Levis kissed her and put on his hat and went away. He did not carry his satchel of medicines nor go to the barn to put his horse into the buggy, but walked down the short lane to the road. Ellen watched him until he reached the gate, and stood for a moment listening to the church bells in Ephrata. When he went on his way, she turned with forgetfulness of all troubles to "David Copperfield." The first paragraphs puzzled her, but she did not linger. Mercifully, one did not need to understand everything in a book in order to get intense enjoyment out of it.
Levis retraced Ellen's journey of yesterday, except that he climbed no fences, but kept to the road until he reached the strange group of old buildings in the hollow, now more uncanny than ever in the twilight. They were entirely dark, and about them in his imagination ghosts seemed to wander, some of them saintly and all pitifully deluded. These old buildings had trapped him; entering them from curiosity soon after he had taken the practice of the old doctor, he had come out bewitched, unable to free himself, the course of his life changed.
Midway between an outer and an inner gate he stood still. He was in the little enclosure beside the public highway where for a hundred and seventy years the Seventh-Day Baptists had buried their dead. Here were no ornate monuments, but a few rows of simple stones, some sunk deep into the soil. One, a little larger and whiter than the rest, seemed to invite contemplation. Levis glanced at it, hesitated for an instant, and then went on. He knew well how unimportant are the remains of mortality and that it is mockery even to pause beside a grave in which lies the object of a love, extinguished not by death, but by life. The shadowy stone recalled not grief born when Mary died, but miseries struggled with long before.
As he passed through the second gate he heard voices. Beside the tall, steep-roofed buildings stood a little cottage where lived Grandfather, the guardian of the property, and Amos, his nephew, protégé, and familiar. Pleased with the attendance at yesterday's meeting, the two sat together on the porch, now for a long time silent, now in earnest conversation. There was now no prophet's fire in Grandfather's eyes. He sat comfortably in an old armchair, the wristbands of his unstarched shirt turned back over his coat sleeves, his loosely hanging hands, his air of negligent repose suggesting the portraits of the aged Whitman.
He spoke rapidly and easily, the young man more slowly and in a questioning tone. The prophet's mantle seemed to Amos a heavy robe, though his piety was sincere and he looked, even more than Grandfather, the part of saint. His features were beautifully modeled; his thick and curling hair was worn a little long, in faint imitation of the pious hermits of long ago. His slightly parted lips and wide gray eyes gave him a look of expectancy which was the expression of his hopes. He anticipated that the faith which filled his soul would be quickened by mystical visions. It had been so in this holy place, it would be so once more. Grandfather had assured him of it a hundred times.
Grandfather believed that in establishing in Amos a preoccupation with spiritual things and with his own soul, he had done him an inestimable service, but to Levis this preoccupation was unwholesome and unpleasant. He felt contempt for Amos and avoided whenever possible the sight of his feminine beauty. Neither Levis nor any one else had realized that Amos, with his magnificent frame, his delicate beard, his long hair, his literary aspirations, and his formal meditations, was not tragic nor profound nor despicable, but perilously like a figure of comedy.
The two did not hear the closing of the gate, and the end of their discourse came distinctly to ears already burning.
"It is a fine thing for us that young Matthew has taken this stand. I'm not afraid for the little one—it was doubtless conviction of sin which made her run away. I will see her alone, and then she too will come into the fold. It has been distinctly prophesied to me in dreams that with you three anything might be done, Matthew the head of a secular congregation, you of a restored brotherhood, and Ellen of a sisterhood."
Levis laid his hand on his heart in an habitual and, almost invariably, an unconscious gesture. The blood seemed to beat behind his eyes and in his throat. He had never been so angry.