Two on a Tower | Page 7

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