University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII.

“Irene, it is past midnight.”

She gave no intimation of having heard him.

“Irene, my child, it is one o'clock.”

Without looking up, she raised her hand
toward the clock on the mantle, and answered,
coldly:

“You need not sit up to tell me the time of
night; I have a clock here. Go to sleep, uncle
Eric.”

He rested his shoulder against the door-facing,
and, leaning on his crutches, watched
her.

She sat there just as he had seen her several
times before, with her arms crossed on the
table, the large celestial globe drawn near, astronomical
catalogues scattered about, and a
thick folio open before her. She wore a loose
wrapper, or robe de chambre, of black velvet,
lined with crimson silk and girded with a heavy
cord and tassel. The sleeves were very full,
and fell away from the arms, exposing them
from the dimpled elbows, and rendering their
pearly whiteness more apparent by contrast
with the sable hue of the velvet, while the
broad round collar was pressed smoothly down,
revealing the polished turn of the throat.
The ivory comb lay on the table, and the unbound
hair, falling around her shoulders, swept
over the back of her chair and trailed on the
carpet. A miracle of statuesque beauty was
his queenly niece, yet he could not look at her
without a vague feeling of awe, of painful apprehension;
and, as he stood watching her motionless
figure in its grand yet graceful pose,
he sighed involuntarily. She rose, shook back
her magnificent hair, and approached him.
Her eyes, so like deep, calm azure lakes, crossed
by no ripple, met his, and the clear, pure
voice echoed through the still room.

“Uncle Eric, I wish you would not sit up on
my account; I do not like to be watched.”

“Irene, your father forbade your studying
until this hour. You will accomplish nothing
but the ruin of your health.”

“How do you know that? Do statistics
prove astronomers short-lived? Rather the
contrary. I commend you to the contemplation
of their longevity. Good-night, uncle;
starry dreams to you.”

“Stay, child; what object have you in view
in all this laborious investigation?”

“Are you sceptical of the possibility of a
devotion to science merely for science-sake?
Do my womanly garments shut me out of the
Holy of Holies, debar me eternally from sacred
arcana, think you? Uncle Eric, once for all,
it is not my aim to—

I take my heart, my intellect, my life, and
offer all upon the altar of its penetralia. You
men doubt women's credentials for work like
mine; but this intellectual bigotry and monopoly
already trembles before the weight of
stern and positive results which women lay
before you—data for your speculations—alms
for your calculation. In glorious attestation
of the truth of female capacity to grapple with
some of the most recondite problems of science
stand the names of Caroline Herschel, Mary
Somerville, Maria Mitchell, Emma Willard,
Mrs Phelps, and the proud compliment paid
to Madame Lepaute by Clairant and Lalande,
who, at the successful conclusion of their
gigantic computations, declared: `The assistance
rendered by her was such that, without
her, we never should have dared to undertake
the enormous labor in which it was necessary
to calculate the distance of each of the two
planets, Jupiter and Saturn, from the comet,
separately for every degree, for one hundred
and fifty years.' Uncle Eric, remember—

She took the volume she had been reading,
selected several catalogues from the mass, and,
lighting a small lamp, passed her uncle and
mounted the spiral staircase leading to the
observatory. He watched her tall form slowly
ascending, and, in the flashing light of the
lamp she carried, her black dress and floating
hair seemed to belong to some veritable Urania
— some ancient Egyptic Berenice. He
heard her open the glass door of the observatory,
then the flame vanished, and the click of
the lock fell down the dark stairway as she
turned the key. With a heavy sigh the cripple
returned to his room, there to ponder the
singular character of the woman whom he had
just left, and to dream that he saw her transplanted
to the constellations, her blue eyes
brightening into stars, her waving hair braiding
itself out into brilliant rushing comets.
The night was keen, still, and cloudless, and,
as Irene locked herself in, the chill from the
marble tiles crept through the carpet to her
slippered feet. In the centre of the apartment
rose a wooden shaft bearing a brass
plate, and to this a telescope was securely
fastened. Two chairs and an old-fashioned

oaken table, with curious carved legs, comprised
the furniture. She looked at the small siderial
clock, and finding that a quarter of an
hour must elapse before she could make the
desired observation, drew a chair to the table
and seated herself. She took from the drawer
a number of loose papers, and prepared the
blank book for registering the observation;
then laid before her a slate covered with
figures, and began to run over the calculation.
At the close of fifteen minutes she placed herself
at the telescope, and waited patiently for
the appearance of a small star which gradually
entered the field; she noted the exact
moment and position, transferred the result
to the register, and after a time went back to
slate and figures. Cautiously she went over
the work, now and then having recourse to
pen and paper; she reached the bottom of the
slate and turned it over, moving one finger
along the lines. The solution was wrong; a
mistake had been made somewhere; she pressed
her palm on her forehead, and thought
over the whole question; then began again.
The work was tedious, the calculation subtle,
and she attached great importance to the result;
the second examination was fruitless as
the first; time was wearing away; where could
the error be? Without hesitation she turned
back for the third time, and commenced at the
first, slowly, patiently threading the maze.
Suddenly she paused and smiled; there was
the mistake, glaring enough, now. She corrected
it, and working the sum through, found
the result perfectly accurate, according fully
with the tables of Leverrier by which she
was computing. She carefully transferred the
operation from slate to paper, and, after numbering
the problem with great particularity,
placed all in the drawer, and turned the key.
It was three o'clock; she opened the door,
drew her chair out on the little gallery, and
sat down, looking toward the east. The air
was crisp but still, unswayed by current waifs;
no sound swept its crystal waves save the low,
monotonous distant thunder of the falls, and
the deep, cloudless blue ocean of space glowed
with its numberless argosies of stellar worlds.
Constellations which, in the purple twilight,
stood sentinel at the horizon, had marched in
majesty to mid-heaven, taken reconnoissance
thence, and as solemnly passed the opposite
horizon to report to watching gazers in another
hemisphere. “Scouts stood upon every
headland, on every plain;” mercilessly the inquisitorial
eye of science followed the heavenly
wanderers; there was no escape from the
eager, sleepless police who kept vigil in every
clime and country; as well call on Böotes to
give o'er his care of Ursa-Major, as hopelessly
attempt to thrust him from the ken of Cynosura.
From her earliest recollection, and
especially from the hour of entering school,
astronomy and mathematics had exerted an
over-mastering influence upon Irene's mind.
The ordinary text-books only increased her
interest in the former science, and while in
New York, with the aid of the professor of
astronomy, she had possessed herself of all the
most eminent works bearing upon the subject,
sending across the Atlantic for tables and
selenographic charts, which were not to be
procured in America.

Under singularly favorably auspices she had
pursued her studies perseveringly, methodically,
and, despite her father's prohibition,
indefatigably. He had indulged, in earlier
years, a penchant for the same science, and
cheerfully facilitated her progress by rearranging
the observatory so as to allow full
play for her fine telescope; but, though proud
of her proficiency, he objected most strenuously
to her devoting so large a share of her
time and attention to this study, and had positively
interdicted all observations after twelve
o'clock. Most girls patronize certain branches
of investigation with fitful, spasmodic vehemence,
or periodic impulses of enthusiasm;
but Irene knew no intermission of interest,
she hurried over no details, and, when the
weather permitted, never failed to make her
nightly visit to the observatory. She loved
her work as a painter his canvas, or the
sculptor the marble one day to enshrine his
cherished ideal; and she prosecuted it, not as
a mere pastime, not as a toy, but as a life-long
labor, for the labor's sake. To-night, as her
drooping palms nestled to each other, and her
eyes searched the vast jewelled dome above,
thought, unwearied as the theme it pondered,
flew back to the dim gray dawn of Time,
“When the morning-stars sang together, and
all the sons of God shouted for joy.” In panoramic
vision she crossed the dusty desert of
centuries, and watched with Chaldean shepherds
the pale, sickly light of waning moons
on Shinar's plains; welcomed the gnomon
(first-born of the great family of astronomic
apparatus); toiled over and gloried in the
Zaros; stood at the armillary sphere of Ju, in
the days of Confucius; studied with Thales,
Anaximander, and Pythagoras; entered the
sacred precincts of the school of Crotona,
hand in hand with Damo, the earliest woman
who bowed a devotee at the starry shrine, and,
with her, was initiated into its esoteric doctrines;
puzzled with Meton over his lunar
cycle; exulted in Hipparchus' gigantic labor,
the first collection of tables, the earliest reliable
catalogues; walked through the Alexandrine
school of savans, misled by Ptolemy;
and bent with Uliegh Beigh over the charts
at Samarcand. In imagination she accompanied
Copernicus and Tycho-Brahe, and wrestled
with Kepler in the Titanic struggle that
ended in the discovery of the magnificent trinity
of astronomic laws framed by the Divine
Architect when the first star threw its faint
shimmer through the silent wastes of space.
Kepler's three laws were an unceasing wonder

and joy to her, and with found, womanly pride
she was wont to recur to a lonely observatory
in Silesia, where, before Newton rose upon the
world, one of her own sex, Maria Cunitz,
launched upon the stormy sea of scientific
literature the “Urania Propitia.” The Congress
of Lilienthal possessed far more of interest
for her than any which ever sat in august
council over the fate of nations, and the names
of Herschel, Bessel, Argelander, Struve, Arago,
Leverrier, and Maedler were sacred as
Persian telefin. From the “Almagest” of
Ptolemy, and the “Cométographie of Pingré,
to the “Mécanique Céleste,” she had searched
and toiled; and now the sublime and almost
bewildering speculations of Maedler held her
spell-bound. The delicate, subtle, beautiful
problem of parallax had heretofore exerted
the strongest fascination over her; but this
magnificent hypothesis of a “central sun,”
from the monarch of computations at Dorpat,
seized upon her imagination with painful tenacity.
From the hour when Kepler stretched
out his curious fingers, feeling for the shape of
planetary orbits, or Leverrier groped through
abysses of darkness for the unknown Neptune,
which a sceptical world declared existed
only in his mathematical calculations, no such
daring or stupendous speculation had been
breathed as this which Maedler threw down
from his Russian observatory. Night after
night she gazed upon the pleiades, singling
out Alcyone, the brilliant central sun of the
mighty astral system, whose light met her
eager eyes after the long travel of five hundred
and thirty-seven years; and, following in the
footsteps of the great speculator, she tried to
grasp the result, that the period of one revolution
of our sun and system around that glittering
centre was eighteen million two hundred
thousand years.

The stony lips of geology asserted that our
globe was growing old, thousands of generations
had fallen asleep in the bosom of mother
earth, the ashes of centuries had gathered
upon the past, were creeping over the present;
and yet, in the face of catacombs, and mummies,
and mouldering monuments, chiselled in
the infancy of the human race, mathematics
unrolled her figured scroll, and proclaimed
that Time had but begun; that chiliasms must
elapse, that æons on æons must roll away, before
the first revolution of the starry universe
could be completed about its far-off alcyon
centre. What mattered human labors, what
need of trophies of human genius, of national
grandeur, or individual glory? Eighteen millions
of years would level all in one huge,
common, shapeless ruin. In comparison with
the mighty mechanism of the astral system,
the solar seemed a mere tiny cluster of jewels
set in some infinite abyss; the sun shrank into
insignificance, the moon waned, the planets
became little gleaming points of light, such as
her diamond ring threw off when held under
gas-chandeliers. Perish the microcosm in the
limitless macrocosm, and sink the feeble earthly
segregate in the boundless, rushing, choral aggregation!
She was oppressed by the stupendous
nature of the problem; human reason
and imagination reeled under the vastness of
the subject which they essayed to contemplate
and measure; and to-night, as she pondered in
silent awe the gigantic, overwhelming laws of
God's great Cosmos, by some subtle association
there flashed upon her memory the sybillic inscription
on the Temple of Neith at Sais: “I
am all that has been, all that is, all that will
be. No mortal has ever raised the veil which
conceals me; and the fruit I have produced is
the sun.” Had Maedler, with telescopic insight,
climbed by mathematical ladders to the
starry adyta of nature, and triumphantly raised
the mystic veil? With a feeling of adoration
which no language could adequately convey
she gazed upon nebulæ, and suns, and systems;
and with the solemn reflection that some, like
Cassiopeia's lost jewel, might be perishing,
wrapped in the last conflagration, while their
light still journeyed to her, she recalled the
feverish yet sublime vision of the great German
dreamer: “Once we issued suddenly
from the middle of thickest night into an
aurora borealis—the herald of an expiring
world—and we found, throughout this cycle of
solar systems, that a day of judgment had
indeed arrived. The suns had sickened, and
the planets were heaving, rocking, yawning
in convulsions; the subterraneous waters of
the great deeps were breaking up, and lightnings
that were ten diameters of a world in
length ran along from zenith to nadir; and,
here and there, where a sun should have been,
we saw, instead, through the misty vapor, a
gloomy, ashy-leaden corpse of a solar body,
that sucked in flames from the perishing world,
but gave out neither light nor heat.........
Then came eternities of twilight that revealed
but were not revealed; on the right
hand and on the left towered mighty constellations,
that by self-repetitions and answers
from afar, that by counter-positions
built up triumphal gates, whose architraves,
whose archways—horizontal, upright—rested,
rose at altitude by spans—that seemed ghostly
from infinitude. Without measure were the
architraves, past number were the archways,
beyond memory the gates. Suddenly, as thus
we rode from infinite to infinite, and tilted
over abyssmal worlds, a mighty cry arose, that
systems more mysterious, that worlds more
billowy, other heights and other depths, were
coming, were nearing, were at hand. Then
the angel threw up his glorious hands to the
heaven of heavens, saying: `End is there none
to the universe of God. Lo! also, there is no
beginning.'”

Among the mysteries of the Crotona school
the Samian sage had taught the “music of the
spheres,” and to-night Irene dwelt upon the

thought of that grand choir of innumerable
worlds, that mighty orchestra of starry systems,
unceasingly to the Lord of glory, till her firm
lips relaxed, and the immortal words of Shakspeare
fell slowly from them:

That the myriad members of the shining
archipelago were peopled with orders of intelligent
beings, differing from our race even as
the planets differ in magnitude and physical
structure, she entertained not a doubt; and as
feeble fancy struggled to grasp and comprehend
the ultimate destiny of the countless
hosts of immortal creatures, to which our
earthly races, with their distinct, unalterable
types, stood that as one small family circle
amid clustering worlds, her wearied brain and
human heart bowed humbly, reverently, worshippingly
before the God of Revelation, who
can “bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or
loose the bands of Orion; bring forth Mazzaroth
in his season, and guide Arcturus with
his sons.” Kneeling there, with the twinkling
light of stars upon her up-turned face, she
prayed earnestly for strength, and grace, and
guidance from on High, that she might so live
and govern herself that, when the season of
earthly probation ended, she could fearlessly
pass to her eternal home, and joyfully meet
the awful face of Jehovah.

The night was almost spent; she knew from
the “celestial clock-work” that Day blushed
just beyond the horizon; that, ere long, silver-gray
fingers would steal up the quiet sky,
parting the sable curtains; and, taking the
lamp, she hung the observatory key upon her
girdle, and glided noiselessly down the stairway
to her own apartment.

Paragon slept on the threshold, and raised
his head to greet her; she stooped, stroked his
silky ears, and closed the door, shutting him
out. Fifteen minutes later she, too, was sleeping
soundly; and an hour and a half afterward,
followed by that faithful guardian “dweller
of the threshold” she swept down the steps,
and, amid the matin chant of forest birds,
mounted Erebus, and dashed off at full gallop
for the customary ride. No matter what occurred
to prevent her sleeping, she invariably
rode before breakfast when the weather permitted;
and as her midnight labors left few
hours for repose, she generally retired to her
room immediately after dinner and indulged
in the luxury of a two hours nap. Such was
a portion of the regimen she had prescribed for
herself on her return from school, and which
she suffered only the inclemency of the
weather to infringe.