Part 7

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.