Tony didn’t reply. He was wondering whether, after all, he was quite so cocksure. He had been telling himself for the last month that it was best, from every point of view, that he should marry Miss Du Cane; his people, his future, his certainty of the safety of it, all urged him, and yet—and yet . . . His mother’s words came back to him. “Tony, don’t marry anybody unless you are quite certain that it is the only person. Don’t let anything else influence you. Marriage with the wrong person is . . .”
And then, in a moment, the fair was upon them. It had just struck eleven and the excitement seemed at its height. The market-place was very French in its neatness, and a certain gathering together of all the life, spiritual and corporate, of the town; the church, Norman, and of some historical interest, filled the right side of the square. Close at its side, and squeezed between its grey walls and the solemn dignity of the Town Hall, was a tall rectangular tower crowded with little slits of windows and curious iron bars that jutted out into the air like pointing fingers.
There was something rather pathetically dignified about it; it protested against its modern neglect and desertion. You felt that it had, in an earlier day, known brave times. Now the ground floor was used by a fruiterer; apples and plums, cherries and pears were bought and sold, and the Count’s Tower was Harding’s shop.
There were several other houses in the Square that told the same tale, houses with fantastic bow-windows and little pepper-pot doors, tiny balconies and quaintly carved figures that stared at you from hidden corners; houses that were once the height of fashion now hid themselves timidly from the real magnificence of the Town Hall. Their day was over, and perhaps their very life was threatened. The Town Hall, with its dinners and its balls and its speeches, need fear no rivalry.
But to-night the Town Hall was pushed aside and counted for nothing at all. It was the one occasion of the year on which it was of no importance, and the old, despised tower was far more in keeping with the hour and the scene.
Down the centre of the Square were rows of booths lighted by gas-jets that flamed and flared in the night-air with the hiss of many serpents. These filled the middle line of the market. To the right was the round-about; its circle of lights wheeling madly round and round gave it the vitality of a living thing—some huge Leviathan on wheels bawling discordantly the latest triumph of the Halls, and then, excited by its voice, whirling ever swifter and swifter as though it would hurl itself into the air and go rioting gaily through the market, and then suddenly dropping, dead, exhausted, melancholy at the ceasing of its song:—