EVELINA’S GARDEN

On the south a high arbor-vitæ hedge separated Evelina’s garden from

the road. The hedge was so high that when the school-children lagged

by, and the secrets behind it fired them with more curiosity than those

between their battered book covers, the tallest of them by stretching

up on tiptoe could not peer over. And so they were driven to childish

engineering feats, and would set to work and pick away sprigs of the

arbor-vitæ with their little fingers, and make peep-holes--but small

ones, that Evelina might not discern them. Then they would thrust their

pink faces into the hedge, and the enduring fragrance of it would come

to their nostrils like a gust of aromatic breath from the mouth of the

northern woods, and peer into Evelina’s garden as through the green

tubes of vernal telescopes.

Then suddenly hollyhocks, blooming in rank and file, seemed to be

marching upon them like platoons of soldiers, with detonations of

color that dazzled their peeping eyes; and, indeed, the whole garden

seemed charging with its mass of riotous bloom upon the hedge. They

could scarcely take in details of marigold and phlox and pinks and

London-pride and cock’s-combs, and prince’s-feathers waving overhead

like standards.

Sometimes also there was the purple flutter of Evelina’s gown; and

Evelina’s face, delicately faded, hung about with softly drooping

gray curls, appeared suddenly among the flowers, like another flower

uncannily instinct with nervous melancholy.

Then the children would fall back from their peep-holes, and huddle

off together with scared giggles. They were afraid of Evelina. There

was a shade of mystery about her which stimulated their childish

fancies when they heard her discussed by their elders. They might

easily have conceived her to be some baleful fairy intrenched in her

green stronghold, withheld from leaving it by the fear of some dire

penalty for magical sins. Summer and winter, spring and fall, Evelina

Adams never was seen outside her own domain of old mansion-house and

garden, and she had not set her slim lady feet in the public highway

for nearly forty years, if the stories were true.

People differed as to the reason why. Some said she had had an

unfortunate love affair, that her heart had been broken, and she

had taken upon herself a vow of seclusion from the world, but nobody

could point to the unworthy lover who had done her this harm. When

Evelina was a girl, not one of the young men of the village had dared

address her. She had been set apart by birth and training, and also

by a certain exclusiveness of manner, if not of nature. Her father,

old Squire Adams, had been the one man of wealth and college learning

in the village. He had owned the one fine old mansion-house, with

its white front propped on great Corinthian pillars, overlooking the

village like a broad brow of superiority.

He had owned the only coach and four. His wife during her short life

had gone dressed in rich brocades and satins that rustled loud in the

ears of the village women, and her nodding plumes had dazzled the eyes

under their modest hoods. Hardly a woman in the village but could

tell--for it had been handed down like a folk-lore song from mother to

daughter--just what Squire Adams’s wife wore when she walked out first

as bride to meeting. She had been clad all in blue.

“Squire Adams’s wife, when she walked out bride, she wore a blue satin

brocade gown, all wrought with blue flowers of a darker blue, cut low

neck and short sleeves. She wore long blue silk mitts wrought with

blue, blue satin shoes, and blue silk clocked stockings. And she wore

a blue crape mantle that was brought from over-seas, and a blue velvet

hat, with a long blue ostrich feather curled over it--it was so long

it reached her shoulder, and waved when she walked; and she carried a

little blue crape fan with ivory sticks.” So the women and girls told

each other when the Squire’s bride had been dead nearly seventy years.

The blue bride attire was said to be still in existence, packed away in

a cedar chest, as the Squire had ordered after his wife’s death. “He

stood over the woman that took care of his wife whilst she packed the

things away, and he never shed a tear, but she used to hear him a-goin’

up to the north chamber nights, when he couldn’t sleep, to look at

’em,” the women told.

People had thought the Squire would marry again. They said Evelina,

who was only four years old, needed a mother, and they selected one

and another of the good village girls. But the Squire never married.

He had a single woman, who dressed in black silk, and wore always a

black wrought veil over the side of her bonnet, come to live with them,

to take charge of Evelina. She was said to be a distant relative of

the Squire’s wife, and was much looked up to by the village people,

although she never did more than interlace, as it were, the fringes

of her garments with theirs. “She’s stuck up,” they said, and felt,

curiously enough, a certain pride in the fact when they met her in the

street and she ducked her long chin stiffly into the folds of her black

shawl by way of salutation.

When Evelina was fifteen years old this single woman died, and the

village women went to her funeral, and bent over her lying in a last

helpless dignity in her coffin, and stared with awed freedom at her

cold face. After that Evelina was sent away to school, and did not

return, except for a yearly vacation, for six years to come. Then she

returned, and settled down in her old home to live out her life, and

end her days in a perfect semblance of peace, if it were not peace.

Evelina never had any young school friend to visit her; she had never,

so far as any one knew, a friend of her own age. She lived alone with

her father and three old servants. She went to meeting, and drove with

the Squire in his chaise. The coach was never used after his wife’s

death, except to carry Evelina to and from school. She and the Squire

also took long walks, but they never exchanged aught but the merest

civilities of good-days and nods with the neighbors whom they met,

unless indeed the Squire had some matter of business to discuss. Then

Evelina stood aside and waited, her fair face drooping gravely aloof.

She was very pretty, with a gentle high-bred prettiness that impressed

the village folk, although they looked at it somewhat askance.

Evelina’s figure was tall, and had a fine slenderness; her silken

skirts hung straight from the narrow silk ribbon that girt her slim

waist; there was a languidly graceful bend in her long white throat;

her long delicate hands hung inertly at her sides among her skirt

folds, and were never seen to clasp anything; her softly clustering

fair curls hung over her thin blooming cheeks, and her face could

scarce be seen, unless, as she seldom did, she turned and looked full

upon one. Then her dark blue eyes, with a little nervous frown between

them, shone out radiantly; her thin lips showed a warm red, and her

beauty startled one.

Everybody wondered why she did not have a lover, why some fine young

man had not been smitten by her while she had been away at school.

They did not know that the school had been situated in another little

village, the counterpart of the one in which she had been born, wherein

a fitting mate for a bird of her feather could hardly be found. The

simple young men of the country-side were at once attracted and

intimidated by her. They cast fond sly glances across the meeting-house

at her lovely face, but they were confused before her when they jostled

her in the doorway and the rose and lavender scent of her lady garments

came in their faces. Not one of them dared accost her, much less march

boldly upon the great Corinthian-pillared house, raise the brass

knocker, and declare himself a suitor for the Squire’s daughter.

One young man there was, indeed, who treasured in his heart an

experience so subtle and so slight that he could scarcely believe in it

himself. He never recounted it to mortal soul, but kept it as a secret

sacred between himself and his own nature, but something to be scoffed

at and set aside by others.

It had happened one Sabbath day in summer, when Evelina had not been

many years home from school, as she sat in the meeting-house in her

Sabbath array of rose-colored satin gown, and white bonnet trimmed with

a long white feather and a little wreath of feathery green, that of a

sudden she raised her head and turned her face, and her blue eyes met

this young man’s full upon hers, with all his heart in them, and it was

for a second as if her own heart leaped to the surface, and he saw it,

although afterwards he scarce believed it to be true.

Then a pallor crept over Evelina’s delicately brilliant face. She

turned it away, and her curls falling softly from under the green

wreath on her bonnet brim hid it. The young man’s cheeks were a hot

red, and his heart beat loudly in his ears when he met her in the

doorway after the sermon was done. His eager, timorous eyes sought

her face, but she never looked his way. She laid her slim hand in its

cream-colored silk mitt on the Squire’s arm; her satin gown rustled

softly as she passed before him, shrinking against the wall to give

her room, and a faint fragrance which seemed like the very breath of

the unknown delicacy and exclusiveness of life came to his bewildered

senses.

Many a time he cast furtive glances across the meeting-house at

Evelina, but she never looked his way again. If his timid boy-eyes

could have seen her cheek behind its veil of curls, he might have

discovered that the color came and went before his glances, although

it was strange how she could have been conscious of them; but he never

knew.

And he also never knew how, when he walked past the Squire’s house

of a Sunday evening, dressed in his best, with his shoulders thrust

consciously back, and the windows in the westering sun looked full of

blank gold to his furtive eyes, Evelina was always peeping at him from

behind a shutter, and he never dared go in. His intuitions were not

like hers, and so nothing happened that might have, and he never fairly

knew what he knew. But that he never told, even to his wife when he

married; for his hot young blood grew weary and impatient with this

vain courtship, and he turned to one of his villagemates, who met him

fairly half way, and married her within a year.

On the Sunday when he and his bride first appeared in the

meeting-house Evelina went up the aisle behind her father in an array

of flowered brocade, stiff with threads of silver, so wonderful that

people all turned their heads to stare at her. She wore also a new

bonnet of rose-colored satin, and her curls were caught back a little,

and her face showed as clear and beautiful as an angel’s.

The young bridegroom glanced at her once across the meeting-house, then

he looked at his bride in her gay wedding finery with a faithful look.

When Evelina met them in the doorway, after meeting was done, she bowed

with a sweet cold grace to the bride, who courtesied blushingly in

return, with an awkward sweep of her foot in the bridal satin shoe. The

bridegroom did not look at Evelina at all. He held his chin well down

in his stock with solemn embarrassment, and passed out stiffly, his

bride on his arm.

Evelina, shining in the sun like a silver lily, went up the street, her

father stalking beside her with stately swings of his cane, and that

was the last time she was ever seen at meeting. Nobody knew why.

When Evelina was a little over thirty her father died. There was not

much active grief for him in the village; he had really figured therein

more as a stately monument of his own grandeur than anything else.

He had been a man of little force of character, and that little had

seemed to degenerate since his wife died. An inborn dignity of manner

might have served to disguise his weakness with any others than these

shrewd New-Englanders, but they read him rightly. “The Squire wa’n’t

ever one to set the river a-fire,” they said. Then, moreover, he left

none of his property to the village to build a new meeting-house or a

town-house. It all went to Evelina.

People expected that Evelina would surely show herself in her mourning

at meeting the Sunday after the Squire died, but she did not. Moreover,

it began to be gradually discovered that she never went out in the

village street nor crossed the boundaries of her own domains after her

father’s death. She lived in the great house with her three servants--a

man and his wife, and the woman who had been with her mother when she

died. Then it was that Evelina’s garden began. There had always been a

garden at the back of the Squire’s house, but not like this, and only a

low fence had separated it from the road. Now one morning in the autumn

the people saw Evelina’s man-servant, John Darby, setting out the

arbor-vitæ hedge, and in the spring after that there were ploughing and

seed-sowing extending over a full half-acre, which later blossomed out

in glory.

Before the hedge grew so high Evelina could be seen at work in her

garden. She was often stooping over the flower-beds in the early

morning when the village was first astir, and she moved among them with

her watering-pot in the twilight--a shadowy figure that might, from her

grace and her constancy to the flowers, have been Flora herself.

As the years went on, the arbor-vitæ hedge got each season a new growth

and waxed taller, until Evelina could no longer be seen above it. That

was an annoyance to people, because the quiet mystery of her life kept

their curiosity alive, until it was in a constant struggle, as it were,

with the green luxuriance of the hedge.

“John Darby had ought to trim that hedge,” they said. They accosted him

in the street: “John, if ye don’t cut that hedge down a little it’ll

all die out.” But he only made a surly grunting response, intelligible

to himself alone, and passed on. He was an Englishman, and had lived in

the Squire’s family since he was a boy.

He had a nature capable of only one simple line of force, with no

radiations or parallels, and that had early resolved itself into

the service of the Squire and his house. After the Squire’s death

he married a woman who lived in the family. She was much older than

himself, and had a high temper, but was a good servant, and he married

her to keep her to her allegiance to Evelina. Then he bent her,

without her knowledge, to take his own attitude towards his mistress.

No more could be gotten out of John Darby’s wife than out of John

Darby concerning the doings at the Squire’s house. She met curiosity

with a flash of hot temper, and he with surly taciturnity, and both

intimidated.

The third of Evelina’s servants was the woman who had nursed her

mother, and she was naturally subdued and undemonstrative, and rendered

still more so by a ceaseless monotony of life. She never went to

meeting, and was seldom seen outside the house. A passing vision of a

long white-capped face at a window was about all the neighbors ever saw

of this woman.

So Evelina’s gentle privacy was well guarded by her own household,

as by a faithful system of domestic police. She grew old peacefully

behind her green hedge, shielded effectually from all rough bristles of

curiosity. Every new spring her own bloom showed paler beside the new

bloom of her flowers, but people could not see it.

Some thirty years after the Squire’s death the man John Darby died; his

wife, a year later. That left Evelina alone with the old woman who had

nursed her mother. She was very old, but not feeble, and quite able

to perform the simple household tasks for herself and Evelina. An old

man, who saved himself from the almshouse in such ways, came daily to

do the rougher part of the garden-work in John Darby’s stead. He was

aged and decrepit; his muscles seemed able to perform their appointed

tasks only through the accumulated inertia of a patiently toilsome

life in the same tracks. Apparently they would have collapsed had he

tried to force them to aught else than the holding of the ploughshare,

the pulling of weeds, the digging around the roots of flowers, and the

planting of seeds.

Every autumn he seemed about to totter to his fall among the

fading flowers; every spring it was like Death himself urging on

the resurrection; but he lived on year after year, and tended well

Evelina’s garden, and the gardens of other maiden-women and widows

in the village. He was taciturn, grubbing among his green beds as

silently as a worm, but now and then he warmed a little under a fire of

questions concerning Evelina’s garden. “Never see none sech flowers in

nobody’s garden in this town, not sence I knowed ’nough to tell a pink

from a piny,” he would mumble. His speech was thick; his words were

all uncouthly slurred; the expression of his whole life had come more

through his old knotted hands of labor than through his tongue. But

he would wipe his forehead with his shirt-sleeve and lean a second on

his spade, and his face would change at the mention of the garden. Its

wealth of bloom illumined his old mind, and the roses and honeysuckles

and pinks seemed for a second to be reflected in his bleared old eyes.

There had never been in the village such a garden as this of Evelina

Adams’s. All the old blooms which had come over the seas with the

early colonists, and started as it were their own colony of flora in

the new country, flourished there. The naturalized pinks and phlox

and hollyhocks and the rest, changed a little in color and fragrance

by the conditions of a new climate and soil, were all in Evelina’s

garden, and no one dreamed what they meant to Evelina; and she did not

dream herself, for her heart was always veiled to her own eyes, like

the face of a nun. The roses and pinks, the poppies and heart’s-ease,

were to this maiden-woman, who had innocently and helplessly outgrown

her maiden heart, in the place of all the loves of life which she had

missed. Her affections had forced an outlet in roses; they exhaled

sweetness in pinks, and twined and clung in honeysuckle-vines. The

daffodils, when they came up in the spring, comforted her like the

smiles of children; when she saw the first rose, her heart leaped as at

the face of a lover.

She had lost the one way of human affection, but her feet had found a

little single side-track of love, which gave her still a zest in the

journey of life. Even in the winter Evelina had her flowers, for she

kept those that would bear transplanting in pots, and all the sunny

windows in her house were gay with them. She would also not let a

rose leaf fall and waste in the garden soil, or a sprig of lavender

or thyme. She gathered them all, and stored them away in chests and

drawers and old china bowls--the whole house seemed laid away in rose

leaves and lavender. Evelina’s clothes gave out at every motion that

fragrance of dead flowers which is like the fragrance of the past, and

has a sweetness like that of sweet memories. Even the cedar chest where

Evelina’s mother’s blue bridal array was stored had its till heaped

with rose leaves and lavender.

When Evelina was nearly seventy years old the old nurse who had lived

with her her whole life died. People wondered then what she would do.

“She can’t live all alone in that great house,” they said. But she did

live there alone six months, until spring, and people used to watch

her evening lamp when it was put out, and the morning smoke from her

kitchen chimney. “It ain’t safe for her to be there alone in that great

house,” they said.

But early in April a young girl appeared one Sunday in the old Squire’s

pew. Nobody had seen her come to town, and nobody knew who she was or

where she came from, but the old people said she looked just as Evelina

Adams used to when she was young, and she must be some relation. The

old man who had used to look across the meeting-house at Evelina,

over forty years ago, looked across now at this young girl, and gave

a great start, and his face paled under his gray beard stubble. His

old wife gave an anxious, wondering glance at him, and crammed a

peppermint into his hand. “Anything the matter, father?” she whispered;

but he only gave his head a half-surly shake, and then fastened his

eyes straight ahead upon the pulpit. He had reason to that day, for

his only son, Thomas, was going to preach his first sermon therein

as a candidate. His wife ascribed his nervousness to that. She put a

peppermint in her own mouth and sucked it comfortably. “That’s all

’tis,” she thought to herself. “Father always was easy worked up,” and

she looked proudly up at her son sitting on the hair-cloth sofa in the

pulpit, leaning his handsome young head on his hand, as he had seen

old divines do. She never dreamed that her old husband sitting beside

her was possessed of an inner life so strange to her that she would

not have known him had she met him in the spirit. And, indeed, it had

been so always, and she had never dreamed of it. Although he had been

faithful to his wife, the image of Evelina Adams in her youth, and that

one love-look which she had given him, had never left his soul, but had

given it a guise and complexion of which his nearest and dearest knew

nothing.

It was strange; but now, as he looked up at his own son as he arose in

the pulpit, he could seem to see a look of that fair young Evelina, who

had never had a son to inherit her beauty. He had certainly a delicate

brilliancy of complexion, which he could have gotten directly from

neither father nor mother; and whence came that little nervous frown

between his dark blue eyes? His mother had blue eyes, but not like his;

they flashed over the great pulpit Bible with a sweet fire that matched

the memory in his father’s heart.

But the old man put the fancy away from him in a minute; it was one

which his stern common-sense always overcame. It was impossible that

Thomas Merriam should resemble Evelina Adams; indeed, people always

called him the very image of his father.

The father tried to fix his mind upon his son’s sermon, but presently

he glanced involuntarily across the meeting-house at the young girl,

and again his heart leaped and his face paled; but he turned his eyes

gravely back to the pulpit, and his wife did not notice. Now and then

she thrust a sharp elbow in his side to call his attention to a grand

point in their son’s discourse. The odor of peppermint was strong in

his nostrils, but through it all he seemed to perceive the rose and

lavender scent of Evelina Adams’s youthful garments. Whether it was

with him simply the memory of an odor, which affected him like the odor

itself, or not, those in the vicinity of the Squire’s pew were plainly

aware of it. The gown which the strange young girl wore was, as many

an old woman discovered to her neighbor with loud whispers, one of

Evelina’s, which had been laid away in a sweet-smelling chest since her

old girlhood. It had been somewhat altered to suit the fashion of a

later day, but the eyes which had fastened keenly upon it when Evelina

first wore it up the meeting-house aisle could not mistake it. “It’s

Evelina Adams’s lavender satin made over,” one whispered, with a sharp

hiss of breath, in the other’s ear.

The lavender satin, deepening into purple in the folds, swept in a

rich circle over the knees of the young girl in the Squire’s pew. She

folded her little hands, which were encased in Evelina’s cream-colored

silk mitts, over it, and looked up at the young minister, and listened

to his sermon with a grave and innocent dignity, as Evelina had done

before her. Perhaps the resemblance between this young girl and the

young girl of the past was more one of mien than aught else, although

the type of face was the same. This girl had the same fine sharpness

of feature and delicately bright color, and she also wore her hair in

curls, although they were tied back from her face with a black velvet

ribbon, and did not veil it when she drooped her head, as Evelina’s

used to do.

The people divided their attention between her and the new minister.

Their curiosity goaded them in equal measure with their spiritual zeal,

“I can’t wait to find out who that girl is,” one woman whispered to

another.

The girl herself had no thought of the commotion which she awakened.

When the service was over, and she walked with a gentle maiden

stateliness, which seemed a very copy of Evelina’s own, out of the

meeting-house, down the street to the Squire’s house, and entered it,

passing under the stately Corinthian pillars, with a last purple gleam

of her satin skirts, she never dreamed of the eager attention that

followed her.

It was several days before the village people discovered who she

was. The information had to be obtained, by a process like mental

thumbscrewing, from the old man who tended Evelina’s garden, but at

last they knew. She was the daughter of a cousin of Evelina’s on the

father’s side. Her name was Evelina Leonard; she had been named for

her father’s cousin. She had been finely brought up, and had attended

a Boston school for young ladies. Her mother had been dead many years,

and her father had died some two years ago, leaving her with only

a very little money, which was now all gone, and Evelina Adams had

invited her to live with her. Evelina Adams had herself told the old

gardener, seeing his scant curiosity was somewhat awakened by the sight

of the strange young lady in the garden, but he seemed to have almost

forgotten it when the people questioned him.

“She’ll leave her all her money, most likely,” they said, and they

looked at this new Evelina in the old Evelina’s perfumed gowns with awe.

However, in the space of a few months the opinion upon this matter was

divided. Another cousin of Evelina Adams’s came to town, and this time

an own cousin--a widow in fine black bombazine, portly and florid,

walking with a majestic swell, and, moreover, having with her two

daughters, girls of her own type, not so far advanced. This woman hired

one of the village cottages, and it was rumored that Evelina Adams paid

the rent. Still, it was considered that she was not very intimate with

these last relatives. The neighbors watched, and saw, many a time, Mrs.

Martha Loomis and her girls try the doors of the Adams house, scudding

around angrily from front, to side and back, and knock and knock again,

but with no admittance. “Evelina she won’t let none of ’em in more’n

once a week,” the neighbors said. It was odd that, although they had

deeply resented Evelina’s seclusion on their own accounts, they were

rather on her side in this matter, and felt a certain delight when they

witnessed a crestfallen retreat of the widow and her daughters. “I

don’t s’pose she wants them Loomises marchin’ in on her every minute,”

they said.

The new Evelina was not seen much with the other cousins, and she made

no acquaintances in the village. Whether she was to inherit all the

Adams property or not, she seemed, at any rate, heiress to all the

elder Evelina’s habits of life. She worked with her in the garden, and

wore her old girlish gowns, and kept almost as close at home as she.

She often, however, walked abroad in the early dusk, stepping along

in a grave and stately fashion, as the elder Evelina had used to do,

holding her skirts away from the dewy roadside weeds, her face showing

out in the twilight like a white flower, as if it had a pale light of

its own.

Nobody spoke to her; people turned furtively after she had passed and

stared after her, but they never spoke. This young Evelina did not seem

to expect it. She passed along with the lids cast down over her blue

eyes, and the rose and lavender scent of her garments came back in

their faces.

But one night when she was walking slowly along, a full half-mile from

home, she heard rapid footsteps behind, and the young minister, Thomas

Merriam, came up beside her and spoke.

“Good-evening,” said he, and his voice was a little hoarse through

nervousness.

Evelina started, and turned her fair face up towards his.

“Good-evening,” she responded, and courtesied as she had been taught

at school, and stood close to the wall, that he might pass; but Thomas

Merriam paused also.

“I--” he began, but his voice broke. He cleared his throat angrily,

and went on. “I have seen you in meeting,” he said, with a kind of

defiance, more of himself than of her. After all, was he not the

minister, and had he not the right to speak to everybody in the

congregation? Why should he embarrass himself?

“Yes, sir,” replied Evelina. She stood drooping her head before him,

and yet there was a certain delicate hauteur about her. Thomas was

afraid to speak again. They both stood silent for a moment, and then

Evelina stirred softly, as if to pass on, and Thomas spoke out bravely.

“Is your cousin, Miss Adams, well?” said he.

“She is pretty well, I thank you, sir.”

“I have been wanting to--call,” he began; then he hesitated again. His

handsome young face was blushing crimson.

Evelina’s own color deepened. She turned her face away. “Cousin Evelina

never sees callers,” she said, with grave courtesy; “perhaps you did

not know. She has not for a great many years.”

“Yes, I did know it,” returned Thomas Merriam; “that’s the reason I

haven’t called.”

“Cousin Evelina is not strong,” remarked the young girl, and there was

a savor of apology in her tone.

“But--” stammered Thomas; then he stopped again. “May I--has she any

objections to--anybody’s coming to see you?”

[Illustration: “SHE HEARD RAPID FOOTSTEPS”]

Evelina started. “I am afraid Cousin Evelina would not approve,”

she answered, primly. Then she looked up in his face, and a girlish

piteousness came into her own. “I am very sorry,” she said, and there

was a catch in her voice.

Thomas bent over her impetuously. All his ministerial state fell from

him like an outer garment of the soul. He was young, and he had seen

this girl Sunday after Sunday. He had written all his sermons with her

image before his eyes, he had preached to her, and her only, and she

had come between his heart and all the nations of the earth in his

prayers. “Oh,” he stammered out, “I am afraid you can’t be very happy

living there the way you do. Tell me--”

Evelina turned her face away with sudden haughtiness. “My cousin

Evelina is very kind to me sir,” she said.

“But--you must be lonesome with nobody--of your own age--to speak to,”

persisted Thomas, confusedly.

“I never cared much for youthful company. It is getting dark; I must be

going,” said Evelina. “I wish you good-evening, sir.”

“Sha’n’t I--walk home with you?” asked Thomas, falteringly.

“It isn’t necessary, thank you, and I don’t think Cousin Evelina would

approve,” she replied, primly; and her light dress fluttered away into

the dusk and out of sight like the pale wing of a moth.

Poor Thomas Merriam walked on with his head in a turmoil. His heart

beat loud in his ears. “I’ve made her mad with me,” he said to himself,

using the old rustic school-boy vernacular, from which he did not

always depart in his thoughts, although his ministerial dignity guarded

his conversations. Thomas Merriam came of a simple homely stock, whose

speech came from the emotions of the heart, all unregulated by the

usages of the schools. He was the first for generations who had aspired

to college learning and a profession, and had trained his tongue by the

models of the educated and polite. He could not help, at times, the

relapse of his thoughts, and their speaking to himself in the dialect

of his family and his ancestors. “She’s ’way above me, and I ought to

ha’ known it,” he further said, with the meekness of an humble but

fiercely independent race, which is meek to itself alone. He would have

maintained his equality with his last breath to an opponent; in his

heart of hearts he felt himself below the scion of the one old gentle

family of his native village.

This young Evelina, by the fine dignity which had been born with her

and not acquired by precept and example, by the sweetly formal diction

which seemed her native tongue, had filled him with awe. Now, when he

thought she was angered with him, he felt beneath her lady-feet, his

nostrils choked with a spiritual dust of humiliation.

He went forward blindly. The dusk had deepened; from either side of the

road, from the mysterious gloom of the bushes, came the twangs of the

katydids, like some coarse rustic quarrellers, each striving for the

last word in a dispute not even dignified by excess of passion.

Suddenly somebody jostled him to his own side of the path. “That you,

Thomas? Where you been?” said a voice in his ear.

“That you, father? Down to the post-office.”

“Who was that you was talkin’ with back there?”

“Miss Evelina Leonard.”

“That girl that’s stayin’ there--to the old Squire’s?”

“Yes.” The son tried to move on, but his father stood before him dumbly

for a minute. “I must be going, father. I’ve got to work on my sermon,”

Thomas said, impatiently.

“Wait a minute,” said his father. “I’ve got something to say to ye,

Thomas, an’ this is as good a time to say it as any. There ain’t

anybody ’round. I don’t know as ye’ll thank me for it--but mother said

the other day that she thought you’d kind of an idea--she said you

asked her if she thought it would be anything out of the way for you

to go up to the Squire’s to make a call. Mother she thinks you can

step in anywheres, but I don’t know. I know your book-learnin’ and your

bein’ a minister has set you up a good deal higher than your mother

and me and any of our folks, and I feel as if you were good enough

for anybody, as far as that goes; but that ain’t all. Some folks have

different startin’-points in this world, and they see things different;

and when they do, it ain’t much use tryin’ to make them walk alongside

and see things alike. Their eyes have got different cants, and they

ain’t able to help it. Now this girl she’s related to the old Squire,

and she’s been brought up different, and she started ahead, even if her

father did lose all his property. She ’ain’t never eat in the kitchen,

nor been scart to set down in the parlor, and satin and velvet, and

silver spoons, and cream-pots ’ain’t never looked anything out of the

common to her, and they always will to you. No matter how many such

things you may live to have, they’ll always get a little the better of

ye. She’ll be ’way above ’em; and you won’t, no matter how hard you

try. Some ideas can’t never mix; and when ideas can’t mix, folks can’t.”

“I never said they could,” returned Thomas, shortly. “I can’t stop to

talk any longer, father. I must go home.”

“No, you wait a minute, Thomas. I’m goin’ to say out what I started to,

and then I sha’n’t ever bring it up again. What I was comin’ at was

this: I wanted to warn ye a little. You musn’t set too much store by

little things that you think mean consider’ble when they don’t. Looks

don’t count for much, and I want you to remember it, and not be upset

by ’em.”

Thomas gave a great start, and colored high. “I’d like to know what you

mean, father,” he cried, sharply.

“Nothin’. I don’t mean nothin’, only I’m older ’n you, and it’s come in

my way to know some things, and it’s fittin’ you should profit by it.

A young woman’s looks at you don’t count for much. I don’t s’pose she

knows why she gives ’em herself half the time; they ain’t like us. It’s

best you should make up your mind to it; if you don’t, you may find it

out by the hardest. That’s all. I ain’t never goin’ to bring this up

again.”

“I’d like to know what you mean, father.” Thomas’s voice shook with

embarrassment and anger.

“I ain’t goin’ to say anything more about it,” replied the old man.

“Mary Ann Pease and Arabella Mann are both in the settin’-room with

your mother. I thought I’d tell ye, in case ye didn’t want to see ’em,

and wanted to go to work on your sermon.”

Thomas made an impatient ejaculation as he strode off. When he reached

the large white house where he lived he skirted it carefully. The

chirping treble of girlish voices came from the open sitting-room

window, and he caught a glimpse of a smooth brown head and a high shell

comb in front of the candle-light. The young minister tiptoed in the

back door and across the kitchen to the back stairs. The sitting-room

door was open, and the candle-light streamed out, and the treble voices

rose high. Thomas, advancing through the dusky kitchen with cautious

steps, encountered suddenly a chair in the dark corner by the stairs,

and just saved himself from falling. There was a startled outcry from

the sitting-room, and his mother came running into the kitchen with a

candle.

“Who is it?” she demanded, valiantly. Then she started and gasped

as her son confronted her. He shook a furious warning fist at the

sitting-room door and his mother, and edged towards the stairs. She

followed him close. “Hadn’t you better jest step in a minute?” she

whispered. “Them girls have been here an hour, and I know they’re

waitin’ to see you.” Thomas shook his head fiercely, and swung himself

around the corner into the dark crook of the back stairs. His mother

thrust the candle into his hand. “Take this, or you’ll break your neck

on them stairs,” she whispered.

Thomas, stealing up the stairs like a cat, heard one of the girls call

to his mother--“Is it robbers, Mis’ Merriam? Want us to come an’ help

tackle ’em?”--and he fairly shuddered; for Evelina’s gentle-lady

speech was still in his ears, and this rude girlish call seemed to jar

upon his sensibilities.

“The idea of any girl screeching out like that,” he muttered. And if he

had carried speech as far as his thought, he would have added, “when

Evelina is a girl!”

He was so angry that he did not laugh when he heard his mother answer

back, in those conclusive tones of hers that were wont to silence all

argument: “It ain’t anything. Don’t be scared. I’m coming right back.”

Mrs. Merriam scorned subterfuges. She took always a silent stand in a

difficulty, and let people infer what they would. When Mary Ann Pease

inquired if it was the cat that had made the noise, she asked if her

mother had finished her blue and white counterpane.

The two girls waited a half-hour longer, then they went home. “What do

you s’pose made that noise out in the kitchen?” asked Arabella Mann of

Mary Ann Pease, the minute they were out-of-doors.

“I don’t know,” replied Mary Ann Pease. She was a broad-backed young

girl, and looked like a matron as she hurried along in the dusk.

“Well, I know what I think it was,” said Arabella Mann, moving ahead

with sharp jerks of her little dark body.

“What?”

“It was him.”

“You don’t mean--”

“I think it was Thomas Merriam, and he was tryin’ to get up the back

stairs unbeknownst to anybody, and he run into something.”

“What for?”

“Because he didn’t want to see us.”

“Now, Arabella Mann, I don’t believe it! He’s always real pleasant to

me.”

“Well, I do believe it, and I guess he’ll know it when I set foot in

that house again. I guess he’ll find out I didn’t go there to see him!

He needn’t feel so fine, if he is the minister; his folks ain’t any

better than mine, an’ we’ve got ’nough sight handsomer furniture in our

parlor.”

“Did you see how the tallow had all run down over the candles?”

“Yes, I did. She gave that candle she carried out in the kitchen to

him, too. Mother says she wasn’t never any kind of a housekeeper.”

“Hush! Arabella: here he is coming now.”

But it was not Thomas; it was his father, advancing through the evening

with his son’s gait and carriage. When the two girls discovered that,

one tittered out quite audibly, and they scuttled past. They were not

rivals; they simply walked faithfully side by side in pursuit of the

young minister, giving him as it were an impartial choice. There were

even no heart-burnings between them; one always confided in the other

when she supposed herself to have found some slight favor in Thomas’s

sight; and, indeed, the young minister could scarcely bow to one upon

the street unless she flew to the other with the news.

Thomas Merriam himself was aware of all this devotion on the part of

the young women of his flock, and it filled him with a sort of angry

shame. He could not have told why, but he despised himself for being

the object of their attention more than he despised them. His heart

sank at the idea of Evelina’s discovering it. What would she think of

him if she knew all those young women haunted his house and lagged

after meeting on the chance of getting a word from him? Suppose she

should see their eyes upon his face in meeting time, and decipher

their half-unconscious boldness, as he had done against his will.

Once Evelina had looked at him, even as the older Evelina had looked

at his father, and all other looks of maidens seemed to him like

profanations of that, even although he doubted afterwards that he

had rightly interpreted it. Full it had seemed to him of that tender

maiden surprise and wonder, of that love that knows not itself, and

sees its own splendor for the first time in another’s face, and flees

at the sight. It had happened once when he was coming down the aisle

after the sermon and Evelina had met him at the door of her pew. But

she had turned her head quickly, and her soft curls flowed over her

red cheek, and he doubted ever after if he had read the look aright.

When he had gotten the courage to speak to her, and she had met him

with the gentle coldness which she had learned of her lady aunt and

her teacher in Boston, his doubt was strong upon him. The next Sunday

he looked not her way at all. He even tried faithfully from day to day

to drive her image from his mind with prayer and religious thoughts,

but in spite of himself he would lapse into dreams about her, as if

borne by a current of nature too strong to be resisted. And sometimes,

upon being awakened from them, as he sat over his sermon with the ink

drying on his quill, by the sudden outburst of treble voices in his

mother’s sitting-room below, the fancy would seize him that possibly

these other young damsels took fond liberties with him in their dreams,

as he with Evelina, and he resented it with a fierce maidenliness of

spirit, although he was a man. The thought that possibly they, over

their spinning or their quilting, had in their hearts the image of

himself with fond words upon his lips and fond looks in his eyes,

filled him with shame and rage, although he took the same liberty with

the delicately haughty maiden Evelina.

But Thomas Merriam was not given to undue appreciation of his own

fascination, as was proved by his ready discouragement in the case

of Evelina. He had the knowledge of his conquests forced upon his

understanding until he could no longer evade it. Every day were

offerings laid upon his shrine, of pound-cakes and flaky pies, and

loaves of white bread, and cups of jelly, whereby the culinary skill

of his devotees might be proved. Silken purses and beautiful socks

knitted with fancy stitches, and holy book-marks for his Bible, and

even a wonderful bedquilt, and a fine linen shirt with hem-stitched

bands, poured in upon him. He burned with angry blushes when his

mother, smiling meaningly, passed them over to him. “Put them away,

mother; I don’t want them,” he would growl out, in a distress that was

half comic and half pathetic. He would never taste of the tempting

viands which were brought to him. “How you act, Thomas!” his mother

would say. She was secretly elated by these feminine libations upon

the altar of her son. They did not grate upon her sensibilities, which

were not delicate. She even tried to assist two or three of the young

women in their designs; she would often praise them and their handiwork

to her son--and in this she was aided by an old woman aunt of hers who

lived with the family. “Nancy Winslow is as handsome a girl as ever

I set eyes on, an’ I never see any nicer sewin’,” Mrs. Merriam said,

after the advent of the linen shirt, and she held it up to the light

admiringly. “Jest look at that hem-stitchin’!” she said.

“I guess whoever made that shirt calkilated ’twould do for a weddin’

one,” said old Aunt Betty Green, and Thomas made an exclamation and

went out of the room, tingling all over with shame and disgust.

“Thomas don’t act nateral,” said the old woman, glancing after him

through her iron-bound spectacles.

“I dun’no’ what’s got into him,” returned his mother.

“Mebbe they foller him up a leetle too close,” said Aunt Betty. “I

dun’no’ as I should have ventured on a shirt when I was a gal. I made a

satin vest once for Joshua, but that don’t seem quite as p’inted as a

shirt. It didn’t scare Joshua, nohow. He asked me to have him the next

week.”

“Well, I dun’no’,” said Mrs. Merriam again. “I kind of wish Thomas

would settle on somebody, for I’m pestered most to death with ’em, an’

I feel as if ’twas kind of mean takin’ all these things into the house.”

“They’ve ’bout kept ye in sweet cake, ’ain’t they, lately?”

“Yes; but I don’t feel as if it was jest right for us to eat it up,

when ’twas brought for Thomas. But he won’t touch it. I can’t see as he

has the least idee of any one of them. I don’t believe Thomas has ever

seen anybody he wanted for a wife.”

“Well, he’s got the pick of ’em, a-settin’ their caps right in his

face,” said Aunt Betty.

Neither of them dreamed how the young man, sleeping and eating and

living under the same roof, beloved of them since he entered the world,

holding himself coldly aloof from this crowd of half-innocently,

half-boldly ardent young women, had set up for himself his own divinity

of love, before whom he consumed himself in vain worship. His father

suspected, and that was all, and he never mentioned the matter again to

his son.

After Thomas had spoken to Evelina the weeks went on, and they never

exchanged another word, and their eyes never met. But they dwelt

constantly within each other’s thoughts, and were ever present to

each other’s spiritual vision. Always as the young minister bent over

his sermon-paper, laboriously tracing out with sputtering quill his

application of the articles of the orthodox faith, Evelina’s blue eyes

seemed to look out at him between the stern doctrines like the eyes of

an angel. And he could not turn the pages of the Holy Writ unless he

found some passage therein which to his mind treated directly of her,

setting forth her graces like a prophecy. “The fairest among women,”

read Thomas Merriam, and nodded his head, while his heart leaped with

the satisfied delight of all its fancies, at the image of his love’s

fair and gentle face. “Her price is far above rubies,” read Thomas

Merriam, and he nodded his head again, and saw Evelina shining as with

gold and pearls, more precious than all the jewels of the earth. In

spite of all his efforts, when Thomas Merriam studied the Scriptures in

those days he was more nearly touched by those old human hearts which

throbbed down to his through the ages, welding the memories of their

old loves to his living one until they seemed to prove its eternity,

than by the Messianic prophecies. Often he spent hours upon his knees,

but arose with Evelina’s face before his very soul in spite of all.

And as for Evelina, she tended the flowers in the elder Evelina’s

garden with her poor cousin, whose own love-dreams had been illustrated

as it were by the pinks and lilies blooming around them when they

had all gone out of her heart, and Thomas Merriam’s half-bold,

half-imploring eyes looked up at her out of every flower and stung her

heart like bees. Poor young Evelina feared much lest she had offended

Thomas, and yet her own maiden decorum had been offended by him, and

she had offended it herself, and she was faint with shame and distress

when she thought of it. How had she been so bold and shameless as to

give him that look in the meeting-house? and how had he been so cruel

as to accost her afterwards? She told herself she had done right for

the maintenance of her own maiden dignity, and yet she feared lest she

had angered him and hurt him. “Suppose he had been fretted by her

coolness?” she thought, and then a great wave of tender pity went over

her heart, and she would almost have spoken to him of her own accord.

But then she would reflect how he continued to write such beautiful

sermons, and prove so clearly and logically the tenets of the faith;

and how could he do that with a mind in distress? Scarcely could she

herself tend the flower-beds as she should, nor set her embroidery

stitches finely and evenly, she was so ill at ease. It must be that

Thomas had not given the matter an hour’s worry, since he continued

to do his work so faithfully and well. And then her own heart would

be sorer than ever with the belief that his was happy and at rest,

although she would chide herself for it.

And yet this young Evelina was a philosopher and an analyst of human

nature in a small way, and she got some slight comfort out of a shrewd

suspicion that the heart of a man might love and suffer on a somewhat

different principle from the heart of a woman. “It may be,” thought

Evelina, sitting idle over her embroidery with far-away blue eyes,

“that a man’s heart can always turn a while from love to other things

as weighty and serious, although he be just as fond, while a woman’s

heart is always fixed one way by loving, and cannot be turned unless it

breaks. And it may be wise,” thought young Evelina, “else how could

the state be maintained and governed, battles for independence be

fought, and even souls be saved, and the gospel carried to the heathen,

if men could not turn from the concerns of their own hearts more easily

than women? Women should be patient,” thought Evelina, “and consider

that if they suffer ’tis due to the lot which a wise Providence has

given them.” And yet tears welled up in her earnest blue eyes and fell

over her fair cheeks and wet the embroidery--when the elder Evelina was

not looking, as she seldom was. The elder Evelina was kind to her young

cousin, but there were days when she seemed to dwell alone in her own

thoughts, apart from the whole world, and she seldom spoke either to

Evelina or her old servant-man.

Young Evelina, trying to atone for her former indiscretion and

establish herself again on her height of maiden reserve in Thomas

Merriam’s eyes, sat resolutely in the meeting-house of a Sabbath day,

with her eyes cast down, and after service she glided swiftly down the

aisle and was out of the door before the young minister could much more

than descend the pulpit stairs, unless he ran an indecorous race.

And young Evelina never at twilight strolled up the road in the

direction of Thomas Merriam’s home, where she might quite reasonably

hope to meet him, since he was wont to go to the store when the

evening stage-coach came in with the mail from Boston.

Instead she paced the garden paths, or, when there was not too heavy

a dew, rambled across the fields; and there was also a lane where she

loved to walk. Whether or not Thomas Merriam suspected this, or had

ever seen, as he passed the mouth of the lane, the flutter of maidenly

draperies in the distance, it so happened that one evening he also went

a-walking there, and met Evelina. He had entered the lane from the

highway, and she from the fields at the head. So he saw her first afar

off, and could not tell fairly whether her light muslin skirt might

not be only a white flowering bush. For, since his outlook upon life

had been so full of Evelina, he had found that often the most common

and familiar things would wear for a second a look of her to startle

him. And many a time his heart had leaped at the sight of a white bush

ahead stirring softly in the evening wind, and he had thought it might

be she. Now he said to himself impatiently that this was only another

fancy; but soon he saw that it was indeed Evelina, in a light muslin

gown, with a little lace kerchief on her head. His handsome young face

was white; his lips twitched nervously; but he reached out and pulled

a spray of white flowers from a bush, and swung it airily to hide his

agitation as he advanced.

As for Evelina, when she first espied Thomas she started and half

turned, as if to go back; then she held up her white kerchiefed head

with gentle pride and kept on. When she came up to Thomas she walked

so far to one side that her muslin skirt was in danger of catching and

tearing on the bushes, and she never raised her eyes, and not a flicker

of recognition stirred her sweet pale face as she passed him.

But Thomas started as if she had struck him, and dropped his spray of

white flowers, and could not help a smothered cry that was half a sob,

as he went on, knocking blindly against the bushes. He went a little

way, then he stopped and looked back with his piteous hurt eyes. And

Evelina had stopped also, and she had the spray of white flowers which

he had dropped, in her hand, and her eyes met his. Then she let the

flowers fall again, and clapped both her little hands to her face to

cover it, and turned to run; but Thomas was at her side, and he put out

his hand and held her softly by her white arm.

“Oh,” he panted, “I--did not mean to be--too presuming, and offend you.

I--crave your pardon--”

Evelina had recovered herself. She stood with her little hands clasped,

and her eyes cast down before him; but not a quiver stirred her pale

face, which seemed turned to marble by this last effort of her maiden

pride. “I have nothing to pardon,” said she. “It was I, whose bold

behavior, unbecoming a modest and well-trained young woman, gave rise

to what seemed like presumption on your part.” The sense of justice was

strong within her, but she made her speech haughtily and primly, as if

she had learned it by rote from some maiden school-mistress, and pulled

her arm away and turned to go; but Thomas’s words stopped her.

“Not--unbecoming if it came--from the heart,” said he, brokenly,

scarcely daring to speak, and yet not daring to be silent.

Then Evelina turned on him, with a sudden strange pride that lay

beneath all other pride, and was of a nobler and truer sort. “Do you

think I would have given you the look that I did if it had not come

from my heart?” she demanded. “What did you take me to be--false

and a jilt? I may be a forward young woman, who has overstepped the

bounds of maidenly decorum, and I shall never get over the shame of

it, but I am truthful, and I am no jilt.” The brilliant color flamed

out on Evelina’s cheeks. Her blue eyes met Thomas’s with that courage

of innocence and nature which dares all shame. But it was only for a

second; the tears sprung into them. “I beg you to let me go home,” she

said, pitifully; but Thomas caught her in his arms, and pressed her

troubled maiden face against his breast.

“Oh, I love you so!” he whispered--“I love you so, Evelina, and I was

afraid you were angry with me for it.”

“And I was afraid,” she faltered, half weeping and half shrinking

from him, “lest you were angry with me for betraying the state of my

feelings, when you could not return them.” And even then she used that

gentle formality of expression with which she had been taught by her

maiden preceptors to veil decorously her most ardent emotions. And,

in truth, her training stood her in good stead in other ways; for she

presently commanded, with that mild dignity of hers which allowed of no

remonstrance, that Thomas should take away his arm from her waist, and

give her no more kisses for that time.

“It is not becoming for any one,” said she, “and much less for a

minister of the gospel. And as for myself, I know not what Mistress

Perkins would say to me. She has a mind much above me, I fear.”

“Mistress Perkins is enjoying her mind in Boston,” said Thomas Merriam,

with the laugh of a triumphant young lover.

But Evelina did not laugh. “It might be well for both you and me if she

were here,” said she, seriously. However, she tempered a little her

decorous following of Mistress Perkins’s precepts, and she and Thomas

went hand in hand up the lane and across the fields.

There was no dew that night, and the moon was full. It was after nine

o’clock when Thomas left her at the gate in the fence which separated

Evelina Adams’s garden from the field, and watched her disappear

between the flowers. The moon shone full on the garden. Evelina walked

as it were over a silver dapple, which her light gown seemed to brush

away and dispel for a moment. The bushes stood in sweet mysterious

clumps of shadow.

Evelina had almost reached the house, and was close to the great althea

bush, which cast a wide circle of shadow, when it seemed suddenly to

separate and move into life.

The elder Evelina stepped out from the shadow of the bush. “Is that

you, Evelina?” she said, in her soft melancholy voice, which had in it

a nervous vibration.

“Yes, Cousin Evelina.”

The elder Evelina’s pale face, drooped about with gray curls, had an

unfamiliar, almost uncanny, look in the moonlight, and might have been

the sorrowful visage of some marble nymph, lovelorn, with unceasing

grace. “Who--was with you?” she asked.

“The minister,” replied young Evelina.

“Did he meet you?”

“He met me in the lane, Cousin Evelina.”

“And he walked home with you across the field?”

“Yes, Cousin Evelina.”

Then the two entered the house, and nothing more was said about the

matter. Young Evelina and Thomas Merriam agreed that their affection

was to be kept a secret for a while. “For,” said young Evelina, “I

cannot leave Cousin Evelina yet a while, and I cannot have her pestered

with thinking about it, at least before another spring, when she has

the garden fairly growing again.”

“That is nearly a whole year; it is August now,” said Thomas, half

reproachfully, and he tightened his clasp of Evelina’s slender fingers.

“I cannot help that,” replied Evelina. “It is for you to show Christian

patience more than I, Thomas. If you could have seen poor Cousin

Evelina, as I have seen her, through the long winter days, when her

garden is dead, and she has only the few plants in her window left!

When she is not watering and tending them she sits all day in the

window and looks out over the garden and the naked bushes and the

withered flower-stalks. She used not to be so, but would read her Bible

and good books, and busy herself somewhat over fine needle-work, and at

one time she was compiling a little floral book, giving a list of the

flowers, and poetical selections and sentiments appropriate to each.

That was her pastime for three winters, and it is now nearly done; but

she has given that up, and all the rest, and sits there in the window

and grows older and feebler until spring. It is only I who can divert

her mind, by reading aloud to her and singing; and sometimes I paint

the flowers she loves the best on card-board with water-colors. I have

a poor skill in it, but Cousin Evelina can tell which flower I have

tried to represent, and it pleases her greatly. I have even seen her

smile. No, I cannot leave her, nor even pester her with telling her

before another spring, and you must wait, Thomas,” said young Evelina.

And Thomas agreed, as he was likely to do to all which she proposed

which touched not his own sense of right and honor. Young Evelina gave

Thomas one more kiss for his earnest pleading, and that night wrote out

the tale in her journal. “It may be that I overstepped the bounds of

maidenly decorum,” wrote Evelina, “but my heart did so entreat me,” and

no blame whatever did she lay upon Thomas.

Young Evelina opened her heart only to her journal, and her cousin was

told nothing, and had little cause for suspicion. Thomas Merriam never

came to the house to see his sweetheart; he never walked home with her

from meeting. Both were anxious to avoid village gossip, until the

elder Evelina could be told.

Often in the summer evenings the lovers met, and strolled hand in hand

across the fields, and parted at the garden gate with the one kiss

which Evelina allowed, and that was all.

Sometimes when young Evelina came in with her lover’s kiss still warm

upon her lips the elder Evelina looked at her wistfully, with a strange

retrospective expression in her blue eyes, as if she were striving to

remember something that the girl’s face called to mind. And yet she

could have had nothing to remember except dreams.

And once, when young Evelina sat sewing through a long summer afternoon

and thinking about her lover, the elder Evelina, who was storing rose

leaves mixed with sweet spices in a jar, said, suddenly, “He looks as

his father used to.”

Young Evelina started. “Whom do you mean, Cousin Evelina?” she asked,

wonderingly; for the elder Evelina had not glanced at her, nor even

seemed to address her at all.

“Nothing,” said the elder Evelina, and a soft flush stole over her

withered face and neck, and she sprinkled more cassia on the rose

leaves in the jar.

Young Evelina said no more; but she wondered, partly because Thomas

was always in her mind, and it seemed to her naturally that nearly

everything must have a savor of meaning of him, if her cousin Evelina

could possibly have referred to him and his likeness to his father. For

it was commonly said that Thomas looked very like his father, although

his figure was different. The young man was taller and more firmly

built, and he had not the meek forward curve of shoulder which had

grown upon his father of late years.

When the frosty nights came Thomas and Evelina could not meet and walk

hand in hand over the fields behind the Squire’s house, and they very

seldom could speak to each other. It was nothing except a “good-day”

on the street, and a stolen glance, which set them both a-trembling

lest all the congregation had noticed, in the meeting-house. When the

winter set fairly in they met no more, for the elder Evelina was taken

ill, and her young cousin did not leave her even to go to meeting.

People said they guessed it was Evelina Adams’s last sickness, and they

furthermore guessed that she would divide her property between her

cousin Martha Loomis and her two girls and Evelina Leonard, and that

Evelina would have the house as her share.

Thomas Merriam heard this last with a satisfaction which he did not

try to disguise from himself, because he never dreamed of there being

any selfish element in it. It was all for Evelina. Many a time he had

looked about the humble house where he had been born, and where he

would have to take Evelina after he had married her, and striven to see

its poor features with her eyes--not with his, for which familiarity

had tempered them. Often, as he sat with his parents in the old

sitting-room, in which he had kept so far an unquestioning belief, as

in a friend of his childhood, the scales of his own personality would

fall suddenly from his eyes. Then he would see, as Evelina, the poor,

worn, humble face of his home, and his heart would sink. “I don’t see

how I ever can bring her here,” he thought. He began to save, a few

cents at a time out of his pitiful salary, to at least beautify his own

chamber a little when Evelina should come. He made up his mind that she

should have a little dressing-table, with an oval mirror, and a white

muslin frill around it, like one he had seen in Boston. “She shall have

that to sit before while she combs her hair,” he thought, with defiant

tenderness, when he stowed away another shilling in a little box in his

trunk. It was money which he ordinarily bestowed upon foreign missions;

but his Evelina had come between him and the heathen. To procure some

dainty furnishings for her bridal-chamber he took away a good half of

his tithes for the spread of the gospel in the dark lands. Now and

then his conscience smote him, he felt shamefaced before his deacons,

but Evelina kept her first claim. He resolved that another year he

would hire a piece of land, and combine farming with his ministerial

work, and so try to eke out his salary, and get a little more money to

beautify his poor home for his bride.

Now if Evelina Adams had come to the appointed time for the closing of

her solitary life, and if her young cousin should inherit a share of

her goodly property and the fine old mansion-house, all necessity for

anxiety of this kind was over. Young Evelina would not need to be taken

away, for the sake of her love, from all these comforts and luxuries.

Thomas Merriam rejoiced innocently, without a thought for himself.

In the course of the winter he confided in his father; he couldn’t keep

it to himself any longer. Then there was another reason. Seeing Evelina

so little made him at times almost doubt the reality of it all. There

were days when he was depressed, and inclined to ask himself if he had

not dreamed it. Telling somebody gave it substance.

His father listened soberly when he told him; he had grown old of late.

“Well,” said he, “she ’ain’t been used to living the way you have,

though you have had advantages that none of your folks ever had; but if

she likes you, that’s all there is to it, I s’pose.”

The old man sighed wearily. He sat in his arm-chair at the kitchen

fireplace; his wife had gone in to one of the neighbors, and the two

were alone.

“Of course,” said Thomas, simply, “if Evelina Adams shouldn’t live, the

chances are that I shouldn’t have to bring her here. She wouldn’t have

to give up anything on my account--you know that, father.”

Then the young man started, for his father turned suddenly on him with

a pale, wrathful face. “You ain’t countin’ on that!” he shouted. “You

ain’t countin’ on that--a son of mine countin’ on anything like that!”

Thomas colored. “Why, father,” he stammered, “you don’t think--you

know, it’s all for _her_--and they say she can’t live anyway. I had

never thought of such a thing before. I was wondering how I could make

it comfortable for Evelina here.”

But his father did not seem to listen. “Countin’ on that!” he repeated.

“Countin’ on a poor old soul, that ’ain’t ever had anything to set her

heart on but a few posies, dyin’ to make room for other folks to have

what she’s been cheated out on. Countin’ on that!” The old man’s voice

broke into a hoarse sob; he got up, and went hurriedly out of the room.

“Why, father!” his son called after him, in alarm. He got up to follow

him, but his father waved him back and shut the door hard.

“Father must be getting childish,” Thomas thought, wonderingly. He did

not bring up the subject to him again.

Evelina Adams died in March. One morning the bell tolled seventy long

melancholy tones before people had eaten their breakfasts. They ran

to their doors and counted. “It’s her,” they said, nodding, when they

had waited a little after the seventieth stroke. Directly Mrs. Martha

Loomis and her two girls were seen hustling importantly down the road,

with their shawls over their heads, to the Squire’s house. “Mis’ Loomis

can lay her out,” they said. “It ain’t likely that young Evelina knows

anything about such things. Guess she’ll be thankful she’s got somebody

to call on now, if she ’ain’t mixed much with the Loomises.” Then they

wondered when the funeral would be, and the women furbished up their

black gowns and bonnets, and even in a few cases drove to the next town

and borrowed from relatives; but there was a great disappointment in

store for them.

Evelina Adams died on a Saturday. The next day it was announced from

the pulpit that the funeral would be private, by the particular request

of the deceased. Evelina Adams had carried her delicate seclusion

beyond death, to the very borders of the grave. Nobody, outside the

family, was bidden to the funeral, except the doctor, the minister, and

the two deacons of the church. They were to be the bearers. The burial

also was to be private, in the Squire’s family burial-lot, at the north

of the house. The bearers would carry the coffin across the yard, and

there would not only be no funeral, but no funeral procession, and no

hearse. “It don’t seem scarcely decent,” the women whispered to each

other; “and more than all that, she ain’t goin’ to be _seen_.” The

deacons’ wives were especially disturbed by this last, as they might

otherwise have gained many interesting particulars by proxy.

Monday was the day set for the burial. Early in the morning old Thomas

Merriam walked feebly up the road to the Squire’s house. People noticed

him as he passed. “How terrible fast he’s grown old lately!” they said.

He opened the gate which led into the Squire’s front yard with fumbling

fingers, and went up the walk to the front door, under the Corinthian

pillars, and raised the brass knocker.

Evelina opened the door, and started and blushed when she saw him. She

had been crying; there were red rings around her blue eyes, and her

pretty lips were swollen. She tried to smile at Thomas’s father, and

she held out her hand with shy welcome.

“I want to see her,” the old man said, abruptly.

Evelina started, and looked at him wonderingly. “I--don’t believe--I

know who you mean,” said she. “Do you want to see Mrs. Loomis?”

“No; I want to see her.”

“_Her?_”

“Yes, _her_.”

Evelina turned pale as she stared at him. There was something strange

about his face. “But--Cousin Evelina,” she faltered--“she--didn’t

want--Perhaps you don’t know: she left special directions that nobody

was to look at her.”

“I _want to see her_,” said the old man, and Evelina gave way. She

stood aside for him to enter, and led him into the great north parlor,

where Evelina Adams lay in her mournful state. The shutters were

closed, and one on entering could distinguish nothing but that long

black shadow in the middle of the room. Young Evelina opened a shutter

a little way, and a slanting shaft of spring sunlight came in and shot

athwart the coffin. The old man tiptoed up and leaned over and looked

at the dead woman. Evelina Adams had left further instructions about

her funeral, which no one understood, but which were faithfully carried

out. She wished, she had said, to be attired for her long sleep in a

certain rose-colored gown, laid away in rose leaves and lavender in a

certain chest in a certain chamber. There were also silken hose and

satin shoes with it, and these were to be put on, and a wrought lace

tucker fastened with a pearl brooch.

It was the costume she had worn one Sabbath day back in her youth, when

she had looked across the meeting-house and her eyes had met young

Thomas Merriam’s; but nobody knew nor remembered; even young Evelina

thought it was simply a vagary of her dead cousin’s.

“It don’t seem to me decent to lay away anybody dressed so,” said Mrs.

Martha Loomis; “but of course last wishes must be respected.”

The two Loomis girls said they were thankful nobody was to see the

departed in her rose-colored shroud.

Even old Thomas Merriam, leaning over poor Evelina, cold and dead in

the garb of her youth, did not remember it, and saw no meaning in it.

He looked at her long. The beautiful color was all faded out of the

yellow-white face; the sweet full lips were set and thin; the closed

blue eyes sunken in dark hollows; the yellow hair showed a line of gray

at the edge of her old woman’s cap, and thin gray curls lay against the

hollow cheeks. But old Thomas Merriam drew a long breath when he looked

at her. It was like a gasp of admiration and wonder; a strange rapture

came into his dim eyes; his lips moved as if he whispered to her, but

young Evelina could not hear a sound. She watched him, half frightened,

but finally he turned to her. “I ’ain’t seen her--fairly,” said he,

hoarsely--“I ’ain’t seen her, savin’ a glimpse of her at the window,

for over forty year, and she ’ain’t changed, not a look. I’d have known

her anywheres. She’s the same as she was when she was a girl. It’s

wonderful--wonderful!”

Young Evelina shrank a little. “We think she looks natural,” she said,

hesitatingly.

“She looks jest as she did when she was a girl and used to come into

the meetin’-house. She is jest the same,” the old man repeated, in

his eager, hoarse voice. Then he bent over the coffin, and his lips

moved again. Young Evelina would have called Mrs. Loomis, for she was

frightened, had he not been Thomas’s father, and had it not been for

her vague feeling that there might be some old story to explain this

which she had never heard. “Maybe he was in love with poor Cousin

Evelina, as Thomas is with me,” thought young Evelina, using her own

leaping-pole of love to land straight at the truth. But she never told

her surmise to any one except Thomas, and that was long afterwards,

when the old man was dead. Now she watched him with her blue dilated

eyes. But soon he turned away from the coffin and made his way straight

out of the room, without a word. Evelina followed him through the entry

and opened the outer door. He turned on the threshold and looked back

at her, his face working.

“Don’t ye go to lottin’ too much on what ye’re goin’ to get through

folks that have died an’ not had anything,” he said; and he shook his

head almost fiercely at her.

“No, I won’t. I don’t think I understand what you mean, sir,” stammered

Evelina.

The old man stood looking at her a moment. Suddenly she saw the tears

rolling over his old cheeks. “I’m much obliged to ye for lettin’ of me

see her,” he said, hoarsely, and crept feebly down the steps.

Evelina went back trembling to the room where her dead cousin lay, and

covered her face, and closed the shutter again. Then she went about

her household duties, wondering. She could not understand what it all

meant; but one thing she understood--that in some way this old dead

woman, Evelina Adams, had gotten immortal youth and beauty in one human

heart. “She looked to him just as she did when she was a girl,” Evelina

kept thinking to herself with awe. She said nothing about it to Mrs.

Martha Loomis or her daughters. They had been in the back part of the

house, and had not heard old Thomas Merriam come in, and they never

knew about it.

Mrs. Loomis and the two girls stayed in the house day and night until

after the funeral. They confidently expected to live there in the

future. “It isn’t likely that Evelina Adams thought a young woman

no older than Evelina Leonard could live here alone in this great

house with nobody but that old Sarah Judd. It would not be proper nor

becoming,” said Martha Loomis to her two daughters; and they agreed,

and brought over many of their possessions under cover of night to the

Squire’s house during the interval before the funeral.

But after the funeral and the reading of the will the Loomises made

sundry trips after dusk back to their old home, with their best

petticoats and cloaks over their arms, and their bonnets dangling

by their strings at their sides. For Evelina Adams’s last will and

testament had been read, and therein provision was made for the

continuance of the annuity heretofore paid them for their support, with

the condition affixed that not one night should they spend after the

reading of the will in the house known as the Squire Adams house. The

annuity was an ample one, and would provide the widow Martha Loomis and

her daughters, as it had done before, with all the needfuls of life;

but upon hearing the will they stiffened their double chins into their

kerchiefs with indignation, for they had looked for more.

Evelina Adams’s will was a will of conditions, for unto it she had

affixed two more, and those affected her beloved cousin Evelina

Leonard. It was notable that “beloved” had not preceded her cousin

Martha Loomis’s name in the will. No pretence of love, when she felt

none, had she ever made in her life. The entire property of Evelina

Adams, spinster, deceased, with the exception of Widow Martha Loomis’s

provision, fell to this beloved young Evelina Leonard, subject to two

conditions--firstly, she was never to enter into matrimony, with any

person whomsoever, at any time whatsoever; secondly, she was never to

let the said spinster Evelina Adams’s garden, situated at the rear and

southward of the house known as the Squire Adams house, die through any

neglect of hers. Due allowance was to be made for the dispensations of

Providence: for hail and withering frost and long-continued drought,

and for times wherein the said Evelina Leonard might, by reason of

being confined to the house by sickness, be prevented from attending to

the needs of the growing plants, and the verdict in such cases was to

rest with the minister and the deacons of the church. But should this

beloved Evelina love and wed, or should she let, through any wilful

neglect, that garden perish in the season of flowers, all that goodly

property would she forfeit to a person unknown, whose name, enclosed

in a sealed envelope, was to be held meantime in the hands of the

executor, who had also drawn up the will, Lawyer Joshua Lang.

There was great excitement in the village over this strange and

unwonted will. Some were there who held that Evelina Adams had not been

of sound mind, and it should be contested. It was even rumored that

Widow Martha Loomis had visited Lawyer Joshua Lang and broached the

subject, but he had dismissed the matter peremptorily by telling her

that Evelina Adams, spinster, deceased, had been as much in her right

mind at the time of drawing the will as anybody of his acquaintance.

“Not setting store by relations, and not wanting to have them under

your roof, doesn’t go far in law nor common-sense to send folks to

the madhouse,” old Lawyer Lang, who was famed for his sharp tongue,

was reported to have said. However, Mrs. Martha Loomis was somewhat

comforted by her firm belief that either her own name or that of one of

her daughters was in that sealed envelope kept by Lawyer Joshua Lang in

his strong-box, and by her firm purpose to watch carefully lest Evelina

prove derelict in fulfilling the two conditions whereby she held the

property.

Larger peep-holes were soon cut away mysteriously in the high

arbor-vitæ hedge, and therein were often set for a few moments, when

they passed that way, the eager eyes of Mrs. Martha or her daughter

Flora or Fidelia Loomis. Frequent calls they also made upon Evelina,

living alone with the old woman Sarah Judd, who had been called in

during her cousin’s illness, and they strolled into the garden, spying

anxiously for withered leaves or dry stalks. They at every opportunity

interviewed the old man who assisted Evelina in her care of the garden

concerning its welfare. But small progress they made with him, standing

digging at the earth with his spade while they talked, as if in truth

his wits had gone therein before his body and he would uncover them.

Moreover, Mrs. Martha Loomis talked much slyly to mothers of young

men, and sometimes with bold insinuations to the young men themselves,

of the sad lot of poor young Evelina, condemned to a solitary and

loveless life, and of her sweetness and beauty and desirability in

herself, although she could not bring the old Squire’s money to her

husband. And once, but no more than that, she touched lightly upon the

subject to the young minister, Thomas Merriam, when he was making a

pastoral call.

“My heart bleeds for the poor child living all alone in that great

house,” said she. And she looked down mournfully, and did not see how

white the young minister’s face turned. “It seems almost a pity,”

said she, furthermore--“Evelina is a good housekeeper, and has rare

qualities in herself, and so many get poor wives nowadays--that some

godly young man should not court her in spite of the will. I doubt,

too, if she would not have a happier lot than growing old over that

garden, as poor Cousin Evelina did before her, even if she has a fine

house to live in and a goodly sum in the bank. She looks pindling

enough lately. I’ll warrant she has lost a good ten pound since poor

Evelina was laid away, and--”

But Thomas Merriam cut her short. “I see no profit in discussing

matters which do not concern us,” said he, and only his ministerial

estate saved him from the charge of impertinence.

As it was, Martha Loomis colored high. “I’ll warrant he’ll look out

which side his bread is buttered on; ministers always do,” she said to

her daughters after he had gone. She never dreamed how her talk had cut

him to the heart.

Had he not seen more plainly than any one else, Sunday after Sunday,

when he glanced down at her once or twice cautiously from his pulpit,

how weary-looking and thin she was growing? And her bright color was

wellnigh gone, and there were pitiful downward lines at the corners

of her sweet mouth. Poor young Evelina was fading like one of her own

flowers, as if some celestial gardener had failed in his care of her.

And Thomas saw it, and in his heart of hearts he knew the reason, and

yet he would not yield. Not once had he entered the old Squire’s house

since he attended the dead Evelina’s funeral, and stood praying and

eulogizing, with her coffin between him and the living Evelina, with

her pale face shrouded in black bombazine. He had never spoken to her

since, nor entered the house; but he had written her a letter, in which

all the fierce passion and anguish of his heart was cramped and held

down by formal words and phrases, and poor young Evelina did not see

beneath them. When her lover wrote her that he felt it inconsistent

with his Christian duty and the higher aims of his existence to take

any further steps towards a matrimonial alliance, she felt merely that

Thomas either cared no more for her, or had come to consider, upon

due reflection, that she was not fit to undertake the responsible

position of a minister’s wife. “It may be that in some way I failed in

my attendance upon Cousin Evelina,” thought poor young Evelina, “or it

may be that he thinks I have not enough dignity of character to inspire

respect among the older women in the church.” And sometimes, with a

sharp thrust of misery that shook her out of her enforced patience and

meekness, she wondered if indeed her own loving freedom with him had

turned him against her, and led him in his later and sober judgment to

consider her too light-minded for a minister’s wife. “It may be that

I was guilty of great indecorum, and almost indeed forfeited my claim

to respect for maidenly modesty, inasmuch as I suffered him to give

me kisses, and did almost bring myself to return them in kind. But my

heart did so entreat me, and in truth it seemed almost like a lack of

sincerity for me to wholly withstand it,” wrote poor young Evelina in

her journal at that time; and she further wrote: “It is indeed hard

for one who has so little knowledge to be fully certain of what is or

is not becoming and a Christian duty in matters of this kind; but if I

have in any manner, through my ignorance or unwarrantable affection,

failed, and so lost the love and respect of a good man, and the

opportunity to become his helpmeet during life, I pray that I may be

forgiven--for I sinned not wilfully--that the lesson may be sanctified

unto me, and that I may live as the Lord order, in Christian patience

and meekness, and not repining.” It never occurred to young Evelina

that possibly Thomas Merriam’s sense of duty might be strengthened by

the loss of all her cousin’s property should she marry him, and neither

did she dream that he might hesitate to take her from affluence into

poverty for her own sake. For herself the property, as put in the

balance beside her love, was lighter than air itself. It was so light

that it had no place in her consciousness. She simply had thought, upon

hearing the will, of Martha Loomis and her daughters in possession of

the property, and herself with Thomas, with perfect acquiescence and

rapture.

Evelina Adams’s disapprobation of her marriage, which was supposedly

expressed in the will, had indeed, without reference to the property,

somewhat troubled her tender heart, but she told herself that Cousin

Evelina had not known she had promised to marry Thomas; that she would

not wish her to break her solemn promise. And furthermore, it seemed to

her quite reasonable that the condition had been inserted in the will

mainly through concern for the beloved garden.

“Cousin Evelina might have thought perhaps I would let the flowers die

when I had a husband and children to take care of,” said Evelina. And

so she had disposed of all the considerations which had disturbed her,

and had thought of no others.

She did not answer Thomas’s letter. It was so worded that it seemed to

require no reply, and she felt that he must be sure of her acquiescence

in whatever he thought best. She laid the letter away in a little

rosewood box, in which she had always kept her dearest treasures since

her school-days. Sometimes she took it out and read it, and it seemed

to her that the pain in her heart would put an end to her in spite of

all her prayers for Christian fortitude; and yet she could not help

reading it again.

It was seldom that she stole a look at her old lover as he stood in

the pulpit in the meeting-house, but when she did she thought with an

anxious pang that he looked worn and ill, and that night she prayed

that the Lord would restore his health to him for the sake of his

people.

It was four months after Evelina Adams’s death, and her garden was in

the full glory of midsummer, when one evening, towards dusk, young

Evelina went slowly down the street. She seldom walked abroad now, but

kept herself almost as secluded as her cousin had done before her. But

that night a great restlessness was upon her, and she put a little

black silk shawl over her shoulders and went out. It was quite cool,

although it was midsummer. The dusk was deepening fast; the katydids

called back and forth from the way-side bushes. Evelina met nobody for

some distance. Then she saw a man coming towards her, and her heart

stood still, and she was about to turn back, for she thought for a

minute it was the young minister. Then she saw it was his father, and

she went on slowly, with her eyes downcast. When she met him she looked

up and said good-evening, gravely, and would have passed on, but he

stood in her way.

“I’ve got a word to say to ye, if ye’ll listen,” he said.

Evelina looked at him tremblingly. There was something strained and

solemn in his manner. “I’ll hear whatever you have to say, sir,” she

said.

The old man leaned his pale face over her and raised a shaking

forefinger. “I’ve made up my mind to say something,” said he. “I don’t

know as I’ve got any right to, and maybe my son will blame me, but I’m

goin’ to see that you have a chance. It’s been borne in upon me that

women folks don’t always have a fair chance. It’s jest this I’m goin’

to say: I don’t know whether you know how my son feels about it or not.

I don’t know how open he’s been with you. Do you know jest why he quit

you?”

Evelina shook her head. “No,” she panted--“I don’t--I never knew. He

said it was his duty.”

“Duty can get to be an idol of wood and stone, an’ I don’t know but

Thomas’s is,” said the old man. “Well, I’ll tell you. He don’t think

it’s right for him to marry you, and make you leave that big house, and

lose all that money. He don’t care anything about it for himself, but

it’s for you. Did you know that?”

Evelina grasped the old man’s arm hard with her little fingers.

“You don’t mean that--was why he did it!” she gasped.

“Yes, that was why.”

Evelina drew away from him. She was ashamed to have Thomas’s father see

the joy in her face. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “I did not understand.

I--will write to him.”

“Maybe my son will think I have done wrong coming betwixt him and his

idees of duty,” said old Thomas Merriam, “but sometimes there’s a good

deal lost for lack of a word, and I wanted you to have a fair chance

an’ a fair say. It’s been borne in upon me that women folks don’t

always have it. Now you can do jest as you think best, but you must

remember one thing--riches ain’t all. A little likin’ for you that’s

goin’ to last, and keep honest and faithful to you as long as you live,

is worth more; an’ it’s worth more to women folks than ’tis to men,

an’ it’s worth enough to them. My son’s poorly. His mother and I are

worried about him. He don’t eat nor sleep--walks his chamber nights.

His mother don’t know what the matter is, but he let on to me some time

since.”

“I’ll write a letter to him,” gasped Evelina again. “Good-night, sir.”

She pulled her little black silk shawl over her head and hastened home,

and all night long her candle burned, while her weary little fingers

toiled over pages of foolscap-paper to convince Thomas Merriam fully,

and yet in terms not exceeding maidenly reserve, that the love of his

heart and the companionship of his life were worth more to her than all

the silver and gold in the world. Then the next morning she despatched

it, all neatly folded and sealed, and waited.

It was strange that a letter like that could not have moved Thomas

Merriam, when his heart too pleaded with him so hard to be moved. But

that might have been the very reason why he could withstand her, and

why the consciousness of his own weakness gave him strength. Thomas

Merriam was one, when he had once fairly laid hold of duty, to grasp it

hard, although it might be to his own pain and death, and maybe to that

of others. He wrote to poor young Evelina another letter, in which he

emphasized and repeated his strict adherence to what he believed the

line of duty in their separation, and ended it with a prayer for her

welfare and happiness, in which, indeed, for a second, the passionate

heart of the man showed forth. Then he locked himself in his chamber,

and nobody ever knew what he suffered there. But one pang he did not

suffer which Evelina would have suffered in his place. He mourned not

over nor realized the grief of her tender heart when she should read

his letter, otherwise he could not have sent it. He writhed under his

own pain alone, and his duty hugged him hard, like the iron maiden of

the old tortures, but he would not yield.

As for Evelina, when she got his letter, and had read it through, she

sat still and white for a long time, and did not seem to hear when old

Sarah Judd spoke to her. But at last she rose and went to her chamber,

and knelt down, and prayed for a long time; and then she went out in

the garden and cut all the most beautiful flowers, and tied them in

wreaths and bouquets, and carried them out to the north side of the

house, where her cousin Evelina was buried, and covered her grave with

them. And then she knelt down there and hid her face among them, and

said, in a low voice, as if in a listening ear, “I pray you, Cousin

Evelina, forgive me for what I am about to do.”

And then she returned to the house, and sat at her needle-work as

usual; but the old woman kept looking at her, and asking if she were

sick, for there was a strange look in her face.

She and old Sarah Judd had always their tea at five o’clock, and put

the candles out at nine, and this night they did as they were wont.

But at one o’clock in the morning young Evelina stole softly down the

stairs with her lighted candle, and passed through into the kitchen;

and a half-hour after she came forth into the garden, which lay in full

moonlight, and she had in her hand a steaming teakettle, and she passed

around among the shrubs and watered them, and a white cloud of steam

rose around them. Back and forth she went to the kitchen; for she had

heated the great copper wash-kettle full of water; and she watered all

the shrubs in the garden, moving amid curling white wreaths of steam,

until the water was gone. And then she set to work and tore up by the

roots with her little hands and trampled with her little feet all the

beautiful tender flower-beds; all the time weeping, and moaning softly:

“Poor Cousin Evelina! poor Cousin Evelina! Oh, forgive me, poor Cousin

Evelina!”

And at dawn the garden lay in ruin, for all the tender plants she had

torn up by the roots and trampled down, and all the stronger-rooted

shrubs she had striven to kill with boiling water and salt.

Then Evelina went into the house, and made herself tidy as well as she

could when she trembled so, and put her little shawl over her head, and

went down the road to the Merriams’ house. It was so early the village

was scarcely astir, but there was smoke coming out of the kitchen

chimney at the Merriams’; and when she knocked, Mrs. Merriam opened the

door at once, and stared at her.

“Is Sarah Judd dead?” she cried; for her first thought was that

something must have happened when she saw the girl standing there with

her wild pale face.

“I want to see the minister,” said Evelina, faintly, and she looked at

Thomas’s mother with piteous eyes.

“Be you sick?” asked Mrs. Merriam. She laid a hard hand on the

girl’s arm, and led her into the sitting-room, and put her into the

rocking-chair with the feather cushion. “You look real poorly,” said

she. “Sha’n’t I get you a little of my elderberry wine?”

“I want to see him,” said Evelina, and she almost sobbed.

“I’ll go right and speak to him,” said Mrs. Merriam. “He’s up, I guess.

He gets up early to write. But hadn’t I better get you something to

take first? You do look sick.”

But Evelina only shook her head. She had her face covered with her

hands, and was weeping softly. Mrs. Merriam left the room, with a long

backward glance at her. Presently the door opened and Thomas came in.

Evelina stood up before him. Her pale face was all wet with tears, but

there was an air of strange triumph about her.

[Illustration: “‘THE LORD MAKE ME WORTHY OF THEE, EVELINA!’”]

“The garden is dead,” said she.

“What do you mean?” he cried out, staring at her, for indeed he thought

for a minute that her wits had left her.

“The garden is dead,” said she. “Last night I watered the roses with

boiling water and salt, and I pulled the other flowers up by their

roots. The garden is dead, and I have lost all Cousin Evelina’s money,

and it need not come between us any longer.” She said that, and looked

up in his face with her blue eyes, through which the love of the whole

race of loving women from which she had sprung, as well as her own,

seemed to look, and held out her little hands; but even then Thomas

Merriam could not understand, and stood looking at her.

“Why--did you do it?” he stammered.

“Because you would have me no other way, and--I couldn’t bear that

anything like that should come between us,” she said, and her voice

shook like a harp-string, and her pale face went red, then pale again.

But Thomas still stood staring at her. Then her heart failed her. She

thought that he did not care, and she had been mistaken. She felt as if

it were the hour of her death, and turned to go. And then he caught her

in his arms.

“Oh,” he cried, with a great sob, “the Lord make me worthy of thee,

Evelina!”

There had never been so much excitement in the village as when the

fact of the ruined garden came to light. Flora Loomis, peeping through

the hedge on her way to the store, had spied it first. Then she had

run home for her mother, who had in turn sought Lawyer Lang, panting

bonnetless down the road. But before the lawyer had started for the

scene of disaster, the minister, Thomas Merriam, had appeared, and

asked for a word in private with him. Nobody ever knew just what that

word was, but the lawyer was singularly uncommunicative and reticent as

to the ruined garden.

“Do you think the young woman is out of her mind?” one of the deacons

asked him, in a whisper.

“I wish all the young women were as much in their minds; we’d have a

better world,” said the lawyer, gruffly.

“When do you think we can begin to move in here?” asked Mrs. Martha

Loomis, her wide skirts sweeping a bed of uprooted verbenas.

“When your claim is established,” returned the lawyer, shortly, and

turned on his heel and went away, his dry old face scanning the ground

like a dog on a scent. That afternoon he opened the sealed document

in the presence of witnesses, and the name of the heir to whom the

property fell was disclosed. It was “Thomas Merriam, the beloved and

esteemed minister of this parish,” and young Evelina would gain her

wealth instead of losing it by her marriage. And furthermore, after

the declaration of the name of the heir was this added: “This do I in

the hope and belief that neither the greed of riches nor the fear of

them shall prevent that which is good and wise in the sight of the

Lord, and with the surety that a love which shall triumph over so much

in its way shall endure, and shall be a blessing and not a curse to my

beloved cousin, Evelina Leonard.”

Thomas Merriam and Evelina were married before the leaves fell in

that same year, by the minister of the next village, who rode over in

his chaise, and brought his wife, who was also a bride, and wore her

wedding-dress of a pink and pearl shot silk. But young Evelina wore the

blue bridal array which had been worn by old Squire Adams’s bride, all

remodelled daintily to suit the fashion of the times; and as she moved,

the fragrances of roses and lavender of the old summers during which it

had been laid away were evident, like sweet memories.