Two on a Tower

‘But would you like to see it?’ he recommenced. ‘It is an event that is witnessed only about once in two or three years, though it may occur often enough.’

She assented, and looked through the shaded eyepiece, and saw a whirling mass, in the centre of which the blazing globe seemed to be laid bare to its core. It was a peep into a maelstrom of fire, taking place where nobody had ever been or ever would be.

‘It is the strangest thing I ever beheld,’ she said. Then he looked again; till wondering who her companion could be she asked, ‘Are you often here?’

‘Every night when it is not cloudy, and often in the day.’

‘Ah, night, of course. The heavens must be beautiful from this point.’

‘They are rather more than that.’

‘Indeed! Have you entirely taken possession of this column?’

‘Entirely.’

‘But it is my column,’ she said, with smiling asperity.

‘Then are you Lady Constantine, wife of the absent Sir Blount Constantine?’

‘I am Lady Constantine.’

‘Ah, then I agree that it is your ladyship’s. But will you allow me to rent it of you for a time, Lady Constantine?’

‘You have taken it, whether I allow it or not. However, in the interests of science it is advisable that you continue your tenancy. Nobody knows you are here, I suppose?’

‘Hardly anybody.’

He then took her down a few steps into the interior, and showed her some ingenious contrivances for stowing articles away.

‘Nobody ever comes near the column, – or, as it’s called here, Rings-Hill Speer,’ he continued; ‘and when I first came up it nobody had been here for thirty or forty years. The staircase was choked with daws’ nests and feathers, but I cleared them out.’

‘I understood the column was always kept locked?’

‘Yes, it has been so. When it was built, in 1782, the key was given to my great-grandfather, to keep by him in case visitors should happen to want it. He lived just down there where I live now.’

He denoted by a nod a little dell lying immediately beyond the ploughed land which environed them.

‘He kept it in his bureau, and as the bureau descended to my grandfather, my mother, and myself, the key descended with it. After the first thirty or forty years, nobody ever asked for it. One day I saw it, lying rusty in its niche, and, finding that it belonged to this column, I took it and came up. I stayed here till it was dark, and the stars came out, and that night I resolved to be an astronomer. I came back here from school several months ago, and I mean to be an astronomer still.’

He lowered his voice, and added:

‘I aim at nothing less than the dignity and office of Astronomer Royal, if I live. Perhaps I shall not live.’

‘I don’t see why you should suppose that,’ said she. ‘How long are you going to make this your observatory?’

‘About a year longer – till I have obtained a practical familiarity with the heavens. Ah, if I only had a good equatorial!’

‘What is that?’

‘A proper instrument for my pursuit. But time is short, and science is infinite, – how infinite only those who study astronomy fully realize, – and perhaps I shall be worn out before I make my mark.’

She seemed to be greatly struck by the odd mixture in him of scientific earnestness and melancholy mistrust of all things human. Perhaps it was owing to the nature of his studies.

‘You are often on this tower alone at night?’ she said.

‘Yes; at this time of the year particularly, and while there is no moon. I observe from seven or eight till about two in the morning, with a view to my great work on variable stars. But with such a telescope as this – well, I must put up with it!’

‘Can you see Saturn’s ring and Jupiter’s moons?’

He said drily that he could manage to do that, not without some contempt for the state of her knowledge.

‘I have never seen any planet or star through a telescope.’

‘If you will come the first clear night, Lady Constantine, I will show you any number. I mean, at your express wish; not otherwise.’

‘I should like to come, and possibly may at some time. These stars that vary so much – sometimes evening stars, sometimes morning stars, sometimes in the east, and sometimes in the west – have always interested me.’

‘Ah – now there is a reason for your not coming. Your ignorance of the realities of astronomy is so satisfactory that I will not disturb it except at your serious request.’

‘But I wish to be enlightened.’

‘Let me caution you against it.’

‘Is enlightenment on the subject, then, so terrible?’

‘Yes, indeed.’

She laughingly declared that nothing could have so piqued her curiosity as his statement, and turned to descend. He helped her down the stairs and through the briers. He would have gone further and crossed the open corn-land with her, but she preferred to go alone. He then retraced his way to the top of the column, but, instead of looking longer at the sun, watched her diminishing towards the distant fence, behind which waited the carriage. When in the midst of the field, a dark spot on an area of brown, there crossed her path a moving figure, whom it was as difficult to distinguish from the earth he trod as the caterpillar from its leaf, by reason of the excellent match between his clothes and the clods. He was one of a dying-out generation who retained the principle, nearly unlearnt now, that a man’s habiliments should be in harmony with his environment. Lady Constantine and this figure halted beside each other for some minutes; then they went on their several ways.

The brown person was a labouring man known to the world of Welland as Haymoss (the encrusted form of the word Amos, to adopt the phrase of philologists). The reason of the halt had been some inquiries addressed to him by Lady Constantine.

‘Who is that – Amos Fry, I think?’ she had asked.

‘Yes my lady,’ said Haymoss; ‘a homely barley driller, born under the eaves of your ladyship’s outbuildings, in a manner of speaking, – though your ladyship was neither born nor ‘tempted at that time.’

‘Who lives in the old house behind the plantation?’

‘Old Gammer Martin, my lady, and her grandson.’

‘He has neither father nor mother, then?’

‘Not a single one, my lady.’

‘Where was he educated?’

‘At Warborne, – a place where they draw up young gam’sters’ brains like rhubarb under a ninepenny pan, my lady, excusing my common way. They hit so much larning into en that ’a could talk like the day of Pentecost; which is a wonderful thing for a simple boy, and his mother only the plainest ciphering woman in the world. Warborne Grammar School – that’s where ’twas ’a went to. His father, the reverent Pa’son St. Cleeve, made a terrible bruckle hit in ’s marrying, in the sight of the high. He were the curate here, my lady, for a length o’ time.’

‘Oh, curate,’ said Lady Constantine. ‘It was before I knew the village.’