse to legalise their marriage, to part from him for ever, and all would be well with him, thenceforward. The pain to him would after all be but slight whatever it might be to his wretched viviet. Be an epness of retaining him at her side, lay not only in the fact itself of injury to him, but in the likelihood of his living to see it as such, and reproaching her for selfishness in not letting him go in this unprecedented opportunity for correcting a move proved to be false. He wished to examine the southern heavens. Perhaps his uncle's letter was the father of that wish, and there was no telling what good might not result to mankind at large from his exploits there. Why should she, to save her narrow honour, waste the wide promise of his ability? That in immolating herself by refusing him, and leaving him free to work wonders for the good of his fellow-creatures, she would in all probability add to the sum of human felicity, console her by its breath as an idea, even while it tortured her by making herself the scapegoat a single unit on whom the evil would fall. Little possibly large number, Swithin included, to remain unbenefited because the one individual whom his release would be an injury chanced to be herself, love between man and woman, which in Homer, Moses, and other early exhibitors of life, is a mere desire, had for centuries passed so far broadened as to include sympathy and friendship, surely it should in this advanced stage of the world include benevolence also. If so, it was her duty to set a young man free, thus she laboured with a generosity more worthy even than its object, to sink her love for her own decorum in devotion to the world in general and to Swithin in particular. To counsel her activities by her understanding rather than by her emotions as usual was hard work for a tender woman, but she strove hard and made advance. The self-centred attitude natural to one in her situation was becoming displaced by the sympathetic attitude, which though it had to be artificially fostered at first, gave her by degrees a certain sweet sense that she was rising above self-love. That maternal element which had from time to time evinced itself in her affection for the youth, and was imparted by her superior ripeness in experience and years, appeared again now, and she drew nearer the resolve not to secure propriety in her own social condition at the expense of this youth's earthly utility. Unexpectedly grand fruits are sometimes forced by harsh pruning. The illiberal letter of Swithin's uncle was suggesting to Lady Constantine an altruism whose turness would probably have amazed that queer old gentleman into a withdrawal of the conditions that had induced it. To love St. Cleave so far better than herself as this was to surpass the love of woman as conventionally understood and as mostly existing. Before however clinching her decision by any definite step, she worried her little brain by devising every kind of ingenious scheme in the hope of lighting on one that might show her how that decision could be avoided with the same good result, but to secure for him the advantages offered, and to retain him likewise, reflection only showed it to be impossible. Yet to let him go for ever was more than she could endure, and at length she jumped at an idea which promised some sort of improvement on that design. She would propose that reunion should not be entirely abandoned but simply postponed, namely till after his twenty-fifth birthday, when he might be her husband without at any rate the loss to him of the income. By this time he would approximate to a man's full judgment, and that painful aspect of her as one who had eluded his raw immaturity would have passed forever. The plan somewhat appeased her disquieted honour. To let her marriage sink into abeyance for four or five years was not to nullify it, and though she would leave it to him to move its substanciation at the end of that time without present stipulations she had not much doubt upon the issue. The clock struck five. This silent mental debate had occupied her whole afternoon. Perhaps it would not have ended now but for an unexpected incident, the entry of her brother Louis. He came into the room where she was sitting, or rather writhing, and after a few words to explain how he had got there, and about the mistake in the date of Sir Blount's death, he walked up close to her. His next remarks were apologetic in form, but in essence they were bitterness itself. "'Viviet,' he said, "'I am sorry for my hasty words to you when I last left this house. I readily withdrawed them. My suspicions took a wrong direction. I think now that I know the truth. You have been even maddered, and I supposed.' "'Lyn, what way?' she asked distantly. I lately thought that unhappy man was only your two-favoured lover. You thought wrong. He is not.' "'He is not. I believe you, for he is more. I am now persuaded that he is your lawful husband. Can you deny it?' "'I can.' "'Not your sacred word.' "'On my sacred word he is not that, either.' "'Thank heavens for that assurance,' said Louis, exhaling a breath of relief. That was not so positive as I pretended to be, but I wanted to know the truth of this mystery. Since you were not fettered to him, in that way I care nothing. Louis turned away, and that afforded her an opportunity for leaving the room. Those few words were the last grains that had turned the balance, and settled her doom. She would let's with and go. All the voices in her world seemed to clamour for that consummation. The morning's mortifications, the afternoon's benevolence, and the evening's instincts of evasions had joined to carry the point. Suddenly she sat down and wrote his swith in a summary of the thoughts above detailed. "'We shall separate,' she concluded. "'You, to obey your uncle's orders, and explore the southern skies, I, to wait as one who can implicitly trust you, do not see me again till the years have expired. You will find me still the same. I am your wife through all time. The letter of the law is not needed to reassert it at present, while the absence of the letter secures your fortune.' Nothing can express what it cost Lady Constantine to marshal her arguments, but she did it, and vanquished self-comfort by a sense of the general expediency. It may unhesitatingly be affirmed that the only ignoble reason which might have dictated such a step was nonexistent, that is to say a serious decline in her affection. Tenderly she had loved the youth at first, and tenderly she loved him now, as time and her after-conduct approved. Women the most delicate get used to strange moral situations. Eve probably regained her normal sweet composure about a week after the fall. On first learning of her anomalous position, Lady Constantine had blushed hot, and her pure instincts had prompted her to legalize her marriage without a moment's delay. Heaven and earth were to be moved at once to effect it. Day after day had passed her union had remained unsecured, and the idea of its nullity had gradually ceased to be strange to her, till it became of little account beside her bold resolve for the young man's sake. CHAPTER 36 The immediate effect upon St. Cleave of the receipt of her well-reasoned argument for retrocession was, naturally, a bitter attack upon himself for having been guilty of such cruel carelessness as to leave in a way the lawyer's letter that had first made her aware of his uncle's provision for him. Immature as he was, he could realize Viviette's position sufficiently well to perceive what the poor lady must suffer at having suddenly thrust upon her the responsibility for repairing her own situation as a wife by ruining his as a legatee. True, it was by the purest inadvertence that his pending sacrifice of means had been discovered, but he should have taken special pains to render such a mishap impossible. If on the first occasion, when a revelation might have been made with impunity, he would not put it in the power of a good nature to relieve his position by refusing him, he should have shown double care not to do so now, when she could not exercise that benevolence without the loss of honour. With the young man's inattention to issues he had not considered how sharp her feelings as a woman must be in this contingency. It had seemed the easiest thing in the world to remedy the defect in their marriage, and therefore nothing to be anxious about, and in his innocence of any thought of appropriating the bequest by taking advantage in the loophole of his matrimonial bond, he undervalued the importance of concealing the existence of that bequest. The looming fear of unhappiness between them revived and swindled the warm emotions of their earlier acquaintance, almost before the sun had set he hastened to Wellent House in search of her. The air was disturbed by stiff summer blasts, productive of windfalls and premature descents of leafage. It was an hour when unripe apples, showered down in orchards, and unbrowned chestnuts descend in their husks upon the park-glades. There was no help for it this afternoon but to call upon her in a direct manner, regardless of suspicion. He was thunderstruck when, while waiting in the full expectation of being admitted to her presence, the answer brought back to him was that she was unable to see him. This had never happened before in the whole course of their acquaintance, but he knew what it meant, and turned away with a vague disquietude. He did not know that Lady Constantine was just above his head, listening to his movements with the liveliest emotions, and, while praying for him to go, longing for him to insist on seeing her and spoil all, but the faintest symptom being always sufficient to convince him of having blundered, he unwittingly took her at her word and went rapidly away. However, he called again the next day, and she, having gained strength by one victory over herself, was unable to repeat her refusal with greater ease, knowing this to be the only course by which her point could be maintained, she clung to it with strenuous and religious pertinacity. Thus amured and self-controlling, she passed a week. Her brother, though he did not live in the house, preferring the nearest watering-place at this time of the year, was continually coming there, and one day he happened to be present when she denied herself to Swithin for the third time. Louis, who did not observe the tears in her eyes, was astonished and delighted. She was coming to her senses at last. Believing now that there could have been nothing more between them than a too plainly shown partiality on her part, he expressed his commendation of her conduct to her face. At this, instead of owning to its advantage also, her tears burst forth outright. Not knowing what to make of this, Louis said, Well, I am simply upholding you in your course. Yes, yes, I know it! She cried, and it is my deliberately chosen course. I wish he, Swithin St. Cleave, would go on his travels at once, and leave the place. Six hundred a year has been left to him for travel and study of the southern constellations, and I wish he would use it. You might represent the advantage to him of the course, if you cared to. Louis thought he could do no better than let Swithin know this as soon as possible. Accordingly, when St. Cleave was riding in the hut the next day, he heard the crackle of footsteps over the four needles outside, and jumped up, supposing them to be hers, but to his disappointment it was her brother who appeared at the door. Excuse my invading the hermitage, St. Cleave, he said in his careless way, but I have heard from my sister of your good fortune. My good fortune? Yes, in having an opportunity for roving, and with a traveller's conceit, I could not help coming to give you the benefit of my experience. When do you start? I have not formed any planners yet, indeed I have not quite been thinking of going. Louis stared. Then I have been misinformed. What I have heard is that a good uncle has kindly bequeathed you a sufficient income to make a second Isaac Newton of you, if you only use it as he directs. Swithin breathed quickly, but said nothing. If you have not decided so to make use of it, let me employ you as your friend, and one nearly old enough to be your father, to decide at once such a chance does not happen to a scientific youth once in a century. Thank you for your good advice, for it is good in itself, I know, said Swithin in a low voice, but has Lady Constantine spoken of it at all? She thinks as I do. She has spoken to you on the subject? Certainly. It is at her request, though I did not intend to say so, that I come to speak to you about it now. Frankly and plainly, said Swithin, his voice trembling with a compound of scientific and amateury emotion that defies his definition. Does she say seriously that she wishes me to go? She does. Then I will go, replied Swithin firmly. I have been fortunate enough to interest some leading astronomers, including the astronomer Royal. And in a letter received this morning I learned that the use of the Cape Observatory has not been offered to me, for any southern observations I may wish to make. No will accept this offer. Will you kindly let Lady Constantine know this, since she is interested in my welfare? Louis promised, and when he was gone Swithin looked blankly at his own situation, as if he could scarcely believe in its reality. Her letter to him then had been deliberately written. She meant him to go. But he was determined that none of those misunderstandings which ruin the happiness of lovers should be allowed to operate in the present case. He would see her, if he slept under her walls all night to do it, and would hear the order to depart from her own lips. This unexpected stand she was making for his interests was winning his admiration to such a degree as to be a danger of defeating the very cause it was meant to subserve. A woman like this was not to be forsaken in a hurry. He wrote two lines, and left the note at the house with his own hand. The cabin rings hill, July 7th. Dear Aunt Viviette, if you insist I will go, but the letter writing will not do. I must have the command from your own two lips, otherwise I shall not star. I am here every evening at seven. Can you come?" S. This note, as fate would have it, reached her hand in the single hour of that week when she was in a mood to comply with his request, just when moved by a reactionary emotion after dismissing Swithin. She went upstairs to the window that had so long served purposes of this kind, and signalled yes. S. Cleave soon saw the answer she had given, and watched her approach from the tower as the sunset drew on. The vivid circumstances of his life at this date led him ever to remember the external scenes in which they were set. It was an evening of exceptional radiations, and the west heaven gleamed like a foundry of all the metals, common and rare. The clouds were broken into a thousand fragments, and the margin of every fragment shone. For seeing the advantage and pain to her of maintaining a resolve under the pressure of a meeting, he vowed not to urge her by word or sign, to put a question plainly and calmly, and to discuss it on a reasonable basis only, like the philosophers they assumed themselves to be. With this intention was scarcely adhered to in all its integrity. She duly appeared on the edge of the field, flooded with the metallic radiance that marked the close of this day, whereupon he quickly descended the steps and met her at the cabin door. They entered it together. As the evening grew darker and darker he listened to her reasoning, which was precisely a repetition of that already sent him by letter, and by degrees accepted her decision, since she would not revoke it. Then came time for them to say good-bye, and then he turned and saw the terror in her eyes that yearned upon him, shining in such wise as a star midway in the midnight fixed. It was the misery of her own condition that showed forth, hitherto obscured by her ardour for ameliorating his. They closed together, and kissed each other as though the emotion of the whole year-and-a-half's acquaintance had settled down upon that moment. I won't go away from you," said Swithon huskily. Why did you propose it for an instant? Thus the nearly-ended interview was again prolonged, and Viviette yielded to all the passion of her first union with him. Time, however, was merciless, and the hour approached midnight and she was compelled to depart. Swithon walked with her towards the house, as he had walked many times before, believing that all was now smooth again between them, and caring it must be owned, very little for his fame as the expositor of the southern constellations just then. When they reached this silent house he said what he had not ventured to say before. Fix the day! You have decided that it is to be soon, and that I am not to go. But youthful Swithon was far, very far, from being up to the fond subtlety of Viviette this evening. I cannot decide here," she said gently, releasing herself from his arm. I will speak to you from the window. Wait for me." She vanished, and he waited. It was a long time before the window opened, and he was not aware that, with her customary complication of feeling, she had knelt for some time inside the room before looking out. Well, he said, It cannot be, she answered. I cannot ruin you. But the day after you are five and twenty our marriage shall be confirmed if you choose. Oh, my Viviette, how is this? He cried. Swithon, I have not altered, but I feared for my powers, and could not tell you whilst I stood by your side. I ought not to have given way as I did tonight. Take the request and go. You are too young to be fettered. I should have thought of it. Do not communicate with me for at least a year. It is imperative. Do not tell me your plans. If we part, we do part. I have vowed a vow not to further obstruct the course you have decided on before you knew me in my pooling ways, and by Heaven's help I'll keep that vow. Now go. These are the parting words of your own Viviette. Swithon, who was stable as a giant in all that appertained in nature and life outside humanity, was a mere pupil in domestic matters. He was quite awed by her firmness, and looked vague in the attire for a time till she closed the window. Then he mechanically turned and went as she had commanded. CHAPTER 37 A week had passed away. It had been a time of cloudy mental weather to Swithon and Viviette. But the only noteworthy fact about it was that what had been planned to happen therein had actually taken place. Swithon had gone from Welland, and would shortly go from England. She became aware of it by a note that he posted to her on his way through Warborne. There was much evidence of haste in the note, and something of reserve. The latter she could not understand, but it might have been obvious enough had she considered. On the morning of his departure he had sat on the edge of his bed, the sunlight streaming through the early mist, the house-martins scratching the back of the ceiling over his head as they scramble out from the roof, for their day is not catching. The thrushes cracking snails on the garden-stones outside, with the noisiness of little smiths at work on little anvils. The sun, and sending its rods of yellow fire into his room, sent, as he suddenly thought, mental illumination with it. For the first time as he sat there, it had crossed his mind that Viviette might have reasons for this separation which he knew not of. There might be family reasons, mysterious blood necessities which are said to rule members of old, musty, mansioned families, and are unknown to other classes of society, and they may have just now been brought before her by her brother Louis on the condition that they were religiously concealed. The idea that some family skeleton, like those he had read of in memoirs, had been unearthed by Louis, and held before her terrified understanding as a matter which rendered Swithin's departure and the neutralization of their marriage no less indispensable to them than it was an advantage to himself seemed a very plausible one to Swithin just now. Viviette might have taken Louis into her confidence at last, for the sake of his brotherly advice. Swithin knew that of her own heart she would never wish to get rid of him, but coerced by Louis, might she not have grown to entertain views of his expediency. Events made such a supposition on Cleve's part, as natural as it was inaccurate, and conjoint with his own excitement as a thought of seeing a new heaven overhead, influenced him to write but the briefest and most hurried final note to her, in which he fully obeyed her sensitive request that he would omit all reference to his plans. These at the last moment had been modified to fall in with the winter expedition formerly mentioned, to observe the transit of Venus at a remote southern station. The business being done, and himself fairly plunged into the preliminaries of an important scientific pilgrimage, Swithin acquired that lightness of heart which most young men feel in forsaking old love for a new adventure, no matter how charming maybe the girl they leave behind them. Moreover, in the present case, the man was endowed with that schoolboy temperament which does not say, or at least consider, with much curiosity, the effect of a given scheme upon others than himself. The bearing upon Lady Constantine of what was an undoubted predicament for any woman was forgotten in his feeling that she had done a very handsome and noble thing for him, and that he was therefore bound in honor to make the most of it. His going had resulted in anything but lightness of heart for her. Her sad fancy could indeed indulge in dreams of a yellow-haired laddie, without that formerly besetting fear that those dreams would prompt her to actions likely to distract and wait him. She was wretched on her own account, relieved on his. She no longer stood in the way of his advancement, and that was enough. For herself she could live in retirement, visit the wood, the old camp, the collium, and, like Inonae, think of the life they had led there, mournfully Inonae, wandering for Lorne of Paris once her playmate on the hills, leaving it entirely to his goodness whether he would come and claim her in the future or desert her for ever. She was diverted for a time from these sad performances by a letter which reached her from Bishop Helmsdale. To see his handwriting again on an envelope, after thinking so anxiously of making a father confessor of him, started her out of her equanimity. She speedily regained it, however, when she read his note. The palace, Melchester, July 30th, 18 something. My dear lady Constantine, I am shocked and grieved that, in the strange dispensation of things here below, my offer of marriage should have reached you almost simultaneously with the intelligence that your widowhood had been of several months less duration than you and I, and the world, had supposed. I quite understand that, viewed from Annie's side, the news must have shaken and disturbed you, and your unequivocal refusal to entertain Annie thought of a new alliance at such a moment was, of course, intelligible, natural and praiseworthy. At present I will say no more beyond expressing a hope that you will accept my assurances that I was quite ignorant of the news at the hour of writing, and a sincere desire that, in due time, and as soon as you have recovered your equanimity, I may be allowed to renew my proposal. I am, my dear lady Constantine, yours ever sincerely. See, Melchester. She laid the letter aside and thought no more about it beyond a momentary meditation on the errors into which people fall in reasoning from actions to motives. Louis, who is now again with her, became in due course acquainted with the contents of the letter, and was satisfied with a promising position in which matters seemingly stood all round. Lady Constantine went her mournful ways as she had planned to do, her chief resort being the familiar collium, where she experienced the unutterable melancholy of seeing two carpenters dismantle the dome of its felt covering, detaching its ribs, and clear away the enclosure at the top, till everything stood as it had stood before Sweden had been known to the place. The equatorial had already been packed in a box, to be in readiness if he should send for it from abroad. The cabin, too, was in course of demolition, such having been his directions acquiesced in by her before he started. Yet she could not bear the idea that these structures, which are so germane to the events of their romance, should be removed as if removed for ever. Going to the men, she bade them store up the materials intact, that they might be re-erected if desired, and had the junctions of the timbers marked with figures, the boards numbered, and the different sets of screws tied up in independent papers for identification. She did not hear the remarks of the workmen when she had gone to the effect that a young man would as soon think of buying a halter for himself, as to come back and spy at the moon from Rings Hill Spear, after seeing the glories of other nations and the golden jewels that were found there, or she might have been more unhappy than she was. On returning from one of these walks to the Column, a curious circumstance occurred. It was evening, and she was coming as usual down through the sighing plantation, choosing her way between the ramparts of the camp towards the outlet giving upon the field, when suddenly in the dusky vista among the fur-trunk she saw, or thought she saw, a golden-haired, toddling child. The child moved a step or two, and vanished behind a tree. Lady Constantine, fearing it had lost its way, went quickly to the spot, searched and called aloud. But no child could she perceive or hear anywhere around. She returned to where she had stood when first beholding it, and looked in the same direction, but nothing re-appeared. The only object at all resembling a little boy or girl was the upper tuft of a bunch of fern, which had prematurely yellowed to about the colour of a fair child's hair, and waved occasionally in the breeze. This however did not sufficiently explain the phenomenon, and she returned to make inquiries of the man whom she had left at work removing the last traces of Swithin's cabin, but he had gone with her departure and the approach of night. Feeling an indescribable dread, she retraced her steps and hastened homeward, doubting, yet half believing, what she had seemed to see, and wondering if her imagination had played her some trick. The tranquil mournfulness of our night of solitude terminated in a most unexpected manner. The morning after the above-mentioned incident, Lady Constantine, after meditating a while, arose with a strange personal conviction that bore curiously on the aforesaid hallucination. She realized a condition of things that she had never anticipated, and for a moment the discovery of her state so overwhelmed her that she thought she must die outright. In her terror she said she had sown the wind to reap the whirlwind. Then the instinct of self-preservation flamed up in her like a fire. Her altruism in subjecting her self-love to benevolence and letting Swithin go away from her was demolished by the new necessity, as if it had been a gossamer web. There was no resisting or evading the spontaneous plan of action which matured in her mind in five minutes. Where was Swithin? How could he be got it instantly? That was her ruling thought. She searched about the room for his last short note, hoping, yet doubting, that its contents were more explicit on his intended movements than the few meager syllables which alone she could call to mind. She could not find the letter in her room, and came downstairs to Louis as pale as a ghost. He looked up at her. And with some concern said, Oh, what's the matter? I'm searching everywhere for a letter, a note from Mr. St. Cleave, just a few words telling me when the Occidental sails. I think that he goes in it. Well, why do you want that unimportant document? It is of the utmost importance that I should know whether he is actually sailed or not, she said, in agonized tones. Where can that letter be? Louis knew where the letter was, for having seen it on her desk he had, without reading it, torn it up and thrown it into the waste-paper basket, thinking the less that remained to remind her of the young philosopher, the better. I destroyed it, he said. Louis, why did you? She cried. I'm going to follow him. I think it best to do so. I want to know if he is gone, and now the date is lost. Going to run out to St. Cleave? Absurd. Yes, I am, she said, with vehement firmness. I must see him. I want to speak to him as soon as possible. Good Lord, Viviet, are you mad? Oh, what was the date of that ship? But it cannot be helped. I started once for Southampton. I have made my mind up to do it. He was going to his uncle's solicitors in the north first, then he was coming back to Southampton. He cannot have sailed yet. I believe he has sailed. Mother Louis, sullenly. She did not wait to argue with him, but returned upstairs where she rang to tell Green to be ready with the pony to drive her to Warborne Station in quarter of an hour. On a Tower by Thomas Hardy Chapter 38 Viviet's determination to hampers with him no longer had led her, as had been shown, to bulk any weak impulse to entreat his return by forbidding him to furnish her with his foreign address. His ready disposition, his fear that there might be other reasons behind, made him obey her only two literally. Thus, to her terror and dismay, she had placed a gratuitous difficulty in the way of her present endeavour. She was ready before Green, and urged on that factotum so wildly as to leave him no time to change his corduroy's and skitty boots in which he had been gardening. He therefore turned himself into a coachman as far down as his waist merely, clapping on his proper coat, hat, and waistcoat, and wrapping a rug over his horticultural half below. In this compromise he appeared at the door, mounted, and reins in hand. Seeing how sad and determined Viviet was, Louis pitted her so far as to put nothing in the way of her starting, though he forebore to help her. He thought her conduct sentimental foolery, the outcome of mistaken pity, and such a kind of gain-giving as would trouble a woman. And he decided that it would be better to let this mood burn itself out than to keep it smoldering by obstruction. Do you remember the date of his sailing? She said finally, as the pony carriage turned to drive off. She sailed on the twenty-fifth, that is, to-day, but it may not be to late in the evening. With this she started, and reached Warborne in time for the up-train. How much longer than it really is a long journey can seem to be was fully learned by the unhappy Viviet that day. The changeful procession of country seats past which she was dragged, the names and memories of their owners had no points of interest for her now. She reached Southampton about midday, and drove straight to the docks. On approaching the gate she was met by a crowd of people and vehicles coming out—men, women, children, porters, police, cabs, and carts. The Occidental had just sailed. The adverse intelligence came upon her with such odds after her morning's tension that she could scarcely crawl back to the cab which had brought her. But this was not a time to succumb. Since she had no luggage she dismissed the man, and without any real consciousness of what she was doing crept away and sat down on a pile of merchandise. After long thinking her case assumed a more hopeful complexion. Much might probably be done towards communicating with him in the time at her command. The obvious step to this end, which she should have thought of sooner, would be to go to his grandmother in Welland Bottom, and there obtain his itinerary in detail, no doubt well known to Mrs. Martin. There was no leisure for her to consider longer if she would be home again that night, and returning to the railway she waited on a seat without eating or drinking till a train was ready to take her back. By the time she again stood in Warburn the sun rested his chin upon the meadows, and enveloped the distant outline of the Ring's hill collium in his humid rays. Hiring an empty fly the chance to be at the station she was driven through the little town onward to Welland, which she approached about eight o'clock. At her request the man set her down at the entrance to the park, and when he was out of sight, instead of pursuing her way to the house, she went along the high road in the direction of Mrs. Martin's. Dusk was drawing on, and the bats were wheeling over the green basin called Welland Bottom about the time she arrived, and had any other errand instigated her call she would have postponed it till the morrow. She responded to her knock, but she could hear footsteps going hither and thither upstairs, the dull noises as of articles moved from their places. She knocked again and again, and ultimately the door was opened by Hannah as usual. "'I could make nobody here,' said Lady Constantine, who was so weary she could scarcely stand. "'I am very sorry, my lady,' said Hannah, slightly awed on beholding her visitor, but we was a potent poor Mr. Swithin's room to lights, now that he is, as a woman may say, dead and buried to us, so he didn't hear your ladyship. I'll call Mrs. Martin at once. She's opened the room that used to be his work-room.' Here Hannah's voice implied moist eyes, and Lady Constantine's instantly over-float. "'No, I'll go up to her,' said Viviet, and almost in advance of Hannah she passed up the shrunken ash stairs. The ebbing-light was not enough to reveal to Mrs. Martin's aged gaze the personality of her visitor, till Hannah explained. "'I will get a light, my lady,' said she. "'No, I would rather not. What are you doing, Mrs. Martin?' "'Well, the poor, misguided boy is gone. He's gone for good to me. I am a woman of over four score-years, my lady Constantine. My junket and days are over, and whether it is feasting or whether it is sorrowing in the land will soon be nothing to me. But his life may be long and active, and for the sake of him I care for what I shall never say, and wish to make pleasant what I shall never enjoy. I'm setting his room in order, as the place will be his own freehold when I am gone, so that when he comes back he may find all his poor gym-cracks and stranglies as he left them, and not feel that I betrayed his trust.' Mrs. Martin's voice revealed that she had burst into such few tears as were left her. And then Hannah began crying likewise, whereupon Lady Constantine, whose heart had been bursting all day, and who, indeed, considering her coming trouble, had reason enough for tears, broke into bitterer sorrows than either, sorbs of absolute pain that could no longer be concealed. Hannah was the first to discover that Lady Constantine was weeping with them, and her feelings being probably the least intense among the three, she instantly controlled herself. "'Refrain yourself, my dear woman, refrain,' she said hastily to Mrs. Martin. "'Don't you see how it do raft, my lady?' And turning to Viviette, she whispered, "'Oh, you'd be so great, your ladyship, that perhaps she'll excuse her for borsing out before you. We know when the mind is dim, my lady, there's not the manners there should be, but decayed people can't help it, poor old soul.' Hannah, that'll do now. Perhaps Lady Constantine would like to speak to me alone,' said Mrs. Martin, and when Hannah had retreated Mrs. Martin continued, "'Such a charge, as she is, my lady, on account of our great age. You'll pardon her biting here, as if you are one of the family. I put up with such things because of a long service, and we know that years lead to childlessness.' "'What are you doing? Can I help you?' Viviette asked, as Mrs. Martin, after speaking, turned to lift some large article. "'Thought is only the skeleton of a telescope that's got no works in its inside,' said Swithin's grandmother, seizing the huge paste-board tube that Swithin had made, and abandoned, because he could get no lenses to suit it. I'm going to hang it up to these hooks, and there it'll buy it till he comes again.' Lady Constantine took one end, and the tube was hung up against the white-washed wall, by strings that the old woman had tied round it. Here's all his equinoctial lines, and his topics of Capricorn, and I don't know what besides, Mrs. Martin continued, pointing to some charcoal scratches on the wall. "'I'll never rub them out. No, though, till such untidiness as I was never brought up to. I'll never rub them out.' "'Where has Swithin gone to first?' asked Viviette anxiously. "'Where does he say you are to write to him?' "'No, yet, my lady. He's gone traipsing all over Europe and America, and then onto the South Pacific Ocean, about this transit of Venus that's going to be done there. He's to write to us first, who God knows when, for he said that if we didn't hear from him for six months we were not to be gallead at all.' At this intelligence so much worse than she had expected, Lady Constantine stood mute, sank down, and would have fallen to the floor if there had not been a chair behind her. Controlling herself by a strenuous effort she disguised the despair and asked vacantly. From America to the South Pacific, transit of Venus, Swithin's arrangement to accompany the expedition, had been made at the last moment, and therefore she had not as yet been informed. Yes, to a lone island, I believe. Yes, a lone island, my lady, echoed Hannah, who had crept in and made herself again one of the family, in spite of Mrs. Martin. He'd gone to meet the English and American astronomers there at the end of the year. After that he'll most likely go on to the Cape. But before the end of the year, what places did he tell you about visiting? Well, let me collect myself. He's gone to the Observatory of Cambridge, United States, to meet some gentleman there, and spied through the Great Refractor. Then there's the Observatory of Chicago, and I think he has a letter to make him be known to a gentleman in the Observatory at Marseille, and he wants to go to Vienna. On Polkowa, too, he means to take in his way, there being great instruments and a lot of astronomers at each place. Does he take Europe or America first? She asked faintly, for the accounts seemed hopeless. Mrs. Martin could not tell till she had heard from Swithin. It depended upon what he decided to do on the day he was leaving England. Lady Constantine bathed the old people goodbye and dragged her weary limbs homeward. The fatuousness of forethought had seldom been evinced more ironically. Had she done nothing to hinder him, he would have kept up an undeserved communication with her, and all might have been well. For that night she could undertake nothing further, and she waited for the next day. Then at once she wrote two letters to Swithin, directing one to Marseille's Observatory, one to the Observatory of Cambridge, U.S., as being the only two spots on the face of the globe at which they were likely to intercept him. Each letter stated to him the urgent reasons which existed for his return, and contained a passionately regretful intimation that the annuity on which his hopes depended must of necessity be sacrificed by the completion of their original contract without delay. But letter-conveyance was too slow a process to satisfy her to send an epitome of her epistles where telegraph was, after all, indispensable. Such an imploring sentence as she desired to address to him it would be hazardous to dispatch from Warborne, and she took a dreary journey to a strange town on purpose to send it from an office at which she was unknown. There she handed in her message, addressing it to the port of a rival of the Occidental, and again returned home. She waited, and there being no returned telegram, the inference was that he had somehow missed hers. For an answer to either of her letters she would have to wait long enough to allow him time to reach one of the Observatories, a tedious while. She considered a weakness. The stultifying nature of her attempt at recall. Events mocked her on all sides, by the favour of an accident, and by her own immense exertions against her instincts, Swithin had been restored to the rightful heritage that he had nearly forfeited on her account. He had just started to utilize it when she, without a moment's warning, was asking him again to cast it away. She had set a certain machinery in motion to stop it before it had revolved once. A horrid apprehension possessed her. It had been easy for Swithin to give up what he had never known the advantages of keeping, but having once begun to enjoy his possession, would he give it up now? Could he be depended on for such self-sacrifice? Before leaving he would have done anything at her request, but the Molia temper of Fondai had now passed. Suppose there arrived no reply from him for the next three months, and that when his answer came he were to inform her that having now fully acquiesced in her original decision, he found the life he was leading so profitable as to be unable to abandon it, even to please her, that he was very sorry, but having embarked on this course by her advice, he meant to adhere to it by his own. There was indeed every probability that moving about as he was doing, and cautioned as he had been by her very self against listening to her too readily, she would receive no reply of any sort from him for three or perhaps four months. This would be on the eve of the transit, and what likelihood was there that a young man full of ardour for that spectacle would forego it at the last moment to return to a humdrum domesticity with a woman who was no longer a novelty, if she could only leave him to his career, and save her own situation also, but at that moment the proposition seemed as impossible as to construct a triangle of two straight lines. In her walk home, pervaded by these hopeless views, she passed near the dark and deserted tower. Night in that solitary place, which would have caused her some uneasiness in her years of blitheness, had no terrors for her now. She went up the winding path, and the door being unlocked felt her way to the top. The open sky greeted her as in times previous to the dome and equatorial period, but there was not a star to suggest to her in which direction Swithin had gone. The absence of the dome suggested a way out of her difficulties. A leap in the dark and all would be over. But she had not reached that stage of action as yet, and the thought was dismissed as quickly as it had come. The new consideration which at present occupied her mind was whether she could have the courage to leave Swithin to himself, as in the original plan, and singly, meet her impending trial, despising the shame, till he should return at five and twenty and claim her. Yet was this assumption of his return so very safe? How altered things would be at that time. At twenty-five he would still be young and handsome. She would be three and thirty, fading to middle-aged and homeliness from a junior's point of view. A fierce, sharpest frost settled down upon her, that in any such scheme as this she would be building upon the sand. She hardly knew how she reached home that night. Entering by the lawn-door she saw a red coal in the direction of the arbor. We were smoking there, and he came forward. He had not seen her since the morning, and was naturally anxious about her. She blessed the chance which enveloped her in night, and lessened the weight of the encounter one-half by depriving him of vision. "'Did you accomplish your object?' he asked. "'No,' said she. "'How was that?' He has sailed. "'A very good thing for both, I say. I believe you would have married him if you could have overtaken him.' "'That I would,' she said. "'Good God!' I would marry a tinker for that matter. I have reasons for being any man's wife,' she said recklessly. "'Only I should prefer to drown myself.' Louis held his breath, and stood rigid at the meaning her words conveyed. "'But, Louis, you don't know all,' cried Viviet. "'I am not so bad as you think. Mine has been folly, not vice. I thought I had married him, and when I found I had not, the marriage was invalid. Sir Blount was alive, and now Swithin has gone away and will not come back for my calling. How can he? His fortune is left to him on condition that he forms no legal tie. "'Oh, Willie, will he come again?' "'Never, if that's the position of affairs,' said Louis, firmly, after a pause. "'What then shall I do?' said Viviet. Louis escaped the formidable difficulty of replying by pretending to continue his Havana, and she, bowed down to dust by what she had revealed, crept from him into the house. Louis' cigar went out in his hand as he stood looking intently on the ground. CHAPTER XXXIX Louis got up the next morning with an idea in his head. He addressed for a journey and breakfasted hastily. Before he started, Viviet came downstairs. Louis, who is now greatly disturbed about her, went up to his sister and took her hand. "'Oh, Granmole, Le Granre-Med,' he said gravely, "'I have a plan.' "'I have a dozen,' said she. "'You have?' "'Yes, but what are they worth? And yet there must—there must be a way.' "'Viviet,' said Louis, promised that you will wait till I come home to-night before you do anything.' Her distracted eyes showed slight comprehension of his request as she said, "'Yes.' An hour after that time Louis entered the train at Warborne, and was speedily crossing a country of ragged woodland, which, though intruded on by the plough at places, remained largely intact from prehistoric times, and still abounded with use of gigantic growth, and oaks tufted with mistletoe. It was the route to Melchester. On setting foot in that city he took the cathedral spire as his guide, the place being strange to him. He went on till he reached the archway dividing Melchester sacred from Melchester secular. Thence he threaded his course into the precincts of the damp and venerable clothes, level as a bowling-green and beloved of rucks, whom from their elm perches on high threatened any unwavering gaiter with a mishap of Tobit. At the corner of this reposal spot stood the Episcopal Palace. Louis entered the gates, rang the bell, and looked round. Here the trees and rucks seemed older, if possible, than those of the close behind him. Everything was dignified, and he felt himself like Punchinello in the King's chambers. Verily in the present case, Blanville was not a man to stick at trifles any more than his illustrious prototype, and on the servant bringing a message that his lordship would see him at once, Louis marched boldly in. Through an old dark corridor, roofed with old, dark beams, the servant led the way to the heavily moulded door of the bishop's room. Dr. Helmsdale was there, and welcomed Louis with considerable statelyness, but his condescension was tempered with a curious anxiety, and even with nervousness. He asked in pointed tones after the health of Lady Constantine, if Louis had brought an answer to the letter he had addressed to her a day or two earlier, and if the contents of the letter, or of the previous one, were known to him. I have brought no answer from her, said Louis, but the contents of your letter have been made known to me. Since entering the building, Louis had more than once felt some hesitation, and it might now, with a favouring manner from his entertainer, have operated to deter him from going further with his intention, but the bishop had personal weaknesses that were fatal to sympathy for more than a moment. Then I may speak in confidence to you as a nearest relative, said the prelate, and explain that I am now in a position with regard to Lady Constantine, which, in view of the important office I hold, I should not have cared to place myself in, unless I had felt quite sure of not being refused by her. And hence it is a great grief, and some mortification to me that I was refused, owing, of course, to the fact that I unwittingly risked making my proposal at the very moment when she was under the influence of those strange tidings, and therefore not herself, and scarcely able to judge what was best for her. The bishop's words disclosed a mind who, sensitive fear of danger to its own dignity, hindered it from criticism elsewhere. Things might have been worse for Louis's puk-like idea of mismating his Hermia with his Demetrius. Throwing a strong colour of earnestness into his mienne, he replied, Bishop, Viviet is my only sister. I am her only brother and friend. I am alarmed for her health and state of mind. Hence I have come to consult you on this very matter that you have broached. I come absolutely without her knowledge, and a hope unconventionality may be excused in me on the score of my anxiety for her. But certainly I trust that the prospect opened up by my proposal, combined with this other news, has not proved too much for her. My sister is distracted and distressed, Bishop Helmsdale. She wants comfort. Ah, not distressed by my letter, said the bishop, turning red. Has it lowered me in her estimation? On the contrary, while your disinterested offer was uppermost in her mind, she was a different woman. It is this other matter that oppresses her. The result upon her of the recent discovery with regard to the late Sir Blount Constantine is peculiar. To say that he'll use her in his lifetime is to understate a truth. He has been dead now a considerable period. But this revival of his memory operates as a sort of terror upon her. Images of the manner of Sir Blount's death are with her night and day, intensified by a hideous picture of the supposed scene, which was cruelly sent to her. She dreads being alone. Nothing will restore my poor viviet to her former cheerfulness, but a distraction, a hope, a new prospect. That's precisely what acceptance of my offer would afford. Precisely, said Louis, with great respect. But how to get her to avail herself of it, after once refusing you, is the difficulty and my earnest problem. Then we are quite at one. We are, and it is to promote our wishes that I am calm, since you will do nothing of our self. Then you can give me no hope of a reply to my second communication. On whatever, by letter, said Louis, her impression plainly is that she cannot encourage your lordship, yet in face of all its reticence, the secret is that she loves you warmly. Can you indeed assure me of that? Indeed, indeed, said the bishop musingly. Then I must try to see her. I begin to feel, to feel strongly, that a course which would seem premature and unbecoming in other cases would be true and proper conduct in this. Her unhappy dilemmas, her unwonted position. Yes, yes, I see it all. I can afford to have some little misconstruction put upon my motifs. I will go and see her immediately. Her past has been a cruel one. She wants sympathy, and with heaven's help I give it." I think the remedy lies that way, said Louis gently. Some words came from her one night which seemed to show it. I was standing on the terrace. I heard somebody sighing in the dark and found that it was she. I asked her what was the matter, and gently pressed her on this subject of boldly and promptly contracting a new marriage, as a means of dispersing the horrors of the old. Her answer implied that she would have no objection to do it, to do it at once provided she could remain externally passive in the matter, that she would tacitly yield, in fact, to pressure, but not meet solicitation half-way. Now, Bishop Helmsdale, you see what has prompted me? On the one hand is a dignitary of high position and integrity to say no more, who is anxious to save her from the gloom of a situation. On the other is this sister, who will not make known to you her willingness to be saved, partly from apathy, partly from the fear that she may be thought forward in responding favourably at so early a moment, partly also perhaps from a modest sense that there would be some sacrifice on your part in allying yourself with a woman of her secluded and sad experience. Oh, there is no sacrifice, and quite otherwise I care greatly for this alliance, Mr. Glanville. Your sister is very dear to me. Moreover the advantages her mind would derive from the enlarged field of activity that the position of a bishop's wife would afford are palpable. I am induced to think that an early settlement of the question, an immediate coming to the point, which might be called too early in the majority of cases, would be a right and considerate tenderness here. My only dread is that she should think an immediate following about the subject premature. And the risk of a rebuff a second time is one which, as you must perceive, it would be highly unbecoming in me to run. I think the risk would be small if your lordship would approach her frankly. Right she will not, I am assured, and knowing that, and having her interest at heart, I was induced to come to you and make this candid statement in reply to your communication. Her late husband, having been virtually dead these four or five years, believed dead two years, and actually dead nearly one, no reproach could attach to her if she were to contract another union to-morrow. I agree with you, Mr. Glanville, said the bishop, warmly. I will think it over. Hormode of in not replying I can quite understand, near motive in coming I can also understand and appreciate in a brother. If I feel convinced that it would be a seemly and expedient thing, I will come to Welland to-morrow. The point to which Louie had brought the bishop being so satisfactory, he feared to endanger it by another word. He went away almost hurriedly, and had once left the precincts of the cathedral, lest another encounter with Dr. Helmsdale should leave the latter to take a new and slower view of his duties as viviette's suitor. He reached Welland by dinnertime, and came upon viviette in the same pensive mood in which he had left her. It seemed she had hardly moved since. Have you discovered Swith and St. Cleave's address? She said, without looking up at him. No, said Louie. Then she broke out with indescribable anguish. Would you ask me to wait till this evening? And I waited through the long day in the belief that your words meant something, that you would bring good tidings. And now I find your words meant nothing, and you had not brought good tidings. You could not decide for a moment what to say to this. Should he venture to give her thoughts a new course by a revelation of his design? No. It would be better to prolong her despair yet another night, and spring relief upon her suddenly, that she might jump at it, and commit herself without an interval for reflection on certain aspects of the proceedings. Nothing accordingly did he say, and conjecturing that she would be hardly likely to take any desperate step that night, he left her to herself. His anxiety at this crisis continued to be great. Everything depended on the result of the bishop's self-communion. Would he or would he not come the next day? Perhaps instead of his important presence there would appear a letter postponing the visit indefinitely. If so, all would be lost. Louie's suspense kept him awake, and he was not alone in his sleeplessness. Through the night he heard his sister walking up and down in a state which betoken that very pang of grief she had disclosed. Twice as many had remained unspoken. He almost feared that she might seek to end her existence by violence so unreasonably sudden where her moods, and he lay and longed for the day. It was morning. She came down the same as usual, and asked that I had arrived at telegram or letter, but there was neither. We avoided her, knowing that nothing he could say just then would do her any good. No communication had reached him from the bishop, and that looked well. By one ruse and another, as the day went on, he led her away from contemplating the remote possibility of hearing from Swithin, and induced her to look at the worst contingency as her probable fate. It seemed as if she really made up her mind to this, for by the afternoon she was apathetic like a woman who neither hoped nor feared. And then a fly drove up to the door. Louis, who had been standing in the hall for the greater part of the day, glanced out through a private window and went to Viviet. The bishop has called. He said, be ready to see him. The bishop of Melchester said Viviet bewildered. Yes, I asked him to come. He comes for an answer to his letters. An answer to his letters? She murmured. An immediate reply of yes or no. Her face showed the workings of her mind. How entirely an answer of assent, at once acted on for better or for worse, would clear the spectre from her path. There needed no tongue to tell. It would, moreover, accomplish that end without involving the impoverishment of Swithin, the inevitable result if she had adopted the legitimate role out of her trouble. Hitherto she had seemed, to her dismayed mind, unenlightened as to any course save one of honesty, no possible achievement of both her desires, the saving of Swithin and the saving of herself. But behold, here was a way. A tempter had shown it to her. It involved a great wrong, which to her had quite obscured its feasibility. But she perceived now that it was indeed a way. Nature was forcing her hand at this game, and to what will not nature compel her weaker victims in extremes? We left her to think it out. When he reached the drawing-room, Dr. Helmsdale was standing there, with the air of a man too good for his destiny, which, to be just to him, was not far from the truth this time. Have you broken my message to her? Asked the bishop sonorously. Not your message, your visit, said Louis. I leave the rest in your lordship's hands. I have done all I can for her. She was in her own small room to-day, and feeling that it must be a bold stroke or none, he led the bishop across the hall till he reached her apartment and opened the door, but instead of following he shut it behind his visitor. Then Glanville passed an anxious time. He walked from the foot of the staircase to the star of the old swords and pikes on the wall, from these to the stag's horns, then stand a corridor as far as the door, where he could hear murmurings inside, but not its import. The longer they remained closeted, the more excited did he become. That she had not preemptively negative the proposal at the outset was a strong sign of its success. It showed that she had admitted argument, and the worthy bishop had a pleader on his side whom he knew little of. The very weather seemed to favour Dr. Helmsdale in his suit. A blusterous wind had blown up from the west, howling in the smokeless chimneys, and suggesting to the feminine mind storms at sea, a tossing ocean, and the hopeless inaccessibility of all astronomers and men on the other side of the same. The bishop had entered Viviette's room at ten minutes past three. The long hand of the tall clock lay level at forty-five minutes past when the knob of the door moved, and he came out. Louis met him, where the passage joined the hall. Dr. Helmsdale was decidedly in an emotional state, his face being slightly flushed. Louis looked as anxious and quietly, without speaking it. "'She accepts me,' said the bishop in a low voice, and the wedding is to be soon. Her long solitude and suffering justify haste. What you said was true. Sure weariness and distraction have driven her to me. She was quite passive at last, and agreed to anything I proposed, such as the persuasive force of a trained logical reasoning. A good and wise woman, she perceived what a true shelter from sadness was offered in me, and was not the one to despise heaven's gift." CHAPTER 40 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 premises, Vivietta 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. But 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 the corresponding forgetfulness of what lay to the north behind his back, whether human or celestial. Never made a plurit, few will wonder that Vivietta, 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 this specified time, four years dense, 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 little time at Cape Town on this his first reconnoitering journey, and on that account wrote to no one from the place. Unleaving 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 ship-board and under clear skies, he took the steamer from Melbourne, returning dense 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 thereby the help of an introduction he had brought from England he reveled 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 civilisation 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 it will be to mention that Viviette's letter to Cambridge had been returned long before he reached that place, where her missive to Marseille was, of course, misdirected altogether. On arriving in America, uncertain of an address in that country at which he would stay long, Swidon 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 Swidon 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. When he entered Table Bay and landed on the quay, he called at once at the post-office. Two letters were handed to him, and he found from the date that he had been waiting there for some time. One of these epistles, which had a weather-worn look as regarded the ink, and was an old-fashioned penmanship he knew to be from his grandmother. He opened it before he as much as glanced at his superscription on the second. Besides the material portions it contained the following. I reckon you know by now our main news this fall, but lest you should not have heard of it, I send the exact thing snipped out of the newspaper. Nobody expected her to do it quite so soon, but it is said here about that my Lord Bishop of Mellady had been drawn night 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 a-flicked into her mind, and made her poor heart so timid and low that in charity to Mellady her few friends agreed on origin or to let the bishop go on paying his court as before, notwithstanding that she had not been a widow-woman near so long as was taught. This as it turned out she was willing to do, and when my Lord asked her she told him that she would marry him at once or never. That as I was told, and as I had heard it from those that know. The cutting from the newspaper was an ordinary announcement of marriage between the Bishop of Mellchester 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 content soon acquainted him with her motive for the precipitate act. The few concluding sentences were all that would 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 act 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 I 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 an answer to this. Do not think of me. Do not see me ever any more. You are unhappy, Viviet. 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 that his own relation to the deed. He felt like an awakened, some nambulist, 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 and 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 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 direction 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 economising clear nights, as he had been obliged to do on the old tower at Welland. There it had happened more than once, that after awaiting 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 at 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 slightly 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 in Orlorn, 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 pattern stereotyped in history and legend, without which it had almost seemed that a polar sky could not exist, had never been seen therein. Sincleve, 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 about two months, in a comparatively idle survey of northern 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 instruments to rove, evening after evening, from the gorgeous glitter of Canopus, to the hazy clouds of Magellan. Before he had well finished his optical prelude, there floated over him from the other side of the equator, the post-grip to the epistle of his lost viviette. It came in the vehicle of a common newspaper, under the head of Berthes. April 10th, 18 something. At the palace, Melchester, the wife of the Bishop of Melchester, of a son. CHAPTER 41 Three years passed away, and Swithin still remained at the cape, quietly pursuing the work that had brought him there. His memoranda of observations had accumulated to a wheelbarrow load, and he was beginning to shape them into a treatise which had possessed some scientific utility. He had gauged the southern skies with greater results than even he himself had anticipated. Those familiar constellations which, to the casual beholder, are at most a new arrangement of ordinary points of light, where to this professed astronomer, as to his brethren, a far greater matter. It was below the surface that his material lay, there in region revealed only to the instrumental observer, were sons of hybrid kind, fire-fogs, floating nuclei, globes that flew in groups like swarms of bees, and other extraordinary sights, which when decomposed by Swithin's equatorial, turned out to be the beginning of a new series of phenomena, instead of the end of an old one. There were gloomy deserts in those southern skies, such as the north shows scarcely an example of, sights set apart for the position of sons which, for some unfathomable reason, were left uncreated, their places remaining ever since conspicuous by their emptiness. The inspection of these chasms brought him a second pulsation of that old horror which he had used to describe to Viviette as produced in him by bottomlessness in the north heaven. The ghostly finger of limitless vacancy touched him now on the other side. Infinite deeps in the north stellar region had a homely familiarity about them, when compared with infinite deeps in the region of the South Pole. This was an even more unknown tract of the unknown. Space here, being less the historic haunt of human thought than overhead at home, seemed to be pervaded with a more lonely loneliness. Were they given on paper to these astronomical exorcitations of St. Cleve, a space proportionable to that occupied by his year with Viviette at Welland, this narrative would be trebled its length, but not a single additional glimpse would be afforded of Swithin in his relations with old emotions. In these experiments with tubes and glasses, important as they were to human intellect, there was little food for the sympathetic instincts which create the changes in a life. That which is the foreground and measuring base of one perspective draft, may be the vanishing point of another perspective draft, while yet they are both drafts of the same thing, Swithin's doings and discoveries in the Southern Sidereel system where, no doubt, incidents of the highest importance to him, and yet from an intersocial point of view, they served with a humble purpose of killing time, while other doings, more nearly allied to his heart than to his understanding, developed themselves at home. In the intervals between his professional occupations, he took walks over the sand-flats near, or among the farms which were gradually overspreading the country in the vicinity of Cape Town. He grew familiar with the outline of Table Mountain, and the fleecy Devil's Tablecloth which used to settle on its top when the wind was southeast. On these promenades he would more particularly think of Viviette, and of that curious pathetic chapter in his life with her which seemed to have wound itself up and ended forever. Those scenes were rapidly receding into distance, and the intensity of his sentiment regarding them had proportionately abated. He felt that there had been something wrong therein, and yet he could not exactly define the boundary of the wrong. Viviette's sad and amazing sequel to that chapter had still a fearful catastrophic aspect in his eyes, but instead of musing over it and its bearings, he shunned the subject as we shun by night the shady scene of a disaster, and keep to the open road. He sometimes contemplated her apart from the past, leading her life in the cathedral close at Melchester, and wondered how often she looked south and thought of where he was. On one of these afternoon walks in the neighbourhood of the Royal Observatory he turned and gazed towards the signal post on the lion's rump. It was a high promenade tree on the south-west of Table Mountain and overlooked Table Bay. Before his eyes had left the scene the signal was suddenly hoisted on the staff. It announced that a male steamer had appeared in view over the sea. In the course of an hour he retraced his steps, as he had often done on such occasions, and strolled leisurely across the intervening mile-and-a-half till he arrived at the post-office door. There was no letter from England for him, but there was a newspaper addressed in the seventeenth-century handwriting of his grandmother, who, in spite of her great age, still retained a steady hold on life. He turned away disappointed, and resumed his walk into the country, opening the newspaper as he went along. Across in black ink attracted his attention, and it was opposite a name among the deaths. His blood ran icily as he discerned the words, the palace, Melchester. But it was not she. Her husband, the Bishop of Melchester, had, after a short illness, departed this life at the comparatively early age of fifty years. All the enactments of the bygone days at Welland now started up like an awakened army from the ground. But a few months were wanting to the time when he would be of an age to marry without sacrificing the annuity which formed his means of subsistence. It was a point in his life that had had no meaning or interest in him, since his separation from Viviette, for women were now no more to him than the inhabitants of Jupiter. But a whirligig of time, having again set Viviette free, the aspect of home altered and conjectured as to her future found room to work anew. But beyond the simple fact that she was a widow, he for some time gained not an atom of intelligence concerning her. There was no one of whom he could inquire but his grandmother, and she could tell him nothing about a lady who dwelt far away at Melchester. Several months slipped by thus, and no feeling within him rose to sufficient strength to force him out of a passive attitude. Again by the merest chance his granny stated in one of our rambling epistles that Lady Constantine was coming to live again at Welland in the old house with her child, now a little boy between three and four years of age. Swithin, however, lived on as before. But by the following autumn a change became necessary for the young man himself. His work at the Cape was done. His uncle's wishes that he should study there had been more than observed. The materials for his great treaties were collected, and had now only remained for him to arrange, digest, and publish them, for which purpose a return to England was indispensable. So the equatorial wasn't screwed, and the stand taken down, the astronomer's barrow-load of precious memoranda and rolls upon rolls of diagrams representing three years of continuous labour, were safely packed, and Swithin departed for good and all from the shores of Cape Town. He had long before informed his grandmother of the date at which she might expect him, and in a reply from her, which reached him just previous to sailing, she casually mentioned that she frequently saw Lady Constantine, that on the last occasion her ladyship had shown great interest in the information that Swithin was coming home, and had inquired the time of his return. On a late summer day Swithin stepped from the train at Warborne, and directing his baggage to be sent on after him, set out on foot for old Welland once again. It seemed but the day after his departure, so little had the scene changed. True, there was that change which is always the first to arrest the tension in places that are conventionally called unchanged, a higher and broader vegetation at every familiar corner than at the former time. He had not gone a mile when he saw, walking before him, a clergyman whose form, after consideration, he recognized, in spite of a novel whiteness in that part of his hair that showed below the brim of his hat. Swithin walked much faster than this gentleman, and soon was at his side. "'Mr. Talkingham, I knew it was,' said Swithin. Mr. Talkingham was slower in recognizing the astronomer, but in a moment he greeted him with a warm shake of the hand. "'I have been to the station on purpose to meet you,' cried Mr. Talkingham, and was returning with the idea that you had not come. I am your grandmother's emissary, as she could not come herself, and as she was anxious, and nobody else could be spared. I came for her.' Then they walked on together. The parson told Swithin all about his grandmother, the parish, and his endeavours to enlighten it. And a due course said, you are no doubt aware that Lady Constantine is living again at Welland.' Swithin said that he had heard as much, and added, what was far within the truth, that the news of the Bishop's death had been a great surprise to him. "'Yes,' said Mr. Talkingham, with nine thoughts to one word. One might have prophesized to look at him that Melchester would not lack a bishop for the next forty years. Yes, pale death knocks at the cottages of the poor and the palaces of kings with an impartial foot. Was he a particularly good man?' asked Swithin. He was not a kenner-heber. To speak candidly he had his faults, of which arrogance was not the least. But who is perfect?' Swithin somehow felt relieved to hear that the bishop was not a perfect man. In his poor wife, I fear, had not a great deal more happiness with him than with her first husband. But one might almost have foreseen it. The marriage was hasty. The result of a red-hot caprice hardly becoming in a man of his position, and it be tokened a want of temperate discretion which soon showed itself in other ways. That's all there was to be said against him, and now it is all over, and things have settled again into their old course. But the bishop's widow is not the lady Constantine of former days. No, put it as you will, she is not the same. There seems to be a nameless something on our mind, a trouble, a rooted melancholy, which no man's ministry can reach. Formerly she was a woman whose confidence it was easy to gain, but neither religion nor philosophy avails with her now. From that her life is strangely like what it was when you were with us. Conversing thus they pursued the termpike road till their conversation was interrupted by a crying voice on their left. They looked and perceived that a child in getting over in a joining style had fallen on his face. Mr. Tawkingham and Swithin both hastened up to help the little sufferer, who was a lovely little fellow with flaxen hair, which spread out in a frill of curls from beneath a quaint, close-fitting velvet cap that he wore. Swithin picked him up, while Mr. Tawkingham wiped the sand from his lips and nose and administered a few words of consolation. Together with a few sweet-meats, which, something to Swithin surprise, the parson produced as if by magic from his pocket. One half of the comfort rendered would have sufficed to soothe such a disposition as the child's. He ceased crying and ran away in delight to his unconscious nurse, who was reaching up from blackberries at a head some way off. You know who he is, of course, said Mr. Tawkingham, as they resumed their journey. No, said Swithin. Oh, I thought you did. Yet how should you? It is Lady Constantine's boy, her only child. His fond mother little thinks he is so far away from home. Dear me, Lady Constantine's, ah, how interesting. Swithin paused abstractedly for a moment, then stepped back again to the style while he stood watching the little boy out of sight. I never venture out of doors now without sweets in my pocket, continued the good-natured vicar, and the result is that I meet that young man more frequently on my rounds than any other of my parishioners. St. Cleve was silent, and they turned into well-end lane, where their paths presently diverged, and Swithin was left to pursue his way alone. He might have accompanied a vicar yet further and gone straight into well-end house, but it would have been difficult to do so without provoking an inquiry. It was easy to go there now. By a cross-path he could be at the mansion almost as soon as by the direct road, and yet Swithin did not turn. He felt an indescribable reluctance to see Viviette. He could not exactly say why. True, before he knew how the land lay, it might be awkward to attempt to call. And this was a sufficient excuse for postponement. In this mood he went on, following the direct way to his grandmother's homestead. He reached the garden-gate, and looking into the Bosque Basin, where the old house stood, saw a graceful female form moving before the porch, bidding a Jew to someone within the door. He wondered what creature of that mould his grandmother could know, and went forward with some hesitation. At his approach the apparition turned, and he beheld, developed into blushing womanhood, one who had once been known to him as the village maiden, Tabitha Lark. Seeing Swithin, and apparently from an instinct that her presence would not be desirable just then, she moved quickly round into the garden. The traveller entered the house, where he found awaiting him poor old Mrs. Martin, to whose earthly course death stood rather as yasm tot than as the end. She was perceptibly smaller informed than when he had left her, and she could see less distinctly. A rather affecting greeting followed, in which his grandmother murmured the words of Israel, Now, let me die, since I have seen thy face, because thou art yet alive. The form of Hannah had disappeared from the kitchen, that ancient servant having been gathered up to her father's about six months before, her place being filled by a young girl who knew not Joseph. They presently chatted with much cheerfulness, and his grandmother said, Have you heard what a wonderful young woman Mrs. Lark has become? A mere fleet-footed slittering maid, when you were last at home? St. Cleave had not heard, but he had partly seen. And he was informed that Tabitha had left Welland shortly after his own departure, and had studied music with great success in London, where she had resided ever since to quite recently. That she played at concerts, oratorios, had in short joined the phalanx of wonderful women who had resolved to eclipse masculine genius altogether, and humiliate the brutal sex to the dust. She was only in the garden, added his grandmother, why don't you go out and speak to her? Swithin was nothing loath, and strolled out under the apple-trees, where he had just arrived in time to prevent Mrs. Lark going off by the back gate, there was not much difficulty in breaking the ice between them, and they began to chat with vivacity. Now all these proceedings occupied time. For somehow it was very charming to talk to Mrs. Lark, and by degrees St. Cleave informed Tabitha of his great undertaking, and of the voluminous notes he had amassed, which would require so much rearrangement and recopying by an eminuences as to absolutely appall him. He greatly feared that he should not get one careful enough for such scientific matter, whereupon Tabitha said that she would be delighted to do it for him, then blushing and declaring suddenly that it had grown quite late. She left him in the garden for her relations house hard by. Swithin, no less than Tabitha, had been surprised by the disappearance of the sun behind the hill, and the question now arose whether it would be advisable to call upon Viviette that night. There was little doubt that she knew of his coming, but more than that he could not predicate, and being entirely ignorant of whom she had around her, entirely in the dark as to her present feelings towards him, he thought it would be better to defer his visit until the next day. Walking round to the front of the house, he beheld well-known agriculturalists, Hezibiles, Hamas Frye, and some others of the same old school, passing the gate homeward from the work with bundles of wood at their backs. Swithin saluted him over the top rail. "'Well, do my eyes and ears,' began Hezie, and then balancing his faggots on one end against the hedge came forward, the others following. "'Sis I to myself as soon as I heard his voice,' Hezie continued, addressing Swithin as if he were a disinterested spectator, and not himself. "'Please, God, I'll pitch my niche, and go across and speak to him.' "'Are you not in a wink into some great navigator that I see it standing there?' said Hamas. "'But whether to a sought-a-nay-bob, or a diamond-digger, or a lion-hunter, I couldn't so much as guess till I heard and speak.' "'And what changes have come over well in, since there was last at home?' asked Swithin. "'Well, Mr. Sancleve,' Hezie replied. "'When you've said that a few stripplin' boys and maidens have busted into blute, and a few married women have plimmed and chimped Miladiumungum, why, you've said, a-nised all, Mr. Sancleve?' The conversation, thus began, was continued on diverse matters till they were all enveloped in total darkness, when his old acquaintances shoulder their faggots again and proceeded on their way. Now that he was actually within her coasts against, Swithin felt a little more strongly the influence of the past and viviette, than he had been accustomed to do for the last two or three years. During the night he half felt sorry that he had not marched off to the great house to see her, regardless of the time of day. If she really nourished for him any particle of her old affection, it had been the cruelest thing not to call. A few questions that he put concerning her to his grandmother elicited that Lady Constantine had no friends about her, not even her brother, and that her health had not been so good since her return from Melchester as formerly. Still, this proved nothing as to the state of her heart, and as she had kept a dead silence since the bishop's death it was quite possible that she would meet him with that cold repressive tone and manner which experienced women know so well how to put on, when they wished to intimate to the long-lost lover that old episodes are to be taken as forgotten. The next morning he prepared to call, if only on the ground of old acquaintance, for Swithin was too straight forward to ascertain anything indirectly. It was rather too early for this purpose when he went out from his grandmother's garden gate after breakfast, and he waited in the garden. While he lingered his eye fell on Ringshild's spear. It appeared dark for a moment against the blue sky behind it, and the fleeting cloud which shadowed it passed on and the face of the column brightened into such luminousness that the sky behind sank to the complexion of a dark foil. Surely somebody is on the column, he said to himself, after gazing at it a while. Instead of going straight to the great house he deviated through the insulating field, now sown with turnips which surrounded the plantation on Ringshild. By the time that he plunged under the trees he was still more certain that somebody was on the tower. He crept up to the base, with proprietary curiosity, for the spot seemed again like his own. The path still remained much as formally, but the nook in which the cabin had stood was covered with undergrowth. Swithin entered the door of the tower, ascended the staircase about half way on tiptoe, and listened, for he did not wish to intrude on the top if any stranger were there. The hollow spiral, as he knew from old experience, would bring down to his ears the slightest sound from above, and had now revealed to him the words of a duolog in progress at the summit of the tower. "'Mother, what shall I do?' a child's voice said. Shall I sing?' The mother seemed to assent, for the child began. The robin has fled from the wood to the snug habitation of man. This performance apparently attracted but little attention from the child's companion, for the young voice suggested, as a new form of entertainment, "'Shall I say my prayers?' "'Yes,' replied one whom Swithin had begun to recognize. "'Who shall I pray for?' "'No answer.' "'Who shall I pray for?' "'Pray for father.' "'But he has gone to heaven.' As I, from Viviette, was distinctly audible. "'You made a mistake, didn't you, mother?' continued the little one. "'I must have. The strangest mistake a woman never made.' Nothing more was said, and Swithin ascended, words from above indicating to him that his footsteps were heard. In another half-minute he rose through the hatchway, a lady in black was sitting in the sun, and the boy with the flaxen hair whom he had seen yesterday was at her feet. "'Viviette,' he said. "'Swithin, at last!' she cried. The words died upon her lips, and from very faintness she bent her head. For instead of rushing forward to her he had stood still, and there appeared on his face a look which there was no mistaking. Yes, he was shocked at her worn and faded aspect. The image she had mentally carried out with him to the cape he had brought home again as that of the woman he was now to rejoin. But another woman sat before him, and not the original Viviette. Her cheeks had lost forever that firm contour which had been drawn by the vigorous hand of youth, and the masses of hair that were once darkness visible had become touched here and there by a faint grey haze, like the Via Lattea in a midnight sky. Yet to those who had eyes to understand as well as to see, the chastened pensiveness of her once-handsome features revealed more promising material beneath than ever youth had done. But Swithin was hopelessly her junior. Unhappily for her he had just now arrived at an age whose canon of fate it is that the silly period of woman's life is her only period of beauty. Viviette saw it all, and knew that time had at last brought about his revenges. She had tremblingly watched and waited without sleep ever since Swithin had re-entered wellened, and it was for this. Swithin came forward, and took her by the hand, which she passively allowed him to do. "'Swithin, you don't love me,' she said simply. "'Oh, Viviette, you don't love me,' she repeated. "'Don't say it.' "'Yes, but I will. You have a right not to love me. You once did. But I am now an old woman, and you are still a young man, so how can you love me? I do not expect it. It is kind and charitable of you to come and see me here.' "'I have come all the way from the Cape,' he faltered, for her insistence took all power out of him to deny in mere politeness what she said. "'Yes, you have come from the Cape, but not from me,' she answered. "'It would be absurd if you had come for me. You have come because your work there is finished. I like to sit here with my little boy. It is a pleasant spot. It was once something to us, was it not? But that was long ago. You scarcely knew me for the same woman, did you?' "'Knew you? Yes, of course I knew you. You looked as if you did not. But you must not be surprised at me. I belong to a ne'er generation than you, remember?' Thus ensured bitterness of spirit did she inflict wounds on herself by exaggerating the difference in their years, but she had nevertheless spoken truly. Sympathised with her, as he might, and as he unquestionably did, he loved her no longer. But why had she expected otherwise? "'A woman,' might a prophet have said to her, great is thy faith, if thou believest that Junior Lovers' love will last five years.' "'I shall be glad to know through your grandmother how you were getting on,' she said meekly. But now I would much rather that be part. Yes, do not question me. I would rather that be part. Good-bye.' Hardly knowing what he did he touched her hand and obeyed. He was a scientist, and took word literally. There was something in the inexorably simple logic of such men which partakes of the cruelty of the natural laws that are their study. He entered the terror-steps, and mechanically descended, and it was not till he got halfway down that he thought she could not mean what she had said. Before leaving Cape Town he had made up his mind on this one point, that if she were willing to marry him, marry her he would, without letter hindrance. Not much he morally owed her, and was not the man to demure. And though the swithin who had returned was not quite the swithin who had gone away, though he could not now love her with that sort of love he had once bestowed, he believed that all her conduct had been dictated by the purest benevolence to him, by that charity which seeketh not her own. Hence he did not flinch from a wish to deal with loving-kindness towards her, a sentiment perhaps in the long run more to be prized than lover's love. Her manner had caught him unawares, but now, recovering himself, he turned back determinately. Bursting out upon the roof he clasped her in his arms, and kissed her several times. "'Viviet, viviet,' he said, "'I have come to marry you.' She uttered a shriek, a shriek of amazed joy, such as never was heard on that tower before our since, and fell in his arms, clasping his neck. There she lay heavily. Not to disturb her, he sat down in her seat, still holding her fast. Their little son, who had stood with round, conjectural eyes throughout the meeting, now came close, and presently, looking up to Swithin said, "'Mother has gone to sleep.' Swithin looked down and started. Her type-class had loosened. A wave of whiteness, like that of marble which had never seen the son, crept up from her neck, and travelled upwards and onwards over her cheek, lips, eyelids, forehead, temples. His margin banishing back the live pink till the latter had entirely disappeared. Seeing that something was wrong, yet not understanding what, the little boy began to cry. But in his concentration Swithin hardly heard it. "'Viviet, viviet,' he said. The child cried with still deeper grief, and after a momentary hesitation pushed his hand into Swithin's for protection. "'Hush, hush, my child,' said Swithin distractedly. "'I'll take care of you.' "'Oh, Viviet!' He exclaimed again, pressing her face to his. But she did not reply. "'What can this be?' He asked himself. He would not then answer according to his fear. He looked for help. Nobody appeared in sight but Tabitha Lark, who was skirting the field with a bounding tread, the single bright spot of colour and animation within the whole horizon. When he looked down again, his fear deepened to certainty. It was no longer a mere surmise that help was vain. Sudden joy after despair had touched an overstrained heart too smartly. Viviet was dead. The bishop was avenged.