Chapter V: Part 5

“I cannot help that,” replied Evelina. “It is for you to show Christian patience more than I, Thomas. If you could have seen poor Cousin Evelina, as I have seen her, through the long winter days, when her garden is dead, and she has only the few plants in her window left! When she is not watering and tending them she sits all day in the window and looks out over the garden and the naked bushes and the withered flower-stalks. She used not to be so, but would read her Bible and good books, and busy herself somewhat over fine needle-work, and at one time she was compiling a little floral book, giving a list of the flowers, and poetical selections and sentiments appropriate to each. That was her pastime for three winters, and it is now nearly done; but she has given that up, and all the rest, and sits there in the window and grows older and feebler until spring. It is only I who can divert her mind, by reading aloud to her and singing; and sometimes I paint the flowers she loves the best on card-board with water-colors. I have a poor skill in it, but Cousin Evelina can tell which flower I have tried to represent, and it pleases her greatly. I have even seen her smile. No, I cannot leave her, nor even pester her with telling her before another spring, and you must wait, Thomas,” said young Evelina.

And Thomas agreed, as he was likely to do to all which she proposed which touched not his own sense of right and honor. Young Evelina gave Thomas one more kiss for his earnest pleading, and that night wrote out the tale in her journal. “It may be that I overstepped the bounds of maidenly decorum,” wrote Evelina, “but my heart did so entreat me,” and no blame whatever did she lay upon Thomas.

Young Evelina opened her heart only to her journal, and her cousin was told nothing, and had little cause for suspicion. Thomas Merriam never came to the house to see his sweetheart; he never walked home with her from meeting. Both were anxious to avoid village gossip, until the elder Evelina could be told.

Often in the summer evenings the lovers met, and strolled hand in hand across the fields, and parted at the garden gate with the one kiss which Evelina allowed, and that was all.

Sometimes when young Evelina came in with her lover’s kiss still warm upon her lips the elder Evelina looked at her wistfully, with a strange retrospective expression in her blue eyes, as if she were striving to remember something that the girl’s face called to mind. And yet she could have had nothing to remember except dreams.

And once, when young Evelina sat sewing through a long summer afternoon and thinking about her lover, the elder Evelina, who was storing rose leaves mixed with sweet spices in a jar, said, suddenly, “He looks as his father used to.”

Young Evelina started. “Whom do you mean, Cousin Evelina?” she asked, wonderingly; for the elder Evelina had not glanced at her, nor even seemed to address her at all.

“Nothing,” said the elder Evelina, and a soft flush stole over her withered face and neck, and she sprinkled more cassia on the rose leaves in the jar.

Young Evelina said no more; but she wondered, partly because Thomas was always in her mind, and it seemed to her naturally that nearly everything must have a savor of meaning of him, if her cousin Evelina could possibly have referred to him and his likeness to his father. For it was commonly said that Thomas looked very like his father, although his figure was different. The young man was taller and more firmly built, and he had not the meek forward curve of shoulder which had grown upon his father of late years.

When the frosty nights came Thomas and Evelina could not meet and walk hand in hand over the fields behind the Squire’s house, and they very seldom could speak to each other. It was nothing except a “good-day” on the street, and a stolen glance, which set them both a-trembling lest all the congregation had noticed, in the meeting-house. When the winter set fairly in they met no more, for the elder Evelina was taken ill, and her young cousin did not leave her even to go to meeting. People said they guessed it was Evelina Adams’s last sickness, and they furthermore guessed that she would divide her property between her cousin Martha Loomis and her two girls and Evelina Leonard, and that Evelina would have the house as her share.

Thomas Merriam heard this last with a satisfaction which he did not try to disguise from himself, because he never dreamed of there being any selfish element in it. It was all for Evelina. Many a time he had looked about the humble house where he had been born, and where he would have to take Evelina after he had married her, and striven to see its poor features with her eyes--not with his, for which familiarity had tempered them. Often, as he sat with his parents in the old sitting-room, in which he had kept so far an unquestioning belief, as in a friend of his childhood, the scales of his own personality would fall suddenly from his eyes. Then he would see, as Evelina, the poor, worn, humble face of his home, and his heart would sink. “I don’t see how I ever can bring her here,” he thought. He began to save, a few cents at a time out of his pitiful salary, to at least beautify his own chamber a little when Evelina should come. He made up his mind that she should have a little dressing-table, with an oval mirror, and a white muslin frill around it, like one he had seen in Boston. “She shall have that to sit before while she combs her hair,” he thought, with defiant tenderness, when he stowed away another shilling in a little box in his trunk. It was money which he ordinarily bestowed upon foreign missions; but his Evelina had come between him and the heathen. To procure some dainty furnishings for her bridal-chamber he took away a good half of his tithes for the spread of the gospel in the dark lands. Now and then his conscience smote him, he felt shamefaced before his deacons, but Evelina kept her first claim. He resolved that another year he would hire a piece of land, and combine farming with his ministerial work, and so try to eke out his salary, and get a little more money to beautify his poor home for his bride.

Now if Evelina Adams had come to the appointed time for the closing of her solitary life, and if her young cousin should inherit a share of her goodly property and the fine old mansion-house, all necessity for anxiety of this kind was over. Young Evelina would not need to be taken away, for the sake of her love, from all these comforts and luxuries. Thomas Merriam rejoiced innocently, without a thought for himself.

In the course of the winter he confided in his father; he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer. Then there was another reason. Seeing Evelina so little made him at times almost doubt the reality of it all. There were days when he was depressed, and inclined to ask himself if he had not dreamed it. Telling somebody gave it substance.

His father listened soberly when he told him; he had grown old of late.

“Well,” said he, “she ’ain’t been used to living the way you have, though you have had advantages that none of your folks ever had; but if she likes you, that’s all there is to it, I s’pose.”

The old man sighed wearily. He sat in his arm-chair at the kitchen fireplace; his wife had gone in to one of the neighbors, and the two were alone.

“Of course,” said Thomas, simply, “if Evelina Adams shouldn’t live, the chances are that I shouldn’t have to bring her here. She wouldn’t have to give up anything on my account--you know that, father.”

Then the young man started, for his father turned suddenly on him with a pale, wrathful face. “You ain’t countin’ on that!” he shouted. “You ain’t countin’ on that--a son of mine countin’ on anything like that!”

Thomas colored. “Why, father,” he stammered, “you don’t think--you know, it’s all for _her_--and they say she can’t live anyway. I had never thought of such a thing before. I was wondering how I could make it comfortable for Evelina here.”

But his father did not seem to listen. “Countin’ on that!” he repeated. “Countin’ on a poor old soul, that ’ain’t ever had anything to set her heart on but a few posies, dyin’ to make room for other folks to have what she’s been cheated out on. Countin’ on that!” The old man’s voice broke into a hoarse sob; he got up, and went hurriedly out of the room.

“Why, father!” his son called after him, in alarm. He got up to follow him, but his father waved him back and shut the door hard.

“Father must be getting childish,” Thomas thought, wonderingly. He did not bring up the subject to him again.

Evelina Adams died in March. One morning the bell tolled seventy long melancholy tones before people had eaten their breakfasts. They ran to their doors and counted. “It’s her,” they said, nodding, when they had waited a little after the seventieth stroke. Directly Mrs. Martha Loomis and her two girls were seen hustling importantly down the road, with their shawls over their heads, to the Squire’s house. “Mis’ Loomis can lay her out,” they said. “It ain’t likely that young Evelina knows anything about such things. Guess she’ll be thankful she’s got somebody to call on now, if she ’ain’t mixed much with the Loomises.” Then they wondered when the funeral would be, and the women furbished up their black gowns and bonnets, and even in a few cases drove to the next town and borrowed from relatives; but there was a great disappointment in store for them.

Evelina Adams died on a Saturday. The next day it was announced from the pulpit that the funeral would be private, by the particular request of the deceased. Evelina Adams had carried her delicate seclusion beyond death, to the very borders of the grave. Nobody, outside the family, was bidden to the funeral, except the doctor, the minister, and the two deacons of the church. They were to be the bearers. The burial also was to be private, in the Squire’s family burial-lot, at the north of the house. The bearers would carry the coffin across the yard, and there would not only be no funeral, but no funeral procession, and no hearse. “It don’t seem scarcely decent,” the women whispered to each other; “and more than all that, she ain’t goin’ to be _seen_.” The deacons’ wives were especially disturbed by this last, as they might otherwise have gained many interesting particulars by proxy.

Monday was the day set for the burial. Early in the morning old Thomas Merriam walked feebly up the road to the Squire’s house. People noticed him as he passed. “How terrible fast he’s grown old lately!” they said. He opened the gate which led into the Squire’s front yard with fumbling fingers, and went up the walk to the front door, under the Corinthian pillars, and raised the brass knocker.

Evelina opened the door, and started and blushed when she saw him. She had been crying; there were red rings around her blue eyes, and her pretty lips were swollen. She tried to smile at Thomas’s father, and she held out her hand with shy welcome.

“I want to see her,” the old man said, abruptly.

Evelina started, and looked at him wonderingly. “I--don’t believe--I know who you mean,” said she. “Do you want to see Mrs. Loomis?”

“No; I want to see her.”

“_Her?_”

“Yes, _her_.”

Evelina turned pale as she stared at him. There was something strange about his face. “But--Cousin Evelina,” she faltered--“she--didn’t want--Perhaps you don’t know: she left special directions that nobody was to look at her.”

“I _want to see her_,” said the old man, and Evelina gave way. She stood aside for him to enter, and led him into the great north parlor, where Evelina Adams lay in her mournful state. The shutters were closed, and one on entering could distinguish nothing but that long black shadow in the middle of the room. Young Evelina opened a shutter a little way, and a slanting shaft of spring sunlight came in and shot athwart the coffin. The old man tiptoed up and leaned over and looked at the dead woman. Evelina Adams had left further instructions about her funeral, which no one understood, but which were faithfully carried out. She wished, she had said, to be attired for her long sleep in a certain rose-colored gown, laid away in rose leaves and lavender in a certain chest in a certain chamber. There were also silken hose and satin shoes with it, and these were to be put on, and a wrought lace tucker fastened with a pearl brooch.

It was the costume she had worn one Sabbath day back in her youth, when she had looked across the meeting-house and her eyes had met young Thomas Merriam’s; but nobody knew nor remembered; even young Evelina thought it was simply a vagary of her dead cousin’s.

“It don’t seem to me decent to lay away anybody dressed so,” said Mrs. Martha Loomis; “but of course last wishes must be respected.”

The two Loomis girls said they were thankful nobody was to see the departed in her rose-colored shroud.

Even old Thomas Merriam, leaning over poor Evelina, cold and dead in the garb of her youth, did not remember it, and saw no meaning in it. He looked at her long. The beautiful color was all faded out of the yellow-white face; the sweet full lips were set and thin; the closed blue eyes sunken in dark hollows; the yellow hair showed a line of gray at the edge of her old woman’s cap, and thin gray curls lay against the hollow cheeks. But old Thomas Merriam drew a long breath when he looked at her. It was like a gasp of admiration and wonder; a strange rapture came into his dim eyes; his lips moved as if he whispered to her, but young Evelina could not hear a sound. She watched him, half frightened, but finally he turned to her. “I ’ain’t seen her--fairly,” said he, hoarsely--“I ’ain’t seen her, savin’ a glimpse of her at the window, for over forty year, and she ’ain’t changed, not a look. I’d have known her anywheres. She’s the same as she was when she was a girl. It’s wonderful--wonderful!”

Young Evelina shrank a little. “We think she looks natural,” she said, hesitatingly.

“She looks jest as she did when she was a girl and used to come into the meetin’-house. She is jest the same,” the old man repeated, in his eager, hoarse voice. Then he bent over the coffin, and his lips moved again. Young Evelina would have called Mrs. Loomis, for she was frightened, had he not been Thomas’s father, and had it not been for her vague feeling that there might be some old story to explain this which she had never heard. “Maybe he was in love with poor Cousin Evelina, as Thomas is with me,” thought young Evelina, using her own leaping-pole of love to land straight at the truth. But she never told her surmise to any one except Thomas, and that was long afterwards, when the old man was dead. Now she watched him with her blue dilated eyes. But soon he turned away from the coffin and made his way straight out of the room, without a word. Evelina followed him through the entry and opened the outer door. He turned on the threshold and looked back at her, his face working.

“Don’t ye go to lottin’ too much on what ye’re goin’ to get through folks that have died an’ not had anything,” he said; and he shook his head almost fiercely at her.

“No, I won’t. I don’t think I understand what you mean, sir,” stammered Evelina.

The old man stood looking at her a moment. Suddenly she saw the tears rolling over his old cheeks. “I’m much obliged to ye for lettin’ of me see her,” he said, hoarsely, and crept feebly down the steps.

Evelina went back trembling to the room where her dead cousin lay, and covered her face, and closed the shutter again. Then she went about her household duties, wondering. She could not understand what it all meant; but one thing she understood--that in some way this old dead woman, Evelina Adams, had gotten immortal youth and beauty in one human heart. “She looked to him just as she did when she was a girl,” Evelina kept thinking to herself with awe. She said nothing about it to Mrs. Martha Loomis or her daughters. They had been in the back part of the house, and had not heard old Thomas Merriam come in, and they never knew about it.

Mrs. Loomis and the two girls stayed in the house day and night until after the funeral. They confidently expected to live there in the future. “It isn’t likely that Evelina Adams thought a young woman no older than Evelina Leonard could live here alone in this great house with nobody but that old Sarah Judd. It would not be proper nor becoming,” said Martha Loomis to her two daughters; and they agreed, and brought over many of their possessions under cover of night to the Squire’s house during the interval before the funeral.

But after the funeral and the reading of the will the Loomises made sundry trips after dusk back to their old home, with their best petticoats and cloaks over their arms, and their bonnets dangling by their strings at their sides. For Evelina Adams’s last will and testament had been read, and therein provision was made for the continuance of the annuity heretofore paid them for their support, with the condition affixed that not one night should they spend after the reading of the will in the house known as the Squire Adams house. The annuity was an ample one, and would provide the widow Martha Loomis and her daughters, as it had done before, with all the needfuls of life; but upon hearing the will they stiffened their double chins into their kerchiefs with indignation, for they had looked for more.

Evelina Adams’s will was a will of conditions, for unto it she had affixed two more, and those affected her beloved cousin Evelina Leonard. It was notable that “beloved” had not preceded her cousin Martha Loomis’s name in the will. No pretence of love, when she felt none, had she ever made in her life. The entire property of Evelina Adams, spinster, deceased, with the exception of Widow Martha Loomis’s provision, fell to this beloved young Evelina Leonard, subject to two conditions--firstly, she was never to enter into matrimony, with any person whomsoever, at any time whatsoever; secondly, she was never to let the said spinster Evelina Adams’s garden, situated at the rear and southward of the house known as the Squire Adams house, die through any neglect of hers. Due allowance was to be made for the dispensations of Providence: for hail and withering frost and long-continued drought, and for times wherein the said Evelina Leonard might, by reason of being confined to the house by sickness, be prevented from attending to the needs of the growing plants, and the verdict in such cases was to rest with the minister and the deacons of the church. But should this beloved Evelina love and wed, or should she let, through any wilful neglect, that garden perish in the season of flowers, all that goodly property would she forfeit to a person unknown, whose name, enclosed in a sealed envelope, was to be held meantime in the hands of the executor, who had also drawn up the will, Lawyer Joshua Lang.

There was great excitement in the village over this strange and unwonted will. Some were there who held that Evelina Adams had not been of sound mind, and it should be contested. It was even rumored that Widow Martha Loomis had visited Lawyer Joshua Lang and broached the subject, but he had dismissed the matter peremptorily by telling her that Evelina Adams, spinster, deceased, had been as much in her right mind at the time of drawing the will as anybody of his acquaintance.

“Not setting store by relations, and not wanting to have them under your roof, doesn’t go far in law nor common-sense to send folks to the madhouse,” old Lawyer Lang, who was famed for his sharp tongue, was reported to have said. However, Mrs. Martha Loomis was somewhat comforted by her firm belief that either her own name or that of one of her daughters was in that sealed envelope kept by Lawyer Joshua Lang in his strong-box, and by her firm purpose to watch carefully lest Evelina prove derelict in fulfilling the two conditions whereby she held the property.

Larger peep-holes were soon cut away mysteriously in the high arbor-vitæ hedge, and therein were often set for a few moments, when they passed that way, the eager eyes of Mrs. Martha or her daughter Flora or Fidelia Loomis. Frequent calls they also made upon Evelina, living alone with the old woman Sarah Judd, who had been called in during her cousin’s illness, and they strolled into the garden, spying anxiously for withered leaves or dry stalks. They at every opportunity interviewed the old man who assisted Evelina in her care of the garden concerning its welfare. But small progress they made with him, standing digging at the earth with his spade while they talked, as if in truth his wits had gone therein before his body and he would uncover them.

Moreover, Mrs. Martha Loomis talked much slyly to mothers of young men, and sometimes with bold insinuations to the young men themselves, of the sad lot of poor young Evelina, condemned to a solitary and loveless life, and of her sweetness and beauty and desirability in herself, although she could not bring the old Squire’s money to her husband. And once, but no more than that, she touched lightly upon the subject to the young minister, Thomas Merriam, when he was making a pastoral call.

“My heart bleeds for the poor child living all alone in that great house,” said she. And she looked down mournfully, and did not see how white the young minister’s face turned. “It seems almost a pity,” said she, furthermore--“Evelina is a good housekeeper, and has rare qualities in herself, and so many get poor wives nowadays--that some godly young man should not court her in spite of the will. I doubt, too, if she would not have a happier lot than growing old over that garden, as poor Cousin Evelina did before her, even if she has a fine house to live in and a goodly sum in the bank. She looks pindling enough lately. I’ll warrant she has lost a good ten pound since poor Evelina was laid away, and--”

But Thomas Merriam cut her short. “I see no profit in discussing matters which do not concern us,” said he, and only his ministerial estate saved him from the charge of impertinence.

As it was, Martha Loomis colored high. “I’ll warrant he’ll look out which side his bread is buttered on; ministers always do,” she said to her daughters after he had gone. She never dreamed how her talk had cut him to the heart.

Had he not seen more plainly than any one else, Sunday after Sunday, when he glanced down at her once or twice cautiously from his pulpit, how weary-looking and thin she was growing? And her bright color was wellnigh gone, and there were pitiful downward lines at the corners of her sweet mouth. Poor young Evelina was fading like one of her own flowers, as if some celestial gardener had failed in his care of her. And Thomas saw it, and in his heart of hearts he knew the reason, and yet he would not yield. Not once had he entered the old Squire’s house since he attended the dead Evelina’s funeral, and stood praying and eulogizing, with her coffin between him and the living Evelina, with her pale face shrouded in black bombazine. He had never spoken to her since, nor entered the house; but he had written her a letter, in which all the fierce passion and anguish of his heart was cramped and held down by formal words and phrases, and poor young Evelina did not see beneath them. When her lover wrote her that he felt it inconsistent with his Christian duty and the higher aims of his existence to take any further steps towards a matrimonial alliance, she felt merely that Thomas either cared no more for her, or had come to consider, upon due reflection, that she was not fit to undertake the responsible position of a minister’s wife. “It may be that in some way I failed in my attendance upon Cousin Evelina,” thought poor young Evelina, “or it may be that he thinks I have not enough dignity of character to inspire respect among the older women in the church.” And sometimes, with a sharp thrust of misery that shook her out of her enforced patience and meekness, she wondered if indeed her own loving freedom with him had turned him against her, and led him in his later and sober judgment to consider her too light-minded for a minister’s wife. “It may be that I was guilty of great indecorum, and almost indeed forfeited my claim to respect for maidenly modesty, inasmuch as I suffered him to give me kisses, and did almost bring myself to return them in kind. But my heart did so entreat me, and in truth it seemed almost like a lack of sincerity for me to wholly withstand it,” wrote poor young Evelina in her journal at that time; and she further wrote: “It is indeed hard for one who has so little knowledge to be fully certain of what is or is not becoming and a Christian duty in matters of this kind; but if I have in any manner, through my ignorance or unwarrantable affection, failed, and so lost the love and respect of a good man, and the opportunity to become his helpmeet during life, I pray that I may be forgiven--for I sinned not wilfully--that the lesson may be sanctified unto me, and that I may live as the Lord order, in Christian patience and meekness, and not repining.” It never occurred to young Evelina that possibly Thomas Merriam’s sense of duty might be strengthened by the loss of all her cousin’s property should she marry him, and neither did she dream that he might hesitate to take her from affluence into poverty for her own sake. For herself the property, as put in the balance beside her love, was lighter than air itself. It was so light that it had no place in her consciousness. She simply had thought, upon hearing the will, of Martha Loomis and her daughters in possession of the property, and herself with Thomas, with perfect acquiescence and rapture.

Evelina Adams’s disapprobation of her marriage, which was supposedly expressed in the will, had indeed, without reference to the property, somewhat troubled her tender heart, but she told herself that Cousin Evelina had not known she had promised to marry Thomas; that she would not wish her to break her solemn promise. And furthermore, it seemed to her quite reasonable that the condition had been inserted in the will mainly through concern for the beloved garden.

“Cousin Evelina might have thought perhaps I would let the flowers die when I had a husband and children to take care of,” said Evelina. And so she had disposed of all the considerations which had disturbed her, and had thought of no others.

She did not answer Thomas’s letter. It was so worded that it seemed to require no reply, and she felt that he must be sure of her acquiescence in whatever he thought best. She laid the letter away in a little rosewood box, in which she had always kept her dearest treasures since her school-days. Sometimes she took it out and read it, and it seemed to her that the pain in her heart would put an end to her in spite of all her prayers for Christian fortitude; and yet she could not help reading it again.

It was seldom that she stole a look at her old lover as he stood in the pulpit in the meeting-house, but when she did she thought with an anxious pang that he looked worn and ill, and that night she prayed that the Lord would restore his health to him for the sake of his people.

It was four months after Evelina Adams’s death, and her garden was in the full glory of midsummer, when one evening, towards dusk, young Evelina went slowly down the street. She seldom walked abroad now, but kept herself almost as secluded as her cousin had done before her. But that night a great restlessness was upon her, and she put a little black silk shawl over her shoulders and went out. It was quite cool, although it was midsummer. The dusk was deepening fast; the katydids called back and forth from the way-side bushes. Evelina met nobody for some distance. Then she saw a man coming towards her, and her heart stood still, and she was about to turn back, for she thought for a minute it was the young minister. Then she saw it was his father, and she went on slowly, with her eyes downcast. When she met him she looked up and said good-evening, gravely, and would have passed on, but he stood in her way.

“I’ve got a word to say to ye, if ye’ll listen,” he said.

Evelina looked at him tremblingly. There was something strained and solemn in his manner. “I’ll hear whatever you have to say, sir,” she said.

The old man leaned his pale face over her and raised a shaking forefinger. “I’ve made up my mind to say something,” said he. “I don’t know as I’ve got any right to, and maybe my son will blame me, but I’m goin’ to see that you have a chance. It’s been borne in upon me that women folks don’t always have a fair chance. It’s jest this I’m goin’ to say: I don’t know whether you know how my son feels about it or not. I don’t know how open he’s been with you. Do you know jest why he quit you?”

Evelina shook her head. “No,” she panted--“I don’t--I never knew. He said it was his duty.”

“Duty can get to be an idol of wood and stone, an’ I don’t know but Thomas’s is,” said the old man. “Well, I’ll tell you. He don’t think it’s right for him to marry you, and make you leave that big house, and lose all that money. He don’t care anything about it for himself, but it’s for you. Did you know that?”

Evelina grasped the old man’s arm hard with her little fingers.

“You don’t mean that--was why he did it!” she gasped.

“Yes, that was why.”

Evelina drew away from him. She was ashamed to have Thomas’s father see the joy in her face. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “I did not understand. I--will write to him.”

“Maybe my son will think I have done wrong coming betwixt him and his idees of duty,” said old Thomas Merriam, “but sometimes there’s a good deal lost for lack of a word, and I wanted you to have a fair chance an’ a fair say. It’s been borne in upon me that women folks don’t always have it. Now you can do jest as you think best, but you must remember one thing--riches ain’t all. A little likin’ for you that’s goin’ to last, and keep honest and faithful to you as long as you live, is worth more; an’ it’s worth more to women folks than ’tis to men, an’ it’s worth enough to them. My son’s poorly. His mother and I are worried about him. He don’t eat nor sleep--walks his chamber nights. His mother don’t know what the matter is, but he let on to me some time since.”

“I’ll write a letter to him,” gasped Evelina again. “Good-night, sir.” She pulled her little black silk shawl over her head and hastened home, and all night long her candle burned, while her weary little fingers toiled over pages of foolscap-paper to convince Thomas Merriam fully, and yet in terms not exceeding maidenly reserve, that the love of his heart and the companionship of his life were worth more to her than all the silver and gold in the world. Then the next morning she despatched it, all neatly folded and sealed, and waited.

It was strange that a letter like that could not have moved Thomas Merriam, when his heart too pleaded with him so hard to be moved. But that might have been the very reason why he could withstand her, and why the consciousness of his own weakness gave him strength. Thomas Merriam was one, when he had once fairly laid hold of duty, to grasp it hard, although it might be to his own pain and death, and maybe to that of others. He wrote to poor young Evelina another letter, in which he emphasized and repeated his strict adherence to what he believed the line of duty in their separation, and ended it with a prayer for her welfare and happiness, in which, indeed, for a second, the passionate heart of the man showed forth. Then he locked himself in his chamber, and nobody ever knew what he suffered there. But one pang he did not suffer which Evelina would have suffered in his place. He mourned not over nor realized the grief of her tender heart when she should read his letter, otherwise he could not have sent it. He writhed under his own pain alone, and his duty hugged him hard, like the iron maiden of the old tortures, but he would not yield.

As for Evelina, when she got his letter, and had read it through, she sat still and white for a long time, and did not seem to hear when old Sarah Judd spoke to her. But at last she rose and went to her chamber, and knelt down, and prayed for a long time; and then she went out in the garden and cut all the most beautiful flowers, and tied them in wreaths and bouquets, and carried them out to the north side of the house, where her cousin Evelina was buried, and covered her grave with them. And then she knelt down there and hid her face among them, and said, in a low voice, as if in a listening ear, “I pray you, Cousin Evelina, forgive me for what I am about to do.”

And then she returned to the house, and sat at her needle-work as usual; but the old woman kept looking at her, and asking if she were sick, for there was a strange look in her face.

She and old Sarah Judd had always their tea at five o’clock, and put the candles out at nine, and this night they did as they were wont. But at one o’clock in the morning young Evelina stole softly down the stairs with her lighted candle, and passed through into the kitchen; and a half-hour after she came forth into the garden, which lay in full moonlight, and she had in her hand a steaming teakettle, and she passed around among the shrubs and watered them, and a white cloud of steam rose around them. Back and forth she went to the kitchen; for she had heated the great copper wash-kettle full of water; and she watered all the shrubs in the garden, moving amid curling white wreaths of steam, until the water was gone. And then she set to work and tore up by the roots with her little hands and trampled with her little feet all the beautiful tender flower-beds; all the time weeping, and moaning softly: “Poor Cousin Evelina! poor Cousin Evelina! Oh, forgive me, poor Cousin Evelina!”

And at dawn the garden lay in ruin, for all the tender plants she had torn up by the roots and trampled down, and all the stronger-rooted shrubs she had striven to kill with boiling water and salt.

Then Evelina went into the house, and made herself tidy as well as she could when she trembled so, and put her little shawl over her head, and went down the road to the Merriams’ house. It was so early the village was scarcely astir, but there was smoke coming out of the kitchen chimney at the Merriams’; and when she knocked, Mrs. Merriam opened the door at once, and stared at her.

“Is Sarah Judd dead?” she cried; for her first thought was that something must have happened when she saw the girl standing there with her wild pale face.

“I want to see the minister,” said Evelina, faintly, and she looked at Thomas’s mother with piteous eyes.

“Be you sick?” asked Mrs. Merriam. She laid a hard hand on the girl’s arm, and led her into the sitting-room, and put her into the rocking-chair with the feather cushion. “You look real poorly,” said she. “Sha’n’t I get you a little of my elderberry wine?”

“I want to see him,” said Evelina, and she almost sobbed.

“I’ll go right and speak to him,” said Mrs. Merriam. “He’s up, I guess. He gets up early to write. But hadn’t I better get you something to take first? You do look sick.”

But Evelina only shook her head. She had her face covered with her hands, and was weeping softly. Mrs. Merriam left the room, with a long backward glance at her. Presently the door opened and Thomas came in. Evelina stood up before him. Her pale face was all wet with tears, but there was an air of strange triumph about her.

“The garden is dead,” said she.

“What do you mean?” he cried out, staring at her, for indeed he thought for a minute that her wits had left her.

“The garden is dead,” said she. “Last night I watered the roses with boiling water and salt, and I pulled the other flowers up by their roots. The garden is dead, and I have lost all Cousin Evelina’s money, and it need not come between us any longer.” She said that, and looked up in his face with her blue eyes, through which the love of the whole race of loving women from which she had sprung, as well as her own, seemed to look, and held out her little hands; but even then Thomas Merriam could not understand, and stood looking at her.

“Why--did you do it?” he stammered.

“Because you would have me no other way, and--I couldn’t bear that anything like that should come between us,” she said, and her voice shook like a harp-string, and her pale face went red, then pale again.

But Thomas still stood staring at her. Then her heart failed her. She thought that he did not care, and she had been mistaken. She felt as if it were the hour of her death, and turned to go. And then he caught her in his arms.

“Oh,” he cried, with a great sob, “the Lord make me worthy of thee, Evelina!”

There had never been so much excitement in the village as when the fact of the ruined garden came to light. Flora Loomis, peeping through the hedge on her way to the store, had spied it first. Then she had run home for her mother, who had in turn sought Lawyer Lang, panting bonnetless down the road. But before the lawyer had started for the scene of disaster, the minister, Thomas Merriam, had appeared, and asked for a word in private with him. Nobody ever knew just what that word was, but the lawyer was singularly uncommunicative and reticent as to the ruined garden.

“Do you think the young woman is out of her mind?” one of the deacons asked him, in a whisper.

“I wish all the young women were as much in their minds; we’d have a better world,” said the lawyer, gruffly.

“When do you think we can begin to move in here?” asked Mrs. Martha Loomis, her wide skirts sweeping a bed of uprooted verbenas.

“When your claim is established,” returned the lawyer, shortly, and turned on his heel and went away, his dry old face scanning the ground like a dog on a scent. That afternoon he opened the sealed document in the presence of witnesses, and the name of the heir to whom the property fell was disclosed. It was “Thomas Merriam, the beloved and esteemed minister of this parish,” and young Evelina would gain her wealth instead of losing it by her marriage. And furthermore, after the declaration of the name of the heir was this added: “This do I in the hope and belief that neither the greed of riches nor the fear of them shall prevent that which is good and wise in the sight of the Lord, and with the surety that a love which shall triumph over so much in its way shall endure, and shall be a blessing and not a curse to my beloved cousin, Evelina Leonard.”

Thomas Merriam and Evelina were married before the leaves fell in that same year, by the minister of the next village, who rode over in his chaise, and brought his wife, who was also a bride, and wore her wedding-dress of a pink and pearl shot silk. But young Evelina wore the blue bridal array which had been worn by old Squire Adams’s bride, all remodelled daintily to suit the fashion of the times; and as she moved, the fragrances of roses and lavender of the old summers during which it had been laid away were evident, like sweet memories.

A NEW ENGLAND PROPHET

At half-past six o’clock a little company of people passed down the village street in the direction of the Lennox farm-house.

They advanced in silence, stepping along the frozen ridges of the road. It was cold, but there was no snow. There was a young moon shining through thin white clouds like nebulæ.

Now and then, as the company went on, new recruits were gathered from the scattered houses. A man would emerge darkly from a creaking gate, with maybe a second and third dark figure following, with a flirt of feminine draperies. “There’s Deacon Scranton,” or “There’s Thomas Jennings and his wife and Ellen,” the people would murmur to one another.

Once a gleam of candle-light from an open door lay across the road in advance, and wavered into darkness with a slam of the door when the company drew near. Then a solitary woman came ponderously down the front walk, seeming to jar the frozen earth with the jolt of her great feminine bulk. “There’s Abby Mosely,” somebody muttered. Sometimes two young girls fluttered out of a door-yard, clinging together with nervous giggles and outcries, which were soon hushed. They moved along with the others, their little cold fingers clinging together with a rigid clutch. It was as if a strange, solemn atmosphere surrounded this group moving along the country road in the starlit night. Whoever came into their midst felt it, and his emotions changed involuntarily as respiration changes on a mountaintop.

When the party reached a windy hill-top in sight of the lighted windows of the Lennox house in the valley below, it numbered nearly twenty. Half-way down the hill somebody else joined them. He had been standing ahead of them, waiting in the long shadow of a poplar, and they had not discerned him until they were close to him. Then he stepped forward and the shadow of the tree was left motionless. The young girls half screamed, he appeared so suddenly, and their nerves were strained. The elders made a solemn hushed murmur of greeting. They knew as soon as he moved that he was Isaac Penfield. He had a martial carriage of his shoulders, he was a captain in the militia, and he wore an ash-colored cloak, which distinguished him.

The young girls cast glances, bolder from the darkness, towards his stately ash-colored shoulders and the pale gleam of his face. Not one of them who had not her own lover but had her innocent secret dreams about this Isaac Penfield. Now, had a light shone out suddenly in the darkness, their dreams would have shown in their faces.

One slender girl slunk softly around in the rear darkness and crept so close to Isaac Penfield that his ash-colored cloak, swinging out in the wind, brushed her cheek. He did not notice her; indeed, after his first murmur of salutation, he did not speak to any one.

They all went in silence down the hill, and flocked into the yard of the Lennox house. There was a red flicker of light in the kitchen windows from the great hearth fire, but a circle of dark heads and shoulders hid the fire itself from the new-comers. There was evidently a number of people inside.

Deacon Scranton raised the knocker, and the door was opened immediately. Melissa Lennox stood there holding a candle in a brass candlestick, with the soft light streaming up on her fair face. She looked through it with innocent, anxious blue eyes at the company. “Won’t you walk in?” she said, tremulously, and the people passed into the south entry, and through the door on the left into the great Lennox kitchen. Some dozen persons who had come from the other end of the village were already there.

Isaac Penfield entered last. Melissa did not see him until he stepped suddenly within her radius of candle-light. Then she started, and bent her head before him, blushing. The candle shook in her outstretched hand.

Isaac Penfield took the candle without a word and set it on the stairs. Then he took Melissa’s slim right hand in his, and stood a moment looking down at her bent head, with its parted gloss of hair. His forehead was frowning, and yet he half smiled with tender triumph.

“Come out in the front yard with me a moment,” he whispered. He pulled her with gentle force towards the door, and the girl yielded, after a faint murmur of expostulation.

Out in the front yard Isaac Penfield folded a corner of his ash-colored cloak around Melissa’s slender shoulders.

“Now I want you to tell me, Melissa,” he whispered. “You are not still carried away by all this?” He jerked his head towards the kitchen windows.

Melissa trembled against the young man’s side under the folds of his cloak.

“You are not, after all I said to you, Melissa?”

She nodded against his breast, with a faint sob.

“I hoped you would do as I asked you, and cut loose from this folly,” Isaac Penfield said, sternly.

“Father--says--it’s true. Oh, I am afraid--I am afraid! My sins are so great, and I cannot hide from the eyes of the Lord. I am afraid!”

Isaac Penfield tightened his clasp of the girl’s trembling figure, and bent his head low down over hers. “Melissa, dear, can’t you listen to me?” he whispered.

Suddenly the kitchen door opened, and a new light streamed across the entry.

“Melissa, where be you?” called a woman’s voice, high-pitched and melancholy.

“There’s mother calling,” Melissa said, in a frightened whisper, and she broke away and ran into the house.

Her mother stood in the kitchen door. “Where have you been?” she began. Then she stopped, and looked at Isaac Penfield with a half-shrinking, half-antagonistic air. This stalwart young man, radiant with the knowledge of his own strength, represented to this delicate woman, who was held to the earth more by the tension of nerves than the weight of matter, the very pride of life, the material power which she was to fear and fight for herself and for her daughter.

“I thought I would step into your meeting to-night, if I were permitted,” Isaac Penfield said.

Mrs. Lennox looked at him with deep blue eyes under high, thin temples. “All are permitted who listen to the truth with the right spirit,” said she, and turned shortly and glided into the kitchen. Melissa and Isaac followed.

The company sat in wide semicircles, three deep, before the fire. In the open space between the first semicircle and the fire, his wide arm-chair on the bricks of the broad hearth, half facing the company, sat Solomon Lennox. Near him sat his deaf-and-dumb son Alonzo. He held up a large slate so the firelight fell upon it, and marked upon it with a grating pencil. He screwed his face with every stroke, so it seemed that one watching attentively might discern the picture itself from his changing features.

Alonzo Lennox was fourteen years old, but he looked no more than ten, and he had been deaf and dumb from his birth. The firelight gave a reddish tinge to his silvery blond hair, spreading out stiffly from the top of his head over his ears like the thatch of a hut. His delicate irregular profile bent over the slate; now and then a spasm of silent merriment shook his narrow chest, and the surrounding people looked at him with awe. They regarded it as the mystic ecstasy of a seer.

Melissa and her mother had slid softly through the semicircles to the chairs they had left. Isaac Penfield stood on the outskirts, towering over all the people, refusing a seat which somebody offered him. He threw off his ash-colored cloak and held it on his arm. His costume of fine broadcloth and flowered satin and glittering buttons surpassed any there, as did his face and his height and his carriage; and, more than all, he stood among the others raised upon a spiritual eminence, unseen, but none the less real, which his ancestors had reared for him before his birth. The Penfield name had been a great one in that vicinity for three generations. Once Penfields had owned the larger part of the township. Isaac’s father, and his grandfather before him, had been esquires, and held as nearly the position of lords of this little village as was possible in New England. Now this young man was the last of his race, living, with his housekeeper and an old servant, in the Penfield homestead; and the village adulation which had been accorded to his ancestors was his also in a large measure.

To-night, as he entered, people glanced at him, away from Alonzo and his slate, but only for a moment. The matter under discussion that night was too solemn and terrible to be lost sight of long.

In about ten minutes after Isaac Penfield entered, the boy gave a shout, grating and hideous, with a discord of human thoughts and senses in it. A shudder passed over the company like a wind.

Alonzo Lennox sprang up and waved the slate, and his father reached out for it. “Give it to me,” he demanded, sternly, as if the boy could hear. But Alonzo gave another shout, and leaped aside, and waved the slate out of his father’s reach. Then he danced lightly up and down on the tips of his toes, shaking his head and flinging out fantastic heels. His shock of hair flew out wildly, and looked like a luminous crown; the firelight struck his dilated eyes, and they gleamed red.

The people watched him with sobbing breaths and pale faces, all except Isaac Penfield and one other. Isaac stood looking at him, with his mouth curling in a scornful smile. Solomon Lennox stood aside with a startled air, then he caught the boy firmly by the arm and grasped the slate.

Alonzo grinned impishly in his father’s face, then he let go the slate, and sank down on his stool in the chimney-corner. There he sat submissive and inactive, except for the cunning, sharp flash of his blue eyes under his thatch of hair.

Solomon Lennox held the slate to the light and looked at it, while the people waited breathless, their pale intent faces bent forward. Then he handed the slate, without a word, to the man at the end of the first semicircle, and it was circulated through the entire company. As one passed the slate to another a shuddering thrill like an electric shock seemed to be passed with it, and there was a faint murmur of horror.