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.