“I know I am making an unfortunate quotation,” said Northcote; “but there is reason in it. It might be sold for so much, and given to the poor.”
“Cheating the poor, in the first place,” said Reginald, warmly concerned for what he felt to be his own; “just as the paddock an old horse dies in might bear a crop instead, and pay the owner; but what would become of the old horse?”
“Half-quarter of this space would do quite as well for your pensioners, and they might do without—”
“A chaplain!” said Reginald, laughing in spite of himself. “I know you think so. It is a sinecure.”
“Well, I think they may say their prayers for themselves; a young man like you, full of talent, full of capability—I beg your pardon,” said Northcote, “you must excuse me, I grudge the waste. There are so many things more worthy of you that you might do.”
“What, for example?”
“Anything almost,” cried the other; “digging, ploughing, building—anything! And for me too.”
This he said in an undertone; but Reginald heard, and did not carry his magnanimity so far as not to reply.
“Yes,” he said; “if I am wasted reading prayers for my old men, what are you, who come to agitate for my abolition? I think, too, almost anything would be better than to encourage the ignorant to make themselves judges of public institutions, which the wisest even find too delicate to meddle with. The digging and the ploughing might be a good thing for more than me.”
“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 noble 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.