Part 8

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.