Chapter 2

Brother George nodded. “That is good; He works in a mysterious way--she’s real miserable, is she? Well, well; that’s good. The mercies of the Lord are everlasting,” he ended, in a satisfied voice, and began to read again.

“Amen!--amen!” said Brother William, vaguely.

“Poor Lydy!” Brother Nathan murmured.

“And I had another letter,” the Eldress proceeded, “from that young woman who came here in August--Athalia Hall; do you remember?--she asked two questions to the minute! She wants to visit us.”

Brother Nathan looked at her over his spectacles, and one of the sisters opened her eyes.

“I don’t see why she should,” Eldress Hannah added.

Two of the old brothers nodded agreement.

“The curiosity of the world’s people does not help their souls,” said one of the knitters.

“She thinks we walk in the Way to Peace,” said the Eldress.

“Yee; we do,” said Brother George.

“Shall I tell her ‘nay’?” the Eldress questioned, calmly.

“Yee,” said Brother George; and the dozing sisters murmured “Yee.”

“Wait,” said Brother Nathan; “her husband--HE has something to him. Let her come.”

“But if she visited us, how would that affect him?” Eldress Hannah asked, surprised into faint animation.

“If she was moved to stay it would affect him,” Brother Nathan said, dryly; “he would come, too, and there are very few of us left, Eldress. He would be a great gain.”

There was a long silence. Brother William’s gray head sagged on his shoulder, and the hymn-book slipped from his gnarled old hands. The knitting sisters began, one after another, to stab their needles into their balls of gray yarn and roll their work up in their aprons.

“It’s getting late, Eldress,” one of them said, and glanced at the clock.

“Then I’ll tell her she may come?” said Eldress Hannah, reluctantly.

“He can make the wrath of man to praise Him,” Brother Nathan encouraged her.

“Yee; but I never heard that He could make the foolishness of woman do it,” the old woman said, grimly.

As the brothers and sisters parted at the door of the sitting-room Brother Nathan plucked at the Eldress’s sleeve; “Is she very wretched--Lydia? Where is she now, Eldress? Poor Lydy! poor little Lydy!”

The fortnight of Athalia’s absence wore greatly upon her husband. Apprehension lurked in the back of his mind. In the mill, or out on the farm, or when he sat down among his shabby, old, calf-skin books, he was assailed by the memory of all her various fancies during their married life. Some of them were no more remarkable or unexpected than this interest in Shakerism. He began to be slowly frightened. Suppose she should take it into her head--?

When her fortnight was nearly up and he was already deciding whether, when he drove over to Depot Corners to meet her, he would take Ginny’s colt or the new mare, a letter came to say she was going to stay a week longer.

“I believe,” she wrote--her very pen, in the frantic down-hill slope of her lines, betraying the excitement of her thoughts--“I believe that for the first time in my life I have found my God!” The letter was full of dashes and underlining, and on the last page there was a blistered splash into which the ink had run a little on the edges.

Lewis Hall’s heart contracted with an almost physical pang. “I must go and get her right off,” he said; “this thing is serious!” And yet, after a wakeful night, he decided, with the extraordinary respect for her individuality so characteristic of the man--a respect that may be called foolish or divine, as you happen to look at it--he decided not to go. If he dragged her away from the Shakers against her will, what would be gained? “I must give her her head, and let her see for herself that it’s all moonshine,” he told himself, painfully, over and over; “my seeing it won’t accomplish anything.” But he counted the hours until she would come home.

When she came, as soon as he saw her walking along the platform looking for him while he stood with his hand on Ginny’s colt’s bridle, even before she had spoken a single word, even then he knew what had happened--the uplifted radiance of her face announced it.

But she did not tell him at once. On the drive home, in the dark December afternoon, he was tense with apprehension; once or twice he ventured some questions about the Shakers, but she put them aside with a curious gentleness, her voice a little distant and monotonous; her words seemed to come only from the surface of her mind. When he lifted her out of the sleigh at their own door he felt a subtle resistance in her whole body; and when, in the hall, he put his arms about her and tried to kiss her, she drew back sharply and said:

“No!--PLEASE!” Then, as they stood there in the chilly entry, she burst into a passionate explanation: she had been convicted and converted! She had found her Saviour! She--

“There, there, little Tay,” he broke in, sadly; “supper is ready, dear.” He heard a smothered exclamation--that it was smothered showed how completely she was immersed in a new experience, one of the details of which was the practice of self-control.

But, of course, that night they had it out.... When they came into the sitting-room after supper she flung the news into his pale face: _she wished to join the Shakers_. But she must have his consent, she added, impatiently, because otherwise the Shakers would not let her come.

“That’s the only thing I don’t agree with them about,” she said, candidly; “I don’t think they ought to make anything so solemn contingent upon the ‘consent’ of any other human being. But, of course, Lewis, it’s only a form. I have left you in spirit, and that is what counts. So I told them I knew you would consent.”

She looked at him with those blue, ecstatic eyes, so oblivious to his pain that for a moment a sort of impersonal amazement at such self-centredness held him silent. But after the first shock he spoke with a slow fluency that pierced Athalia’s egotism and stirred an answering astonishment in her. His weeks of vague misgiving, deepening into keen apprehension, had given him protests and arguments which, although they never convinced her, silenced her temporarily. She had never known her husband in this character. Of course, she had been prepared for objections and entreaties, but sound arguments and stern disapproval confused and annoyed her. She had supposed he would tell her she would break his heart; instead, he said, calmly, that she hadn’t the head for Shakerism.

“You’ve got to be very reasonable, ‘Thalia, to stand a community life, or else you’ve got to be an awful fool. You are neither one nor the other.”

“I believe their doctrines,” she declared, “and I would die for a religious belief. But I don’t suppose you ever felt that you could die for a thing!”

“I think I have--after a fashion,” he said, mildly; “but dying for a thing is easy; it’s living for it that’s hard. You couldn’t keep it up, Athalia; you couldn’t live for it.”

Well, of course, that night was only the beginning. The days and weeks that followed were full of argument, of entreaty, of determination. Perhaps if he had laughed at her.... But it is dangerous to laugh at unhumorous people, for if they get angry all is lost. So he never laughed, nor in all their talks did he ever reproach her for not loving him. Once only his plea was personal--and even then it was only indirectly so.

“Athalia,” he said, “there’s only one kind of pain in this world that never gets cured. It’s the pain that comes when you remember that you’ve made somebody who loved you unhappy--not for a principle, but for your own pleasure. I know that pain, and I know how it lasts. Once I did something, just to please myself, that hurt mother’s feelings. I’d give my right hand if I hadn’t done it. It’s twenty-two years ago, and I wasn’t more than a boy, and she forgave me and forgot all about it. I have never forgotten it. I wish to God I could! ‘Thalia, I don’t want you to suffer that kind of pain.”

She saw the implication rather than the warning, and she burst out, angrily, that she wasn’t doing this for “pleasure”; she was doing it for principle! It was for the salvation of her soul!

“Athalia,” he said, solemnly, “the salvation of our souls depends on doing our duty.”

“Ah!” she broke in, triumphantly, “out of your own lips:--isn’t it my duty to do what seems to me right?”

He considered a minute. “Well, yes; I suppose the most valuable example any one can set is to do what he or she believes to be right. It may be wrong, but that is not the point. We must do what we conceive to be our duty. Only, we’ve got to be sure, Tay, in deciding upon duty, in deciding what is right,--we’ve got to be sure that self-interest is eliminated. I don’t believe anybody can decide absolutely on what is right without eliminating self.”

She frowned at this impatiently; its perfect fairness meant nothing to her.

“You promised to be my wife,” he went on with a curious sternness; “it is obviously ‘right,’ and so it is your first duty to keep your promise--at least, so long as my conduct does not absolve you from it.” Then he added, hastily, with careful justice: “Of course, I’m not talking about promises to love; they are nonsense. Nobody can promise to love. Promises to do our duty are all that count.”

That was the only reproach he made--if it was a reproach--for his betrayed love. It was just as well. Discussion on this subject between husbands and wives is always futile. Nothing was ever accomplished by it; and yet, in spite of the verdict of time and experience that nothing is gained, over and over the jealous man, and still more frequently the jealous woman, protests against a lost love with a bitterness that kills pity and turns remorse into antagonism. But Lewis Hall made no reproaches. Perhaps Athalia missed them; perhaps, under her spiritual passion, she was piqued that earthly passion was so readily silenced. But, if she was, she did not know it. She was entirely sincere and intensely happy in a new experience. It was a long winter of argument;--and then suddenly, in early April, the break came....

“I WILL go; I have a right to save my soul!”

And he said, very simply, “Well, Athalia, then I’ll go, too.”

“You? But you don’t believe--” And almost in the Bible words he answered her, “No; but where you go, I will go; where you live, I will live.” And then, a moment later, “I promised to cleave to you, little Tay.”

II

THE uprooting of their life took a surprisingly short time. In all those dark months of argument Lewis Hall had been quietly making plans for this final step, and such preparation betrayed his knowledge from the first of the hopelessness of his struggle--indeed, the struggle had only been loyalty to a lost cause. His calm assent to his wife’s ultimatum left her a little blank; but in the immediate excitement of removal, in the thrill of martyrdom that came with publicity, the blankness did not last. What the publicity was to her husband she could not understand. He received the protests of his family in stolid silence; when the venturesome great-aunt told him what she thought of him, he smiled; when his brother informed him that he was a fool, he said he shouldn’t wonder. When the minister, egged on by distracted Hall relatives, remonstrated, he replied, respectfully, that he was doing what he believed to be his duty, “and if it seems to be a duty, I can’t help myself; you see that, don’t you?” he said, anxiously. But that was practically all he found to say; for the most part he was silent. Athalia, in her absorption, probably had not the slightest idea of the agonies of mortification which he suffered; her imagination told her, truly enough, what angry relatives and pleasantly horrified neighbors said about her, and the abuse exhilarated her very much; but her imagination stopped there. It did not give her the family’s opinion of her husband; it did not whisper the gossip of the grocery-store and the post-office; it did not repeat the chuckles or echo the innuendoes:

“So Squire Hall’s wife’s got tired of him? Rather live with the Shakers than him!” “I like Hall, but I haven’t any sympathy with him,” the doctor said; “what in thunder did he let her go gallivanting off to visit the Shakers for? Might have known a female like Mrs. Hall’d get a bee in her bonnet. He ought to have kept her at home. _I_ would have. I wouldn’t have had any such nonsense in my family! Well, for an obstinate man (and he IS obstinate, you know), the squire, when it comes to his wife, has no more backbone than a wet string.”

“Wonder if there’s anything under it all?” came the sly insinuation of gossip; “wonder if she hasn’t got something besides the Shakers up her sleeve? You wait!”

If Athalia’s imagination spared her these comments, Lewis’s unimaginative common sense supplied them. He knew what other men and husbands were saying about him; what servants and gossip and friends insinuated to one another, and set his jaw in silence. He made no excuse and no explanation. Why should he? The facts spoke. His wife did prefer the Shakers to her husband and her home. To have interfered with her purpose by any plea of his personal unhappiness, or by any threat of an appeal to law, or even by refusing to give the “consent” essential to her admission, would not have altered these facts. As for his reasons for going with her, they would not have enhanced his dignity in the eyes of the men who wouldn’t have had any such nonsense in their families: he must be near her to see that she did not suffer too much hardship, and to bring her home when she was ready to come.

In those days of tearing his life up by the roots the silent man was just a little more silent, that was all. But the fact was burning into his consciousness: he couldn’t keep his wife! That was what they said, and that was the truth. It seemed to him as if his soul blushed at his helplessness. But his face was perfectly stolid. He told Athalia, passively, that he had rented the house and mill to Henry Davis; that he had settled half his capital upon her, so that she would have some money to put into the common treasury of the community; then he added that he had taken a house for himself near the settlement, and that he would hire out to the Shakers when they were haying, or do any farm-work that he could get.

“I can take care of myself, I guess,” he said; “I used to camp out when I was a boy, and I can cook pretty well, mother always said.” He looked at her wistfully; but the uncomfortable-ness of such an arrangement did not strike her. In her desire for a new emotion, her eagerness to FEEL--that eagerness which is really a sensuality of the mind--she was too absorbed in her own self-chosen hardships to think of his; which were not entirely self-chosen.

“I think I can find enough to do,” he said; “the Shakers need an able-bodied man; they only have those three old men.”

“How do you know that?” she asked, quickly.

“I’ve been to see them twice this winter,” he said.

“Why!” she said, amazed, “you never told me!”

“I don’t tell you everything nowadays, ‘Thalia,” he said, briefly.

In those two visits to the Shakers, Lewis Hall had been treated with great delicacy; there had been no effort to proselytize, and equally there had been no triumphing over the accession of his wife; in fact, Athalia was hardly referred to, except when they told him that they would take good care of her, and when Brother Nathan volunteered a brief summary of Shaker doctrines--“so as you can feel easy about her,” he explained: “We believe that Christ was the male principle in Deity, and Mother Ann was the female principle. And we believe in confession of our sins, and communion with the dead--spiritualism, they call it nowadays--and in the virgin life. Shakers don’t marry, nor give in marriage. And we have all things in common. That’s all, friend. You see, we don’t teach anything that Christ didn’t teach, so she won’t learn any evil from us. Simple, ain’t it?”

“Well, yes, after a fashion,” Lewis Hall said; “but it isn’t human.”

And Brother Nathan smiled mystically. “Maybe that isn’t against it, in the long run,” he said.

They came to the community in the spring twilight. The brothers and sisters had assembled to meet the convert, and to give a neighborly hand to the silent man who was to live by himself in a little, gray, shingled house down on Lonely Lake Road. It was a supreme moment to Athalia. She had expected an intense parting from her husband when they left their own house; and she was ready to press into her soul the poignant thorn of grief, not only because it would make her FEEL, but because it would emphasize in her own mind the divine self-sacrifice which she wanted to believe she was making. But when the moment came to close the door of the old home behind them, her husband was cruelly commonplace about it--for poor Lewis had no more drama in him than a kindly Newfoundland dog! He was full of practical cares for his tenant, and he stopped even while he was turning the key in the lock, to “fuss,” as Athalia said, over some last details of the transfer of the sawmill. Athalia could not tear herself from arms that placidly consented to her withdrawal; so there had been no rending ecstasies. In consequence, on the journey up to the community she was a little morose, a little irritable even, just as the drunkard is apt to be irritable when sobriety is unescapable.... But at the door of the Family House she had her opportunity: she said, dramatically, “Good-night--_Brother Lewis_.” It was an entirely sincere moment. Dramatic natures are not often insincere, they are only unreal.

As for her husband, he said, calmly, “Good-night, dear,” and trudged off in the cool May dusk down Lonely Lake Road. He found the door of the house on the latch, and a little fire glowing in the stove; Brother Nathan had seen to that, and had left some food on the table for him. But in spite of the old man’s friendly foresight the house had all the desolation of confusion; in the kitchen there were two or three cases of books, broken open but not unpacked, a trunk and a carpet-bag, and some bundles of groceries; they had been left by the expressman on tables and chairs and on the floor, so that the solitary man had to do some lifting and unpacking before he could sit down in his loneliness to eat the supper Brother Nathan had provided. He looked about to see where he would put up shelves for his books, and as he did so the remembrance of his quiet, shabby old study came to him, almost like a blow.

“Well,” he said to himself, “this won’t be for so very long. We’ll be back again in a year, I guess. Poor little Tay! I shouldn’t wonder if it was six months. I wonder, can I buy Henry Davis off, if she wants to go back in six months?”

And yet, in spite of his calm understanding of the situation, the wound burned. As he went about putting things into some semblance of order, he paused once and looked hard into the fire.... When she did want to go back--let it be in six months or six weeks or six days--would things be the same? Something had been done to the very structure and fabric of their life. “Can it ever be the same?” he said to himself; and then he passed his hand over his eyes, in a bewildered way--“Will I be the same?” he said.

III

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?”