The Belfry

E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects,
Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Author of the Three Sisters , etc.
1916
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, if nobody else's, so to speak, would do. But he couldn't and wouldn't take his own big things, particularly not that last thing.
When I say that I can't publish this story yet as it stands, I'm not forgetting that I have published the end of it already. But only in the way of business; to publish that sort of thing was what I went out for; it was all part of my Special Correspondent's job.