They had left the train at five o'clock in the morning, and were sitting in the station awaiting the express when Athalia had had this impulse to climb the hill.
"It looks pretty steep," Lewis objected; and she flung out her hands with an impatient gesture.
"I love to climb!" she said. So here they were, almost at the top, panting and toiling, Athalia's skirts wet with dew, and Lewis's face drawn with fatigue.
"Look!" she said; "it's all open! We can sit down and see all over the world!" She left the road, springing lightly through the fringing bay and briers toward an open space on the hillside. "There is a gate in the wall!" she called out; "it seems to be some sort of enclosure.
Lewis, help me to open the gate! Hurry! What a queer place!
What do you suppose it is?"
The gate opened into a little field bounded by a stone wall; the grass had been lately mowed, and the stubble, glistening with dew, showed the curving swaths of the scythe; across it, in even lines from wall to wall, were rows of small stakes painted black.
Here and there were faint depressions, low, green cradles in the grass; each depression was marked at the head and foot by these iron stakes, hardly higher than the stubble itself.
"Shakers' graveyard, I guess," Lewis said; "I've heard that they don't use gravestones. Peaceful place, isn't it?"
Her vivid face was instantly grave. "Very peaceful! Oh," she added, as they sat down in the shadow of a pine, "don't you sometimes want to lie down and sleep--deep down in the grass and flowers?"
"Well," he confessed, "I don't believe it would be as interesting as walking round on top of them."
She looked at him in despair.
"Come, now," he defended himself, "you don't take much to peace yourself at home."
"You don't understand!" she said, passionately.
"There, there, little Tay," he said, smiling, and putting a soothing hand on hers; "I guess I do--after a fashion."
It was very still; below them the valley had suddenly brimmed with sunshine that flickered and twinkled on the birch leaves or shimmered on sombre stretches of pine and spruce. Close at hand, pennyroyal grew thick in the shadow of the wall; and just beyond, mullen candles cast slender bars of shade across the grass.
The sunken graves and the lines of iron markers lay before them.
"How quiet it is!" she said, in a whisper.
"I guess I'll smoke," Lewis said, and scratched a match on his trousers.
"How can you!" she protested; "it is profane!"
He gave her an amused look, but lighted his cigar and smoked dreamily for a minute; then he drew a long breath. "I was pretty tired," he said, and turned to glance back at the road. A horse and cart were coming in at the open gate; the elderly driver, singing to himself, drew up abruptly at the sight of the two under the pine-tree, then drove toward them, the wheels of the cart jolting cheerfully over the cradling graves.
He had a sickle in his hand, and as he clambered down from the seat, he said, with friendly curiosity:
"You folks are out early, for the world's people."
"Is this a graveyard?" Athalia demanded, impetuously.
"Yee," he said, smiling; "it's our burial-place; we're Shakers."
"But why are there just the stakes--without names?"
"Why should there be names?" he said, whimsically; "they have new names now."
"Where is your community? Can we go and visit it?"
"Yee; but we're not much to see," he said; "just men and women, like you.
Only we're happy. I guess that's all the difference."
"But what a difference!" she exclaimed; and Lewis smiled.
"I've come up for pennyroyal," the Shaker explained, sociably; "it grows thick round here."
"Tell me about the Shakers," Athalia pleaded. "What do you believe?"
"Well," he said, a simple shrewdness glimmering in his brown eyes, "if you go to the Trustees' House, down there in the valley, Eldress Hannah'll tell you all about us. And the sisters have baskets and pretty truck to sell--things the world's people like.
Go and ask the Eldress what we believe, and she'll show you the baskets."
She turned eagerly to her husband. "Never mind the ten-o'clock train, Lewis. Let us go!"
"We could take a later train, all right," he admitted, "but--"
"Oh, PLEASE!" she entreated, joyously. "We'll help you pick pennyroyal," she added to the Shaker.
But this he would not allow. "I doubt you'd be careful enough," he said, mildly; "Sister Lydia was the only female I ever knew who could pick herbs."
"Do you get paid for the work you do?" Athalia asked, practically.
Lewis flushed at the boldness of such a question, but the old man chuckled.
"Should I pay myself?" he asked.
"You own everything in common, don't you?" Lewis said.
"Yee," said the Shaker; "we're all brothers and sisters.
Nobody tries to get ahead of anybody else."
"And you don't believe in marriage?" Athalia asserted.
"We are as the angels of God," he said, simply.
He left them and began to sickle his herbs, with the cheerfully obvious purpose of escaping further interruption.
Athalia instantly bubbled over with questions, but Lewis could tell her hardly more of the Shakers than she knew already.
"No, it isn't free love," he said; "they're decent enough.
They believe in general love, not particular, I suppose. . . . 'Thalia, do you think it's worth while to wait over a train just to see the settlement?"
"Of course it is! He said they were happy; I would like to see what kind of life makes people happy."
He looked at the lighted end of his cigar and smiled, but he said nothing. Afterward, as they followed the cart across the field and out into the road, Athalia asked the old herb-gatherer many questions about the happiness of the community life, which he answered patiently enough. Once or twice he tried to draw into their talk the silent husband who walked at her side, but Lewis had nothing to say. Only when some reference was made to one of the Prophecies did he look up in sudden interest.
"You take that to mean the Judgment, do you?" he said.
