Evelinas Garden | Page 4

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-vitae 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-vitae 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