Chapter V: Quenchless Stars Eloquent

O, who shall tell what deep inspirèd things
Thou speakest me, when, tranquil as the skies,
O Night, I stand in shadow of thy wings,
And with thy robe of suns fulfil mine eyes!
—E. SWEETMAN (_The Star-Gazer_).

It is no unusual thing for a man whom human love has betrayed and left bare; whose life some violent human passion has robbed of all savour, to turn for consolation to the things of heaven. This is what, in course of time, had befallen Sir David Cheveral, when his youthful dream of happiness had fled before a bitter awakening. But the heaven to which he had turned was not that “Realm beyond the Stars” pictured by the faith of ages, but that actual region above and about our globe, as mysterious a world, perhaps, and as little heeded by the bulk of mankind; that immensity peopled by other suns and earths, ruled by a harmony so vast and grandiose that the thought of centuries is but beginning to grasp it; that universe of space and time, as unfathomable to our finite groping senses and as appealing to imagination and reason both as any realm of eternity pictured by the poets of any creed!

The worlds outside the earth, then, seemed for years to have given to his desolate spirit, gradually and absorbingly, all that the world of earth has in different ways to give to man.

The dome of heaven was David Cheveral’s mistress. To his phantasy, a mistress ever variable and ever loved; whether chastely remote, ridden by the fine silver crescent, emblem of virginity; or passionate, low-brooding, full-mooned and crimson, pregnant with autumn promise; or yet high and cold, in winter magnificence, sparkling with the jewels that are beyond dreams of splendour; or yet again veiled and indifferent; or stormy, cloud-wracked with the anger of the gods; condescending now with exquisite intimacy, anon passing as irrevocably as Diana from her shepherd. Who that had once loved such a mistress could ever turn back to one of earth again? So thought the star-dreamer of Bindon.

And this esthetic passion was at the same time his art and his life-work. It filled not only heart, but mind. Endless was the lesson to be learned, opening the road endlessly to others; untiring the labour to be expended; his own the genius to divine, to grasp, to translate; and his also every gratification, every reward! So thought the star-dreamer. He had drifted into a life of study and contemplation as solitary men drift into eccentricity; and if in its all absorbing tendency there lurked madness of a sort, there was a harmonious method in it; and to him, at least (precious boon!), it spelt peace of soul.

Every day’s work of such a study meant a fresh conquest of the mind, noble and peaceful. Mighty conceptions unfolded themselves to an ever-soaring intellect and thrust back more and more the pigmy doings of this small earth into their proper insignificance. Meanwhile his sight was rejoiced with beauty ever renewed. The music of the spheres played its great harmonies to his fastidious ear; the rhythm of a universal poetry, too exquisite to find expression in mere words, settled upon a mind ever attuned to vastness, till the drab miseries of humanity seemed well-nigh fallen away, and the petty fret of everyday life, the chafing, the disillusion, the smart of pride, the cry of the senses, were as forgotten things.—His soul was filled with visions.

Now on this evening, while Master Simon in his laboratory underground was being called by unexpected claims from his own line of abstraction, something equally startling had occurred to Sir David Cheveral in his observatory.

He was pacing his airy platform on the top of the keep, under an exquisite and pensive sky of most benign charity. Never had he felt himself more uplifted to the empyrean, more detached from a sordid world, than at the beginning of this watch. Deep beyond deep spread the blue vasts above him. As the lover knows the soul of his beloved, so his vision, unaided, pierced into the heart of mysteries that even through the telescope would be veiled to the neophyte.

Upon her moonless brow this autumnal night wore a coronal of stars that might have shamed her later glories. The Heavenly Twins and Giant Orion beginning the southward ascent in splendid company; Aldebaran, fiery-red eye of the Bull; the tremulous pearly sheen of the Pleiades; the grand, upright cross of Cygnus, planted in the very stream of the Milky Way, and, slowly sinking towards the West, the gracious circlet of the Northern Crown—when had Night’s greater jewels shone with more entrancing lustre upon the diaper of her endless lesser gems!

David Cheveral turned from one field of beauty to another; anon reckoning his treasures with a jealous eye, anon letting the vast beauty mirror itself in his soul as in a placid pool.

But rapture is ever tracked by fatigue: it seems to be an envious, miserly law of our finite nature that every spell of exaltation must be paid for by despondency. Melancholy is but the weariness either of mind or of body: often of both. The airs were variable and cold, and food had not passed his lips for many hours; yet he had no conscious hankering for the warm hearthstones beneath him; no conscious desire for the touch of a fellow hand or the sound of a human voice. But, by slow degrees there crept upon him an unwonted and profound sadness.

A familiar catch-phrase of Master Simon’s:—“And life’s so short! and life’s so short!”—had begun to haunt his thoughts, to whisper in his ear, lulled though it was by the voice of solitude. A sense of his own limitations before this illimitable began to oppress him. So much beauty and but one sense with which to possess it: but weak mortal eyes and an imperfect vision, inferior even to that of many an animal! To feel within oneself the intellect, the power to conceive the creations of a God, and to know that one’s ignorance was still as vast as the field of knowledge offered ... the pity of it! With every gracious night such as this to glean a little more of the rich harvest—and life so short that, were one to live a cycle beyond the allotted span, the truth garnered in the end would be but as motes glinting here and there in floods of light!

Such revolts give way to lassitude. The useless “Why?” is inevitably succeeded by the “_Cui bono?_”

The astronomer who was too much of a poet—the star-dreamer, as men called him—drew a deep sigh. He had been tempted from his self-allotted task of calculation as a lover may be tempted to dally in adoration of his beloved. He now turned to go back to his table, but as he did so was once more arrested in spite of himself by the fascination of the great dome.

As it is the desire of man to possess what he finds most beautiful, so is it the instinct of the poet, of the painter, of the musician, to express and give again to the world the captured ideal.—The pain of impotency clutched at the dreamer’s heart.

But of a sudden he started; his sad eyes became alert and fixed.—An event that happens but at rarest times in the history of human observation had taken place under his very gaze.

A new gem had been added to the splendours of the heavens!

His languid pulses beat quicker. He passed his hand across his brow; no, it was not the overworked student’s hallucination! Did he not know every aspect of the constellation, of the evening, of the hour? Sooner might a woman miscount her jewels, a collector his treasures, than he misread the face of his idol! It was no fancy. There, above the Northern Crown, a new star—a fire of surpassing radiance had flashed out of his sky even at the moment of his looking.

He had seen it suddenly blossoming, as if it were into his own garden, like a magic flower from some hidden bud. An unknown light had pulsed into existence where darkness hitherto had reigned.

A new star had been born! His soul caught up the fire of its brilliance. It was as if his transient faithlessness had been beautifully rebuked; his faintness of heart driven forth by a glance of his beloved’s eyes. Nay, it was as if, in some fashion, his mystic espousal had brought forth life. To him had been given what is not given to man once in a cycle—to receive the first flash of a world!

Inexpressibly stirred, filled with enthusiasm, he hurried to his instruments and with eager hand turned the great lenses upon the apparition.

Out of the chasm of those inconceivable spaces—from the first contemplation of which, it is said, the neophyte recoils with something like terror—broke, swirling, the splendour of a star where certainly no star had ever been seen before. _His star!_ Breaking from the darkness, it sailed across the field of his vision, radiant, sapphire, gorgeously, exquisitely blue!

To every man who lives more in the spirit than in the flesh there come moments when the _afflatus_ of the gods seems to descend upon him; moments of intuition, inspiration or hallucination, when he sees things not revealed to the ordinary mortal. What, in his sudden exalted mood, David Cheveral saw that night was never vouchsafed to him again. It was beyond anything he could ever put into words; almost, in saner moments, he shrank from putting it into thought.

When at length he descended from his altitudes and touched earth again, though still as in a trance, he entered a record of the discovery on his chart. Every student of the heavens knows that a new star is oftener than not temporary and may fade away as mysteriously as it has blazed forth. His next care, although it was against his habits to invite the company of his fellow creature, was instinctively to seek another witness to the event.

However man may cut himself adrift from his kin, the impulses of his nature remain ever the same in critical moments. A joy is not complete until it is shared; a triumph is savourless until it is acclaimed.

He was still dazed from the strain of watching, from the gloom of the black tower stairs and of the long unlit passages when he reached the basement rooms that were Master Simon’s province at Bindon.

Pushing open the heavy oaken door, he stood a moment looking in.

There was cheerful candle-gleam where he was wont to find dimness; a gay sound of laughter and words where silence used to reign; and instead of Master Simon’s bent grey head, there rose before his sight, haloed with light, so white and pure as almost to seem luminous itself, a young forehead set in a radiance of crisp, fiery-gold hair. His eyes encountered the beam of two unknown eyes, exquisitely blue. Blue as his star!

And he thought he still saw visions; thought that his star had as suddenly and sweetly taken living shape here below as above in the unattainable skies.