Anne's House of Dreams
glow of light. And she must live on here--petting and soothing Dick,
pinching and saving for a mere existence, while I spend my life longing
vainly for her, and debarred, by that very fact, from even giving her
the little help a friend might. I walked the shore last night, almost
till dawn, and thrashed it all out over and over again. And yet, in
spite of everything, I can’t find it in my heart to be sorry that I
came to Four Winds. It seems to me that, bad as everything is, it
would be still worse never to have known Leslie. It’s burning, searing
pain to love her and leave her--but not to have loved her is
unthinkable. I suppose all this sounds very crazy--all these terrible
emotions always do sound foolish when we put them into our inadequate
words. They are not meant to be spoken--only felt and endured. I
shouldn’t have spoken--but it has helped--some. At least, it has given
me strength to go away respectably tomorrow morning, without making a
scene. You’ll write me now and then, won’t you, Mrs. Blythe, and give
me what news there is to give of her?”
“Yes,” said Anne. “Oh, I’m so sorry you are going--we’ll miss you
so--we’ve all been such friends! If it were not for this you could
come back other summers. Perhaps, even yet--by-and-by--when you’ve
forgotten, perhaps--”
“I shall never forget--and I shall never come back to Four Winds,” said
Owen briefly.
Silence and twilight fell over the garden. Far away the sea was
lapping gently and monotonously on the bar. The wind of evening in the
poplars sounded like some sad, weird, old rune--some broken dream of
old memories. A slender shapely young aspen rose up before them
against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky,
which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, elfin
loveliness.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” said Owen, pointing to it with the air of a man
who puts a certain conversation behind him.
“It’s so beautiful that it hurts me,” said Anne softly. “Perfect
things like that always did hurt me--I remember I called it ‘the queer
ache’ when I was a child. What is the reason that pain like this seems
inseparable from perfection? Is it the pain of finality--when we
realize that there can be nothing beyond but retrogression?”
“Perhaps,” said Owen dreamily, “it is the prisoned infinite in us
calling out to its kindred infinite as expressed in that visible
perfection.”
“You seem to have a cold in the head. Better rub some tallow on your
nose when you go to bed,” said Miss Cornelia, who had come in through
the little gate between the firs in time to catch Owen’s last remark.
Miss Cornelia liked Owen; but it was a matter of principle with her to
visit any “high-falutin” language from a man with a snub.
Miss Cornelia personated the comedy that ever peeps around the corner
at the tragedy of life. Anne, whose nerves had been rather strained,
laughed hysterically, and even Owen smiled. Certainly, sentiment and
passion had a way of shrinking out of sight in Miss Cornelia’s
presence. And yet to Anne nothing seemed quite as hopeless and dark
and painful as it had seemed a few moments before. But sleep was far
from her eyes that night.
CHAPTER 27
ON THE SAND BAR
Owen Ford left Four Winds the next morning. In the evening Anne went
over to see Leslie, but found nobody. The house was locked and there
was no light in any window. It looked like a home left soulless.
Leslie did not run over on the following day--which Anne thought a bad
sign.
Gilbert having occasion to go in the evening to the fishing cove, Anne
drove with him to the Point, intending to stay awhile with Captain Jim.
But the great light, cutting its swathes through the fog of the autumn
evening, was in care of Alec Boyd and Captain Jim was away.
“What will you do?” asked Gilbert. “Come with me?”
“I don’t want to go to the cove--but I’ll go over the channel with you,
and roam about on the sand shore till you come back. The rock shore is
too slippery and grim tonight.”
Alone on the sands of the bar Anne gave herself up to the eerie charm
of the night. It was warm for September, and the late afternoon had
been very foggy; but a full moon had in part lessened the fog and
transformed the harbor and the gulf and the surrounding shores into a
strange, fantastic, unreal world of pale silver mist, through which
everything loomed phantom-like. Captain Josiah Crawford’s black
schooner sailing down the channel, laden with potatoes for Bluenose
ports, was a spectral ship bound for a far uncharted land, ever
receding, never to be reached. The calls of unseen gulls overhead were
the cries of the souls of doomed seamen. The little curls of foam that
blew across the sand were elfin things stealing up from the sea-caves.
The big, round-shouldered sand-dunes were the sleeping giants of some
old northern tale. The lights that glimmered palely across the harbor
were the delusive beacons on some coast of fairyland. Anne pleased
herself with a hundred fancies as she wandered through the mist. It
was delightful--romantic--mysterious to be roaming here alone on this
enchanted shore.
But was she alone? Something loomed in the mist before her--took shape
and form--suddenly moved towards her across the wave-rippled sand.
“Leslie!” exclaimed Anne in amazement. “Whatever are you
doing--HERE--tonight?”
“If it comes to that, whatever are YOU doing here?” said Leslie, trying
to laugh. The effort was a failure. She looked very pale and tired;
but the love locks under her scarlet cap were curling about her face
and eyes like little sparkling rings of gold.
“I’m waiting for Gilbert--he’s over at the Cove. I intended to stay at
the light, but Captain Jim is away.”
“Well, _I_ came here because I wanted to walk--and walk--and WALK,”
said Leslie restlessly. “I couldn’t on the rock shore--the tide was
too high and the rocks prisoned me. I had to come here--or I should
have gone mad, I think. I rowed myself over the channel in Captain
Jim’s flat. I’ve been here for an hour. Come--come--let us walk. I
can’t stand still. Oh, Anne!”
“Leslie, dearest, what is the trouble?” asked Anne, though she knew too
well already.
“I can’t tell you--don’t ask me. I wouldn’t mind your knowing--I wish
you did know--but I can’t tell you--I can’t tell anyone. I’ve been
such a fool, Anne--and oh, it hurts so terribly to be a fool. There’s
nothing so painful in the world.”
She laughed bitterly. Anne slipped her arm around her.
“Leslie, is it that you have learned to care for Mr. Ford?”
Leslie turned herself about passionately.
“How did you know?” she cried. “Anne, how did you know? Oh, is it
written in my face for everyone to see? Is it as plain as that?”
“No, no. I--I can’t tell you how I knew. It just came into my mind,
somehow. Leslie, don’t look at me like that!”
“Do you despise me?” demanded Leslie in a fierce, low tone. “Do you
think I’m wicked--unwomanly? Or do you think I’m just plain fool?”
“I don’t think you any of those things. Come, dear, let’s just talk it
over sensibly, as we might talk over any other of the great crises of
life. You’ve been brooding over it and let yourself drift into a
morbid view of it. You know you have a little tendency to do that
about everything that goes wrong, and you promised me that you would
fight against it.”
“But--oh, it’s so--so shameful,” murmured Leslie. “To love
him--unsought--and when I’m not free to love anybody.”
“There’s nothing shameful about it. But I’m very sorry that you have
learned to care for Owen, because, as things are, it will only make you
more unhappy.”
“I didn’t LEARN to care,” said Leslie, walking on and speaking
passionately. “If it had been like that I could have prevented it. I
never dreamed of such a thing until that day, a week ago, when he told
me he had finished his book and must soon go away. Then--then I knew.
I felt as if someone had struck me a terrible blow. I didn’t say
anything--I couldn’t speak--but I don’t know what I looked like. I’m
so afraid my face betrayed me. Oh, I would die of shame if I thought
he knew--or suspected.”
Anne was miserably silent, hampered by her deductions from her
conversation with Owen. Leslie went on feverishly, as if she found
relief in speech.
“I was so happy all this summer, Anne--happier than I ever was in my
life. I thought it was because everything had been made clear between
you and me, and that it was our friendship which made life seem so
beautiful and full once more. And it WAS, in part--but not all--oh,
not nearly all. I know now why everything was so different. And now
it’s all over--and he has gone. How can I live, Anne? When I turned
back into the house this morning after he had gone the solitude struck
me like a blow in the face.”
“It won’t seem so hard by and by, dear,” said Anne, who always felt the
pain of her friends so keenly that she could not speak easy, fluent
words of comforting. Besides, she remembered how well-meant speeches
had hurt her in her own sorrow and was afraid.
“Oh, it seems to me it will grow harder all the time,” said Leslie
miserably. “I’ve nothing to look forward to. Morning will come after
morning--and he will not come back--he will never come back. Oh, when
I think that I will never see him again I feel as if a great brutal
hand had twisted itself among my heartstrings, and was wrenching them.
Once, long ago, I dreamed of love--and I thought it must be
beautiful--and NOW--its like THIS. When he went away yesterday morning
he was so cold and indifferent. He said ‘Good-bye, Mrs. Moore’ in the
coldest tone in the world--as if we had not even been friends--as if I
meant absolutely nothing to him. I know I don’t--I didn’t want him to
care--but he MIGHT have been a little kinder.”
“Oh, I wish Gilbert would come,” thought Anne. She was racked between
her sympathy for Leslie and the necessity of avoiding anything that
would betray Owen’s confidence. She knew why his good-bye had been so
cold--why it could not have the cordiality that their good-comradeship
demanded--but she could not tell Leslie.
“I couldn’t help it, Anne--I couldn’t help it,” said poor Leslie.
“I know that.”
“Do you blame me so very much?”
“I don’t blame you at all.”
“And you won’t--you won’t tell Gilbert?”
“Leslie! Do you think I would do such a thing?”
“Oh, I don’t know--you and Gilbert are such CHUMS. I don’t see how you
could help telling him everything.”
“Everything about my own concerns--yes. But not my friends’ secrets.”
“I couldn’t have HIM know. But I’m glad YOU know. I would feel guilty
if there were anything I was ashamed to tell you. I hope Miss Cornelia
won’t find out. Sometimes I feel as if those terrible, kind brown eyes
of hers read my very soul. Oh, I wish this mist would never lift--I
wish I could just stay in it forever, hidden away from every living
being. I don’t see how I can go on with life. This summer has been so
full. I never was lonely for a moment. Before Owen came there used to
be horrible moments--when I had been with you and Gilbert--and then had
to leave you. You two would walk away together and I would walk away
ALONE. After Owen came he was always there to walk home with me--we
would laugh and talk as you and Gilbert were doing--there were no more
lonely, envious moments for me. And NOW! Oh, yes, I’ve been a fool.
Let’s have done talking about my folly. I’ll never bore you with it
again.”
“Here is Gilbert, and you are coming back with us,” said Anne, who had
no intention of leaving Leslie to wander alone on the sand-bar on such
a night and in such a mood. “There’s plenty of room in our boat for
three, and we’ll tie the flat on behind.”