Two on a Tower | Page 4

a serious view--will be reminded by this imperfect story,

in a manner not unprofitable to the growth of the social sympathies, of
the pathos, misery, long-suffering, and divine tenderness which in real
life frequently accompany the passion of such a woman as Viviette for
a lover several years her junior.
The scene of the action was suggested by two real spots in the part of
the country specified, each of which has a column standing upon it.
Certain surrounding peculiarities have been imported into the narrative
from both sites.
T. H. July 1895.

TWO ON A TOWER.

I
On an early winter afternoon, clear but not cold, when the vegetable
world was a weird multitude of skeletons through whose ribs the sun
shone freely, a gleaming landau came to a pause on the crest of a hill in
Wessex. The spot was where the old Melchester Road, which the
carriage had hitherto followed, was joined by a drive that led round into
a park at no great distance off.
The footman alighted, and went to the occupant of the carriage, a lady
about eight- or nine-and-twenty. She was looking through the opening
afforded by a field-gate at the undulating stretch of country beyond. In
pursuance of some remark from her the servant looked in the same
direction.
The central feature of the middle distance, as they beheld it, was a
circular isolated hill, of no great elevation, which placed itself in strong
chromatic contrast with a wide acreage of surrounding arable by being
covered with fir-trees. The trees were all of one size and age, so that
their tips assumed the precise curve of the hill they grew upon. This
pine-clad protuberance was yet further marked out from the general
landscape by having on its summit a tower in the form of a classical
column, which, though partly immersed in the plantation, rose above
the tree-tops to a considerable height. Upon this object the eyes of lady
and servant were bent.
'Then there is no road leading near it?' she asked.
'Nothing nearer than where we are now, my lady.'
'Then drive home,' she said after a moment. And the carriage rolled on

its way.
A few days later, the same lady, in the same carriage, passed that spot
again. Her eyes, as before, turned to the distant tower.
'Nobbs,' she said to the coachman, 'could you find your way home
through that field, so as to get near the outskirts of the plantation where
the column is?'
The coachman regarded the field. 'Well, my lady,' he observed, 'in dry
weather we might drive in there by inching and pinching, and so get
across by Five-and-Twenty Acres, all being well. But the ground is so
heavy after these rains that perhaps it would hardly be safe to try it
now.'
'Perhaps not,' she assented indifferently. 'Remember it, will you, at a
drier time?'
And again the carriage sped along the road, the lady's eyes resting on
the segmental hill, the blue trees that muffled it, and the column that
formed its apex, till they were out of sight.
A long time elapsed before that lady drove over the hill again. It was
February; the soil was now unquestionably dry, the weather and scene
being in other respects much as they had been before. The familiar
shape of the column seemed to remind her that at last an opportunity
for a close inspection had arrived. Giving her directions she saw the
gate opened, and after a little manoeuvring the carriage swayed slowly
into the uneven field.
Although the pillar stood upon the hereditary estate of her husband the
lady had never visited it, owing to its insulation by this well- nigh
impracticable ground. The drive to the base of the hill was tedious and
jerky, and on reaching it she alighted, directing that the carriage should
be driven back empty over the clods, to wait for her on the nearest edge
of the field. She then ascended beneath the trees on foot.
The column now showed itself as a much more important erection than
it had appeared from the road, or the park, or the windows of Welland
House, her residence hard by, whence she had surveyed it hundreds of
times without ever feeling a sufficient interest in its details to
investigate them. The column had been erected in the last century, as a
substantial memorial of her husband's great- grandfather, a respectable
officer who had fallen in the American war, and the reason of her lack
of interest was partly owing to her relations with this husband, of which

more anon. It was little beyond the sheer desire for something to
do--the chronic desire of her curiously lonely life--that had brought her
here now. She was in a mood to welcome