Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (405 page)

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.

CHAPTER 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 anything that would in some measure disperse an almost killing
ennui
.  She would have welcomed even a misfortune.  She had heard that from the summit of the pillar four counties could be seen.  Whatever pleasurable effect was to be derived from looking into four counties she resolved to enjoy to-day.

The fir-shrouded hill-top was (according to some antiquaries) an old Roman camp, — if it were not (as others insisted) an old British castle, or (as the rest swore) an old Saxon field of Witenagemote, — with remains of an outer and an inner vallum, a winding path leading up between their overlapping ends by an easy ascent.  The spikelets from the trees formed a soft carpet over the route, and occasionally a brake of brambles barred the interspaces of the trunks.  Soon she stood immediately at the foot of the column.

It had been built in the Tuscan order of classic architecture, and was really a tower, being hollow with steps inside.  The gloom and solitude which prevailed round the base were remarkable.  The sob of the environing trees was here expressively manifest; and moved by the light breeze their thin straight stems rocked in seconds, like inverted pendulums; while some boughs and twigs rubbed the pillar’s sides, or occasionally clicked in catching each other.  Below the level of their summits the masonry was lichen-stained and mildewed, for the sun never pierced that moaning cloud of blue-black vegetation.  Pads of moss grew in the joints of the stone-work, and here and there shade-loving insects had engraved on the mortar patterns of no human style or meaning; but curious and suggestive.  Above the trees the case was different: the pillar rose into the sky a bright and cheerful thing, unimpeded, clean, and flushed with the sunlight.

The spot was seldom visited by a pedestrian, except perhaps in the shooting season.  The rarity of human intrusion was evidenced by the mazes of rabbit-runs, the feathers of shy birds, the exuviæ of reptiles; as also by the well-worn paths of squirrels down the sides of trunks, and thence horizontally away.  The fact of the plantation being an island in the midst of an arable plain sufficiently accounted for this lack of visitors.  Few unaccustomed to such places can be aware of the insulating effect of ploughed ground, when no necessity compels people to traverse it.  This rotund hill of trees and brambles, standing in the centre of a ploughed field of some ninety or a hundred acres, was probably visited less frequently than a rock would have been visited in a lake of equal extent.

She walked round the column to the other side, where she found the door through which the interior was reached.  The paint, if it had ever had any, was all washed from the wood, and down the decaying surface of the boards liquid rust from the nails and hinges had run in red stains.  Over the door was a stone tablet, bearing, apparently, letters or words; but the inscription, whatever it was, had been smoothed over with a plaster of lichen.

Here stood this aspiring piece of masonry, erected as the most conspicuous and ineffaceable reminder of a man that could be thought of; and yet the whole aspect of the memorial betokened forgetfulness.  Probably not a dozen people within the district knew the name of the person commemorated, while perhaps not a soul remembered whether the column were hollow or solid, whether with or without a tablet explaining its date and purpose.  She herself had lived within a mile of it for the last five years, and had never come near it till now.

She hesitated to ascend alone, but finding that the door was not fastened she pushed it open with her foot, and entered.  A scrap of writing-paper lay within, and arrested her attention by its freshness.  Some human being, then, knew the spot, despite her surmises.  But as the paper had nothing on it no clue was afforded; yet feeling herself the proprietor of the column and of all around it her self-assertiveness was sufficient to lead her on.  The staircase was lighted by slits in the wall, and there was no difficulty in reaching the top, the steps being quite unworn.  The trap-door leading on to the roof was open, and on looking through it an interesting spectacle met her eye.

A youth was sitting on a stool in the centre of the lead flat which formed the summit of the column, his eye being applied to the end of a large telescope that stood before him on a tripod.  This sort of presence was unexpected, and the lady started back into the shade of the opening.  The only effect produced upon him by her footfall was an impatient wave of the hand, which he did without removing his eye from the instrument, as if to forbid her to interrupt him.

Pausing where she stood the lady examined the aspect of the individual who thus made himself so completely at home on a building which she deemed her unquestioned property.  He was a youth who might properly have been characterized by a word the judicious chronicler would not readily use in such a connection, preferring to reserve it for raising images of the opposite sex.  Whether because no deep felicity is likely to arise from the condition, or from any other reason, to say in these days that a youth is beautiful is not to award him that amount of credit which the expression would have carried with it if he had lived in the times of the Classical Dictionary.  So much, indeed, is the reverse the case that the assertion creates an awkwardness in saying anything more about him.  The beautiful youth usually verges so perilously on the incipient coxcomb, who is about to become the Lothario or Juan among the neighbouring maidens, that, for the due understanding of our present young man, his sublime innocence of any thought concerning his own material aspect, or that of others, is most fervently asserted, and must be as fervently believed.

Such as he was, there the lad sat.  The sun shone full in his face, and on his head he wore a black velvet skull-cap, leaving to view below it a curly margin of very light shining hair, which accorded well with the flush upon his cheek.

He had such a complexion as that with which Raffaelle enriches the countenance of the youthful son of Zacharias, — a complexion which, though clear, is far enough removed from virgin delicacy, and suggests plenty of sun and wind as its accompaniment.  His features were sufficiently straight in the contours to correct the beholder’s first impression that the head was the head of a girl.  Beside him stood a little oak table, and in front was the telescope.

His visitor had ample time to make these observations; and she may have done so all the more keenly through being herself of a totally opposite type.  Her hair was black as midnight, her eyes had no less deep a shade, and her complexion showed the richness demanded as a support to these decided features.  As she continued to look at the pretty fellow before her, apparently so far abstracted into some speculative world as scarcely to know a real one, a warmer wave of her warm temperament glowed visibly through her, and a qualified observer might from this have hazarded a guess that there was Romance blood in her veins.

But even the interest attaching to the youth could not arrest her attention for ever, and as he made no further signs of moving his eye from the instrument she broke the silence with —

‘What do you see? — something happening somewhere?’

‘Yes, quite a catastrophe!’ he automatically murmured, without moving round.

‘What?’

‘A cyclone in the sun.’

The lady paused, as if to consider the weight of that event in the scale of terrene life.

‘Will it make any difference to us here?’ she asked.

The young man by this time seemed to be awakened to the consciousness that somebody unusual was talking to him; he turned, and started.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said.  ‘I thought it was my relative come to look after me!  She often comes about this time.’

He continued to look at her and forget the sun, just such a reciprocity of influence as might have been expected between a dark lady and a flaxen-haired youth making itself apparent in the faces of each.

‘Don’t let me interrupt your observations,’ said she.

‘Ah, no,’ said he, again applying his eye; whereupon his face lost the animation which her presence had lent it, and became immutable as that of a bust, though superadding to the serenity of repose the sensitiveness of life.  The expression that settled on him was one of awe.  Not unaptly might it have been said that he was worshipping the sun.  Among the various intensities of that worship which have prevailed since the first intelligent being saw the luminary decline westward, as the young man now beheld it doing, his was not the weakest.  He was engaged in what may be called a very chastened or schooled form of that first and most natural of adorations.

‘But would you like to see it?’ he recommenced.  ‘It is an event that is witnessed only about once in two or three years, though it may occur often enough.’

She assented, and looked through the shaded eyepiece, and saw a whirling mass, in the centre of which the blazing globe seemed to be laid bare to its core.  It was a peep into a maelstrom of fire, taking place where nobody had ever been or ever would be.

‘It is the strangest thing I ever beheld,’ she said.  Then he looked again; till wondering who her companion could be she asked, ‘Are you often here?’

‘Every night when it is not cloudy, and often in the day.’

‘Ah, night, of course.  The heavens must be beautiful from this point.’

‘They are rather more than that.’

‘Indeed!  Have you entirely taken possession of this column?’

‘Entirely.’

‘But it is my column,’ she said, with smiling asperity.

‘Then are you Lady Constantine, wife of the absent Sir Blount Constantine?’

‘I am Lady Constantine.’

‘Ah, then I agree that it is your ladyship’s.  But will you allow me to rent it of you for a time, Lady Constantine?’

‘You have taken it, whether I allow it or not.  However, in the interests of science it is advisable that you continue your tenancy.  Nobody knows you are here, I suppose?’