It was a tedious complaint, and he followed it abstractedly—winding through the sick imaginings of a nervous woman and administering well-worn advice in his rich voice, which lent a charm to the truisms. When it was over, he advised physical exercise, and, closing the door, seated himself to await the next comer.
It was Miss Vernish, and as she entered, with her impatient limp, the bitterness of her mouth relaxed. She was supervising the embroidering of the vestments to be worn at Easter, and in a spirit of devotion she had sacrificed her diamonds to their ornamentation. Her eyes grew bright as she talked, and a religious warmth softened her manner.
"It has made me so happy," she said, "to feel that I can give something beautiful to the service. It is the sincerest pleasure I have known for years."
She left, and her place was taken by a young divinity student who had been drawn from law to theology by the eloquence of Father Algarcife. He had come to obtain the priest's advice upon a matter of principle, and departed with a quickening of his religious tendencies.
Then came several women, entering with a great deal of rustling and no evident object in view. Then a vestryman to talk over a point in business; then the wife of a well-known politician, to ask if she should consent to her husband's accepting a foreign appointment; then a man who wished to be confirmed in his church; and, after all, Mrs. Ryder, large and warm and white, to say that since the last communion she had felt herself stronger to contend with disappointment.
When it was over and he came out into the evening light, he drew himself together with a quick movement, as if he had knelt in a strained position for hours. Vaguely he wondered how his nerves had sustained it, and he smiled half bitterly as he admitted that eight years ago he would have succumbed.
"It is because my nerves are dead," he said; "as dead as my emotions."
He knew that since the pressure of feeling had been lifted the things which would have overwhelmed him in the past had lost the power to thrill his supine sensations, that from a mere jangled structure of nerve wires he had become a physical being—a creature who ate and drank and slept, but did not feel.
He went about his daily life as methodically as if it were mapped out for him by a larger hand. His very sermons came to him with no effort of will or of memory, but as thoughts long thought out and forgotten sometimes obtrude themselves upon the mind that has passed into other channels. They were but twisted and matured phrases germinating since his college days. The old fatal facility for words remained with him, though the words had ceased to be symbols of honest thought. He could still speak, it was only the ability to think that the fever had drained—it was only the power to plod with mental patience in the pursuit of a single fact. Otherwise he was unchanged. But as every sensation is succeeded by a partial incapacity, so the strain of years had been followed by years of stagnation.
He went home to dinner with a physical zest.