Nobody could guess; only she knew; only she could know, because she was the great-grand-daughter of the man himself
Why are they?
«No, no, no,» she protested. He had told her the story. What story? If they liked, she would try to tell it. There was still time before the play.
«But where do I begin?» she pondered. «In the year 1820. It must have been about then that my greatgrandfather was a boy. I’m not young myself «-no, but she was very well set up and handsome-«and he was a very old man when I was a child-when he told me the story. A very handsome old man, with a shock of white hair, and blue eyes. He must have been a beautiful boy. But queer. That was only natural,» she explained, «seeing how they lived. The name was Comber. They’d come down in the world. They’d been gentlefolk; they’d owned land up in Yorkshire. But when he was a boy only the tower was left. The house was nothing but a little farmhouse, standing in the middle of fields. We saw it ten years ago and went over it. We had to leave the car and walk across the fields. There isn’t any road to the house. It stands all alone, the grass grows right up to the gate. there were chickens pecking about, running in and out of the rooms. All gone to rack and ruin. I remember a stone fell from the tower suddenly.» She paused. «There they lived,» she went on, «the old man, the woman and the boy. She wasn’t his wife, or the boy’s mother. She was just a farm hand, a girl the old man had taken to live with him when his wife died. Another reason perhaps why nobody visited them-why the whole place was gone to rack and ruin. But I remember a coat of arms over the door; and books, old books, gone mouldy. He taught himself all he knew from books. He read and read, he told me, old books, books with maps hanging out from the pages. There’s a chair still in the window with the bottom fallen out; and the window swinging open, and the panes broken, and a view for miles and miles across the moors.»
He dragged them up to the top of the tower-the rope’s still there and the broken steps
«But we couldn’t,» she said, «find the telescope.» In the dining-room behind them the clatter of plates grew louder. But Mrs. Ivimey, on the balcony, seemed puzzled, because she could not find the telescope.
«It must have been there,» she resumed, «because, he told me, every night when the old people had gone to bed he sat at the window, looking through the telescope at the stars. Jupiter, Aldebaran, Cassiopeia.» She waved her hand at the stars that were beginning to show over the trees. It was growing draker. And the searchlight seemed brighter, sweeping across the sky, pausing here and there to stare at the stars.
«There they were,» she went on, «the stars. And he asked himself, my great-grandfather-that boy: ‘What are they? And who am I?’ as one does, sitting alone, with no one to talk to, looking at the stars.»
She was silent. They all looked at the stars that were coming out in the darkness over the trees. The stars seemed very permanent, very unchanging. The roar of London sank away. A hundred years seemed nothing. They felt that the boy was looking at the stars with them. They seemed to be with him, in the tower, looking out over the moors at the stars.