Only Ellen Levis and her brother were clad in any modern fashion. Their mother, long dead, had been a Seventh-Day Baptist and their father, who was not a church member, not even a worldly Lutheran, sent them to the meeting at the Kloster because of a promise made to her.
The two children, Matthew, a sturdy, blond boy of sixteen, and Ellen, who was almost two years younger, sat a little apart from the others, Matthew with his arms folded like the brethren, and Ellen close beside him. Sometimes she laid her head for a moment on his shoulder. She was a child of intense affections to whom the sight and touch of the beloved object gave unspeakable satisfaction. Matthew was to go to school in the fall to study medicine and at the thought of separation from him tears came into her brown eyes.
The meeting seemed interminable. It was not always possible for the little flock to gather together on the Seventh Day, and once assembled they communed long together. This evening after the solemn ceremony of Foot-washing, the Lord's Supper would be celebrated, as was proper, as an evening feast.
The attendance was comparatively large, all that remained of the Ephrata flock having gathered, as well as a few members from Franklin and Bedford Counties; and Grandfather Milhausen, feeling the occasion to be important, was delivering himself of the fruits of a lifetime of meditation. He proved the necessity of baptism; he proved that baptism by sprinkling had no warrant in Scripture; he dwelt in conclusion with passionate outpouring of words upon the efficacy and comfort of trine immersion.
His voice, now loud, now soft, kept throughout a monotone. His hearers grew drowsy, slept, woke again, changed their positions, and slept once more. The little black lamb came again and again into the field of Ellen's vision, fifty accurately counted automobile horns sounded from a curve near by, and each member of the congregation was in turn gazed at and meditated upon.
"I like Sister König because she is so very fat and when she is not in meeting she smiles pleasantly.... I pity Brother Reith because they had to take his wife to the asylum, but I do not like him.... I pity Sister Herman because she had to be baptized in the cold creek last winter. I should choose the summer. I should"—there was a slight admonitory motion of the shoulder against which she leaned. But she was disturbed only for a second; then she settled her plump body still more closely against her brother's arm. He was tired, she was sure, and she was very, very tired. Grandfather's eyes, lifted a moment ago toward the ceiling, were bent now upon his congregation. He must see that they were tired, that they longed to go, but he took no heed of their misery.
Once more Ellen returned to her musing. She journeyed through the strange old building, passing from the meeting-room into a kitchen where, long ago, meals were prepared for visiting brethren, and climbing up into large empty lofts which had been their dormitories.
Then she sped in imagination out the door of the meeting-room and across the angle between the Saal and Saron. In Saron had lived a conventual sisterhood, young women who had left their fathers' houses, and older women who had left their own homes and their husbands and children, to pray, to spin and weave, to letter the old charts, and to sing morning, noon and midnight, strange, attenuated music from a latticed gallery.
The old building was an enchanting place—if only one were sometimes allowed there alone, so that one might dream without the guiding admonitions of Grandfather, to whom these women were all saints. Here were old spinning-wheels and a curious tower clock which struck the hours, and pieces of pottery and old books and still other elaborate charts. Climbing a narrow, winding stairway, one came to tiny cells where the sisters had slept on narrow benches fastened to the wall, with blocks of wood for pillows. Ellen pictured them lying stiffly; sometimes she imagined them falling with a crash from their narrow couches; sometimes she fancied herself pursued by them, and taking refuge with Matthew or her father. They wore, she seemed to remember, thick white dresses, tied about with ropes. The poor things lay now, dead and done for, in the little cemetery between the meeting-house and the road.
After a long time she resumed her meditations upon the subject of immersion.