Evelinas Garden | Page 2

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