Two on a Tower | Page 8

sun, watched her diminishing towards the distant fence, behind which
waited the carriage. When in the midst of the field, a dark spot on an
area of brown, there crossed her path a moving figure, whom it was as
difficult to distinguish from the earth he trod as the caterpillar from its
leaf, by reason of the excellent match between his clothes and the clods.
He was one of a dying-out generation who retained the principle, nearly
unlearnt now, that a man's habiliments should be in harmony with his
environment. Lady Constantine and this figure halted beside each other
for some minutes; then they went on their several ways.
The brown person was a labouring man known to the world of Welland
as Haymoss (the encrusted form of the word Amos, to adopt the phrase
of philologists). The reason of the halt had been some inquiries
addressed to him by Lady Constantine.
'Who is that--Amos Fry, I think?' she had asked.
'Yes my lady,' said Haymoss; 'a homely barley driller, born under the
eaves of your ladyship's outbuildings, in a manner of speaking,-
-though your ladyship was neither born nor 'tempted at that time.'
'Who lives in the old house behind the plantation?'
'Old Gammer Martin, my lady, and her grandson.'
'He has neither father nor mother, then?'
'Not a single one, my lady.'
'Where was he educated?'
'At Warborne,--a place where they draw up young gam'sters' brains like
rhubarb under a ninepenny pan, my lady, excusing my common way.
They hit so much larning into en that 'a could talk like the day of
Pentecost; which is a wonderful thing for a simple boy, and his mother
only the plainest ciphering woman in the world. Warborne Grammar
School--that's where 'twas 'a went to. His father, the reverent Pa'son St.
Cleeve, made a terrible bruckle hit in 's marrying, in the sight of the
high. He were the curate here, my lady, for a length o' time.'
'Oh, curate,' said Lady Constantine. 'It was before I knew the village.'
'Ay, long and merry ago! And he married Farmer Martin's daughter--
Giles Martin, a limberish man, who used to go rather bad upon his lags,

if you can mind. I knowed the man well enough; who should know en
better! The maid was a poor windling thing, and, though a playward
piece o' flesh when he married her, 'a socked and sighed, and went out
like a snoff! Yes, my lady. Well, when Pa'son St. Cleeve married this
homespun woman the toppermost folk wouldn't speak to his wife. Then
he dropped a cuss or two, and said he'd no longer get his living by
curing their twopenny souls o' such d--- nonsense as that (excusing my
common way), and he took to farming straightway, and then 'a dropped
down dead in a nor'-west thunderstorm; it being said--hee-hee!--that
Master God was in tantrums wi'en for leaving his service,--hee-hee! I
give the story as I heard it, my lady, but be dazed if I believe in such
trumpery about folks in the sky, nor anything else that's said on 'em,
good or bad. Well, Swithin, the boy, was sent to the grammar school, as
I say for; but what with having two stations of life in his blood he's
good for nothing, my lady. He mopes about--sometimes here, and
sometimes there; nobody troubles about en.'
Lady Constantine thanked her informant, and proceeded onward. To
her, as a woman, the most curious feature in the afternoon's incident
was that this lad, of striking beauty, scientific attainments, and
cultivated bearing, should be linked, on the maternal side, with a local
agricultural family through his father's matrimonial eccentricity. A
more attractive feature in the case was that the same youth, so capable
of being ruined by flattery, blandishment, pleasure, even gross
prosperity, should be at present living on in a primitive Eden of
unconsciousness, with aims towards whose accomplishment a Caliban
shape would have been as effective as his own.

II
Swithin St. Cleeve lingered on at his post, until the more sanguine birds
of the plantation, already recovering from their midwinter anxieties,
piped a short evening hymn to the vanishing sun.
The landscape was gently concave; with the exception of tower and hill
there were no points on which late rays might linger; and hence the
dish-shaped ninety acres of tilled land assumed a uniform hue of shade
quite suddenly. The one or two stars that appeared were quickly
clouded over, and it was soon obvious that there would be no sweeping
the heavens that night. After tying a piece of tarpaulin, which had once

seen service on his maternal grandfather's farm, over all the apparatus
around him, he went down the stairs in the dark, and locked the door.
With the key in his pocket