To his profound regret J. T. Maston had had to resign himself to staying at home. But he was not idle. After the construction of the immense telescope on the summit of Long’s Peak, one of the highest of the Rocky Mountains, he had transported himself there, and from the moment he found the projectile describing its majestic trajectory in the sky he never left his post of observation. At the eye-piece of the huge instrument he devoted himself to the task of following his friends as they journeyed in their strange carriage through space.
It might be thought that the bold voyagers were for ever lost to earth. The projectile, drawn into a new orbit by the Moon, might gravitate eternally round the Queen of the Night as a sort of sub-satellite. But no! A deviation, which by many was called providential, had modified the projectile’s direction, and, after making the circle of the Moon, brought it back from that spheroid at a speed of 172,800 miles an hour at the moment it plunged into the ocean.
Luckily the liquid mass of the Pacific had broken the fall, which had been perceived by the U.S. frigate Susquehanna. As soon as the news had reached J. T. Maston, he had set out in all haste from the observatory at Long’s Peak to the rescue of his friends. Soundings were taken in the vicinity of where the shell had been seen to fall, and the devoted Maston had not hesitated to go down in diver’s dress to find his friends. But such trouble was unnecessary. The projectile being of aluminium, displacing an amount of water greater than its own weight, had returned to the surface of the Pacific after a magnificent plunge. And President Barbicane, Captain Nicholl, and Michel Ardan were found in their floating prison playing dominoes.
The part that Maston took in these extraordinary proceedings had brought him prominently to the front. He was not handsome, with his artificial cranium and his mechanical arm with its hook for a hand. He was not young, for fifty-eight years had chimed and struck at the date of our story’s beginning. But the originality of his character, the vivacity of his intelligence, the fire in his eye, the impetuosity with which he had attacked everything, had made him the beau-ideal of a man in the eyes of Evangelina Scorbitt. His brain, carefully protected beneath its gutta-percha roof was intact, and justly bore the reputation of being one of the most remarkable of the day.
Mrs. Scorbitt—though the least calculation gave her a headache—had a taste for mathematicians if she had not one for mathematics. She looked upon them as upon beings of a peculiar and superior species. Heads where x’s knocked against x’s like nuts in a bag, brains which rejoiced in algebraic formulæ, hands which threw about triple integrals as an equilibrist plays with glasses and bottles, intelligences which understood this sort of thing:
∫∫∫Φ(xyz) dx dy dz
—these were the wise men who appeared worthy of all the admiration of a woman, attracted to them proportionally to their mass and in inverse ratio to the square of their distances. And J. T. Maston was bulky enough to exercise on her an irresistible attraction, and as to the distance between them it would be simply zero, if she succeeded in her plans.
It must be confessed that this gave some anxiety to the secretary of the Gun Club, who had never sought happiness in such close approximations. Besides, Evangelina Scorbitt was no longer in her first youth; but she was not a bad sort of person by any means, and she would have wanted for nothing could she only see the day when she was introduced to the drawing-rooms of Baltimore as Mrs. J. T. Maston.
The widow’s fortune was considerable. Not that she was as rich as Gould, Mackay, Vanderbilt, or Gordon Bennett, whose fortunes exceed millions, and who could give alms to a Rothschild. Not that she possessed the millions of Mrs. Moses Carper, Mrs. Stewart, or Mrs. Crocker; nor was she as rich as Mrs. Hammersley, Mrs. Helby Green, Mrs. Maffitt, Mrs. Marshall, Mrs. Para Stevens, Mrs. Mintbury, and a few others. But she was the possessor of four good millions of dollars, which had come to her from John P. Scorbitt, who had made a fortune by trade in fashionable sundries and salt pork. And this fortune the generous widow would have been happy to employ for the advantage of J. T. Maston, to whom she would bring a treasure of tenderness yet more inexhaustible.
At Maston’s request, she had cheerfully consented to put several hundreds of thousands of dollars at the disposal of the North Polar Practical Association, without even knowing what it was all about. With J. T. Maston concerned in it she felt assured that the work could not but be grandiose, sublime, super-excellent. The past of the Gun Club’s secretary was voucher enough for the future.