Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885

"My wants are all satisfied, thank God," said Adam, lifting his cap. "I have you, and the breath o' life, and the camp-outfit."

"And the mountains, and the lake, and the rocks, and the woods," added Eva. "I never could have believed there were such sublime things in the world if I hadn't seen them."

"Neither could I," owned the Scotchman. "Especially such a sublime thing as me wife."

Eva struck at him, restraining her palm from bringing more than a pat upon his cheek.

"How your little hand makes me tremble!" said Adam, drawing his breath from chest-depths. "Will I ever grow to glimpse at you without having the blood spurt quick from me hairt, or to touch you without this faintness o' joy? And don't mock me wi' your eyes, bonnie wee one, for it's bonnie wee one you'll be to me when you're a fat auld woman the size of yonder mountain. And that changes the laughter in your eyes."

"I didn't suppose you ever could call me a fat old woman."

"I'll be an auld man then meself, me fiery locks powthered with ashes, and my auld knees knocking one at the ither," laughed Adam.

"But hand in hand we'll go,"
sang Eva,
"And sleep thegither at the foot,
Joh—n Ander—son, my jo—o."

"Oh, don't!" said Adam, with a sudden grasp on her wrist. "My God! one must go first; and I could naither leave you nor close these eyes of yours." He put his other hand across his eyelids, his lower features wincing. "Sweetheart," said Adam, removing it, and taking her head between his palms, "for what we have already received the Lord make us duly thankful. And shut up about the rest. And there's grace said for dinner: excepting I didn't uncover me head. Excuse me bonnet."

"Take off your ridiculous bonnet," said Eva, emerging from the eclipse of a long kiss, "and drag me out of my web. If I am to be your helpmeet, make me help."

"You naidn't lift a finger, my darling. I don't afford and won't have a sairvant in the camp, so I should sairve you myself."

Passing over this argument, Eva crept up on the stretcher and had him lift her to the ground. Her shape was very slender and elegant, and when the two passed each an arm across the other's back to walk together school-girl fashion, Adam's grasp sloped far downward. She did not quite reach his shoulder.

They made coffee, and served up their dinner in various pieces of pottery. The baked muskalunge was portioned upon two plates and surrounded with stewed potato. Potatoes with scorched jackets, enclosing their own utmost fragrance, also came out of the ashes. Adam poured coffee for Eva into a fragile china cup, and coffee for himself into a tin pint-measure. The sugar was in a glass fruit-jar, and the cream came directly off a pan in the cold-box. They had pressed beef in slices, chow-chow through the neck of the bottle, apricot jam in a little white pot, baker's rolls, and a cracked platter heaped with wild strawberries. Around the second point of Magog Island, down one whole stony hill-side, those strawberries grew too thick for stepping. The hugest, most deadly sweet of cultivated berries could not match them. You ate in them the light of the sky and the ancient life of the mountain.

"I never was so hungry at home," said Eva, accepting a finely-done bit of fish with which her lord fed her as a nestling. "Perhaps things taste better eaten out of unmatched crockery and under a roof of leaves. I wouldn't have a plate different in the whole camp."

"Nor would I," said Adam.

She looked across at the mountain-panorama, for, though stationary, it was also forever changing, and the light of intense and burning noon was different from the humid veil of morning.

"And yonder goes a sail," she tacked to the end of her mountain-observations.

"Heaven speed it!" responded Adam, carrying his cup for a second filling to the coffee-pot on the stove. "Will ye have a drop more?"

"Indeed, yes. I don't know how many drops more I shall drink. We get so fierce and reckless about our victuals. Will it be the spirit of the old counterfeiters who used to inhabit this island entering into us?" suggested Eva, using the English-Canadian idiom of the western provinces.

"Without doot. It was their custom never to let a body leave this strond alive, and they can only hairm us by making us eat oursels to death."

"Nearly a hundred years ago, wasn't it, they lived here and made counterfeit money and drew silly folks in to buy it of them? When I hear the rocks all over this island sounding hollow like muffled drumming under our feet, I scare myself thinking that gang may be hid hereabouts yet and may come and peep into the tent some night."

"Behind them all the army of bones they drowned in Magog watther or buried in the island," laughed Adam. "It's not for a few old ghosts we'd take up our pans and kettles and move out of the Gairden of Eden. I'll keep you safe from the counterfeiters, my darling, never fear."

"You said heaven speed that sail yonder; but the man has taken it down and is rowing in here."

"Then he's an impudent loon. Who asked him?"

"The sight of our tent, very likely. And maybe it will be some friend of ours, stopping at the Magog House. He wears a white helmet-hat; and isn't that a yachting-suit of white flannel?"

"He comes clothed as an angel of light," said Adam.

They both watched the figure and the boat growing larger in perspective. Features formed in the blur under the rower's hat; his individuality sprung suddenly from a shape which a moment ago might have been any man's.

"Oh, Adam, it will be Louis Satanette from Toronto," exclaimed Eva.

"And what's a Toronto man doing away up on Lake Magog?"

"What will a Glasgow man be doing away off here on Lake Magog?"

"Camping with his wife, and getting more religion than ever was taught in the creeds."

"I'm not so sure of that, then."

"Because I don't love a Frenchman?"

"A French-Canadian. And a member of Parliament, too. Think of that at his age! They say in Toronto he is one of the most promising men in the provinces."

"Can he spear a salmon with a gaff, and does he know a pairch from a lunge? And he couldn't be a Macgregor, anyhow, if he was first man in Canada."

Eva laughed, and, forming her lips into a kiss, slyly impressed the same upon the air, as if it could reach Adam through some invisible pneumatic tube. He was not ashamed to make a return in kind; and, the boat being now within their bay, they went down to the sand to meet it.

II. FORBIDDEN FRUIT

In spotless procession the days moved along until that morning on which Adam dreamed his dream. He waked up trembling with joy and feeling the tears run down his face. His watch ticked like the beating of a pulse under his pillow, and he kept time to its rhythm with whispered words no human ear would ever hear him utter with such rapture.

He had dreamed of breasting oceans and groping through darkness after his wife until he was ready to die. Then, while he lay helpless, she came to him and lifted him up in her arms. There was perfect and unearthly union between them. His happiness became awful. He woke up shaken by it as by a hand of infinite power.

Instead of turning toward her, he was still. Such experiences cannot be told. The tongue falters and words limp when we try to repeat them to the one beloved. A divine shame keeps us silent. Perhaps the glory of that perfect love puts a halo around our common thoughts and actions for days afterward, but no man or woman can fitly say, "I was in heaven with you, my other soul, and the gladness was so mighty that I cried helplessly long after I woke."

Adam kept his sleeve across his eyes. He had risked his life in many an adventure without changing a pulse-beat, but now he was an infant in the grasp of emotion.

When at last he cast a furtive glance at Eva's cot, she was not there. She often slipped out in the early morning to drench herself with dew. Once he had discovered her stooping on the sand, washing soiled clothes in the lake. She clapped and rubbed the garments between soap and her little fists. The sun was just coming up in the far northeast. Shapes of mist gyrated slowly upward in the distance, and all the morning birds were rushing about, full of eager business. Eva stopped her humming song when she saw him, and laughed over her unusual employment. The first time she ever washed clothes in her life she wanted to have Magog for her tub and accomplish the labor on a vast and princess-like scale. Adam helped her spread the wet things on bushes, and they both marvelled at the bleached dazzle which the sun gave to those garments.

He did not move from the cot, hoping awhile that she might come in, dew-footed, and yet kiss him. That clear shining of the face which one sometimes observes in pure-minded devotees, or in young mothers over their firstborn, gave him a look of nobility in the pallid shadow of the tent.

He thought of all their days on the island, and, incidentally, of Louis Satanette's frequent comings. The Frenchman was a beautiful, versatile fellow. He sailed a boat, he swam, he fished knowingly, he sang like an angel, leaning his head back against a tree to let the moonlight touch up his ivory face and silky moustache and eyebrows. He had firm, marble-white fingers, nicely veined, on which reckless exposure to sun and wind had no effect, and the kindliest blue eyes that ever beamed equal esteem upon man and woman. Sometimes this Satanette came in a blue-flannel suit, the collar turned well back from the throat, and in a broad straw hat wound with pink and white tarlatan. He looked like a flower,—if any flower ever expressed along with its beauty the powerful nerve of manliness.

Frequently he sailed out from Magog House and stayed all night on the island, slinging his own hammock between trees. Then he and Adam rose early and trolled for lunge in deep water under the cliff. In the afternoon they all plunged into the lake, Eva swimming like a cardinal-flower afloat. Adam was careful to keep near her, and finally to help her into the boat, where she sat with her scarlet bathing-dress shining in the sun and her drenched hair curling in an arch around her face.

All these days flashed before Adam while he put a slow foot out on the tent-rug.

There was nobody about the camp when he had made his morning toilet and unclosed the tent-flaps, so he built a fire in the stove, hung the bedding to sun, and set out the cots. A blueness which was not humid filtered itself through the air everywhere, and fold upon fold of it seemed rising from invisible censers on the mainland.

Eva hailed him from the lake. She came rowing across the sun's track. The water was fresh and blue, glittering like millions of alternately dull and burnished scales.