Part 27 (1/2)
”I don't say otherwise,” said the young Dissenter, following into the old fifteenth-century chapel, small but perfect, the young priest of the place. They stood together for a moment under the vaulted roof, both young, in the glory of their days, both with vague n.o.ble meanings in them, which they knew so poorly how to carry out. They meant everything that was fine and great, these two young men, standing upon the threshold of their life, knowing little more than that they were fiercely opposed to each other, and meant to reform the world each in his own way; one by careful services and visitings of the poor, the other by the Liberation Society and overthrow of the State Church; both foolish, wrong and right, to the utmost bounds of human possibility. How different they felt themselves standing there, and yet how much at one they were without knowing it! Northcote had sufficient knowledge to admire the perfect old building. He followed his guide with a certain humility through the details, which Reginald had already learned by heart.
”There is nothing so perfect, so beautiful, so real now-a-days,” said the young Churchman, with a natural expansion of mind over the beauty to which he had fallen heir. It seemed to him, as he looked up at the tall windows with their graceful tracery, that he was the representative of all who had worked out their belief in G.o.d within these beautiful walls, and of all the perpetual wors.h.i.+ppers who had knelt among the old bra.s.ses of the early founders upon the worn floor. The other stood beside him with a half envy in his mind. The Dissenter did not feel himself the heir of those centuries in the same unhesitating way. He tried to feel that he was the heir of something better and more spiritual, yet felt a not ungenerous grudge that he could not share the other kins.h.i.+p too.
”It is very beautiful and n.o.ble,” he said. ”I should like to feel for it as you do; but what I should like still better would be to have the same clear certainty of faith, the same conviction that what they were doing was the only right thing to do which made both building and prayer so unfaltering in those days. We can't be so sure even of the span of an arch now.”
”No--nor can you be content with the old span, even though it is clearly the best by all rules,” said Reginald. The other smiled; he was the most speculative of the two, being perhaps the most thoughtful; and he had no fifteenth-century chapel to charm, nor old foundation to give him an anchor. He smiled, but there was a little envy in his mind. Even to have one's life set out before one within clear lines like this, would not that be something? If it had but been possible, no doubt saying prayers for the world, even with no better than the old men of the College to say amen, had something more beautiful in it than tours of agitation for the Liberation Society; but Northcote knew that for him it was not possible, any more than was the tonsure of Reginald's predecessor, who had said ma.s.s when first those pinnacles were reared towards heaven.
After he had smiled he sighed, for the old faith was more lovely than all the new agitations; he felt a little ashamed of the Liberation Society, so long as he stood under that groined and glorious roof.
”May!” said some one, coming in suddenly. ”I want you to go to the hospital for me. I am obliged to go off to town on urgent business--convocation work; and I must get a lawyer's opinion about the reredos question; there is not a moment to lose. Go and see the people in the pulmonary ward, there's a good fellow; and there are two or three bad accidents; and that old woman who is ill in Brown's cottage, you saw her the other day; and the Simmonds in Back Grove Street. I should have had a day's work well cut out, if I had not had this summons to town; but the reredos question is of the first importance, you know.”
”I'll go,” said Reginald. There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or a.s.sumption than to hear it sympathetically, through the ears, as it were, of a sceptic. Reginald, seeing Northcote's keen eyes gleam at the sound of the Rector's voice, instinctively fell into sympathy with him, and heard the speech through him; and though he himself felt the importance of the reredos, yet he saw in a moment how such a question would take shape in the opinion of the young Dissenter, in whom he clearly saw certain resemblances to himself. Therefore he a.s.sented very briefly, taking out his note-book to put down the special cases of which the Rector told him. They had a confidential conversation in a corner, during which the new-comer contemplated the figure of Northcote in his strange semi-clerical garments with some amaze. ”Who is your friend?” he said abruptly, for he was a rapid man, losing no time about anything.
”It is not my friend at all; it is my enemy who denounced me at the Dissenters' meeting.”
”Pah!” cried the Rector, curling up his nostrils, as if some disagreeable smell had reached him. ”A Dissenter here! I should not have expected it from you, May.”
”Nor I either,” said Reginald; but his colour rose. He was not disposed to be rebuked by any rector in Carlingford or the world.
”Are you his curate,” said Northcote, ”that he orders you about as if you were bound to do his bidding? I hope, for your own sake, it is not so.”
Now it was Reginald's turn to smile. He was young, and liked a bit of grandiloquence as well as another.
”Since I have been here,” he said, ”in this sinecure, as you call it--and such it almost is--I have been everybody's curate. If the others have too much work, and I too little, my duty is clear, don't you think?”
Northcote made no reply. Had he known what was about to be said to him, he might have stirred up his faculties to say something; but he had not an idea that Reginald would answer him like this, and it took him aback.
He was too honest himself not to be worsted by such a speech. He bowed his head with genuine respect. The apology of the Churchman whom he had a.s.saulted, filled him with a kind of reverential confusion; he could make no reply in words. And need it be said that Reginald's heart too melted altogether when he saw how he had confounded his adversary? That silent a.s.sent more than made up for the noisy onslaught. That he should have thus overcome Northcote made Northcote appear his friend. He was pleased and satisfied beyond the reach of words.
”Will you come to the hospital with me?” he said; and they walked out together, the young Dissenter saying very little, doing what he could to arrange those new lights which had suddenly flashed upon his favourite subject, and feeling that he had lost his landmarks, and was confused in his path. When the logic is taken out of all that a man is doing, what is to become of him? This was what he felt; an ideal person in Reginald's place could not have made a better answer. Suddenly somehow, by a strange law of a.s.sociation, there came into his mind the innocent talk he had overheard between the two girls who were, he was aware, May's sisters. A certain romantic curiosity about the family came into his mind. Certainly they could not be an ordinary family like others.
There must be something in their const.i.tution to account for this sudden downfall, which he had encountered in the midst of all his theories. The Mays must be people of a different strain from others; a peculiar race, to whom great thoughts were familiar; he could not believe that there was anything common or ordinary in their blood. He went out in silence, with the holder of the sinecure which he had so denounced, but which now seemed to him to be held after a divine fas.h.i.+on, in a way which common men had no idea of. Very little could he say, and that of the most commonplace kind. He walked quite respectfully by the young clergyman's side along the crowded High Street, though without any intention of going to the hospital, or of actually witnessing the kind of work undertaken by his new friend. Northcote himself had no turn that way. To go and minister at a sick-bed had never been his custom; he did not understand how to do it; and though he had a kind of sense that it was the right thing to do, and that if any one demanded such a service of him he would be obliged to render it, he was all in the dark as to how he could get through so painful an office; whereas May went to it without fear, thinking of it only as the most natural thing in the world. Perhaps, it is possible, Northcote's ministrations, had he been fully roused, would have been, in mere consequence of the reluctance of his mind, to undertake them, more real and impressive than those which Reginald went to discharge as a daily though serious duty; but in any case it was the Churchman whose mode was the more practical, the more useful. They had not gone far together, when they met the Rector hurrying to the railway; he cast a frowning, dissatisfied look at Northcote, and caught Reginald by the arm, drawing him aside.
”Don't be seen walking about with that fellow,” he said; ”it will injure you in people's minds. What have you to do with a Dissenter--a demagogue? Your father would not like it any more than I do. Get rid of him, May.”
”I am sorry to displease either you or my father,” said Reginald stiffly; ”but, pardon me, in this respect I must judge for myself.”
”Don't be pig-headed,” said the spiritual ruler of Carlingford; but he had to rush off for his train, and had no time to say more. He left Reginald hot and angry, doubly disposed, as was natural, to march Northcote over all the town, and show his intimacy with him. Get rid of an acquaintance whom he chose to extend his countenance to, to please the Rector! For a man so young as Reginald May, and so lately made independent, such an act of subserviency was impossible indeed.
Before they entered the hospital, however, another encounter happened of a very different character. Strolling along in the centre of the pavement, endeavouring after the almost impossible combination of a yawn and a cigar, they perceived a large figure in a very long great-coat, and with an aspect of languor and _ennui_ which was unmistakable a hundred yards off. This apparition called a sudden exclamation from Northcote.
”If it was possible,” he said, ”I should imagine I knew that man. Are there two like him? but I can't fancy what he can be doing here.”
”_That_ fellow!” said Reginald. ”It's a pity if there are two like him.
I can't tell you what a nuisance he is to me. His name is Copperhead; he's my father's pupil.”
”Then it _is_ Copperhead! I thought there could not be another. He gives a sort of odd familiar aspect to the place all at once.”
”Then you are a friend of his!” said Reginald, with a groan. ”Pardon the natural feelings of a man whose father has suddenly chosen to become a coach. I hate it, and my dislike to the thing is reflected on the person of the pupil. I suppose that's what my antipathy means.”
”He does not merit antipathy. He is a bore, but there is no harm in him.