Jupiter Lights

As she entered she met Paul.

“I was coming to hunt for you. Where have you been?” He spoke with surprise.

Eve looked at him once. Then she turned away. What a change in herself! Now she understood Cicely. Now she understood – yes, she understood everything – the things she had always despised – pettiness, jealousy, impossible hopes, disgrace, shame.

“I was afraid Cicely would be alarmed,” Paul went on.

And Eve was not offended that it was Cicely of whom he was thinking. It had not yet occurred to her that he could think of her.

She went in search of Cicely, who had nothing to say to her; then, excusing herself, she retreated to her room. Here she took off her dress and began to unbraid her hair. Then the thought came to her that Paul would go to the parlor about this time, that he would play a game of chess, perhaps, with the judge; hastily repairing the disorder she had made, she rearranged the braids, felt in the rough closet for her evening shoes, put them on, and went down-stairs again with rapid step.

Cicely made no remark as she came in; Paul and the judge were playing their game, with Hollis looking on. Eve took a book and sat reading, or apparently reading, at some distance. “Oh, how abject this is! How childish, how sickening!” Anger against herself rose hotly; under its sting she felt her strength returning. She sat there as long as the others did. “I will not make a second scene by going out” (but no one had noticed her first). She answered Paul’s good-night coldly. But when she was back in her room again, when there was no more escape from its four walls until morning, then she found herself without defences, without pretexts, face to face with the fact that she loved this man, this Paul Tennant, with all her heart. It was a surprise as great as if she had suddenly become blind, or deaf, or mad – “stricken of God,” as people call it. “I am stricken. But I am not sure it is of God!” That she, no longer a girl, after all these years untouched by such feelings – that she, with her clear vision and strong will (she had always been so proud of her will), should be led captive in this way by a stranger who cared nothing for her, who did not even wish to capture – it was a sort of insanity. She paced her room to and fro as she had paced the fringe of woods. She stretched out her hands and looked at them as though they had been the hands of some one else; she struck one of them upon her bare arm; she was so humiliated that she must hurt something; that something should be herself. “If he should ever care for me, I would refuse him,” she repeated, in bitter triumph. Immediately the thought followed, “He will never care!”

“I do not love him really,” she kept repeating. “I am not well; it will pass.” But while she was saying this, there came a glow that contradicted her, a glow before whose new sway she was helpless. “Oh, I do! I loved him the first day I saw him. What is that old phrase? – I love the ground he walks on.” She buried her face in her hands.

“How strange! I am happier than I have ever been in my life before; I didn’t know that there was such happiness!” A door seemed to open, showing a way out of her trouble, a way which led to a vision of subtle sweetness – her life through the future with this passion hidden like a treasure in her heart, no one to know it, no one to suspect its existence. “As I am to be nothing to him, as I wish to be nothing to him, I shall not care whom he loves; that is nothing to me.” Upon this basis she would arrange her life.

But it is not so easy to arrange life. Almost immediately she began to suffer, a species of suffering, too, to which she was unused: trifles annoyed her like innumerable stings – she was not able to preserve her calm; as regarded anything important, she could have been herself, or so she imagined; but little things irritated her, and the days were full of little things. She rebelled against this nervousness, but she could not subdue it; and gradually the beautiful vision of her life, as she had imagined it, faded away miserably in a cloud of petty exasperations and despair. After wretched hours, unable to endure her humiliation longer, she resolved to conquer herself at any cost, to set herself free; she could not go away, because she would not leave Cicely; there was still her brother’s child; but here, on the spot, she would overcome this feeling that had taken possession of her and changed her so that she did not know herself. “I will!” she said. It was a vow; her will was the strongest force of her being.

This very will blinded her, she was too sure of it. She was in earnest about wishing and intending to win in her great battle. But she forgot the details.

These are some of the details:

The one time of day when Paul was neither at the mine nor in his office was at sunset; twice she went through a chain of reasoning to prove to herself that she had a necessary errand at that hour at one of the stores; both times she met him. She had heard Paul say that he liked to see women sew; she was no needlewoman; but presently she began to embroider an apron for Jack (with very poor success). Paul was no reader; he looked through the newspapers once a day, and when it rained very hard in the evening, and there was nothing else to do, occasionally he took up his one book; for he had but one, at least so Hollis declared; at any rate he read but one; this one was Gibbon. The only edition of the great history in the little book-store of Port aux Pins was a miserably printed copy in paper covers. But a lady bought it in spite of its blurred type.

Finally this same lady went to church. It was on a Sunday afternoon, the second service; she came in late, and took a seat in the last pew. When had Eve Bruce been to church before? Paul went once in a while. And it was when she saw his head towering above the heads of the shorter people about him, as the congregation rose to repeat the creed – it was then suddenly that the veil was lifted and she saw the truth: this was what she had come for.

She did not try to deny it, she comprehended her failure. After this she ceased to struggle, she only tried to be quiet. She lived from day to day, from hour to hour; it was a compromise. “But I shall not be here long; something will separate us; soon, perhaps in a few weeks, it will have come to an end, and then I may never see him again.” So she reasoned, passively.

About this time Cicely fell ill. The Port aux Pins doctor had at length given a name to her listlessness and her constantly increasing physical weakness; he called it nervous prostration (one of the modern titles for grief, or an aching heart).

“What do you advise?” Paul had asked.

“Take her away.”

Two days later they were living under tents at Jupiter Light.

“We cannot get off this evening; it is perfectly impossible,” the judge had declared, bewildered by Paul’s sudden decision, not knowing as yet whether he agreed with it or not, and furthermore harried by the arrival of tents, provisions, Indians, cooks, and kettles, the kettles invading even the dining-room, his especial retreat.

“Oh, we shall go; never you fear,” said Hollis, who was hard at work boxing up an iron bedstead. “At the last moment Paul will drive us all on board like a flock of sheep.”

And, at nine o’clock that night, they did embark, the judge, who had given up comprehending anything, walking desperately behind the others; Hollis, weighed down with rods and guns, and his own clothing escaping from newspapers; a man cook; a band of Indians; Porley and Jack; Eve; and, last of all, Cicely, tenderly carried in Paul’s arms. In a week the complete change, the living under canvas in the aromatic air of the pines, produced a visible effect; Cicely began to recover her lost vitality; the alarming weakness disappeared. Every day there came her letter or despatch, one of the Indians going fifteen miles for it, in a canoe; the message was always favorable, Ferdie was constantly improving. All was arranged, Paul was to go southward in July. He and Cicely had frequent talks (talks which Paul tried to make as cheerful as possible); perhaps, next winter, they should all be living together at Port aux Pins; that is, in case it should be thought best to give up Valparaiso, after all. Cicely read and re-read the letters; she always kept the last one under her dress on her heart; for the rest she floated in the canoe, and she played with Jack, who bloomed with health to that extent that he was called the Porpoise. The judge, happy in the improvement of his darling little girl, fished; snarled with Hollis; then fished again. Hollis, always attired in his black coat, showed positive genius in the matter of broiling. And Paul came and went as he was able. As he could not be absent long from the mine, he made the journey to Port aux Pins every three days, leaving Hollis in charge at the camp during his absence. One day Hollis also was obliged to go to Port aux Pins. And while he was there he attended an evening party. This entertainment he described for Cicely’s amusement upon his return. For she was the central person to them all; they gathered round her, they obeyed eagerly her slightest wish; when she laughed, they laughed also, they were so glad to see life once more animating her white little face; it was for this that Hollis prolonged his story, and quoted Shakespeare; he would have stood on his head if it would have made her smile.

A part of Hollis’s description: “So then her sister Idora started on the piano an accompaniment that went like this: Bang! la-la-la. Bang! la-la-la, and Miss Parthenia, she began singing:

‘O why-ee should the white man follow my pathLike the hound on the tiger’s track?’

And then, with her hand over her mouth, she gave us a regular Indian war-whoop.”

“How I wish I had been there!” said Cicely, with sudden laughter.

“She’ll whoop for you at any time; proud to,” continued Hollis. “Well, after the song was over, Mother Drone she sat back in her chair, and she loosened her cap-strings on the sly. Says she: ‘I hope the girls won’t see me doing this, Mr. Hollis; they think tarlatan strings tied under the chin for a widow are so sweet. I told them I’d been a widow fifteen years without ’em; but they say, now they’ve grown up, I ought to have strings for their sakes, and be more prominent. Is Idora out on the steps with Wolf Roth? Would you mind peeking? ’ So I peeked. But Wolf Roth was there alone. ‘He don’t look dangerous,’ I remarked, when I’d loped back. Says she: ‘He’d oughter, then. And he would, too, if he knew it was me he sees when he comes serenading. I tap the girls on the shoulder: ‘Girls? Wolf Roth and his guitar!’ But you might as well tap the seven sleepers! So I have to cough, and I have to glimp, and Wolf Roth – he little thinks it’s ma’am!”

“Oh, what is glimp?” said Cicely, still laughing.

“It’s showing a light through the blinds, very faint and shy,” answered Hollis.

”‘Thou know’st the mask of night is on me face,Else would a maid-en blush bepaint me cheek,’”

he quoted, gravely. “That’s about the size of it, I guess.”

Having drawn the last smile from Cicely, he went off to his tent, and presently he and the judge started for the nearest trout-brook together.

Paul came up from the beach. “There’s an Indian village two miles above here, Cicely; do you care to have a look at it? I could take you and Miss Bruce in the little canoe.”

But Cicely was tired: often now, after a sudden fit of merriment (which seemed to be a return, though infinitely fainter, of her old wild moods), she would look exhausted. “I think I will swing in the hammock,” she said.

“Will you go, then, Miss Bruce?” Paul asked, carelessly.

“Thanks; I have something to do.”

Half an hour later, Paul having gone off by himself, she was sitting on a fallen tree on the shore, at some distance from the tents, when his canoe glided suddenly into view, coming round a near point; he beached it and sprang ashore.

“You surely have not had time to go to that village?” she said, rising.

“Did I say I was going alone? Apparently what you had to do was not so very important,” he added, smiling.

“Yes, I was occupied,” she answered.

“We can go still, if you like; there is time.”

“Thank you; – no.”

Paul gave her a look. She fancied that she saw in it regret. “Is it very curious – your village? Perhaps it would be amusing, after all.”

He helped her into the canoe, and the next moment they were gliding up the lake. The village was a temporary one, twenty or thirty wigwams in a grove. Only the women and children were at home, the sweet-voiced young squaws in their calico skirts and blankets, the queer little mummy-like pappooses, the half-naked children. They brought out bows and arrows to sell, agates which they had found on the beach, Indian sugar in little birch-bark boxes, quaintly ornamented.

“Tell them to gather some bluebells for me,” said Eve. Her face had an expression of joyousness; every now and then she laughed like a merry girl.

Paul repeated her request in the Chippewa tongue, and immediately all the black-eyed children sallied forth, returning with large bunches of the fragile-stemmed flowers, so that Eve’s hands were full. She lingered, sitting on the side of an old canoe; she distributed all the small coins she had. Finally they were afloat again; she wondered who had suggested it. “There’s a gleam already,” she said, as they passed Jupiter Light. “Some day I should like to go out there.”

“I can take you now,” Paul answered. And he sent the canoe flying towards the reef.

She had made no protest. “He wished to go,” she said to herself, contentedly.

The distance was greater than she had supposed; it was twilight when they reached the miniature beach.

“Shall we make them let us in, and climb up to the top?” suggested Paul.

She laughed. “No; better not.”

She looked up at the tower. Paul, standing beside her, his arms folded, his head thrown back, was looking up also. “I can’t see the least light from here,” he said. Then again, “Don’t you want to go up?”

“Well – if you like.”

It was dark within; a man came down with a lantern, and preceded them up the narrow winding stairway. When they reached the top they could see nothing but the interior of the little room; so down they came again, without even saying the usual things: about the probable queerness of life in such a place; and whether any one could really like it; and that some persons might be found who would consider it an ideal residence and never wish to come away. Though their stay had been so short, their going up so aimless, the expedition did not seem to Eve at all stupid; in her eyes it had the air of an exciting adventure.

“They will be wondering where we are,” said Paul, as he turned the canoe homeward. She did not answer, it was sweet to her to sit there in silence, and feel the light craft dart forward through the darkness under his strong strokes. Who were “they"? Why should “they” wonder? Paul too said nothing. Unconsciously she believed that he shared her mood.

When they reached the camp he helped her out. “I hope you are not too tired? At last I can have the credit of doing something that has pleased you; I saw how much you wanted to go.”

He saw how much she had wanted to go! – that spoiled all. Anger filled her heart to suffocation.

Two hours later she stood looking from her tent for a moment. Cicely and Jack, with whom she shared it, were asleep, and she herself was wrapped in a blue dressing-gown over her delicate night-dress, her hair in long braids hanging down her back. The judge and Hollis had gone to bed, the Indians were asleep under their own tent; all was still, save the regular wash of the water on the beach. By the dying light of the camp-fire she could make out a figure – Paul, sitting alone beside one of their rough tables, with his elbow upon it, his head supported by his hand. Something in his attitude struck her, and reasonlessly, silently, her anger against him vanished, and its place was filled by a great tenderness. What was he thinking of? She did not know; she only knew one thing – that she loved him. After looking at him for some minutes she dropped the flap of the tent and stole to bed, where immediately she began to imagine what she might say to him if she were out there, and what he might reply; her remarks should be very original, touching, or brilliant; and he would be duly impressed, and would gradually show more interest. And then, when he began to advance, she would withdraw. So at last she fell asleep.

Meanwhile, outside by the dying fire, what was Paul Tennant thinking of? His Clay County iron. He had had another offer, and this project was one in which he should himself have a share. But could he accept it? Could he pledge himself to advance the money required? He had only his salary at present, all his savings having gone to Valparaiso; there were Ferdie’s expenses to think of, and Ferdie’s wife, that little wife so unreasonable and so sweet, she too must lack nothing. It grew towards midnight; still he sat there pondering, adding figures mentally, calculating. The bird which had so insistently cried “Whip-po-Will,” “Whip-po-Will,” had ceased its song; there came from a distance, twice, the laugh of a loon; Jupiter Light went on flashing its gleam regularly over the lake.

The man by the fire never once thought of Eve Bruce.

XVII

PAUL’S arrangements, as regarded Cicely, had been excellent. But an hour arrived when the excellence suddenly became of no avail; for Cicely’s mood changed. When the change had taken place, nothing that any of these persons, who were devoting themselves to her, could do or say, weighed with her for one instant. She came from her tent one morning, and said, “Grandpa, please come down to the shore for a moment.” She led the way, and the judge followed her. When they reached the beach the moon was rising, its narrow golden path crossed the lake to their feet. “I can’t stay here any longer, grandpa.”

“We will go back to Port aux Pins, then, dearie; though it seems a pity, you have been so well here.”

“I don’t mean Port aux Pins; I am going to Romney.”

“But I thought Ferdie had written to you not to come? Tennant certainly said so, he assured me that Ferdie had written, urging you to stay here; he has no right to deceive me in that way – Paul Tennant; it’s outrageous!”

“Ferdie did write. And he didn’t urge me to stay, he commanded me.”

“Then you must obey him,” said the judge.

“No; I must disobey him.” She stood looking absently at the water. “He has some reason.”

“Of course he has – an excellent one; he wants to keep you out of the mess of a long illness – you and Jack.”

“I wish you would never mention Jack to me again.”

“My dear little girl, – not mention Jack? Why, how can we talk at all, without mentioning baby?”

“You and Eve keep bringing him into every conversation, because you think it will have an influence – make me give up Ferdie. Nothing will make me give up Ferdie. So you need not talk of baby any more.”

The judge looked at her with eyes of despair.

Cicely went on. “No; it is not his illness that made Ferdie tell me to stay here. He has some other reason. And I am afraid.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I don’t know, – that is the worst of it! Since his letter, I have imagined everything. I cannot bear it any longer; you must take me to him to-morrow, or I shall start by myself; I could easily do it, I could outwit you twenty times over.”

“Outwit? You talk in that way to me?”

Cicely watched him as his face quivered, all his features seeming to shrink together for an instant. “I suppose I seem selfish, grandpa.” She threw out her hands with sudden passion. “I don’t want to be, I don’t mean to be! It is you who are keeping me here. Can’t you see that I must go? Can’t you?”

“Why no, I can’t,” said the old man, terrified by her vehemence.

“There’s no use talking, then.” She left him, and went back through the woods towards the tents.

The judge came up from the beach alone. Hollis, who was sitting by the fire, noted his desolate face. “Euchre?” he proposed, good-naturedly. (He called it “yuke.”) But the judge neither saw him nor heard him.

As Cicely reached her tent, she met Eve coming out, with Jack in her arms. She seized the child, felt of his feet and knees, and then, holding him tightly, she carried him to the fire, where she seated herself on a bench. Eve came also, and stood beside the fire. After a moment the judge seated himself humbly on the other end of the bench which held his grandchild. There was a pause, broken only by the crackling of the flame. Then Cicely said, with a dry little laugh, “You had better go to your tent, Mr. Hollis. You need not take part in this family quarrel.”

“Quarrel!” replied Hollis, cheerily. “Who could quarrel with you, Mrs. Morrison? Might as well quarrel with a bobolink.” No one answered him. “Don’t know as you’ve ever seen a bobolink?” he went on, rather anxiously. “I assure you – lively and magnificent!”

“It is a pity you are so devoted to Paul,” remarked Cicely, looking at him.

“Devoted? Well, now, I never thought I should come to that,” said Hollis, with a grin of embarrassment, kicking the brands of the fire apart with, his boot.

“Because if you weren’t, I might take you into my confidence – I need some one; I want to run away from grandpa and Eve.”

“Oh, I dare say,” said Hollis, jocularly. But his eyes happening to fall first upon Eve, then upon the judge, he grew suddenly disturbed. “Why don’t you take Paul?” he suggested, still trying to be jocular. “He is a better helper than I am.”

“Paul is my head jailer,” answered Cicely. “Grandpa and Eve are only his assistants.”

The judge covered his face with his hand. Hollis saw that he was suffering acutely. “Paul had better come and defend himself,” he said, still clinging to his jocosity; “I am going to get him.” And he started towards Paul’s tent with long swinging strides, like the lope of an Indian.

“Cicely,” said Eve, coming to the bench, “I will take you to Romney, if that is what you want; we will start to-morrow.”

“Saul among the prophets!” answered Cicely, cynically. “Are you planning to escape from me with Jack, as I am planning to escape from grandpa?”

“I am not planning anything; I only want to help you.”

Cicely looked at her. “Curiously enough, Eve, I believe you. I don’t know what has changed you, but I believe you.”

The judge looked up; the two women held each other’s hands. The judge left his seat and hurried away.

He arrived at Paul’s tent breathless. The hanging lamp within illuminated a rude table which held ink and paper; Paul had evidently stopped in the midst of his writing, for he still held his pen in his hand.

“I was saying to Paul that he really ought to come out now and talk to the ladies, instead of crooking his back over that writing,” said Hollis.

But the judge waved him aside. “For God’s sake, Tennant, come out, and see what you can do with Cicely! She is determined to go to that murdering brother of yours in spite of – “

“Hold up, if you please, about my brother,” said Paul, putting down his pen.

“And Eve is abetting her; – says she will take her to-morrow.”

“Not Miss Bruce? What has made her change so? – confound her!”

The judge had already started to lead the way back. But Hollis, who was behind, touched Paul’s arm. “I say, don’t confound her too much, Paul,” he said, in a low tone. “She is a remarkably clever girl. And she thinks a lot of you.”

“Sorry for her, then,” answered Paul, going out. As Hollis still kept up with him, he added, “How do you know she does?”

“Because I like her myself,” answered Hollis, bravely. “When you’re that way, you know, you can always tell.”

He fell behind. Paul went on alone.

When he reached the camp-fire, Cicely looked up. “Oh, you’ve come!”

“Yes.”

“There are two of us now. Eve is on my side.”

“So I have heard.” He went to Eve, took her arm, and led her away almost by force to the shadow at some distance from the fire. “What in the world has made you change so?” he said. “Do you know – it’s abject.”

“Yes, it’s abject,” Eve answered. She could see him looking at her in the dusky darkness; she had never been looked at in such a way before. “It’s brave, too,” she added, trying to keep back the tears.