The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Belfry, by May Sinclair

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Title: The Belfry

Author: May Sinclair

Release Date: November 21, 2004 [eBook #14106]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BELFRY***

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THE BELFRY

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of the _Three Sisters_, etc.

1916

BOOK I

MY BOOK

I

Of course this story can't be published as it stands just yet. Not--if
I'm to be decent--for another generation, because, thank Heaven, they're
still alive. (They've had me there, as they've always had me everywhere.)
How they managed it I can't think. I don't mean merely at the end, though
that was stupendous, but how they ever managed it. It seems to me they
must have taken _all_ the risks, always.

I suppose if you asked him he'd say, "That's how." It was certainly the
way they managed the business of living. Perhaps it's why they managed it
on the whole so well. I remember how when I was shilly-shallying about
that last job of mine he said, "Take it. Take it. If you can risk living
at all, my dear fellow, you can risk that."

And he added, "If I'd only _your_ luck!"

Well, that's exactly what he did have. He had my luck, I mean the luck I
ought to have had, all the time, from the beginning to the very end. But
there is one thing he can't take from me, and that is the telling of this
story. He can hold it up as long as he lives--as long as _she_ lives--as
he has held up pretty nearly everything where I was concerned. But he
can't take it from me. He doesn't "want" it. Even he with his infernal
talent couldn't do anything with it. Unscrupulous as he was, and I assure
you he'd stick at nothing (he'd "take" his mother's last agony if he
"wanted" it badly enough), indecent as he was, he'd stick at that.

I don't mean he couldn't take his wife, part of her, anyhow, at a pinch.
And I don't mean he couldn't take himself, his own emotions, his own
eccentricities, if he happened to want them, and his own meannesses