“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 notebook to put down the special cases of which the Rector told him. They had a confidential conversation in a corner, during which the newcomer 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 assaulted, 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 assent 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 association, 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 constitution 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 fashion, 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 sickbed 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 anyone 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 pigheaded,” said the spiritual
