The Vicar laughed and shook hands with both the girls.
“I have to give some orders about new bell-ropes; ours were rotten, and I’ve had them taken down,” he explained. “And it was an old promise I should take this monkey up the tower next time I had to go there. Do you two feel inclined, I wonder, to come with us, and walk ‘miles and miles and miles up ladders, almost to the sky’?”
Sydney looked at the tower, standing grey and tall outlined sharply on the blue, and then at Miss Osric. “Should you like it? It would be lovely, I think.”
“We should like to go up very much indeed, if Mr. Seaton doesn’t mind the bother of us,” said Miss Osric, and the four went on together to Lislehurst Church at the farther end of the village.
The church itself had been rebuilt in the eighteenth century, when the black oak panelling had been removed as “dirty-looking” and replaced by whitewash, and relieved at intervals by the St. Quentin Arms painted on it in the gaudiest colours. At the same time, the few bits of exquisite stained glass which had survived a visit from the “root and branch” men of the Commonwealth days had been taken away to make room for a complete set of crudely coloured windows, which vexed the soul of Mr. Seaton whenever his eyes fell upon them. But the old tower had been left intact, and was considered by the learned to be one of the finest specimens of fourteenth century architecture left in England.
There was a tradition that the saintly Bishop Ken had once climbed it, and had pronounced the view from the top to be “a foretaste of Heaven.”
Sydney, when she saw the perpendicular ladders tied together, which those who went beyond the belfry chamber were compelled to climb, doubted privately the probability of anyone so old and frail as the non-juring Bishop had grown when he came to Blankshire, having strength or breath to reach the summit!
“You are not frightened, are you?” asked the Vicar, when he had given his orders to the man awaiting him in the belfry chamber, now emptied of its dangling ropes. “Don’t try it, if you feel in the least bit nervous, for it is a stiffish climb!”
To be quite honest, Sydney did not particularly like the look of the many ladders to be scaled, but she would have died sooner than own her fears.