‘Hannah, that will do now. Perhaps Lady Constantine would like to speak to me alone,’ said Mrs. Martin. And when Hannah had retreated Mrs. Martin continued: ‘Such a charge as she is, my lady, on account of her great age! You’ll pardon her biding here as if she were one of the family. I put up with such things because of her long service, and we know that years lead to childishness.’
‘What are you doing? Can I help you?’ Viviette asked, as Mrs. Martin, after speaking, turned to lift some large article.
‘Oh, ’tis only the skeleton of a telescope that’s got no works in his inside,’ said Swithin’s grandmother, seizing the huge pasteboard tube that Swithin had made, and abandoned because he could get no lenses to suit it. ‘I am going to hang it up to these hooks, and there it will bide till he comes again.’
Lady Constantine took one end, and the tube was hung up against the whitewashed wall by strings that the old woman had tied round it.
‘Here’s all his equinoctial lines, and his topics of Capricorn, and I don’t know what besides,’ Mrs. Martin continued, pointing to some charcoal scratches on the wall. ‘I shall never rub ’em out; no, though ’tis such untidiness as I was never brought up to, I shall never rub ’em out.’
‘Where has Swithin gone to first?’ asked Viviette anxiously. ‘Where does he say you are to write to him?’
‘Nowhere yet, my lady. He’s gone traipsing all over Europe and America, and then to the South Pacific Ocean about this Transit of Venus that’s going to be done there. He is to write to us first—God knows when!—for he said that if we didn’t hear from him for six months we were not to be gallied at all.’
At this intelligence, so much worse than she had expected, Lady Constantine stood mute, sank down, and would have fallen to the floor if there had not been a chair behind her. Controlling herself by a strenuous effort, she disguised her despair and asked vacantly: ‘From America to the South Pacific—Transit of Venus?’ (Swithin’s arrangement to accompany the expedition had been made at the last moment, and therefore she had not as yet been informed.)
‘Yes, to a lone island, I believe.’
‘Yes, a lone islant, my lady!’ echoed Hannah, who had crept in and made herself one of the family again, in spite of Mrs. Martin.