Evelinas Garden | Page 3

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