Chapter IV: Part 4

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?”

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.