Anne's House of Dreams
condemning a woman for her dress. I’m only too thankful when her
husband isn’t too mean and miserly to allow it. Not that I bother much
with dress myself. Women just dress to please the men, and I’d never
stoop to THAT. I have had a real placid, comfortable life, dearie, and
it’s just because I never cared a cent what the men thought.”
“Why do you hate the men so, Miss Bryant?”
“Lord, dearie, I don’t hate them. They aren’t worth it. I just sort
of despise them. I think I’ll like YOUR husband if he keeps on as he
has begun. But apart from him about the only men in the world I’ve
much use for are the old doctor and Captain Jim.”
“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 a wistful note in Miss Cornelia’s voice.
“I wish you would call me Anne,” exclaimed Anne impulsively. “It would
seem more HOMEY. Everyone 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.”
CHAPTER 9
AN EVENING AT FOUR WINDS POINT
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 roof’s 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 gray cloud and mist, but it had
ended in a pomp of scarlet and gold. Over the western hills beyond the
harbor 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 grayness 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 neighbors.”
“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 harbor, the sandbar 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 gray 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 here. “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-harbor clans. Uncle Dave says they have
several freaks over there.”
“Uncle Dave is a little prejudiced, I think. You know all the
over-harbor 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 sand-stone 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