CHAPTER XV
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Had any one told Basset, even that morning, that before night he would seek the advice of the Riddsley curate, he would have met the suggestion with unmeasured scorn. Probably he had not since his college days spent an hour in intimate talk with a man so far from him in fortune and position, and so unlike him in those things which bring men together. Nor in the act of approaching Colet—under the impulse of a few casual words and a sudden thought—was he able to understand or to justify himself.
But when he rose to his feet after an hour spent beside the curate’s dingy hearth—over the barber’s shop in Stream Street—he did not need to justify the step. He had said little but he had heard much. Colet’s tongue had been loosened by the sacrifice he had made, and inspired by that love of his kind which takes refuge in the most unlikely shapes, he had poured forth at length his beliefs and his aspirations. And Basset, whose world had tottered since morning, for whom common things had lost their poise and life its wonted aspect, began to think that he had found in the other’s aims a new standpoint and the offer of a new beginning.
The dip candles, which had been many times snuffed, were burning low when the two rose. The curate, whose pale cheeks matched his bandaged head, had a last word to say. “Of the need I am sure,” he repeated, as Basset’s eye sought the cheap clock on the mantelpiece. “If I have not proved that, the fault, sir, is mine. But the means—they are a question for you; almost any man may see them more clearly than I do. By votes, it may be, and so through the people working out their own betterment. Or by social measures, as Lord Ashley thinks, through the classes that are fitted by education to judge for all. Or by the wider spread, as I hold, of self-sacrifice by all for all—to me, the ideal. But of one thing I am convinced; that this tax upon the commonest food, which takes so much more in proportion from the poor than from the rich, is wrong. Certainly wrong, Mr. Basset,—unless the gain and the loss can be equally spread. That’s another matter.”
“I will not say any more now,” Basset answered cautiously, “than that I am inclined to your view. But for yourself, are there not others who will not pay so dearly for maintaining it?”
A redness spread over the curate’s long horse-face. “No, Mr. Basset,” he rejoined, “if I left my duty to others I should pay still more dearly. I am my own man. I will remain so.”
“But what will you do when you leave here?” Basset inquired, casting his eyes round the shabby room. He did not see it as he had seen it on his entrance. He discerned that, small as it was, and shabby as it was, it might be a man’s home. “I fear that there are few incumbents who hold your views.”
“There are absentees,” Colet replied with a smile, “who are not so particular; and in the north there are a few who think as I think. I shall not starve.”
“I have an old house on the Derbyshire border twenty miles from here,” Basset said. “A servant and his wife keep it, and during some months of the year I live there. It is an out-of-the-way place, Mr. Colet, but it is at your service—if you don’t get work?”
The curate seemed to shrink into himself. “I couldn’t trespass on you,” he said.