The Way to Peace Part 1

The Way to Peace.

by Margaret Deland.

I

ATHALIA HALL stopped to get her breath and look back over the road climbing steeply up from the covered bridge. It was a little after five, and the delicate air of dawn was full of wood and pasture scents--the sweetness of bay and the freshness of dew-drenched leaves. In the valley night still hung like gauze under the trees, but the top of the hill was glittering with sunshine.

"Why, we've hardly come halfway!" she said.

Her husband, plodding along behind her, nodded ruefully. "Hardly," he said.

In her slim prettiness Athalia Hall looked like a girl, but she was thirty-four. Part of the girlishness lay in the smoothness of her white forehead and in the sincere intensity of her gaze. She wore a blue linen dress, and there was a little, soft, blue scarf under her chin; her white hat, with pink roses and loops of gray-blue ribbon, shadowed eager, unhumorous eyes, the color of forget-me-nots. Her husband was her senior by several years--a large, loose-limbed man, with a scholarly face and mild, calm eyes--eyes that were full of a singular tenacity of purpose. Just now his face showed the fatigue of the long climb up-hill; and when his wife, stopping to look back over the glistening tops of the birches, said, "I believe it's half a mile to the top yet!" he agreed, breathlessly. "Hard work!" he said.

"It will be worth it when I get to the top and can see the view!" she declared, and began to climb again.

"All the same, this road will be mighty hot when the sun gets full on it," her husband said; and added, anxiously, "I wish I had made you rest in the station until train-time." She flung out her hands with an exclamation: "Rest! I hate rest!"

"Hold on, and I'll give you a stick," he called to her; "it's a help when you're climbing." He pulled down a slender birch, and, setting his foot on it, broke it off at the root. She stopped, with an impatient gesture, and waited while he tore off handfuls of leaves and whittled away the side-shoots.

"Do hurry, Lewis!" she said.

They had left their train at five o'clock in the morning, and had been sitting in the frowsy station, sleepily awaiting the express, when Athalia had had this fancy for climbing the hill so that she might see the view.

"It looks pretty steep," her husband warned her.

"It will be something to do, anyhow!" she said; and added, with a restless sigh, "but you don't understand that, I suppose."

"I guess I do--after a fashion," he said, smiling at her. It was only in love's fashion, for really he was incapable of quite understanding her.

To the country lawyer of sober piety and granite sense of duty, the rich variety of her moods was a continual wonder and sometimes a painful bewilderment. But whether he understood the impetuous inconsequence of her temperament "after a fashion," or whether he failed entirely to follow the complexity of her thought, he met all her fancies with a sort of tender admiration. People said that Squire Hall was henpecked; they also said that he had married beneath him. His father had been a judge and his grandfather a minister; he himself was a graduate of a fresh-water college, which later, when he published his exegesis on the Prophet Daniel, had conferred its little degree upon him and felt that he was a "distinguished son." With such a lineage he might have done better, people said, than to marry that girl, who was the most fickle creature and no housekeeper, and whose people--this they told one another in reserved voices--were PLAY-ACTORS! Athalia's mother, who had been the "play-actor," had left her children an example of duty--domestic as well as professional duty--faithfully done. As she did not leave anything else, Athalia added nothing to the Hall fortune; but Lewis's law practice, which was hardly more than conveyancing now and then, was helped out by a sawmill which the Halls had owned for two generations. So, as things were, they were able to live in humdrum prosperity which gave Lewis plenty of time to browse about among his grandfather's old theological books, and by-and-by to become a very sound Hebrew scholar, and spared Athalia much wholesome occupation which would have been steadying to her eager nature. She was one of those people who express every pa.s.sing emotion, as a flower expresses each wind that sways it upon its stalk. But with expression the emotion ended.

"But she isn't fickle," Lewis had defended her once to a privileged relation who had made the accusation, basing it on the fact that Athalia had sewed her fingers off for the Missionary Society one winter and done nothing the next--"Athalia ISN'T fickle," Lewis explained; "fickle people are insincere. Athalia is perfectly sincere, but she is temporary; that's all. Anyway, she wants to do something else this winter, and 'Thalia must have her head."

"Your head's better than hers, young man," the venturesome relative insisted.

"But it must be her head and not mine, Aunty, when it comes to doing what she thinks is right, even if it's wrong," he said, smiling.

"Well, tell her she's a little fool!" cried the old lady, viciously.

"You can't do that with 'Thalia," Lewis explained, patiently, "because it would make her unhappy. She takes everything so dreadfully hard; she feels things more than other people do."

"Lewis," said the little, old, wrinkled, privileged great-aunt, "think a little less of her feelings and a little more of your own, or you'll make a mess of things."

Lewis Hall was too respectful to tell the old lady what he thought of such selfish advice; he merely did not act upon it. Instead, he went on giving a great deal of thought to Athalia's "feelings." That was why he and she were climbing the hill in the dewy silence of this August morning. Athalia had "felt" that she wanted to see the view--though it would have been better for her to have rested in the station, Lewis thought;--("I ought to have coaxed her out of it," he reproached himself.) It certainly was a hard walk, considering that it followed a broken night in the sleeping-car. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s; 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 gra.s.s 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, pa.s.sionately.

"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 gra.s.s. 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!"