Two on a Tower | Page 6

without removing his eye from the
instrument, as if to forbid her to interrupt him.
Pausing where she stood the lady examined the aspect of the individual

who thus made himself so completely at home on a building which she
deemed her unquestioned property. He was a youth who might properly
have been characterized by a word the judicious chronicler would not
readily use in such a connexion, preferring to reserve it for raising
images of the opposite sex. Whether because no deep felicity is likely
to arise from the condition, or from any other reason, to say in these
days that a youth is beautiful is not to award him that amount of credit
which the expression would have carried with it if he had lived in the
times of the Classical Dictionary. So much, indeed, is the reverse the
case that the assertion creates an awkwardness in saying anything more
about him. The beautiful youth usually verges so perilously on the
incipient coxcomb, who is about to become the Lothario or Juan among
the neighbouring maidens, that, for the due understanding of our
present young man, his sublime innocence of any thought concerning
his own material aspect, or that of others, is most fervently asserted,
and must be as fervently believed.
Such as he was, there the lad sat. The sun shone full in his face, and on
his head he wore a black velvet skull-cap, leaving to view below it a
curly margin of very light shining hair, which accorded well with the
flush upon his cheek.
He had such a complexion as that with which Raffaelle enriches the
countenance of the youthful son of Zacharias,--a complexion which,
though clear, is far enough removed from virgin delicacy, and suggests
plenty of sun and wind as its accompaniment. His features were
sufficiently straight in the contours to correct the beholder's first
impression that the head was the head of a girl. Beside him stood a
little oak table, and in front was the telescope.
His visitor had ample time to make these observations; and she may
have done so all the more keenly through being herself of a totally
opposite type. Her hair was black as midnight, her eyes had no less
deep a shade, and her complexion showed the richness demanded as a
support to these decided features. As she continued to look at the pretty
fellow before her, apparently so far abstracted into some speculative
world as scarcely to know a real one, a warmer wave of her warm
temperament glowed visibly through her, and a qualified observer
might from this have hazarded a guess that there was Romance blood in
her veins.

But even the interest attaching to the youth could not arrest her
attention for ever, and as he made no further signs of moving his eye
from the instrument she broke the silence with--
'What do you see?--something happening somewhere?'
'Yes, quite a catastrophe!' he automatically murmured, without moving
round.
'What?'
'A cyclone in the sun.'
The lady paused, as if to consider the weight of that event in the scale
of terrene life.
'Will it make any difference to us here?' she asked.
The young man by this time seemed to be awakened to the
consciousness that somebody unusual was talking to him; he turned,
and started.
'I beg your pardon,' he said. 'I thought it was my relative come to look
after me! She often comes about this time.'
He continued to look at her and forget the sun, just such a reciprocity of
influence as might have been expected between a dark lady and a
flaxen-haired youth making itself apparent in the faces of each.
'Don't let me interrupt your observations,' said she.
'Ah, no,' said he, again applying his eye; whereupon his face lost the
animation which her presence had lent it, and became immutable as
that of a bust, though superadding to the serenity of repose the
sensitiveness of life. The expression that settled on him was one of awe.
Not unaptly might it have been said that he was worshipping the sun.
Among the various intensities of that worship which have prevailed
since the first intelligent being saw the luminary decline westward, as
the young man now beheld it doing, his was not the weakest. He was
engaged in what may be called a very chastened or schooled form of
that first and most natural of adorations.
'But would you like to see it?' he recommenced. 'It is an event that is
witnessed only about once in two or three years, though it may occur
often enough.'
She assented, and looked through the shaded eyepiece, and saw a
whirling mass, in the centre of which the blazing globe seemed to be
laid bare to its core. It was a