And for the rest of the walk to the settlement the two men discussed the point, the Shaker walking with one hand on the heavy shaft, for the support it gave him, and Lewis keeping step with him.
At the foot of the hill the road widened into a grassy street, on both sides of which, under the elms and maples, were the community houses, big and substantial, but gauntly plain; their yellow paint, flaking and peeling here and there, shone clean and fresh in the sparkle of morning. Except for a black cat whose fur glistened like jet, dozing on a white doorstep, the settlement, steeped in sunshine, showed no sign of life.
There was a strange remoteness from time about the place; a sort of emptiness, and a silence that silenced even Athalia.
"Where IS everybody?" she said, in a lowered voice; as she spoke, a child in a blue apron came from an open doorway and tugged a basket across the street.
"Are there children here?" Lewis asked, surprised; and their guide said, sadly:
"Not as many as there ought to be. The new school laws have made a great difference. We've only got two. Folks used to send 'em to us to bring up; oftentimes they stayed on after they were of age.
Sister Lydia came that way. Well, well, she tired of us, Lydy did, poor girl! She went back into the world twenty years ago, now.
And Sister Jane, she was a bound-out child, too," he rambled on;"she came here when she was six; she's seventy now."
"What!" Lewis exclaimed; "has she never known anything but--this?"
His shocked tone did not disturb the old man.
"Want to see my herb-house?" he said. "Guess you'll find some of the sisters in the sorting-room. I'm Nathan Dale," he added, courteously.
They had come to the open door of a great, weather-beaten building, from whose open windows an aromatic breath wandered out into the summer air. As they crossed the worn threshold, Athalia stopped and caught her breath in the overpowering scent of drying herbs; then they followed Brother Nathan up a shaky flight of steps to the loft.
Here some elderly women, sitting on low benches, were sorting over great piles of herbs in silence--the silence, apparently, of peace and meditation. Two of them were dressed like world's people, but the others wore small gray shoulder-capes buttoned to their chins, and little caps of white net stretched smoothly over wire frames; the narrow shirrings inside the frames fitted so close to their peaceful, wrinkled foreheads that no hair could be seen.
"I wish I could sit and sort herbs!" Athalia said, under her breath.
Brother Nathan chuckled. "For how long?" he asked; and then introduced her to the three workers, who greeted her calmly and went on sorting their herbs. The loft was dark and cool; the window-frames, in which there were no sashes, opened wide on the still August fields and woods; the occasional brief words of the sorting-women seemed to drop into a pool of fragrant silence.
The two visitors followed Brother Nathan down the room between piles of sorted herbs, and out into the sunshine again.
Athalia drew a breath of ecstasy.
"It's all so beautifully tranquil!" she whispered, looking about her with blue, excited eyes.
"Tay and tranquillity!" Lewis said, with an amused laugh.
But as they went along the grassy street this sense of tranquillity closed about them like a palpable peace.
Now and then they stopped and spoke to some one--always an elderly person; and in each old face the experiences that life writes in unerasable lines about eyes and lips were hidden by a veil of calmness that was curiously unhuman.
"It isn't canny, exactly," Lewis told his wife, in a low voice.
But she did not seem to hear him. She asked many questions of Eldress Hannah, who had taken them in charge, and once or twice she burst into impetuous appreciation of the idea of brotherhood, and even of certain theological principles-- which last diverted her husband very much. Eldress Hannah showed them the dairy, and the work-room, and all there was to see, with a patient hospitality that kept them at an infinite distance.
She answered Lewis's questions about the community with a sad directness.
"Yee; there are not many of us now. The world's people say we're dying out. But the Lord will preserve the remnant to redeem the world, young man. Yee; when they come in from the world they cast their possessions into the whole; we own nothing, for ourselves. Nay; we don't have many come. Brother William was the last. Why did he come?" She looked coldly at Athalia, who had asked the question. "Because he saw the way to peace.
He'd had strife enough in the world. Yee," she admitted, briefly, "some fall from grace, and leave us. The last was Lydia.
She was one of our children, and I thought she was of the chosen.
But she was only thirty when she fell away, and you can't expect wisdom at that age. That was nearly twenty years ago.
When she has tasted the dregs of the world she will come back to us-- if she lives," Eldress Hannah ended.
Athalia listened breathlessly, her rapt, unhumorous eyes fixed on Eldress Hannah's still face. Now and then she asked a question, and once cried out that, after all, why wasn't it the way to live?
Peace and self-sacrifice and love! "Oh," she said, turning to her husband, "can't you feel the attraction of it?
I should think even you could feel it!"
"I think I feel it--after a fashion," he said, mildly; "I think I have always felt the attraction of community life."
Afterward, when they had left all this somnolent peace and begun the long walk back to the station, he explained what he meant:
"I couldn't say so before the Eldress, but of course there are times when anybody can feel the charm of getting rid of personal responsibility-- and that is what community life really means. It's the relief of being a little cog in a big machine; in fact, the very attraction of it is a sort of temptation, to my way of looking at it.
But it--well, it made me sleepy," he confessed.
