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 *******, 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!"
