第45章

Her wits must have been a good deal confused by the strange sights of the evening.She had seen tickets marked complimentary, she remembered, but she could not for the life of her understand why our party should be particularly favored at a celestial exhibition like this.On the whole, she questioned inwardly whether it might not be some subtle pleasantry, and smiled, experimentally, with a note of interrogation in the smile, but, finding no encouragement, allowed her features to subside gradually as if nothing had happened.I saw all this as plainly as if it had all been printed in great-primer type, instead of working itself out in her features.I like to see other people muddled now and then, because my own occasional dulness is relieved by a good solid background of stupidity in my neighbors.

--And the two revolve round each other? --said the Young Girl.

--Yes,--he answered,--two suns, a greater and a less, each shining, but with a different light, for the other.

--How charming! It must be so much pleasanter than to be alone in such a great empty space! I should think one would hardly care to shine if its light wasted itself in the monstrous solitude of the sky.Does not a single star seem very lonely to you up there?

--Not more lonely than I am myself,--answered the Young Astronomer.

--I don't know what there was in those few words, but I noticed that for a minute or two after they, were uttered I heard the ticking of the clock-work that moved the telescope as clearly as if we had all been holding our breath, and listening for the music of the spheres.

The Young Girl kept her eye closely applied to the eye-piece of the telescope a very long time, it seemed to me.Those double stars interested her a good deal, no doubt.When she looked off from the glass I thought both her eyes appeared very much as if they had been a little strained, for they were suffused and glistening.It may be that she pitied the lonely young man.

I know nothing in the world tenderer than the pity that a kind-hearted young girl has for a young man who feels lonely.It is true that these dear creatures are all compassion for every form of human woe, and anxious to alleviate all human misfortunes.They will go to Sunday-schools through storms their brothers are afraid of, to teach the most unpleasant and intractable classes of little children the age of Methuselah and the dimensions of Og the King of Bashan's bedstead.They will stand behind a table at a fair all day until they are ready to drop, dressed in their prettiest clothes and their sweetest smiles, and lay hands upon you, like--so many Lady Potiphars,--perfectly correct ones, of course,--to make you buy what you do not want, at prices which you cannot afford; all this as cheerfully as if it were not martyrdom to them as well as to you.

Such is their love for all good objects, such their eagerness to sympathize with all their suffering fellow-creatures! But there is nothing they pity as they pity a lonely young man.

I am sure, I sympathize with her in this instance.To see a pale student burning away, like his own midnight lamp, with only dead men's hands to hold, stretched out to him from the sepulchres of books, and dead men's souls imploring him from their tablets to warm them over again just for a little while in a human consciousness, when all this time there are soft, warm, living hands that would ask nothing better than to bring the blood back into those cold thin fingers, and gently caressing natures that would wind all their tendrils about the unawakened heart which knows so little of itself, is pitiable enough and would be sadder still if we did not have the feeling that sooner or later the pale student will be pretty sure to feel the breath of a young girl against his cheek as she looks over his shoulder; and that he will come all at once to an illuminated page in his book that never writer traced in characters, and never printer set up in type, and never binder enclosed within his covers!

But our young man seems farther away from life than any student whose head is bent downwards over his books.His eyes are turned away from all human things.How cold the moonlight is that falls upon his forehead, and how white he looks in it! Will not the rays strike through to his brain at last, and send him to a narrower cell than this egg-shell dome which is his workshop and his prison?

I cannot say that the Young Astronomer seemed particularly impressed with a sense of his miserable condition.He said he was lonely, it is true, but he said it in a manly tone, and not as if he were repining at the inevitable condition of his devoting himself to that particular branch of science.Of course, he is lonely, the most lonely being that lives in the midst of our breathing world.If he would only stay a little longer with us when we get talking; but he is busy almost always either in observation or with his calculations and studies, and when the nights are fair loses so much sleep that he must make it up by day.He wants contact with human beings.I wish he would change his seat and come round and sit by our Scheherezade!

The rest of the visit went off well enough, except that the "Man of Letters," so called, rather snubbed some of the heavenly bodies as not quite up to his standard of brilliancy.I thought myself that the double-star episode was the best part of it.