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Page 22
"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?"
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