“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 God within these beautiful walls, and of all the perpetual worshippers who had knelt among the old brasses 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 kinship too.
“It is very beautiful and noble,” 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 mass 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 assumption 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 assented 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.