“Oh, I don’t agree with you!” she said. “Indeed, I think you are wrong. The reason why people go to hear Father Cresswell is not because he has anything new to say, or any new way of saying it. The real reason is because he has the gift of showing them the truth. You can be told things very often, and receive a great many warnings, but you take no notice. There is something wrong about the method of delivering them. It is not the lash which Father Cresswell uses, but it is his extraordinary gift of impressing one with the truth of what he says, that has had such an effect upon everyone.”
Rochester looked across at his wife curiously. It was almost the first time that he had ever heard her speak upon a serious subject. Now he came to think of it, he remembered that she had been spending much of her time lately listening to this wonderful enthusiast. Was he really great enough to have influenced so light a creature, he wondered? Certainly there was something changed in her. He had noticed it during the last few days—an odd sort of nervousness, a greater kindness of speech, an unaccustomed gravity. Her remark set him thinking.
Chalmers leaned forward and bowed to Lady Mary. Again the shadow of a tolerant smile rested upon his lips.
“Very well, Lady Mary,” he said, “I will accept the truth of what you say. Yet a few decades ago, who cared about religion, or hearing the truth? It is simply because the men and women of Society have exhausted every means of self-gratification, that in a sort of unwholesome reaction they turn towards the things as far as possible removed from those with which they are surfeited. But I will leave Father Cresswell alone. I will ask you whether it is not the bizarre, the grotesque in art, which to-day wins most favor. I will turn to the making of books—I avoid the term literature—and I will ask you whether it is not the extravagant, the impossible, the deformed, in style and matter, which is most eagerly read. The simplest things in life should convince one. The novelist’s hero is no longer the fine, handsome young fellow of twenty years ago. He is something between forty and fifty, if not deformed, at least decrepit with dissipations, and with the gift of fascination, whatever that may mean, in place of the simpler attributes of a few decades ago. And the heroine!—There is no more book-muslin and innocence. She has, as a rule, green eyes; she is middle-aged, and if she has not been married before, she has had her affairs. Everything obvious in life, from politics to mutton-chops, is absolutely barred by anyone with any pretensions to intellect to-day.”
“One wonders,” Rochester murmured, “how in the course of your long life, Mr. Chalmers, you have been able to see so far and truthfully into the heart of things!”
Chalmers bowed.
“Mr. Rochester,” he said, “it is the newcomer in life, as in many other things, who sees most of the game.”
The conversation drifted away. Rochester was reminded of it only when driving home that night with his wife. Again, as they took their places in the electric brougham, he was conscious of something changed, not only in the woman herself, but in her demeanor towards him.
“Do you mind,” he asked, soon after they started, “just dropping me at the club? It is scarcely out of your way, and I feel that I need a whiskey and soda, and a game of billiards, to take the taste of that young man’s talk out of my mouth. What a sickly brood of chickens the Duchess does encourage, to be sure!”
“I wonder if you’d mind not going to the club to-night, Henry?” Lady Mary asked quietly.