“He is a good lad—he always was a good lad,” he said, after a pause. “And did he think to come here, to spend his time over a parcel of scamps and drunkards? Eh! I shouldn’t have believed it. He had heard that they want me to have a curate, I suppose,” he added, quickly.
“Oh, yes, uncle; but he was afraid that you would not like it.”
“Look here, my lassie, I like the old methody in his proper place; but I’ll have no psalm-singers in my church. I’m a sound Churchman, and I don’t approve of it.”
Virginia, finding an objection to psalm-singing in church rather difficult to reply to, was silent, and her uncle went on rapidly,—
“I hate the whole tribe of your earnest, hard-working, ‘self-devoted’ young fellows—find it pay, and bring them into the society of gentlemen—write letters in trumpery newspapers, and despise their elders. Newspapers have nothing to do with religion. The Prayer-book’s the Prayer-book, and a paper’s a paper. Give me Bell’s Life. Bless you, my dear, do you think I keep my eyes shut?”
“You are not just, uncle,” said Virginia. “But Cheriton would not have been like that.”
Mr Seyton’s twinkling eyes softened, and the angry resistance to a higher standard, that mingled with the half-shrewd, half-scornful malice of his words, subsided, as he said, in quite a different tone,—
“I would have had Cheriton for my curate, my dear.”
He said no more, and Virginia could not press him; and when he spoke it was only to question her about Cheriton’s condition.
But when she went away he took his hat and walked out through his bit of garden towards the church, and sitting down on the low stone wall, looked over the churchyard, where a fine growth of nettles half smothered the broken gravestones; and as he sat there he thought of his past life, of his dissipated, godless youth, of the sense of desperation with which, to pay his debts, he had “gone into the Church,” of the horrible evils he had never tried to check, and yet of the certain kindliness he had entertained towards his own people. How he had defied censure and resisted example till his fellow-clergy looked askance at him, and though he might affect to despise them, he did not like their contempt. He thought of the family crash that was coming, and he was keen enough to know how he would be regarded by new comers—“as an old abuse.” And he thought of Cheriton’s faith in him, and the project inspired as much by love for him as by the zeal for reform. He thought of the first time he had read the service, the sense of incongruity, of shame-facedness; how a sort of accustomedness had grown upon him till he had felt himself a parson after a sort, and how, on a low level, he had in a way adapted his life to the requirements of his profession.