"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 mysti-cally. "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.
