The Belfry

by May Sinclair

I pointed out to him (what he said he knew as well as I did) that on the most lenient view of his case he had compromised Miss Thesiger very seriously. But, I said, he would have had to have compromised her more seriously still before her people would consent to her marrying him. He must see that, with what he had done, by stopping short of what he might have done, he had made himself, if anything, more unacceptable than he was to begin with. She might—she probably would in her present mood—insist on marrying him without their consent. On the other hand, she just mightn't. And it wasn't as if he could afford to marry her at once, while her present mood was on.

He said, No. But in six months he could afford it. He gave himself six months.

I said, Anything might happen in six months. Miss Thesiger's present mood (which, I put it to him, was very much made up of old Flemish glamour) might change. And if it did, it was just conceivable that she might marry me. He was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if he got the chance. I was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if I got the chance. At the present most of the chances, I owned, were in his favour. But there was just the off-chance in mine.

And that off-chance, I told him plainly, I meant to make the most of. I wouldn't be human if I didn't. I wasn't taking any unfair advantage of him, considering the tremendous innings he had had in Flanders, with the Flemish atmosphere to help him. If I could make any running in Canterbury, with the Canterbury atmosphere to help me (he owned very handsomely that it would help me, that I'd be "in it" quite beautifully) why, I'd make it.

Had he anything to say?

He looked at me very straight, with just the least perceptible twinkle, and he said, "All right, old man, cut in, and take your chance. I'll risk it."

I got to Canterbury in the early evening and went straight from my Fifteenth Century hotel to the Thesigers' house in the Close. I spotted it at once. It was all old red brick and grey stone like the Tudor houses in John's and Margaret's Quad.

I asked for Miss Viola Thesiger and was shown into the Canon's library. To my great relief the Canon wasn't in his library. It looked out on to a perfect garden with a thick green lawn, and an old red-brick wall, very high, all round it, and tall elms topping the wall, and long beds of wallflowers and tulips blazing away underneath it. I said to myself, "If I want atmosphere I've got it. Bruges is nothing to the Thesigers' garden in Canterbury Close." I'd time to take it all in, for Viola kept me waiting.

I was glad of the peace of the garden, for I'd taken in more atmosphere than I wanted already as I came through the house. You went upstairs to the Canon's library, and along a narrow black-oak corridor. And in passing I was aware of a peculiar quietness everywhere. It wasn't simply the quietness and laziness of the Cathedral Close. It was something in the house. I felt it as I crossed the threshold and the hall. It was the sum of slight but definite impressions: the sudden silence of voices that were talking somewhere when I came in; the shutting of a door that stood ajar; the withdrawal of footsteps approaching on the landing.

It was as if there had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker called in to help them to bury their dead.