The work was pretty well over, when Aubrey, who had just arrived with leave for a week, came down, and made it desultory. Dickie, whose imagination had been a good deal occupied by his soldier uncle, wanted to study him, and Gertrude was never steady when Aubrey was near. Presently it was discovered that the door to the tower stair was open. The ascent of the tower was a feat performed two or three times in a lifetime at Stoneborough. Harry had once beguiled Ethel and Mary up, but Gertrude had never gone, and was crazy to go, as was likewise Dickie. Moreover, Aubrey and Gertrude insisted that it was only proper that Ethel should pay her respects to her prototype the gurgoyle, they wanted to compare her with him, and ordered her up; in fact their spirits were too high for them to be at ease within the church, and Ethel, maugre her thirty years, partook of the exhilaration enough to delight in an extraordinary enterprise, and as nothing remained but a little sweeping up, they left this to the superintendence of Mary and Mr. Wilmot, and embarked upon the narrow crumbling steps of the spiral stair, that led up within an unnatural thickening of one of the great piers that supported the tower, at the intersection of nave and transepts. After a long period of dust and darkness, and the monotony of always going with the same leg foremost, came a narrow door, leading to the ringers’ region, with all their ropes hanging down. Ethel was thankful when she had got her youngsters past without an essay on them; she doubted if she should have succeeded, but for Leonard’s being an element of soberness. Other little doors ensued, leading out to the various elevations of roof, which were at all sorts of different heights, the chancel lower than the nave, and one transept than the other; besides that the nave had both triforium and clerestory. It was a sort of labyrinth, and they wondered whether any one, except perhaps the plumber’s foreman knew his way among all the doors. Then there was one leading inwards to the eight bells—from whose fascinations Ethel thought Dickie never would be taken away—and still more charming, to the clock, which clanged a tremendous three, as they were in the act of looking at it, causing Leonard to make a great start, and then colour painfully. It was hard to believe, as Daisy said, that the old tower, that looked so short and squat below, could be so very high when you came to go up it; but the glimpses of the country, through the little loop-hole windows, were most inviting. At last, Aubrey, who was foremost, pushed up the trap-door, and emerged; but, as Dickie followed him, exclaimed, ‘Here we are; but you ladies in crinolines will never follow! You’ll stick fast for ever, and Leonard can’t pass, so there you’ll all have to stay.’
‘Aunt Daisy will sail away like a balloon,’ added Dickie, roguishly, looking back at her, and holding on his cap.
But Gertrude vigorously compressed her hoop, and squeezed through, followed by Ethel and Leonard. There was a considerable space, square, leaded and protected by the battlemented parapet, with a deep moulding round, and a gutter resulting in the pipe smoked by Ethel’s likeness, the gurgoyle. Of course the first thing Dickie and Aubrey did was to look for the letters that commemorated the ascent of H. M., E. M., M. M., in 1852; and it was equally needful that R. R. M., if nobody else, should likewise leave a record on the leads. There was an R. M. of 1820, that made it impossible to gainsay him. The view was not grand in itself, but there was a considerable charm in looking down on the rooks in their leafless trees, cawing over their old nests, and in seeing the roofs of the town; far away, too, the gray Welsh hills, and between, the country lying like a map, with rivers traced in light instead of black. Leonard stood still, his face turned towards the greenest of the meadows, and the river where it dashed over the wheel of a mill.
‘Have you seen it again?’ asked Ethel, as she stood by him, and watched his eye.
‘No. I am rather glad to see it first from so far off,’ he answered, ‘I mean to walk over some day.’
‘Ethel,’ called Gertrude, ‘is this your gurgoyle? His profile, as seen from above, isn’t flattering.’
‘O, Daisy, don’t lean over so far.’
‘Quite safe;’ but at that instant a gust of wind caught her hat, she grasped at it, but only saved it from whirling away, and made it fall short. ‘There, Ethel, your image has put on my hat; and henceforth will appear to the wondering city in a black hat and feather!’
‘I’ll get it,’ exclaimed the ever ready Dickie; and in another moment he had mounted the parapet and was reaching for it. Whether it were Gertrude’s shriek, or the natural recoil away from the grasping hand, or that his hold on the side of the adjoining pinnacle was insecure, he lost his balance, and with a sudden cry, vanished from their eyes.
The frightful consternation of that moment none of those four could ever bear to recall; the next, they remembered that he could only fall as far as the roof, but it was Ethel and Leonard alone who durst press to the parapet, and at the same moment a cry came up—
‘Oh, come! I’m holding on, but it cuts! Oh, come!’
Ethel saw, some five-and-twenty feet below, the little boy upon the transept roof, a smooth slope of lead, only broken by a skylight, a bit of churchwarden’s architecture still remaining. The child had gone crashing against the window, and now lay back clinging to its iron frame. Behind him was the entire height within to the church floor, before him a rapid slope, ended by a course of stone, wide enough indeed to walk on, but too narrow to check the impetus from slipping down the inclination above. Ethel’s brain swam; she just perceived that both Aubrey and Leonard had disappeared, and then had barely power to support Gertrude, who reeled against her, giddy with horror. ‘Oh look, look, Ethel,’ she cried; ‘I can’t. Where is he?’
‘There! Yes, hold on, Dickie, they are coming. Look up—not down—hold on!’
A door opened, and out dashed Aubrey! Alas! it was on the nave clerestory; he might as well have been a hundred, miles off. Another door, and Leonard appeared, and on the right level, but with a giddy unguarded ridge on which to pass round the angle of the tower. She saw his head pass safely round, but, even then, the horror was not over. Could he steady himself sufficiently to reach the child, or might not Dickie lose hold too soon? It was too close below for sight, the moulding and gurgoyle impeded her agonized view, but she saw the child’s look of joyful relief, she heard the steady voice, ‘Wait, don’t let go yet. There,’ and after a few more sounds, came up a shout, ‘all right!’ Infinitely relieved, she had to give her whole attention to poor Gertrude, who, overset by the accident, giddy with the attempt to look over, horrified by the danger, confused and distressed by the hair that came wildly flapping about her head and face, and by the puffs of wind at her hoop, had sunk down in the centre of the little leaden square, clinging with all her might to the staff of the weathercock, and feeling as if the whole tower were rocking with her, absolutely seeing the battlements dance. How was she ever to be safely got down the rickety ladder leading to the crumbling stone stair? Ethel knelt by her, twisted up the fluttering hair, bade her shut her eyes and compose her thoughts, and then called over the battlements to Aubrey, who, confused by the shock, continued to emerge at wrong doors and lose himself on the roofs, and was like one in a bad dream, nearly as much dizzied as his sister, to whose help he came the more readily, as the way up was the only one plain before him.
The detention would have been more dreadful to Ethel had she known all that was passing below, and that when the little boy, at Leonard’s sign, lowered himself towards the out-reaching arms of the young man, who was steadying himself against the wall of the tower, it was with a look of great pain, and leaving a trail of blood behind him. When, at length, he stood at the angle, Leonard calmly said, ‘Now go before me, round that corner, in at the door. Hold by the wall, I’ll hold your shoulder.’ The boy implicitly obeyed, the notion of giddiness never seemed to occur to him, and both safely came to the little door, on the threshold of which Leonard sat down, and lifting him on his knee, asked where he was hurt? ‘My leg,’ said Dickie, ‘the glass was running in all the time, and I could not move; but it does not hurt so much now.’