第100章

There are those who speak lightly of this small aqueous expanse, the eye of the sacred enclosure, which has looked unwinking on the happy faces of so many natives and the curious features of so many strangers.The music of its twilight minstrels has long ceased, but their memory lingers like an echo in the name it bears.Cherish it, inhabitants of the two-hilled city, once three-hilled; ye who have said to the mountain, "Remove hence," and turned the sea into dry land! May no contractor fill his pockets by undertaking to fill thee, thou granite girdled lakelet, or drain the civic purse by drawing off thy waters! For art thou not the Palladium of our Troy?

Didst thou not, like the Divine image which was the safeguard of Ilium, fall from the skies, and if the Trojan could look with pride upon the heaven-descended form of the Goddess of Wisdom, cannot he who dwells by thy shining oval look in that mirror and contemplate Himself,--the Native of Boston.

There must be some fatality which carries our young men and maidens in the direction of the Common when they have anything very particular to exchange their views about.At any rate I remember two of our young friends brought up here a good many years ago, and Iunderstand that there is one path across the enclosure which a young man must not ask a young woman to take with him unless he means business, for an action will hold--for breach of promise, if she consents to accompany him, and he chooses to forget his obligations:

Our two young people stood at the western edge of the little pool, studying astronomy in the reflected firmament.The Pleiades were trembling in the wave before them, and the three great stars of Orion,--for these constellations were both glittering in the eastern sky.

"There is no place too humble for the glories of heaven to shine in,"she said "And their splendor makes even this little pool beautiful and noble,"he answered."Where is the light to come from that is to do as much for our poor human lives?"A simple question enough, but the young girl felt her color change as she answered, "From friendship, I think."--Grazing only as -yet,--not striking full, hardly hitting at all,--but there are questions and answers that come so very near, the wind of them alone almost takes the breath away.

There was an interval of silence.Two young persons can stand looking at water for a long time without feeling the necessity of speaking.Especially when the water is alive with stars and the young persons are thoughtful and impressible.The water seems to do half the thinking while one is looking at it; its movements are felt in the brain very much like thought.When I was in full training as a flaneur, I could stand on the Pont Neuf with the other experts in the great science of passive cerebration and look at the river for half an hour with so little mental articulation that when I moved on it seemed as if my thinking-marrow had been asleep and was just waking up refreshed after its nap.

So the reader can easily account for the interval of silence.It is hard to tell how long it would have lasted, but just then a lubberly intrusive boy threw a great stone, which convulsed the firmament, the one at their feet, I mean.The six Pleiads disappeared as if in search of their lost sister; the belt of Orion was broken asunder, and a hundred worlds dissolved back into chaos.They turned away and strayed off into one of the more open paths, where the view of the sky over them was unobstructed.For some reason or other the astronomical lesson did not get on very fast this evening.

Presently the young man asked his pupil:

--Do you know what the constellation directly over our heads is?

--Is it not Cassiopea?--she asked a little hesitatingly.

--No, it is Andromeda.You ought not to have forgotten her, for Iremember showing you a double star, the one in her right foot, through the equatorial telescope.You have not forgotten the double star,--the two that shone for each other and made a little world by themselves?

--No, indeed,--she answered, and blushed, and felt ashamed because she had said indeed, as if it had been an emotional recollection.

The double-star allusion struck another dead silence.She would have given a week's pay to any invisible attendant that would have cut her stay-lace.

At last: Do you know the story of Andromeda? he said.

--Perhaps I did once, but suppose I don't remember it.

He told her the story of the unfortunate maiden chained to a rock and waiting for a sea-beast that was coming to devour her, and how Perseus came and set her free, and won her love with her life.And then he began something about a young man chained to his rock, which was a star-gazer's tower, a prey by turns to ambition, and lonely self-contempt and unwholesome scorn of the life he looked down upon after the serenity of the firmament, and endless questionings that led him nowhere,--and now he had only one more question to ask.He loved her.Would she break his chain?--He held both his hands out towards her, the palms together, as if they were fettered at the wrists.She took hold of them very gently; parted them a little;then wider--wider--and found herself all at once folded, unresisting, in her lover's arms.

So there was a new double-star in the living firmament.The constellations seemed to kindle with new splendors as the student and the story-teller walked homeward in their light; Alioth and Algol looked down on them as on the first pair of lovers they shone over, and the autumn air seemed full of harmonies as when the morning stars sang together.