'J reckon you know by now of our main news this fall, but lest you
should not have heard of it J send the exact thing snipped out of the
newspaper. Nobody expected her to do it quite so soon; but it is said
hereabout that my lord bishop and my lady had been drawing nigh to an
understanding before the glum tidings of Sir Blount's taking of his
own life reached her; and the account of this wicked deed was so sore
afflicting to her mind, and made her poor heart so timid and low, that
in charity to my lady her few friends agreed on urging her to let the
bishop go on paying his court as before, notwithstanding she had not
been a widow-woman near so long as was thought. This, as it turned
out, she was willing to do; and when my lord asked her she told him
she would marry him at once or never. That's as J was told, and J had
it from those that know.'
The cutting from the newspaper was an ordinary announcement of marriage
between the Bishop of Melchester and Lady Constantine.
Swithin was so astounded at the intelligence of what for the nonce seemed
Viviette's wanton fickleness that he quite omitted to look at the second
letter; and remembered nothing about it till an hour afterwards, when
sitting in his own room at the hotel.
It was in her handwriting, but so altered that its superscription had not
arrested his eye. It had no beginning, or date; but its contents soon
acquainted him with her motive for the precipitate act. The few
concluding sentences are all that it will be necessary to quote here:--
'There was no way out of it, even if I could have found you, without
infringing one of the conditions I had previously laid down. The long
desire of my heart has been not to impoverish you or mar your career.
The new desire was to save myself and, still more, another yet unborn.
. . . I have done a desperate thing. Yet for myself I could do no
better, and for you no less. I would have sacrificed my single self
to honesty, but I was not alone concerned. What woman has a right to
blight a coming life to preserve her personal integrity? . . . The
one bright spot is that it saves you and your endowment from further
catastrophes, and preserves you to the pleasant paths of scientific
fame. I no longer lie like a log across your path, which is now as
open as on the day before you saw me, and ere I encouraged you to win
me. Alas, Swithin, I ought to have known better. The folly was
great, and the suffering be upon my head! I ought not to have
consented to that last interview: all was well till then! . . . Well,
I have borne much, and am not unprepared. As for you, Swithin, by
simply pressing straight on your triumph is assured. Do not
communicate with me in any way--not even in answer to this. Do not
think of me. Do not see me ever any more.--Your unhappy
'VIVIETTE.'
Swithin's heart swelled within him in sudden pity for her, first; then he
blanched with a horrified sense of what she had done, and at his own
relation to the deed. He felt like an awakened somnambulist who should
find that he had been accessory to a tragedy during his unconsciousness.
She had loosened the knot of her difficulties by cutting it
unscrupulously through and through.
The big tidings rather dazed than crushed him, his predominant feeling
being soon again one of keenest sorrow and sympathy. Yet one thing was
obvious; he could do nothing--absolutely nothing. The event which he now
heard of for the first time had taken place five long months ago. He
reflected, and regretted--and mechanically went on with his preparations
for settling down to work under the shadow of Table Mountain. He was as
one who suddenly finds the world a stranger place than he thought; but is
excluded by age, temperament, and situation from being much more than an
astonished spectator of its strangeness.
* * * * *
The Royal Observatory was about a mile out of the town, and hither he
repaired as soon as he had established himself in lodgings. He had
decided, on his first visit to the Cape, that it would be highly
advantageous to him if he could supplement the occasional use of the
large instruments here by the use at his own house of his own equatorial,
and had accordingly given directions that it might be sent over from
England. The precious possession now arrived; and although the sight of
it--of the brasses on which her hand had often rested, of the eyepiece
through which her dark eyes had beamed--engendered some decidedly bitter
regrets in him for a time, he could not long afford to give to the past
the days that were meant for the future.
Unable to get a room convenient for a private observatory he resolved at
last to fix the instrument on a solid pillar in the garden; and several
days were spent in accommodating it to its new position. In this
latitude there was no necessity for economizing clear nights as he had
been obliged to do on the old tower at Welland. There it had happened
more than once, that after waiting idle through days and nights of cloudy
weather, Viviette would fix her time for meeting him at an hour when at
last he had an opportunity of seeing the sky; so that in giving to her
the golden moments of cloudlessness he was losing his chance with the
orbs above.
Those features which usually attract the eye of the visitor to a new
latitude are the novel forms of human and vegetable life, and other such
sublunary things. But the young man glanced slightingly at these; the
changes overhead had all his attention. The old subject was imprinted
there, but in a new type. Here was a heaven, fixed and ancient as the
northern; yet it had never appeared above the Welland hills since they
were heaved up from beneath. Here was an unalterable circumpolar region;
but the polar patterns stereotyped in history and legend--without which
it had almost seemed that a polar sky could not exist--had never been
seen therein.
St. Cleeve, as was natural, began by cursory surveys, which were not
likely to be of much utility to the world or to himself. He wasted
several weeks--indeed above two months--in a comparatively idle survey of
southern novelties; in the mere luxury of looking at stellar objects
whose wonders were known, recounted, and classified, long before his own
personality had been heard of. With a child's simple delight he allowed
his instrument to rove, evening after evening, from the gorgeous glitter
of Canopus to the hazy clouds of Magellan. Before he had well finished
this optical prelude there floated over to him from the other side of the
Equator the postscript to the epistle of his lost Viviette. It came in
the vehicle of a common newspaper, under the head of 'Births:'--
'April 10th, 18--, at the Palace, Melchester, the wife of the Bishop of
Melchester, of a son.'