Anne's House of Dreams (8 page)

‘Captain Jim is certainly splendid,’ agreed Anne cordially.

‘Captain Jim is a good man, but he’s kind of vexing in one way. You
can’t
make him mad. I’ve tried for twenty years and he just keeps on being placid. It does sort of rile me. And I s’pose the woman he should have married got a man who went into tantrums twice a day.’

‘Who was she?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, dearie. I never remember of Captain Jim making up to anybody. He was edging on old as far as my memory goes. He’s seventy-six, you know. I never heard any reason for his staying a bachelor, but there must be one, believe
me
. He sailed all his life till five years ago, and there’s no corner of the earth he hasn’t poked his nose into. He and Elizabeth Russell were great cronies, all their lives, but they never had any notion of sweet-hearting. Elizabeth never married, though she had plenty of chances. She was a great beauty when she was young. The year the Prince of Wales came to the Island she was visiting her uncle in Charlottetown and he was a Government official, and so she got invited to the great ball. She was the prettiest girl there, and the Prince danced with her, and all the other women he didn’t dance with were furious about it, because their social standing was higher than hers and they said he shouldn’t have passed them over. Elizabeth was always very proud of that dance. Mean folks said that was why she never married – she couldn’t put up with an ordinary man after dancing with a prince. But that wasn’t so. She told me the reason once – it was because she had such a temper that she was afraid she couldn’t live peaceably with any man. She
had
an awful temper – she used to have to go upstairs and bite pieces out of her bureau to keep it down by times. But I told her that wasn’t any reason for not marrying if she wanted to. There’s no reason why we should let the men have a monopoly of temper, is there, Mrs Blythe, dearie?’

‘I’ve a bit of temper myself,’ sighed Anne.

‘It’s well you have, dearie. You won’t be half so likely to be trodden on, believe
me
! My, how that golden glow of yours is blooming! Your garden looks fine. Poor Elizabeth always took such care of it.’

‘I love it,’ said Anne. ‘I’m glad it’s so full of old-fashioned flowers. Speaking of gardening, we want to get a man to dig up that little lot beyond the fir-grove and set it out with strawberry plants for us. Gilbert is so busy he will never get time for it this fall. Do you know anyone we can get?’

‘Well, Henry Hammond up at the Glen goes out doing jobs like that. He’ll do, maybe. He’s always a heap more interested in his wages than in his work, just like a man, and he’s so slow in the uptake that he stands still for five minutes before it dawns on him that he’s stopped. His father threw a stump at him when he was small. Nice gentle missile, wasn’t it? So like a man! Course, the boy never got over it. But he’s the only one I can recommend at all. He painted my house for me last spring. It looks real nice now, don’t you think?’

Anne was saved by the clock striking five.

‘Lord, is it that late!’ exclaimed Miss Cornelia. ‘How time does slip by when you’re enjoying yourself! Well, I must betake myself home.’

‘No, indeed! You are going to stay and have tea with us,’ said Anne eagerly.

‘Are you asking me because you think you ought to, or because you really want to?’ demanded Miss Cornelia.

‘Because I really want to.’

‘Then I’ll stay.
You
belong to the race that knows Joseph.’

‘I know we are going to be friends,’ said Anne, with the smile that only they of the household of faith ever saw.

‘Yes, we are, dearie. Thank goodness, we can choose our friends. We have to take our relatives as they are, and be thankful if there are no penitentiary birds among them. Not that I’ve many – none nearer than second cousins. I’m a kind of lonely soul, Mrs Blythe.’

There was wistful note in Miss Cornelia’s voice.

‘I wish you would call me Anne,’ exclaimed Anne impulsively. ‘It would seem more
homey
. Every one in Four Winds, except my husband, calls me Mrs Blythe, and it makes me feel like a stranger. Do you know that your name is very near being the one I yearned after when I was a child? I hated “Anne” and I called myself “Cordelia” in imagination.’

‘I like Anne. It was my mother’s name. Old-fashioned names are the best and sweetest in my opinion. If you’re going to get tea you might send the young doctor to talk to me. He’s been lying on the sofa in that office ever since I came, laughing fit to kill over what I’ve been saying.’

‘How did you know?’ cried Anne, too aghast at this instance of Miss Cornelia’s uncanny prescience to make a polite denial.

‘I saw him sitting beside you when I came up the lane, and I know men’s tricks,’ retorted Miss Cornelia. ‘There, I’ve finished my little dress, dearie, and the eighth baby can come as soon as it pleases.’

It was late September when Anne and Gilbert were able to pay Four Winds light their promised visit. They had often planned to go, but something always occurred to prevent them. Captain Jim had ‘dropped in’ several times at the little house.

‘I don’t stand on ceremony, Mistress Blythe,’ he told Anne. ‘It’s a real pleasure to me to come here, and I’m not going to deny myself jest because you haven’t got down to see me. There oughtn’t to be no bargaining like that among the race that knows Joseph. I’ll come when I can, and you come when you can, and so long’s we have our pleasant little chat it don’t matter a mite what roofs over us.’

Captain Jim took a great fancy to Gog and Magog, who were presiding over the destinies of the hearth in the little house with as much dignity and aplomb as they had done at Patty’s Place.

‘Aren’t they the cutest little cusses?’ he would say delightedly; and he bade them greeting and farewell as gravely and invariably as he did his host and hostess. Captain Jim was not going to offend household deities by any lack of reverence and ceremony.

‘You’ve made this little house just about perfect,’ he told Anne. ‘It never was so nice before. Mistress Selwyn had your taste and she did wonders; but folks in those days didn’t have the pretty little curtains and pictures and nicknacks you have. As for Elizabeth, she lived in the past. You’ve kinder brought the future into it, so to speak. I’d be real happy even if we couldn’t talk at all, when I come here – jest to sit and look at you and your pictures and your flowers would be enough of a treat. It’s beautiful – beautiful.’

Captain Jim was a passionate worshipper of beauty. Every lovely thing heard or seen gave him a deep, subtle, inner joy that irradiated his life. He was quite keenly aware of his own lack of outward comeliness and lamented it.

‘Folks say I’m good,’ he remarked whimsically upon one occasion, ‘but I sometimes wish the Lord had made me only half as good and put the rest of it into looks. But there, I reckon He knew what He was about, as a good Captain should. Some of us have to be homely, or the purty ones – like Mistress Blythe here – wouldn’t show up so well.’

One evening Anne and Gilbert finally walked down to the Four Winds light. The day had begun sombrely in grey cloud and mist, but it had ended in a pomp of scarlet and gold. Over the western hills beyond the harbour were amber deeps and crystalline shallows, with the fire of sunset below.

The north was a mackerel sky of little, fiery golden clouds. The red light flamed on the white sails of a vessel gliding down the channel, bound to a southern port in a land of palms. Beyond her, it smote upon and incarnadined the shining white grassless faces of the sand-dunes. To the right, it fell on the old house among the willows up the brook, and gave it for a fleeting space casements more splendid than those of an old cathedral. They glowed out of its quiet and greyness like the throbbing blood-red thoughts of a vivid soul imprisoned in a dull husk of environment.

‘That old house up the brook always seems so lonely,’ said Anne. ‘I never see visitors there. Of course, its lane opens on the upper road – but I don’t think there’s much coming and going. It seems odd we’ve never met the Moores yet, when they live within fifteen minutes’ walk of us. I may have seen them in church, of course, but if so I didn’t know them. I’m sorry they are so unsociable, when they are our only near neighbours.’

‘Evidently they don’t belong to the race that knows Joseph,’ laughed Gilbert. ‘Have you ever found out who that girl was whom you thought so beautiful?’

‘No. Somehow I have never remembered to ask about her. But I’ve never seen her anywhere, so I suppose she must have been a stranger. Oh, the sun has just vanished – and there’s the light.’

As the dusk deepened, the great beacon cut swathes of light through it, sweeping in a circle over the fields and the harbour, the sand-bar and the gulf.

‘I feel as if it might catch me and whisk me leagues out to sea,’ said Anne, as one drenched them with radiance; and she felt rather relieved when they got so near the Point that they were inside the range of those dazzling, recurrent flashes.

As they turned into the little lane that led across the fields to the Point they met a man coming out of it – a man of such extraordinary appearance that for a moment they both frankly stared. He was a decidedly fine-looking person – tall, broad-shouldered, well featured, with a Roman nose and frank grey eyes; he was dressed in a prosperous farmer’s Sunday best; in so far he might have been any inhabitant of Four Winds or the Glen. But flowing over his breast nearly to his knees was a river of crinkly brown beard; and adown his back, beneath his commonplace felt hat, was a corresponding cascade of thick, wavy brown hair.

‘Anne,’ murmured Gilbert, when they were out of earshot, ‘you didn’t put what Uncle Dave calls “a little of the Scott Act” in that lemonade you gave me just before we left home, did you?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Anne, stifling her laughter, lest the retreating enigma should hear her. ‘Who in the world can he be?’

‘I don’t know; but if Captain Jim keeps apparitions like that down at this Point I’m going to carry cold iron in my pocket when I come here. He wasn’t a sailor, or one might pardon his eccentricity of appearance; he must belong to the over-harbour clans. Uncle Dave says they have several freaks over there.’

‘Uncle Dave is a little prejudiced, I think. You know all the over-harbour people who come to the Glen Church seem very nice. Oh, Gilbert, isn’t this beautiful?’

The Four Winds light was built on a spur of red sandstone cliff jutting out into the gulf. On one side, across the channel, stretched the silvery sand shore of the bar; on the other extended a long, curving beach of red cliffs, rising steeply from the pebbled coves. It was a shore that knew the magic and mystery of storm and star. There is a great solitude about such a shore. The woods are never solitary – they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery – we may only wander, awed and spellbound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only – a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of the archangels.

Anne and Gilbert found Captain Jim sitting on a bench outside the lighthouse, putting the finishing touches to a wonderful, full-rigged toy schooner. He rose and welcomed them to his abode with the gentle, unconscious courtesy that became him so well.

‘This has been a purty nice day all through, Mistress Blythe, and now, right at the last, it’s brought its best. Would you like to sit down here outside a bit, while the light lasts? I’ve just finished this bit of a plaything for my little grand-nephew, Joe, up at the Glen. After I promised to make it for him I was kinder sorry, for his mother was vexed. She’s afraid he’ll be wanting to go to sea later on and she doesn’t want the notion encouraged in him. But what could I do, Mistress Blythe? I’d
promised
him, and I think it’s sorter real dastardly to break a promise you make to a child. Come, sit down. It won’t take long to stay an hour.’

The wind was off shore, and only broke the sea’s surface into long silvery ripples, and sent sheeny shadows flying out across it, from every point and headland, like transparent wings. The dusk was hanging a curtain of violet gloom over the sand-dunes and the headlands where gulls were huddling. The sky was faintly filmed over with scarfs of silken vapour. Cloud fleets rode at anchor along the horizons. An evening star was watching over the bar.

‘Isn’t that a view worth looking at?’ said Captain Jim, with a loving, proprietary pride. ‘Nice and far from the market-place, ain’t it? No buying and selling and getting gain. You don’t have to pay anything – all that sea and sky free – “without money and without price”. There’s going to be a moonrise purty soon, too – I’m never tired of finding out what a moonrise can be over them rocks and sea and harbour. There’s a surprise in it every time.’

They had their moonrise, and watched its marvel and magic in a silence that asked nothing of the world or each other. Then they went up into the tower, and Captain Jim showed and explained the mechanism of the great light. Finally they found themselves in the dining-room, where a fire of driftwood was weaving flames of wavering, elusive, sea-born hues in the open fireplace.

‘I put this fireplace in myself,’ remarked Captain Jim. ‘The Government don’t give lighthouse-keepers such luxuries. Look at the colours that wood makes. If you’d like some driftwood for your fire, Mistress Blythe, I’ll bring you up a load some day. Sit down. I’m going to make you a cup of tea.’

Captain Jim placed a chair for Anne, having first removed therefrom a huge, orange-coloured cat and a newspaper.

‘Get down, Matey. The sofa is your place. I must put this paper away safe till I can find time to finish the story in it. It’s called
A Mad Love
. ’Tisn’t my favourite brand of fiction, but I’m reading it jest to see how long she can spin it out. It’s at the sixty-second chapter now, and the wedding ain’t any nearer than when it begun, far’s I can see. When little Joe comes I have to read him pirate yarns. Ain’t it strange how innocent little creatures like children like the blood-thirstiest stories?’