Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (414 page)

‘It was done in my haste, and I am very, very sorry for it!  I beg both you and all my few friends never, never to forgive me!  It would kill me with self-reproach if you were to pardon my rashness!’

At this moment the doctor was announced, and Mrs. Martin went downstairs to receive him.  Lady Constantine thought she would remain to hear his report, and for this purpose withdrew, and sat down in a nook of the adjoining work-room of Swithin, the doctor meeting her as he passed through it into the sick chamber.

He was there a torturingly long time; but at length he came out to the room she waited in, and crossed it on his way downstairs.  She rose and followed him to the stairhead.

‘How is he?’ she anxiously asked.  ‘Will he get over it?’

The doctor, not knowing the depth of her interest in the patient, spoke with the blunt candour natural towards a comparatively indifferent inquirer.

‘No, Lady Constantine,’ he replied; ‘there’s a change for the worse.’

And he retired down the stairs.

Scarcely knowing what she did Lady Constantine ran back to Swithin’s side, flung herself upon the bed and in a paroxysm of sorrow kissed him.

CHAPTER X

The placid inhabitants of the parish of Welland, including warbling waggoners, lone shepherds, ploughmen, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the gardener at the Great House, the steward and agent, the parson, clerk, and so on, were hourly expecting the announcement of St. Cleeve’s death.  The sexton had been going to see his brother-in-law, nine miles distant, but promptly postponed the visit for a few days, that there might be the regular professional hand present to toll the bell in a note of due fulness and solemnity; an attempt by a deputy, on a previous occasion of his absence, having degenerated into a miserable stammering clang that was a disgrace to the parish.

But Swithin St. Cleeve did not decease, a fact of which, indeed, the habituated reader will have been well aware ever since the rain came down upon the young man in the ninth chapter, and led to his alarming illness.  Though, for that matter, so many maimed histories are hourly enacting themselves in this dun-coloured world as to lend almost a priority of interest to narratives concerning those

‘Who lay great bases for eternity

Which prove more short than waste or ruining.’

How it arose that he did not die was in this wise; and his example affords another instance of that reflex rule of the vassal soul over the sovereign body, which, operating so wonderfully in elastic natures, and more or less in all, originally gave rise to the legend that supremacy lay on the other side.

The evening of the day after the tender, despairing, farewell kiss of Lady Constantine, when he was a little less weak than during her visit, he lay with his face to the window.  He lay alone, quiet and resigned.  He had been thinking, sometimes of her and other friends, but chiefly of his lost discovery.  Although nearly unconscious at the time, he had yet been aware of that kiss, as the delicate flush which followed it upon his cheek would have told; but he had attached little importance to it as between woman and man.  Had he been dying of love instead of wet weather, perhaps the impulsive act of that handsome lady would have been seized on as a proof that his love was returned.  As it was her kiss seemed but the evidence of a naturally demonstrative kindliness, felt towards him chiefly because he was believed to be leaving her for ever.

The reds of sunset passed, and dusk drew on.  Old Hannah came upstairs to pull down the blinds and as she advanced to the window he said to her, in a faint voice, ‘Well, Hannah, what news to-day?’

‘Oh, nothing, sir,’ Hannah replied, looking out of the window with sad apathy, ‘only that there’s a comet, they say.’

‘A what?’ said the dying astronomer, starting up on his elbow.

‘A comet — that’s all, Master Swithin,’ repeated Hannah, in a lower voice, fearing she had done harm in some way.

‘Well, tell me, tell me!’ cried Swithin.  ‘Is it Gambart’s?  Is it Charles the Fifth’s, or Halley’s, or Faye’s, or whose?’

‘Hush!’ said she, thinking St. Cleeve slightly delirious again.  ‘‘Tis God A’mighty’s, of course.  I haven’t seed en myself, but they say he’s getting bigger every night, and that he’ll be the biggest one known for fifty years when he’s full growed.  There, you must not talk any more now, or I’ll go away.’

Here was an amazing event, little noise as it had made in the happening.  Of all phenomena that he had longed to witness during his short astronomical career, those appertaining to comets had excited him most.  That the magnificent comet of 1811 would not return again for thirty centuries had been quite a permanent regret with him.  And now, when the bottomless abyss of death seemed yawning beneath his feet, one of these much-desired apparitions, as large, apparently, as any of its tribe, had chosen to show itself.

‘O, if I could but live to see that comet through my equatorial!’ he cried.

Compared with comets, variable stars, which he had hitherto made his study, were, from their remoteness, uninteresting.  They were to the former as the celebrities of Ujiji or Unyamwesi to the celebrities of his own country.  Members of the solar system, these dazzling and perplexing rangers, the fascination of all astronomers, rendered themselves still more fascinating by the sinister suspicion attaching to them of being possibly the ultimate destroyers of the human race.  In his physical prostration St. Cleeve wept bitterly at not being hale and strong enough to welcome with proper honour the present specimen of these desirable visitors.

The strenuous wish to live and behold the new phenomenon, supplanting the utter weariness of existence that he had heretofore experienced, gave him a new vitality.  The crisis passed; there was a turn for the better; and after that he rapidly mended.  The comet had in all probability saved his life.  The limitless and complex wonders of the sky resumed their old power over his imagination; the possibilities of that unfathomable blue ocean were endless.  Finer feats than ever he would perform were to be achieved in its investigation.  What Lady Constantine had said, that for one discovery made ten awaited making, was strikingly verified by the sudden appearance of this splendid marvel.

The windows of St. Cleeve’s bedroom faced the west, and nothing would satisfy him but that his bed should be so pulled round as to give him a view of the low sky, in which the as yet minute tadpole of fire was recognizable.  The mere sight of it seemed to lend him sufficient resolution to complete his own cure forthwith.  His only fear now was lest, from some unexpected cause or other, the comet would vanish before he could get to the observatory on Rings-Hill Speer.

In his fervour to begin observing he directed that an old telescope, which he had used in his first celestial attempts, should be tied at one end to the bed-post, and at the other fixed near his eye as he reclined.  Equipped only with this rough improvisation he began to take notes.  Lady Constantine was forgotten, till one day, suddenly, wondering if she knew of the important phenomenon, he revolved in his mind whether as a fellow-student and sincere friend of his she ought not to be sent for, and instructed in the use of the equatorial.

But though the image of Lady Constantine, in spite of her kindness and unmistakably warm heart, had been obscured in his mind by the heavenly body, she had not so readily forgotten him.  Too shy to repeat her visit after so nearly betraying her secret, she yet, every day, by the most ingenious and subtle means that could be devised by a woman who feared for herself, but could not refrain from tampering with danger, ascertained the state of her young friend’s health.  On hearing of the turn in his condition she rejoiced on his account, and became yet more despondent on her own.  If he had died she might have mused on him as her dear departed saint without much sin: but his return to life was a delight that bewildered and dismayed.

One evening a little later on he was sitting at his bedroom window as usual, waiting for a sufficient decline of light to reveal the comet’s form, when he beheld, crossing the field contiguous to the house, a figure which he knew to be hers.  He thought she must be coming to see him on the great comet question, to discuss which with so delightful and kind a comrade was an expectation full of pleasure.  Hence he keenly observed her approach, till something happened that surprised him.

When, at the descent of the hill, she had reached the stile that admitted to Mrs. Martin’s garden, Lady Constantine stood quite still for a minute or more, her gaze bent on the ground.  Instead of coming on to the house she went heavily and slowly back, almost as if in pain; and then at length, quickening her pace, she was soon out of sight.  She appeared in the path no more that day.

CHAPTER XI

Why had Lady Constantine stopped and turned?

A misgiving had taken sudden possession of her.  Her true sentiment towards St. Cleeve was too recognizable by herself to be tolerated.

That she had a legitimate interest in him as a young astronomer was true; that her sympathy on account of his severe illness had been natural and commendable was also true.  But the superfluous feeling was what filled her with trepidation.

Superfluities have been defined as things you cannot do without, and this particular emotion, that came not within her rightful measure, was in danger of becoming just such a superfluity with her.  In short, she felt there and then that to see St. Cleeve again would be an impropriety; and by a violent effort she retreated from his precincts, as he had observed.

She resolved to ennoble her conduct from that moment of her life onwards.  She would exercise kind patronage towards Swithin without once indulging herself with his company.  Inexpressibly dear to her deserted heart he was becoming, but for the future he should at least be hidden from her eyes.  To speak plainly, it was growing a serious question whether, if he were not hidden from her eyes, she would not soon be plunging across the ragged boundary which divides the permissible from the forbidden.

By the time that she had drawn near home the sun was going down.  The heavy, many-chevroned church, now subdued by violet shadow except where its upper courses caught the western stroke of flame-colour, stood close to her grounds, as in many other parishes, though the village of which it formerly was the nucleus had become quite depopulated: its cottages had been demolished to enlarge the park, leaving the old building to stand there alone, like a standard without an army.

It was Friday night, and she heard the organist practising voluntaries within.  The hour, the notes, the even-song of the birds, and her own previous emotions, combined to influence her devotionally.  She entered, turning to the right and passing under the chancel arch, where she sat down and viewed the whole empty length, east and west.  The semi-Norman arches of the nave, with their multitudinous notchings, were still visible by the light from the tower window, but the lower portion of the building was in obscurity, except where the feeble glimmer from the candle of the organist spread a glow-worm radiance around.  The player, who was Miss Tabitha Lark, continued without intermission to produce her wandering sounds, unconscious of any one’s presence except that of the youthful blower at her side.

The rays from the organist’s candle illuminated but one small fragment of the chancel outside the precincts of the instrument, and that was the portion of the eastern wall whereon the ten commandments were inscribed.  The gilt letters shone sternly into Lady Constantine’s eyes; and she, being as impressionable as a turtle-dove, watched a certain one of those commandments on the second table, till its thunder broke her spirit with blank contrition.

She knelt down, and did her utmost to eradicate those impulses towards St. Cleeve which were inconsistent with her position as the wife of an absent man, though not unnatural in her as his victim.

She knelt till she seemed scarcely to belong to the time she lived in, which lost the magnitude that the nearness of its perspective lent it on ordinary occasions, and took its actual rank in the long line of other centuries.  Having once got out of herself, seen herself from afar off, she was calmer, and went on to register a magnanimous vow.  She would look about for some maiden fit and likely to make St. Cleeve happy; and this girl she would endow with what money she could afford, that the natural result of their apposition should do him no worldly harm.  The interest of her, Lady Constantine’s, life should be in watching the development of love between Swithin and the ideal maiden.  The very painfulness of the scheme to her susceptible heart made it pleasing to her conscience; and she wondered that she had not before this time thought of a stratagem which united the possibility of benefiting the astronomer with the advantage of guarding against peril to both Swithin and herself.  By providing for him a suitable helpmate she would preclude the dangerous awakening in him of sentiments reciprocating her own.

Arrived at a point of exquisite misery through this heroic intention, Lady Constantine’s tears moistened the books upon which her forehead was bowed.  And as she heard her feverish heart throb against the desk, she firmly believed the wearing impulses of that heart would put an end to her sad life, and momentarily recalled the banished image of St. Cleeve to apostrophise him in thoughts that paraphrased the quaint lines of Heine’s
Lieb’ Liebchen
: —

‘Dear my love, press thy hand to my breast, and tell

If thou tracest the knocks in that narrow cell;

A carpenter dwells there; cunning is he,

And slyly he’s shaping a coffin for me!’

Lady Constantine was disturbed by a break in the organist’s meandering practice, and raising her head she saw a person standing by the player.  It was Mr. Torkingham, and what he said was distinctly audible.  He was inquiring for herself.

‘I thought I saw Lady Constantine walk this way,’ he rejoined to Tabitha’s negative.  ‘I am very anxious indeed to meet with her.’