summer at the shaker settlement, lying in the green cup of the hills, was very beautiful. the yellow houses along the grassy street drowsed in the sunshine, and when the wind stirred the maple leaves one could see the distant sparkle of the lake. athalia had a fancy, in the warm twilights, for walking down lonely lake road, that jolted over logs and across gullies and stopped abruptly at the water’s edge. she had to pass lewis’s house on the way, and if he saw her he would call out to her, cheerfully,
“hullo, ‘thalia! how are you, dear?”
and she, with prim intensity, would reply, “good-evening, brother lewis.”
if one of the sisters was with her, they would stop and speak to him; otherwise she passed him by in such an eager consciousness of her part that he smiled—and then sighed. when she had a companion, lewis and the other shakeress would gossip about the weather or the haying, and lewis would have the chance to say: “you’re not overworking, ‘thalia? you’re not tired?” while athalia, in her net cap and her gray shoulder cape buttoned close up to her chin, would dismiss the anxious affection with a peremptory “of course not! i have bread to eat you know not of, brother lewis.” then she would add, didactically, some word of dogma or admonition.
but she had not much time to give to brother lewis’s salvation—she was so busy in adjusting herself to her new life. its picturesque details fascinated her—the cap, the brevity of speech, the small mannerisms, the occasional and very reserved mysticism, absorbed her so that she thought very little of her husband. she saw him occasionally on those walks down to the lake, or when, after a day in the fields with the three old shaker men, brother nathan brought him home to supper.
“we shakers are given to hospitality,” he said; “we’re always looking for the angel we are going to entertain unawares. come along home with us, lewis.” and lewis would plod up the hill and take his turn at the tin washbasin, and then file down the men’s side of the stairs to the dining-room, where he and the three old brothers sat at one table, and athalia and the eight sisters sat at the other table. after supper he had the chance to see athalia and to make sure that she was not looking tired. “you didn’t take cold yesterday, ‘thalia? i saw you were out in the rain,” he would say. and she, always a little embarrassed at such personal interest, would reply, primly, “i am not at all tired, brother lewis.” nathan used to walk home with his guest, and sometimes they talked of work that must be done, and sometimes touched on more unpractical things—those spiritual manifestations which at rare intervals centred in brother william and were the hope of the whole community. for who could tell when the old man’s incoherent muttering would break into the clear speech of one of those heavenly visitants who, in the early days, had descended upon the shakers, and then, for some divine and deeply mysterious reason, withdrawn from such pure channels of communication, and manifested themselves in the world,—but through base and sordid natures. poor, vague brother william, who saw visions and dreamed dreams, was, in this community, the torch that held a smouldering spark of the divine fire, and when, in a cataleptic state, his faint intelligence fluttered back into some dim depths of personality, and he moaned and muttered, using awful names with babbling freedom, brother nathan and the rest listened with pathetic eagerness for a “thus saith the lord,” which should enflame the gray embers of shakerism and give light to the whole world! when nathan talked of these things he would add, with a sigh, that he hoped some day william would be inspired to tell them something more of sister lydia: “once william said, ‘coming, coming.’ i think it meant lydia; but eldress thought it was athalia; it was just before she came.” brother nathan sighed. “i wish it had meant lydy,” he said, simply.
if lewis wished it had meant lydy, he did not say so. and, indeed, he said very little upon any subject; brother nathan did most of the talking.
“i fled from the city of destruction when i was thirty,” he told lewis; “that was just a year before sister lydy left us. poor lydy! poor lydy!” he said. “oh, yee, i know the world. i know it, my boy! do you?”
“why, after a fashion,” lewis said; and then he asked, suddenly, “why did you turn shaker, nathan?”
“well, i got hold of a shaker book that set me thinking. sister lydia gave it to me. i met sister lydia when she had come down to the place i lived to sell baskets. and she was interested in my salvation, and gave me the book. then i got to figuring out the prophecies, and i saw shakerism fulfilled them; and then i began to see that when you don’t own anything yourself you can’t worry about your property; well, that clinched me, i guess. poor sister lydia, she didn’t abide in grace herself,” he ended, sadly.
“i should have thought you would have been sorry then, that you—” lewis began, but checked himself. “how about”—he said, and stopped to clear his voice, which broke huskily;—“how about love between man and woman? husband and wife?”
“marriage is honorable,” brother nathan conceded; “shakers don’t despise marriage. but they like to see folks grow out of it into something better, like—like your wife, maybe.”
“well, your doctrine would put an end to the world,” lewis said, smiling.
“i guess,” said brother nathan, dryly, “there ain’t any immediate danger of the world coming to an end.”
“i’d like to see that book,” lewis said, when they parted at the pasture-bars where a foot-path led down the hill to his own house.
and that night brother nathan had an eager word for the family. “he’s asked for a book!” he said. the eldress smiled doubtfully, but athalia, with a rapturous upward look, said,
“may the lord guide him!” then added, practically, “it won’t amount to anything. he thinks shakerism isn’t human.”
“that’s not against it, that’s not against it!” nathan declared, smiling; “i’ve told him so a dozen times!”
but athalia was so happy that first year, and so important, that she did not often concern herself with the welfare of the man who had been her husband. instead—it was early in april—he concerned himself with hers; he tried, tentatively, to see if it wasn’t almost time for athalia “to get through with it.” of course, afterward, sister athalia realized, with chagrin, that this attempt was only a forerunner of the fever that was developing, which in a few days was to make him a very sick man. but for the moment his question seemed to her a temptation of the devil, and, of course, resisted temptation made her faith stronger than ever.
it was a deliciously cold spring night; lewis had drawn the table, with his books on it, close to the fire to try to keep warm, but he shivered, even while his shoulders scorched, and somehow he could not keep his mind on the black, rectangular characters of the hebrew page before him. he had been interested in brother nathan’s explanation of hosea’s forecasting of shakerism, and he had admitted to himself that, if nathan was correct, there would be something to be said for shakerism. the idea made him vaguely uneasy, because, that “something” might be so conclusive, that—but he could not face such a possibility.
he wanted to dig at the text, so that he might refute nathan; but somehow that night he was too dull to refute anybody, and by-and-by he pushed the black-lettered page aside, and, crouching over the fire, held out his hands to the blaze. he thought, vaguely, of the big fireplace in the old study, and suddenly, in the chilly numbness of his mind, he saw it—with such distinctness that he was startled. then, a moment later, it changed into the south chamber that had been his mother’s bedroom—he could even detect the faint scent of rose-geranium that always hung about her; he noticed that the green shutters on the west windows were bowed, and from between them a line of sunshine fell across the matting on the floor and touched the four-poster that had a chintz spread and valance. how well he knew the faded roses and the cockatoos on that old chintz! over there by the window he had caught her crying that time he had hurt her feelings, “just for his own pleasure”; the old stab of this thought pierced through the feverish mists and touched the quick. he struggled numbly with the visualization of fever, brushing his hot hand across his eyes and trying to see which was real—the geranium-sweet south chamber or the chilly house on lonely lake road. athalia had given him pain in that same way—just for her own pleasure. poor little tay! he was afraid it would hurt her, some day, when she realized it; well, when she came to herself, when she got through her playing at shakerism, he must not let her know how great the pain had been; she would suffer too much if she should understand his misery: and athalia didn’t bear suffering well.... but how long she had been getting over shakerism! he had thought it would only last six months, and here it was a year! well, if nathan’s reading of the prophecies was right, then athalia would never get over it. she ought never to get over it. then what would become of the farm and the sawmill? and instantly everything was unreal again; he could hear the hum of the driving-wheel and the screech of the saw tearing through a log; how fragrant the fresh planks were, and the great heaps of sawdust—but the noise made his head ache; and—and the fire didn’t seem hot....
it was in one of those moments when the mists thinned, and he knew that he was shivering over the stove instead of basking in the sunshine in his mother’s room that smelled of rose-geranium leaves, that athalia came in. she looked conscious and confused, full of a delightful embarrassment at being for once alone with him. the color was deep on her cheeks, and her eyes were starry.
“eldress asked me to bring your mail down to you, brother lewis,” she said.
“thalia!” he said; “i am so glad to see you, dear; i—i seem to be rather used up, somehow.” the mists had quite cleared away, but a violent headache made his words stumble. “i was just wondering, thalia—don’t you think you might go home now? you’ve had a whole year of it—and i really ought to go home—the mill—”
“why, lewis hall! what do you mean!” she said, forgetting her part in her indignation. “i am a shakeress. you’ve no right to speak so to me.”
he blinked at her through the blur of pain. “i wish you’d stay with me, athalia, i’ve got a—a sort of—headache. never mind about being a shakeress just for to-night. it would be such a comfort to have you.”
but athalia, with a horrified look, had left him. she fled home in the darkness with burning cheeks; she debated with herself whether she should tell eldress how her husband—no, brother lewis—had tried to “tempt” her back to him. in her excitement at this lure of the devil she even wondered whether lewis had pretended that he was ill, to induce her to stay with him? but even athalia’s imagination could not compass such a thought of lewis for more than a moment, so she only told the eldress that brother lewis had “tried to persuade her to go back to the world with him.” the lord had defended her, she said, excitedly, and she had forbidden him to speak to her!
eldress hannah looked perplexed. “that’s not like lewis. i wonder—” but she did not say what she wondered. instead, she went early in the morning down lonely lake road to lewis’s house. the poor fellow was entirely in the mists by that time, shivering and burning and quite unconscious, saying over and over, “she wouldn’t stay; she wouldn’t stay.”
“‘lure her back,’” said eldress hannah, with a snort. “poor boy! it’s good riddance for him.”
but eldress hannah stayed, and brother nathan joined her, and for many days the little community was shaken with real anxiety, for they had all come to love the solitary, waiting husband. athalia, abashed, but still cherishing the dear insult of having been tempted, took what little part eldress allowed her in the care of the sick man; but in the six or seven weeks of his illness brother nathan and the eldress were his devoted nurses, and by-and-by a genuine friendship grew up between them. old eldress hannah’s shrewd good-humor was as wholesome as a sound winter apple, and nathan had a gayety lewis had never suspected. the old man grew very confidential in those days of lewis’s convalescence; he showed his simple heart with a generosity that made the sick man’s lip tighten once or twice and his eyes blur;—lewis came to know all about sister lydia; indeed, he knew more than the old man knew himself. when the invalid grew stronger, nathan wrestled with him over the prophecies, and lewis studied them and the other foundation-stones of the shaker faith with a constantly increasing anxiety. “because,” he said, with a nervous blink, “if you are right—” but he left the sentence unfinished. once he said, with a feeble passion—for he was still very weak—“i tell you, nathan, it isn’t human!” and then added, under his breath, “but god knows whether that’s not in its fa-vor.”
when he was quite well again he was plainly preoccupied. he pored over the prophecies with a concentration that made him blind even to athalia’s tired looks. once, when some one said in his presence, “sister ‘thalia is working too hard,” he blinked at her in an absent way before the old, anxious attention awoke in his eyes.
athalia tossed her head and said, “brother lewis has his own affairs to think of, i guess!”
and he said, eagerly: “yes, ‘thalia; i have been thinking—some day i’ll tell you. but not yet.”
“oh, i haven’t time to pry into other people’s thoughts,” she said, acidly. and, indeed, just then her time was very full. she was enormously useful to the community that second winter; her young power and strength shone out against the growing weariness of the old sisters. “athalia’s capable,” eldress hannah said, and the other sisters said “yee,” and smiled at one another.
“she is useful,” sister jane declared; “do you know, she got through the churning before nine? i’d ‘a’ been at it until eleven!”
“athalia is like one of those candles that have a streak of soft wax in ‘em,” eldress hannah murmured; “but she’s useful, as you say, jane.”
in january, when the eldress fell ill, athalia was especially useful. she nursed her with a passion of faithfulness that made the other sisters remonstrate.
“you’ll wear yourself out, athalia; you haven’t had your clothes off for three days and nights!”
“the lord has upheld me, and his right hand has sustained me,” athalia quoted, with an uplifted look.
“yee,” old jane assented, “but he likes sense, athalia, and there ain’t any reason why two of us shouldn’t take turns settin’ up with her tonight.”
“this is my service,” athalia said, smiling joyously.
eldress hannah, lying with closed eyes, said, suddenly: “athalia, don’t be foolish and conceited. you go right along to your bed; jane and mary’ll look after me.”
it took athalia a perceptible minute to get herself in hand sufficiently to say, meekly, “yee, eldress.” when she had shut the door behind her with perhaps something more than shaker emphasis, the eldress opened her eyes and smiled at old jane. “she’s smart,” she said.
“yee,” said sister jane; and there was a little chuckle.
the sick woman closed her eyes again and sighed. “what a nurse lydia was!” she said; and added, suddenly: “how is nathan getting along with lewis? there isn’t much more time, i guess,” she ended, mildly; “she won’t last it out another summer.”
“she’s done better than i expected to stay till now,” jane said; and the eldress nodded.
but it was, perhaps, a natural result of athalia’s abounding energy that toward the end of that second winter in the shaker village she should grow irritable. the spring work was very heavy that year. brother william was too feeble to do even the light, pottering tasks that had been allotted to him, and his vague babblings about the spirits ceased altogether. in april old jane died, and that put extra burdens on athalia’s capable shoulders. “but i notice i don’t get anything extra for my work, not even thanks!” she told lewis, sharply, and forgot to call him “brother.” she had walked down lonely lake road and stopped at his gate. she looked thinner; her forget-me-not eyes were clouded, and there was an impatient line about her lips, instead of the faint, ecstatic smile which was part of her early experience.
“yes, there’s lots of work to be done,” he agreed, “but when people do it together—”
“what do you think?”—she interrupted him, her lip drooping a little in a half-contemptuous smile—“they’ve heard again from that sister lydia who ran away! you know who i mean?—brother nathan is always talking about her. they think she’ll come back. i should say good riddance! though of course if it’s genuine repentance i’ll be glad. only i don’t think it is.”
“how pleased nathan will be!” lewis said.
“oh, he’s pleased; he’s rather too pleased for a shaker, it strikes me.”
lewis frowned. “there is joy in the presence of the angels,” he reminded her, gravely.
“angels!” she said, with a laugh; “i don’t believe so much in the angels as i did before i knew so much about them. i understand that when this ‘angel’ comes back i am to give up my room to her, if you please, because it used to be hers. oh, i’m of no importance now—lewis,” she broke off, suddenly, “who has our house this year?”
“davis; he wants to re-lease it in may.”
“he just takes it by the year, doesn’t he?” she asked.
he nodded. “wants a five-years’ lease next time.”
“well, don’t give it to him!” she said; and added, frowning: “you ought to go back yourself, you know. it’s foolish for you to be here. why, it’s almost two years!”
“time flies,” he said, smiling.
she laughed and sighed. “yes—i mean yee—indeed, it does! i was just thinking, lewis, we’ve been married ten years!”
“no, eight years. we were married just eight years,” he said, soberly.
the color flew into her face. “oh, yee; we were married eight years when i came in.”
he looked at her with great tenderness. “athalia, i have to confess to you that when you came i didn’t think it would last with you. i distrusted the holy spirit. and i came, myself, against my will, as you know. but now i begin to think you were led—and perhaps you have led me.”
athalia gave a little gasp—“what!”
“i am not sure yet,” he said.
“you said shakerism was unhuman!” athalia protested, with a thrill of panic in her voice.
“ah!” he cried, his voice suddenly kindling, “you know what nathan is always saying?—‘that’s not against it’? athalia, its unhumanness, as you call it, is why i think it may be of god. the human in us must give way to the divine. ‘first that which is natural; then that which is spiritual.’”
“i—don’t understand,” she said, faintly; “you are not a shaker?”
“no,” he said, “not yet. but perhaps some day—i am trying to follow you, athalia.”
she caught her breath with a frightened look. “follow—me?” then she burst out crying.
“why, tay!” he said, bewildered; “what is it, dear?” but she had left him, stumbling blindly as she walked, her face hidden in her hands.
lewis went back into his house, and, lighting his lamp, sat down to pore over one of brother nathan’s books. he was concerned, but he smiled a little; it was so like athalia to cry when she was happy! he did not see his wife for several days. the eldress said sister ‘thalia was not well, and lewis looked sorry, but made no comment. he was a little anxious, but he did not dwell upon his anxiety. in the next few days he worked hard all day in brother nathan’s herb-house, where the air was hazy with the aromatic dust of tansy and pennyroyal, then hurried home at night to sit down to his books, so profoundly absorbed in them that sometimes he only knew that it was time to sleep because the dawn fell white across the black-lettered page.
but one night, a week later, when he came home from work, he did not open his bible; he stood a long time in his doorway, looking at the sunset, and, as he looked, his face seemed to shine with some inner light. the lake was like glass; high in the upper heavens thin golden lines of cloud had turned to rippling copper; the sky behind the black circle of the hills was a clear, pale green, and in the growing dusk the water whitened like snow. “‘glass mingled with fire,’” he murmured to himself; “yes, ‘great and marvellous are thy works, lord god almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou king of saints!’” and what more marvellous work than this wonder of his own salvation? brought here against his will, against his judgment! how he had struggled against the spirit. he was humbled to the earth at the remembrance of it; “if i had my way, we wouldn’t have walked up the hill from the station that morning!”...
the flushing heavens faded into ashes, but the solemn glow of half-astonished gratitude lingered on his face.
“lewis,” some one said in the darkness of the lane—“lewis!” athalia came up the path swiftly and put her hands on his arm. “lewis, i—i want to go home.” she sobbed as she spoke.
he started as if she had struck him.
“lewis, lewis, let us go home!”
the flame of mystical satisfaction went out of his face as a lighted candle goes out in the wind.
“there isn’t any home now, athalia,” he said, with a sombre look; “there’s only a house. come in,” he added, heavily; “we must talk this out.”
she followed him, and for a moment they neither of them spoke; he fumbled about in the warm darkness for a match, and lifting the shade, lighted the lamp on the table; then he looked at her. “athalia,” he said, in a terrified voice, “i am—i am a shaker!”
“no—no—no!” she said. she grew very white, and sat down, breathing quickly. then the color came back faintly into her lips. “don’t say it, lewis; it isn’t true. it can’t be true!”
“it is true,” he said, with a groan. he had sunk into a chair, and his face was hidden in his hands. “what are we going to do?” he said, hoarsely.
“why, you mustn’t be!” she cried; “you can’t be—that’s all. you can’t stay if i go!”
“i must stay,” he said.
there was a stunned silence. then she said, in an amazed whisper:
“what! you don’t love me any more?”
still he was silent.
“you—don’t—love—me,” she said, as if repeating some astounding fact, which she could not yet believe.
he seemed to gather his courage up.
“i have—” he tried to speak; faltered, broke, went on: “i have—the kindliest feelings toward you, ‘thalia”—his last word was in a whisper.
“stop!” she protested, with a frightened look—“oh, stop!—don’t say that!” he did not speak; and suddenly, looking at his fixed face, she cried out, violently: “oh, why, why did i go up to the graveyard that day? why did you let me?” she stared at him, her forget-me-not eyes dilating with dismay. “it all came from that. if we hadn’t walked up the hill that morning—” he was speechless. then, abruptly, she sprang to her feet, and, running to him, knelt beside him and tried to pull down the hands in which he had again hidden his face. “lewis, it’s i—tay! you don’t ‘feel kindly’ to me? lewis, you haven’t stopped loving me?”
“i am a shaker,” he said, helplessly. “i can’t give up my religion, even for you.”
he got on his feet and stood before her, his empty palms hanging at his sides in that strange gesture of entire hopelessness; he tried to speak, but no words came. the lamp on the table flickered a little. their shadows loomed gigantic on the wall behind them; the little hot room was very still.
“you think you don’t love me?” athalia said, between set teeth; “i know better!” with a laugh she caught his arm with both her shaking hands, and kissed him once, and then again. still he was silent. then with a cry she threw herself against his breast. “i love you,” she said, passionately, “and you love me! nothing on earth will make me believe you don’t love me,”—and for one vital moment her lips burned against his.
his arms did not close about her,—but his hands clinched slightly. then he moved back a step or two, and she heard him sigh. “don’t, sister,” he said, gently.
she threw up her hands with a frantic gesture. “sister? my god!” she said; and left him.
there was no further struggle between them. a week later she went away. as he told her, “the house was there”—and to that she went until she should go to find some whirl of life that would make her deaf to voices of the past.
as for lewis, he did not see that miserable departure from the family house in the shabby old carryall that had been the shakers’ one vehicle for more than thirty years. he told nathan he wanted to mow the burial-ground up on the hill that morning. from that high and silent spot he could see the long white road up from the settlement on one side and down to the covered bridge on the other side. he sat under the pine-tree, his scythe against the stone wall behind him, his clinched hands between his knees. sitting thus, he watched the road and the slow crawl of the shaky old carriage. ... after it had passed the burying-ground and was out of sight, he hid his face in his bent elbow.
it was some ten years afterward that word came to eldress hannah that athalia hall was dying and wanted to see her husband; would he come to her?
“will you go, brother lewis?” eldress asked him, doubtfully.
“yee, if you think best,” he said.
“i do think best,” the old woman said.
he went, a bent, elderly man in a gray coat, threading his wavering way through the noisy buffet of the streets of the city where athalia had elected to dwell. he found her in a gaudy hotel, full of the glare of pushing, hurrying life. he sat down at her bedside, a little breathless, and looked at her with mild, remote eyes.
“do you forgive me, lewis?” she said.
“i have nothing to forgive, sister,” he told her.
“don’t call me that!” she cried, with feeble passion.
he looked a little bewildered. “yee,” he said, “i forgive you.”
“oh, lewis!—lewis!—lewis!” she mourned; “this is what i have done!” she wept pitifully. his face grew vaguely troubled, as if he did not quite understand.... then, abruptly, the veil lifted: his eyes dilated with pain; he passed his hand over his forehead once or twice and sighed. then he looked down at the poor, dying face that once he had loved.
“why, ‘thalia!” he said, in a surprised and anguished voice; suddenly he put his arm under the restless head. “there, there, little tay; don’t cry,” he said, and smiled at her.
and with that she was content to fall asleep.
