CHAPTER V
A GLIMPSE OF THE DOOM
After dinner Lennard excused himself, saying that he wanted to make afew more calculations; and then he got outside and lit his pipe, andwalked up the winding path towards the observatory.
"What am I to do?" he said between his teeth. "It's a ghastly positionfor a man to be placed in. Fancy--just a poor, ordinary, human beinglike myself having the power of losing or saving the world in his hands!And then, of course, there's a woman in the question--the EternalFeminine--even in such a colossal problem as this!
"It's mean, and I know it; but, after all, I saved her life--though, ifI hadn't reached her first, that other chap might have got her. I loveher and he loves her; there's no doubt about that, and Papa Parmenterwants to marry her to a coronet. There's one thing certain, Castellanshall not have her, and I love her a lot too much to see her made MyLady This, or the Marchioness of So-and-so, just because she's beautifuland has millions, and the other fellow, whoever he may be, may have acoronet that probably wants re-gilding; and yet, after all, it's onlythe same old story in a rather more serious form--a woman against theworld. I suppose Papa Parmenter would show me the door to-morrow morningif I, a poor explorer of the realm of Space, dared to tell him that Iwant to marry his daughter.
"And yet how miserable and trivial all these wretched distinctions ofwealth and position look now; or would look if the world only knew andbelieved what I could tell it--and that reminds me--shall I tell her, orthem? Of course, I must before long; simply because in a month or sothose American fellows will be on it, and they won't have any scrupleswhen it comes to a matter of scare head-lines. Yes, I think it may aswell be to-night as any other time. Still, it's a pretty awful thing fora humble individual like myself to say, especially to a girl one happensto be very much in love with--nothing less than the death-sentence ofHumanity. Ah, well, she's got to hear it some time and from some one,and why shouldn't she hear it now and from me?"
When he got back to the house, there was a carriage at the door, and MrParmenter was just coming down the avenue, followed by a man with asmall portmanteau in his hand.
"Sorry, Mr Lennard," he said, holding out his hand, "I've just had awire about a company tangle in London that I've got to go and shake outat once, so I'll have to see what you have to show me later on. Still,that needn't trouble anyone. It looks as if it were going to be asplendid night for star-gazing, and I don't want Auriole disappointed,so she can go up to the observatory with you at the proper time and seewhat there is to be seen. See you later, I have only just about time toget the connection for London."
Lennard was not altogether sorry that this accident had happened.Naturally, the prospect of an hour or so with Auriole alone in histemple of Science was very pleasant, and moreover, he felt that, as themomentous tidings had to be told, he would prefer to tell them to herfirst. And so it came about.
A little after half-past eleven that night Miss Auriole was lookingwonderingly into the eye-piece of the great Reflector, watching a tinylittle patch of mist, somewhat brighter towards one end than the other;like a little wisp of white smoke rising from a very faint spark thatwas apparently floating across an unfathomable sea of darkness.
She seemed to see this through black darkness, and behind it a swarm ofstars of all sizes and colours. They appeared very much more wonderfuland glorious and important than the little spray of white smoke, becauseshe hadn't yet the faintest conception of its true import to her andevery other human being on earth: but she was very soon to know now.
While she was watching it in breathless silence, in which the clickingof the mechanism which kept the great telescope moving so as to exactlycounteract the motion of the machinery of the Universe, sounded like theblows of a sledge-hammer on an anvil, Gilbert Lennard stood beside her,wondering if he should begin to tell her, and what he should say.
At last she turned away from the eye-piece, and looked at him withsomething like a scared expression in her eyes, and said:
"It's very wonderful, isn't it, that one should be able to see all thatjust by looking into a little bit of a hole in a telescope? And you tellme that all those great big bright stars around your comet are so faraway that if you look at them just with your own eyes you don't even seethem--and there they look almost as if you could put out your hand andtouch them. It's just a little bit awful, too!" she added, with a littleshiver.
"Yes," he said, speaking slowly and even more gravely that she thoughtthe subject warranted, "yes, it is both wonderful and, in a way, awful.Do you know that some of those stars you have seen in there are so faraway that the light which you see them by may have left them whenSolomon was king in Jerusalem? They may be quite dead and dark now, orreduced into fire-mist by collision with some other star. And then,perhaps, there are others behind them again so far away that their lighthas not even reached us yet, and may never do while there are human eyeson earth to see it."
"Yes, I know," she said, smiling. "You don't forget that I have been tocollege--and light travels about a hundred and eighty-six thousand milesa second, doesn't it? But come, Mr Lennard, aren't you what they callstretching the probabilities a little when you say that the light ofsome of them will never get here, as far as we're concerned? I alwaysthought we had a few million years of life to look forward to beforethis old world of ours gets worn out."
"There are other ends possible for this world besides wearing out, MissParmenter," he answered, this time almost solemnly. "Other worlds have,as I say, been reduced to fire-mist. Some have been shattered to tinyfragments to make asteroids and meteorites--stars and worlds, incomparison with which this bit of a planet of ours is nothing more thana speck of sand, a mere atom of matter drifting over the wilderness ofimmensity. In fact, such a trifle is it in the organism of the Universe,that if some celestial body collided with it--say a comet with asufficiently solid nucleus--and the heat developed by the impact turnedit into a mass of blazing gas, an astronomer on Neptune, one of our ownplanets, wouldn't even notice the accident, unless he happened to bewatching the earth through a powerful telescope at the time."
"And is such an accident, as you call it, possible, Mr Lennard?" sheasked, jumping womanlike, by a sort of unconscious intuition, to thevery point to which he was so clumsily trying to lead up.
"I thought you spoke rather queerly about this comet of yours atbreakfast this morning. I hope there isn't any chance of its getting onto the same track as this terrestrial locomotive of ours. That would bejust awful, wouldn't it? Why, what's the matter? You are going to beill, I know. You had better get down to the house, and go to bed. It'swant of sleep, isn't it? You'll be driving yourself mad that way."
A sudden and terrible change had come over him while she was speaking.It was only for the moment, and yet to him it was an eternity. It might,as she said, have been the want of sleep, for insomnia plays strangetricks sometimes with the strongest of intellects.
More probably, it might have been the horror of his secret working onthe great love that he had for this girl who was sitting there alonewith him in the silence of that dim room and in the midst of the gloriesand the mysteries of the Universe.
His eyes had grown fixed and staring, and looked sightlessly at her, andhis face shone ghastly pale in the dim light of the solitary shadedlamp. Certainly, one of those mysterious crises which are among theunsolved secrets of psychology had come upon him like some swift accessof delirium.
He no longer saw her sitting there by the telescope, calm, gracious, andbeautiful. He saw her as, by his pitiless calculations, he must do thatday thirteen months to come--with her soft grey eyes, starting,horror-driven from their orbits, staring blank and wide and hideous atthe overwhelming hell that would be falling down from heaven upon thedevoted earth. He saw her fresh young face withered and horror-lined andold, and the bright-brown hair grown grey with the years that would passin those few final moments. He saw the sweet red lips which had temptedhim so often to wild thoughts parched and black, wide open and gaspi
ngvainly for the breath of life in a hot, burnt-out atmosphere.
Then he saw--no, it was only a glimpse; and with that the strangetrance-vision ended. What must have come after that would in allcertainty have driven him mad there and then, before his work had evenbegun; but at that moment, swiftly severing the darkness that wasfalling over his soul, there came to him an idea, bright, luminous, andlovely as an inspiration from Heaven itself, and with it came back thecalm sanity of the sternly-disciplined intellect, prepared tocontemplate, not only the destruction of the world he lived in, but eventhe loss of the woman he loved--the only human being who could make theworld beautiful or even tolerable for him.
The vision was blotted out from the sight of his soul; the darknesscleared away from his eyes, and he saw her again as she still was. Ithad all passed in a few moments and yet in them he had been down intohell--and he had come back to earth, and into her presence.
Almost by the time she had uttered her last word, he had regainedcommand of his voice, and he began clearly and quietly to answer thequestion which was still echoing through the chambers of his brain.
"It was only a little passing faintness, thank you; and something elsewhich you will understand when I have done, if you have patience to hearme to the end," he said, looking straight at her for a moment, and thenbeginning to walk slowly up and down the room past her chair.
"I am going to surprise you, perhaps to frighten you, and very probablyto offend you deeply," he began again in a quiet, dry sort of tone,which somehow impressed her against all her convictions that he didn'tmuch care whether or not he did any or all of these things: but therewas something else in his tone and manner which held her to her seat,silent and attentive, although she was conscious of a distinct desire toget up and run away.
"Your guess about the comet, or whatever it may prove to be, is quitecorrect. I don't think it is a new one. From what I have seen of it sofar, I have every reason to believe that it is Gambert's comet, whichwas discovered in 1826, and became visible to the naked eye in theautumn of 1833. It then crossed the orbit of the earth one month afterthe earth had passed the point of intersection. After that, some forcedivided it, and in '46 and '52 it reappeared as twin comets constantlyseparating. Now it would seem that the two masses have come togetheragain: and as they are both larger in bulk and greater in density itwould appear that, somewhere in the distant fields of Space, they haveunited with some other and denser body. The result is, that what ispractically a new comet, with a much denser nucleus than any so farseen, is approaching our system. Unless a miracle happens, or there is apractically impossible error in my calculations, it will cross the orbitof the earth thirteen months from to-day, at the moment that the earthitself arrives at the point of intersection."
So far Auriole had listened to the stiff scientific phraseology withmore interest than alarm; but now she took advantage of a little pause,and said:
"And the consequences, Mr Lennard? I mean the consequences to us asliving beings. You may as well tell me everything now that you've goneso far."
"I am going to," he said, stopping for a moment in his walk, "and I amgoing to tell you something more than that. Granted that what I havesaid happens, one of two things must follow. If the nucleus of the cometis solid enough to pass through our atmosphere without being dissipated,it will strike the surface with so much force that both it and the earthwill probably be transformed into fiery vapour by the conversion of themotion of the two bodies into heat. If not, its contact with the oxygenof the earth's atmosphere will produce an aerial conflagration which, ifit does not roast alive every living thing on earth, will convert theoxygen, by combustion, into an irrespirable and poisonous gas, and sokill us by a slower, but no less fatal, process."
"Horrible!" she said, shivering this time. "You speak like a judgepronouncing sentence of death on the whole human race! I suppose thereis no possibility of reprieve? Well, go on!"
"Yes," he said, "there is something else. Those are the scientificfacts, as far as they go. I am going to tell you the chances now--andsomething more. There is just one chance--one possible way of avertinguniversal ruin from the earth, and substituting for it nothing moreserious than an unparalleled display of celestial fireworks. All thatwill be necessary is perfect calculation and illimitable expenditure ofmoney."
"Well," she said, "can't you do the calculations, Mr Lennard, and hasn'tdad got millions enough? How could he spend them better than in savingthe human race from being burnt alive? There isn't anything else, isthere?"
"There was something else," he said, stopping in front of her again. Shehad risen to her feet as she said the last words, and the two stoodfacing each other in the dim light, while the mechanism of the telescopekept on clicking away in its heedless, mechanical fashion.
"Yes, there was something else, and I may as well tell you after all;for, even if you never see or speak to me again, it won't stop the workbeing done now. I could have kept this discovery to myself till it wouldhave been too late to do anything: for no other telescope without myhelp would even find the comet for four months to come, and even nowthere is hardly a day to be lost if the work is to be done in time. Andthen--well, I suppose I must have gone mad for the time being, for Ithought--you will hardly believe me, I suppose--that I could make youthe price of the world's safety.
"From that, you will see how much I have loved you, however mad I mayhave been. Losing you, I would have lost the world with you. If my lovelives, I thought, the world shall live: if not, if you die, the worldshall die. But just now, when you thought I was taken ill, I had a sortof vision, and I saw you,--yes, you, Auriole as, if my one chance fails,you must infallibly be this night thirteen months hence. I didn't seeany of the other millions who would be choking and gasping for breathand writhing in the torture of the universal fire--I only saw you and myown baseness in thinking, even for a moment, that such a bargain wouldbe possible.
"And then," he went on, more slowly, and with a different ring in hisvoice, "there are the other men."
"Which other men?" she asked, looking up at him with a flush on hercheeks and a gleam in her eyes.
"To be quite frank, and in such a situation as this, I don't see thatanything but complete candour is of any use," he replied slowly. "I needhardly tell you that they are John Castellan and the Marquis ofWesterham. Castellan, I know, has loved you just as I have done, fromthe moment we had the good luck to pick you out of the bay at Clifden.Lord Westerham also wants you, so do I. That, put plainly, brutally, ifyou like, is the situation. Of your own feelings, of course, I do notpretend to have the remotest idea; but I confess that when thisknowledge came to me, the first thought that crossed my mind was thethought of you as another man's wife--and then came the vision of theworld in flames. At first I chose the world in flames. I see that I waswrong. That is all."
She had not interrupted even by a gesture, but as she listened, athousand signs and trifles which alone had meant nothing to her, nowseemed to come together and make one clear and definite revelation. Thisstrong, reserved, silent man had all the time loved her so desperatelythat he was going mad about her--so mad that, as he had said, he hadeven dreamed of weighing the possession of her single, insignificantself against the safety of the whole world, with all its innumerablemillions of people--mostly as good in their way as she was.
Well--it might be that the love of such a man was a thing worth to weigheven against a coronet--not in her eyes, for there was no question ofthat now, but in her father's. But that was a matter for futureconsideration. She drew herself up a little stiffly, and said, in justsuch a tone as she might have used if what he had just been saying hadhad no personal interest for her--had, in fact, been about some othergirl:
"I think it's about time to be going down to the house, Mr Lennard,isn't it? I am quite sure a night's rest won't do you any harm. No, I'mnot offended, and I don't think I'm even frightened yet. It somehowseems too big and too awful a thing to be only frightened at--too muchlike the Day of Judgment, you know. I
am glad you've told me--yes,everything--and I'm glad that what you call your madness is over. Youwill be able to do your work in saving the world all the better. Onlydon't tell dad anything except--well--just the scientific and necessarypart of it. You know, saving a world is a very much greater matter thanwinning a woman--at least it is in one particular woman's eyes--andI've learnt somewhere in mathematics something about the greaterincluding the less. And now, don't you think we had better be going downinto the house? It's getting quite late."