Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Love stories; New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
It was several days before the village people discovered who she was.
The information had to be obtained, by a process like mental
thumb-screwing, from the old man who tended Evelina's garden, but at
last they knew. She was the daughter of a cousin of Evelina's on the
father's side. Her name was Evelina Leonard; she had been named for
her father's cousin. She had been finely brought up, and had attended
a Boston school for young ladies. Her mother had been dead many
years, and her father had died some two years ago, leaving her with
only a very little money, which was now all gone, and Evelina Adams
had invited her to live with her. Evelina Adams had herself told the
old gardener, seeing his scant curiosity was somewhat awakened by the
sight of the strange young lady in the garden, but he seemed to have
almost forgotten it when the people questioned him.
"She'll leave her all her money, most likely," they said, and they
looked at this new Evelina in the old Evelina's perfumed gowns with
awe.
However, in the space of a few months the opinion upon this matter
was divided. Another cousin of Evelina Adams's came to town, and this
time an own cousin--a widow in fine black bombazine, portly and
florid, walking with a majestic swell, and, moreover, having with her
two daughters, girls of her own type, not so far advanced. This woman
hired one of the village cottages, and it was rumored that Evelina
Adams paid the rent. Still, it was considered that she was not very
intimate with these last relatives. The neighbors watched, and saw,
many a time, Mrs. Martha Loomis and her girls try the doors of the
Adams house, scudding around angrily from front to side and back, and
knock and knock again, but with no admittance. "Evelina she won't let
none of 'em in more 'n once a week," the neighbors said. It was odd
that, although they had deeply resented Evelina's seclusion on their
own accounts, they were rather on her side in this matter, and felt a
certain delight when they witnessed a crestfallen retreat of the
widow and her daughters. "I don't s'pose she wants them Loomises
marchin' in on her every minute," they said.
The new Evelina was not seen much with the other cousins, and she
made no acquaintances in the village. Whether she was to inherit all
the Adams property or not, she seemed, at any rate, heiress to all
the elder Evelina's habits of life. She worked with her in the
garden, and wore her old girlish gowns, and kept almost as close at
home as she. She often, however, walked abroad in the early dusk,
stepping along in a grave and stately fashion, as the elder Evelina
had used to do, holding her skirts away from the dewy roadside weeds,
her face showing out in the twilight like a white flower, as if it
had a pale light of its own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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