Evelinas Garden | Page 8

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 mustn't set too much store by little
things that you