Thomas Hardy

Two on a Tower Thomas Hardy

Swithin St. Cleeve lingered on at his post, until the more sanguine birds of the plantation, alreadyrecovering 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 onwhich late rays might linger; and hence the dish-shaped ninety acres of tilled land assumed a uniformhue of shade quite suddenly. The one or two stars that appeared were quickly clouded over, and itwas soon obvious that there would be no sweeping the heavens that night. After tying a piece oftarpaulin, which had once seen service on his maternal grandfather's farm, over all the apparatusaround him, he went down the stairs in the dark, and locked the door. With the key in his pocket he descended through the underwood on the side of the slope oppositeto that trodden by Lady Constantine, and crossed the field in a line mathematically straight, and in amanner that left no traces, by keeping in the same furrow all the way on tiptoe. In a few minutes hereached a little dell, which occurred quite unexpectedly on the other side of the field-fence, anddescended to a venerable thatched house, whose enormous roof, broken up by dormers as big ashaycocks, could be seen even in the twilight. Over the white walls, built of chalk in the lump, outlines of creepers formed dark patterns, as if drawn in charcoal. Inside the house his maternal grandmother was sitting by a wood fire. Before it stood a pipkin, inwhich something was evidently kept warm. An eight-legged oak table in the middle of the room waslaid for a meal. This woman of eighty, in a large mob cap, under which she wore a little cap to keepthe other clean, retained faculties but little blunted. She was gazing into the flames, with her handsupon her knees, quietly re-enacting in her brain certain of the long chain of episodes, pathetic, tragical, and humorous, which had constituted the parish history for the last sixty years. OnSwithin's entry she looked up at him in a sideway directio