Tobias Smollett - "The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Part I."

James E. Talmage - "The Story of Mormonism"

Brett Page - "Writing for Vaudeville"

Plato - "Plato's Republic"

Two on a Tower

T >> Thomas Hardy >> Two on a Tower




But the events of the night had not yet fully disclosed themselves.
At this moment there was a sound of footsteps and a knocking at the
door below.

'It can't be for me!' said Lady Constantine. 'I retired to my room
before leaving the house, and told them on no account to disturb
me.'

She remained at the top while Swithin went down the spiral. In the
gloom he beheld Hannah.

'O Master Swithin, can ye come home! The wind have blowed down the
chimley that don't smoke, and the pinning-end with it; and the old
ancient house, that have been in your family so long as the memory
of man, is naked to the world! It is a mercy that your grammer were
not killed, sitting by the hearth, poor old soul, and soon to walk
wi' God,--for 'a 's getting wambling on her pins, Mr. Swithin, as
aged folks do. As I say, 'a was all but murdered by the elements,
and doing no more harm than the babes in the wood, nor speaking one
harmful word. And the fire and smoke were blowed all across house
like a chapter in Revelation; and your poor reverent father's
features scorched to flakes, looking like the vilest ruffian, and
the gilt frame spoiled! Every flitch, every eye-piece, and every
chine is buried under the walling; and I fed them pigs with my own
hands, Master Swithin, little thinking they would come to this end.
Do ye collect yourself, Mr. Swithin, and come at once!'

'I will,--I will. I'll follow you in a moment. Do you hasten back
again and assist.'

When Hannah had departed the young man ran up to Lady Constantine,
to whom he explained the accident. After sympathizing with old Mrs.
Martin Lady Constantine added, 'I thought something would occur to
mar our scheme!'

'I am not quite sure of that yet.'

On a short consideration with him, she agreed to wait at the top of
the tower till he could come back and inform her if the accident
were really so serious as to interfere with his plan for departure.
He then left her, and there she sat in the dark, alone, looking over
the parapet, and straining her eyes in the direction of the
homestead.

At first all was obscurity; but when he had been gone about ten
minutes lights began to move to and fro in the hollow where the
house stood, and shouts occasionally mingled with the wind, which
retained some violence yet, playing over the trees beneath her as on
the strings of a lyre. But not a bough of them was visible, a cloak
of blackness covering everything netherward; while overhead the
windy sky looked down with a strange and disguised face, the three
or four stars that alone were visible being so dissociated by clouds
that she knew not which they were. Under any other circumstances
Lady Constantine might have felt a nameless fear in thus sitting
aloft on a lonely column, with a forest groaning under her feet, and
palaeolithic dead men feeding its roots; but the recent passionate
decision stirred her pulses to an intensity beside which the
ordinary tremors of feminine existence asserted themselves in vain.
The apocalyptic effect of the scene surrounding her was, indeed, not
inharmonious, and afforded an appropriate background to her
intentions.

After what seemed to her an interminable space of time, quick steps
in the staircase became audible above the roar of the firs, and in a
few instants St. Cleeve again stood beside her.

The case of the homestead was serious. Hannah's account had not
been exaggerated in substance: the gable end of the house was open
to the garden; the joists, left without support, had dropped, and
with them the upper floor. By the help of some labourers, who lived
near, and Lady Constantine's man Anthony, who was passing at the
time, the homestead had been propped up, and protected for the night
by some rickcloths; but Swithin felt that it would be selfish in the
highest degree to leave two lonely old women to themselves at this
juncture. 'In short,' he concluded despondently, 'I cannot go to
stay in Bath or London just now; perhaps not for another fortnight!'

'Never mind,' she said. 'A fortnight hence will do as well.'

'And I have these for you,' he continued. 'Your man Green was
passing my grandmother's on his way back from Warborne, where he had
been, he says, for any letters that had come for you by the evening
post. As he stayed to assist the other men I told him I would go on
to your house with the letters he had brought. Of course I did not
tell him I should see you here.'

'Thank you. Of course not. Now I'll return at once.'

In descending the column her eye fell upon the superscription of one
of the letters, and she opened and glanced over it by the lantern
light. She seemed startled, and, musing, said, 'The postponement of
our--intention must be, I fear, for a long time. I find that after
the end of this month I cannot leave home safely, even for a day.'
Perceiving that he was about to ask why, she added, 'I will not
trouble you with the reason now; it would only harass you. It is
only a family business, and cannot be helped.'

'Then we cannot be married till--God knows when!' said Swithin
blankly. 'I cannot leave home till after the next week or two; you
cannot leave home unless within that time. So what are we to do?'

'I do not know.'

'My dear, dear one, don't let us be beaten like this! Don't let a
well-considered plan be overthrown by a mere accident! Here's a
remedy. Do YOU go and stay the requisite time in the parish we are
to be married in, instead of me. When my grandmother is again well
housed I can come to you, instead of you to me, as we first said.
Then it can be done within the time.'

Reluctantly, shyly, and yet with a certain gladness of heart, she
gave way to his proposal that they should change places in the
programme. There was much that she did not like in it, she said.
It seemed to her as if she were taking the initiative by going and
attending to the preliminaries. It was the man's part to do that,
in her opinion, and was usually undertaken by him.

'But,' argued Swithin, 'there are cases in which the woman does give
the notices, and so on; that is to say, when the man is absolutely
hindered from doing so; and ours is such a case. The seeming is
nothing; I know the truth, and what does it matter? You do not
refuse--retract your word to be my wife, because, to avoid a
sickening delay, the formalities require you to attend to them in
place of me?'

She did not refuse, she said. In short she agreed to his entreaty.
They had, in truth, gone so far in their dream of union that there
was no drawing back now. Whichever of them was forced by
circumstances to be the protagonist in the enterprise, the thing
must be done. Their intention to become husband and wife, at first
halting and timorous, had accumulated momentum with the lapse of
hours, till it now bore down every obstacle in its course.

'Since you beg me to,--since there is no alternative between my
going and a long postponement,' she said, as they stood in the dark
porch of Welland House before parting,--'since I am to go first, and
seem to be the pioneer in this adventure, promise me, Swithin,
promise your Viviette, that in years to come, when perhaps you may
not love me so warmly as you do now--'

'That will never be.'

'Well, hoping it will not, but supposing it should, promise me that
you will never reproach me as the one who took the initiative when
it should have been yourself, forgetting that it was at your
request; promise that you will never say I showed immodest readiness
to do so, or anything which may imply your obliviousness of the fact
that I act in obedience to necessity and your earnest prayer.'

Need it be said that he promised never to reproach her with that or
any other thing as long as they should live? The few details of the
reversed arrangement were soon settled, Bath being the place finally
decided on. Then, with a warm audacity which events had encouraged,
he pressed her to his breast, and she silently entered the house.
He returned to the homestead, there to attend to the unexpected
duties of repairing the havoc wrought by the gale.


That night, in the solitude of her chamber, Lady Constantine
reopened and read the subjoined letter--one of those handed to her
by St. Cleeve:--


"----- STREET, PICCADILLY,
October 15, 18--.

'DEAR VIVIETTE,--You will be surprised to learn that I am in
England, and that I am again out of harness--unless you should have
seen the latter in the papers. Rio Janeiro may do for monkeys, but
it won't do for me. Having resigned the appointment I have returned
here, as a preliminary step to finding another vent for my energies;
in other words, another milch cow for my sustenance. I knew nothing
whatever of your husband's death till two days ago; so that any
letter from you on the subject, at the time it became known, must
have miscarried. Hypocrisy at such a moment is worse than useless,
and I therefore do not condole with you, particularly as the event,
though new to a banished man like me, occurred so long since. You
are better without him, Viviette, and are now just the limb for
doing something for yourself, notwithstanding the threadbare state
in which you seem to have been cast upon the world. You are still
young, and, as I imagine (unless you have vastly altered since I
beheld you), good-looking: therefore make up your mind to retrieve
your position by a match with one of the local celebrities; and you
would do well to begin drawing neighbouring covers at once. A
genial squire, with more weight than wit, more realty than weight,
and more personalty than realty (considering the circumstances),
would be best for you. You might make a position for us both by
some such alliance; for, to tell the truth, I have had but in-and-
out luck so far. I shall be with you in little more than a
fortnight, when we will talk over the matter seriously, if you don't
object.--Your affectionate brother,
LOUIS.'


It was this allusion to her brother's coming visit which had caught
her eye in the tower staircase, and led to a modification in the
wedding arrangement.

Having read the letter through once Lady Constantine flung it aside
with an impatient little stamp that shook the decaying old floor and
casement. Its contents produced perturbation, misgiving, but not
retreat. The deep glow of enchantment shed by the idea of a private
union with her beautiful young lover killed the pale light of cold
reasoning from an indifferently good relative.

'Oh, no,' she murmured, as she sat, covering her face with her hand.
'Not for wealth untold could I give him up now!'

No argument, short of Apollo in person from the clouds, would have
influenced her. She made her preparations for departure as if
nothing had intervened.



XVII

In her days of prosperity Lady Constantine had often gone to the
city of Bath, either frivolously, for shopping purposes, or musico-
religiously, to attend choir festivals in the abbey; so there was
nothing surprising in her reverting to an old practice. That the
journey might appear to be of a somewhat similar nature she took
with her the servant who had been accustomed to accompany her on
former occasions, though the woman, having now left her service, and
settled in the village as the wife of Anthony Green, with a young
child on her hands, could with some difficulty leave home. Lady
Constantine overcame the anxious mother's scruples by providing that
young Green should be well cared for; and knowing that she could
count upon this woman's fidelity, if upon anybody's, in case of an
accident (for it was chiefly Lady Constantine's exertions that had
made an honest wife of Mrs. Green), she departed for a fortnight's
absence.

The next day found mistress and maid settled in lodgings in an old
plum-coloured brick street, which a hundred years ago could boast of
rank and fashion among its residents, though now the broad fan-light
over each broad door admitted the sun to the halls of a lodging-
house keeper only. The lamp-posts were still those that had done
duty with oil lights; and rheumatic old coachmen and postilions,
that once had driven and ridden gloriously from London to Land's
End, ornamented with their bent persons and bow legs the pavement in
front of the chief inn, in the sorry hope of earning sixpence to
keep body and soul together.

'We are kept well informed on the time o' day, my lady,' said Mrs.
Green, as she pulled down the blinds in Lady Constantine's room on
the evening of their arrival. 'There's a church exactly at the back
of us, and I hear every hour strike.'

Lady Constantine said she had noticed that there was a church quite
near.

'Well, it is better to have that at the back than other folks'
winders. And if your ladyship wants to go there it won't be far to
walk.'

'That's what occurred to me,' said Lady Constantine, 'IF I should
want to go.'

During the ensuing days she felt to the utmost the tediousness of
waiting merely that time might pass. Not a soul knew her there, and
she knew not a soul, a circumstance which, while it added to her
sense of secrecy, intensified her solitude. Occasionally she went
to a shop, with Green as her companion. Though there were purchases
to be made, they were by no means of a pressing nature, and but
poorly filled up the vacancies of those strange, speculative days,--
days surrounded by a shade of fear, yet poetized by sweet
expectation.

On the thirteenth day she told Green that she was going to take a
walk, and leaving the house she passed by the obscurest streets to
the Abbey. After wandering about beneath the aisles till her
courage was screwed to its highest, she went out at the other side,
and, looking timidly round to see if anybody followed, walked on
till she came to a certain door, which she reached just at the
moment when her heart began to sink to its very lowest, rendering
all the screwing up in vain.

Whether it was because the month was October, or from any other
reason, the deserted aspect of the quarter in general sat especially
on this building. Moreover the pavement was up, and heaps of stone
and gravel obstructed the footway. Nobody was coming, nobody was
going, in that thoroughfare; she appeared to be the single one of
the human race bent upon marriage business, which seemed to have
been unanimously abandoned by all the rest of the world as proven
folly. But she thought of Swithin, his blonde hair, ardent eyes,
and eloquent lips, and was carried onward by the very reflection.

Entering the surrogate's room Lady Constantine managed, at the last
juncture, to state her errand in tones so collected as to startle
even herself to which her listener replied also as if the whole
thing were the most natural in the world. When it came to the
affirmation that she had lived fifteen days in the parish, she said
with dismay--

'O no! I thought the fifteen days meant the interval of residence
before the marriage takes place. I have lived here only thirteen
days and a half. Now I must come again!'

'Ah--well--I think you need not be so particular,' said the
surrogate. 'As a matter of fact, though the letter of the law
requires fifteen days' residence, many people make five sufficient.
The provision is inserted, as you doubtless are aware, to hinder
runaway marriages as much as possible, and secret unions, and other
such objectionable practices. You need not come again.'

That evening Lady Constantine wrote to Swithin St. Cleeve the last
letter of the fortnight:--


'MY DEAREST,--Do come to me as soon as you can. By a sort of
favouring blunder I have been able to shorten the time of waiting by
a day. Come at once, for I am almost broken down with apprehension.
It seems rather rash at moments, all this, and I wish you were here
to reassure me. I did not know I should feel so alarmed. I am
frightened at every footstep, and dread lest anybody who knows me
should accost me, and find out why I am here. I sometimes wonder
how I could have agreed to come and enact your part, but I did not
realize how trying it would be. You ought not to have asked me,
Swithin; upon my word, it was too cruel of you, and I will punish
you for it when you come! But I won't upbraid. I hope the
homestead is repaired that has cost me all this sacrifice of
modesty. If it were anybody in the world but YOU in question I
would rush home, without waiting here for the end of it,--I really
think I would! But, dearest, no. I must show my strength now, or
let it be for ever hid. The barriers of ceremony are broken down
between us, and it is for the best that I am here.'


And yet, at no point of this trying prelude need Lady Constantine
have feared for her strength. Deeds in this connexion demand the
particular kind of courage that such perfervid women are endowed
with, the courage of their emotions, in which young men are often
lamentably deficient. Her fear was, in truth, the fear of being
discovered in an unwonted position; not of the act itself. And
though her letter was in its way a true exposition of her feeling,
had it been necessary to go through the whole legal process over
again she would have been found equal to the emergency.

It had been for some days a point of anxiety with her what to do
with Green during the morning of the wedding. Chance unexpectedly
helped her in this difficulty. The day before the purchase of the
license Green came to Lady Constantine with a letter in her hand
from her husband Anthony, her face as long as a fiddle.

'I hope there's nothing the matter?' said Lady Constantine.

'The child's took bad, my lady!' said Mrs. Green, with suspended
floods of water in her eyes. 'I love the child better than I shall
love all them that's coming put together; for he's been a good boy
to his mother ever since twelve weeks afore he was born! 'Twas he,
a tender deary, that made Anthony marry me, and thereby turned
hisself from a little calamity to a little blessing! For, as you
know, the man were a backward man in the church part o' matrimony,
my lady; though he'll do anything when he's forced a bit by his
manly feelings. And now to lose the child--hoo-hoo-hoo! What shall
I doo!'

'Well, you want to go home at once, I suppose?'

Mrs. Green explained, between her sobs, that such was her desire;
and though this was a day or two sooner than her mistress had wished
to be left alone she consented to Green's departure. So during the
afternoon her woman went off, with directions to prepare for Lady
Constantine's return in two or three days. But as the exact day of
her return was uncertain no carriage was to be sent to the station
to meet her, her intention being to hire one from the hotel.

Lady Constantine was now left in utter solitude to await her lover's
arrival.



XVIII

A more beautiful October morning than that of the next day never
beamed into the Welland valleys. The yearly dissolution of leafage
was setting in apace. The foliage of the park trees rapidly
resolved itself into the multitude of complexions which mark the
subtle grades of decay, reflecting wet lights of such innumerable
hues that it was a wonder to think their beauties only a repetition
of scenes that had been exhibited there on scores of previous
Octobers, and had been allowed to pass away without a single dirge
from the imperturbable beings who walked among them. Far in the
shadows semi-opaque screens of blue haze made mysteries of the
commonest gravel-pit, dingle, or recess.

The wooden cabin at the foot of Rings-Hill Speer had been furnished
by Swithin as a sitting and sleeping apartment, some little while
before this time; for he had found it highly convenient, during
night observations at the top of the column, to remain on the spot
all night, not to disturb his grandmother by passing in and out of
the house, and to save himself the labour of incessantly crossing
the field.

He would much have liked to tell her the secret, and, had it been
his own to tell, would probably have done so; but sharing it with an
objector who knew not his grandmother's affection so well as he did
himself, there was no alternative to holding his tongue. The more
effectually to guard it he decided to sleep at the cabin during the
two or three nights previous to his departure, leaving word at the
homestead that in a day or two he was going on an excursion.

It was very necessary to start early. Long before the great eye of
the sun was lifted high enough to glance into the Welland valley,
St. Cleeve arose from his bed in the cabin and prepared to depart,
cooking his breakfast upon a little stove in the corner. The young
rabbits, littered during the foregoing summer, watched his
preparations through the open door from the grey dawn without, as he
bustled, half dressed, in and out under the boughs, and among the
blackberries and brambles that grew around.

It was a strange place for a bridegroom to perform his toilet in,
but, considering the unconventional nature of the marriage, a not
inappropriate one. What events had been enacted in that earthen
camp since it was first thrown up, nobody could say; but the
primitive simplicity of the young man's preparations accorded well
with the prehistoric spot on which they were made. Embedded under
his feet were possibly even now rude trinkets that had been worn at
bridal ceremonies of the early inhabitants. Little signified those
ceremonies to-day, or the happiness or otherwise of the contracting
parties. That his own rite, nevertheless, signified much, was the
inconsequent reasoning of Swithin, as it is of many another
bridegroom besides; and he, like the rest, went on with his
preparations in that mood which sees in his stale repetition the
wondrous possibilities of an untried move.

Then through the wet cobwebs, that hung like movable diaphragms on
each blade and bough, he pushed his way down to the furrow which led
from the secluded fir-tree island to the wide world beyond the
field.

He was not a stranger to enterprise, and still less to the
contemplation of enterprise; but an enterprise such as this he had
never even outlined. That his dear lady was troubled at the
situation he had placed her in by not going himself on that errand,
he could see from her letter; but, believing an immediate marriage
with her to be the true way of restoring to both that equanimity
necessary to serene philosophy, he held it of little account how the
marriage was brought about, and happily began his journey towards
her place of sojourn.

He passed through a little copse before leaving the parish, the
smoke from newly lit fires rising like the stems of blue trees out
of the few cottage chimneys. Here he heard a quick, familiar
footstep in the path ahead of him, and, turning the corner of the
bushes, confronted the foot-post on his way to Welland. In answer
to St. Cleeve's inquiry if there was anything for himself the
postman handed out one letter, and proceeded on his route.

Swithin opened and read the letter as he walked, till it brought him
to a standstill by the importance of its contents.

They were enough to agitate a more phlegmatic youth than he. He
leant over the wicket which came in his path, and endeavoured to
comprehend the sense of the whole.

The large long envelope contained, first, a letter from a solicitor
in a northern town, informing him that his paternal great-uncle, who
had recently returned from the Cape (whither he had gone in an
attempt to repair a broken constitution), was now dead and buried.
This great-uncle's name was like a new creation to Swithin. He had
held no communication with the young man's branch of the family for
innumerable years,--never, in fact, since the marriage of Swithin's
father with the simple daughter of Welland Farm. He had been a
bachelor to the end of his life, and had amassed a fairly good
professional fortune by a long and extensive medical practice in the
smoky, dreary, manufacturing town in which he had lived and died.
Swithin had always been taught to think of him as the embodiment of
all that was unpleasant in man. He was narrow, sarcastic, and
shrewd to unseemliness. That very shrewdness had enabled him,
without much professional profundity, to establish his large and
lucrative connexion, which lay almost entirely among a class who
neither looked nor cared for drawing-room courtesies.

However, what Dr. St. Cleeve had been as a practitioner matters
little. He was now dead, and the bulk of his property had been left
to persons with whom this story has nothing to do. But Swithin was
informed that out of it there was a bequest of 600 pounds a year to
himself,--payment of which was to begin with his twenty-first year,
and continue for his life, unless he should marry before reaching
the age of twenty-five. In the latter precocious and objectionable
event his annuity would be forfeited. The accompanying letter, said
the solicitor, would explain all.

This, the second letter, was from his uncle to himself, written
about a month before the former's death, and deposited with his
will, to be forwarded to his nephew when that event should have
taken place. Swithin read, with the solemnity that such posthumous
epistles inspire, the following words from one who, during life, had
never once addressed him:-

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.