Anne's House of Dreams (12 page)

Leslie came over to the house of dreams one frosty night, when moonlit mists were hanging over the harbour and curling like silver ribbons along the seaward glens. She looked as if she repented coming when Gilbert answered her knock; but Anne flew past him, pounced on her, and drew her in.

‘I’m so glad you picked tonight for a call,’ she said gaily. ‘I made up a lot of extra good fudge this afternoon and we want some one to help us eat it – before the fire – while we tell stories. Perhaps Captain Jim will drop in, too. This is his night.’

‘No. Captain Jim is over home,’ said Leslie. ‘He – he made me come here,’ she added, half defiantly.

‘I’ll say a thank-you to him for that when I see him,’ said Anne, pulling easy chairs before the fire.

‘Oh, I don’t mean that I didn’t want to come,’ protested Leslie, flushing a little. ‘I – I’ve been thinking of coming – but it isn’t always easy for me to get away.’

‘Of course it must be hard for you to leave Mr Moore,’ said Anne, in a matter-of-fact tone. She had decided that it would be best to mention Dick Moore occasionally as an accepted fact, and not give undue morbidness to the subject by avoiding it. She was right, for Leslie’s air of constraint suddenly vanished. Evidently she had been wondering how much Anne knew of the conditions of her life and was relieved that no explanations were needed. She allowed her cap and jacket to be taken, and sat down with a girlish snuggle in the big arm-chair by Magog. She was dressed prettily and carefully, with the customary touch of colour in the scarlet geranium at her white throat. Her beautiful hair gleamed like molten gold in the warm firelight. Her sea-blue eyes were full of soft laughter and allurement. For the moment, under the influence of the little house of dreams, she was a girl again – a girl forgetful of the past and its bitterness. The atmosphere of the many loves that had sanctified the little house was all about her; the companionship of two healthy, happy young folks of her own generation encircled her; she felt and yielded to the magic of her surroundings – Miss Cornelia and Captain Jim would scarcely have recognized her; Anne found it hard to believe that this was the cold, unresponsive woman she had met on the shore – this animated girl who talked and listened with the eagerness of a starved soul. And how hungrily Leslie’s eyes looked at the bookcases between the windows!

‘Our library isn’t very extensive,’ said Anne, ‘but every book in it is a
friend
. We’ve picked our books up through the years, here and there, never buying one until we had first read it and knew that it belonged to the race of Joseph.’

Leslie laughed – beautiful laughter that seemed akin to all the mirth that had echoed through the little house in the vanished years.

‘I have a few books of Father’s – not many,’ she said. ‘I’ve read them until I know them almost by heart. I don’t get many books. There’s a circulating library at the Glen store – but I don’t think the committee who pick the books for Mr Parker know what books are of Joseph’s race – or perhaps they don’t care. It was so seldom I got one I really liked that I gave up getting any.’

‘I hope you’ll look on our bookshelves as your own,’ said Anne. ‘You are entirely and whole-heartedly welcome to the loan of any book on them.’

‘You are setting a feast of fat things before me,’ said Leslie, joyously. Then, as the clock struck ten, she rose, half unwillingly.

‘I must go. I didn’t realize it was so late. Captain Jim is always saying it doesn’t take long to stay an hour. But I’ve stayed two – and oh, but I’ve enjoyed them,’ she added frankly.

‘Come often,’ said Anne and Gilbert. They had risen and stood together in the firelight’s glow. Leslie looked at them – youthful, hopeful, happy, typifying all she had missed and must for ever miss. The light went out of her face and eyes; the girl vanished; it was the sorrowful, cheated woman who answered the invitation almost coldly and got herself away with a pitiful haste.

Anne watched her until she was lost in the shadows of the chill and misty night. Then she turned slowly back to the glow of her own radiant hearth stone.

‘Isn’t she lovely, Gilbert? Her hair fascinates me. Miss Cornelia says it reaches to her feet. Ruby Gillis had beautiful hair – but Leslie’s is
alive
– every thread of it is living gold.’

‘She is very beautiful,’ agreed Gilbert, so heartily that Anne almost wished he were a
little
less enthusiastic.

‘Gilbert, would you like my hair better if it were like Leslie’s?’ she asked wistfully.

‘I wouldn’t have your hair any colour but just what it is for the world,’ said Gilbert, with one or two convincing accompaniments. ‘You wouldn’t be
Anne
if you had golden hair – or hair of any colour but –’

‘Red,’ said Anne, with gloomy satisfaction.

‘Yes, red – to give warmth to that milk-white skin and those shining grey-green eyes of yours. Golden hair wouldn’t suit you at all, Queen Anne –
my
Queen Anne – queen of my heart and life and home.’

‘Then you may admire Leslie’s all you like,’ said Anne magnanimously.

One evening, a week later, Anne decided to run over the fields to the house up the brook for an informal call. It was an evening of grey fog that had crept in from the gulf, swathed the harbour, filled the glens and valleys, and clung heavily to the autumnal meadows. Through it the sea sobbed and shuddered. Anne saw Four Winds in a new aspect, and found it weird and mysterious and fascinating; but it also gave her a little feeling of loneliness. Gilbert was away and would be away until the morrow, attending a medical pow-wow in Charlottetown. Anne longed for an hour of fellowship with some girl friend. Captain Jim and Miss Cornelia were ‘good fellows’ each, in their own way but youth yearned to youth.

‘If only Diana or Phil or Pris or Stella could drop in for a chat,’ she said to herself, ‘how delightful it would be! This is such a
ghostly
night. I’m sure all the ships that ever sailed out of Four Winds to their doom could be seen tonight sailing up the harbour with their drowned crews on their decks, if that shrouding fog could suddenly be drawn aside. I feel as if it concealed innumerable mysteries – as if I were surrounded by the wraiths of old generations of Four Winds people peering at me through that grey veil. If ever the dear dead ladies of this little house came back to revisit it they would come on just such a night as this. If I sit here any longer I’ll see one of them there opposite me in Gilbert’s chair. This place isn’t exactly canny tonight. Even Gog and Magog have an air of pricking up their ears to hear the footsteps of unseen guests. I’ll run over to see Leslie before I frighten myself with my own fancies, as I did long ago in the matter of the Haunted Wood. I’ll leave my house of dreams to welcome back its old inhabitants. My fire will give them my good-will and greeting – they will be gone before I come back, and my house will be mine once more. Tonight I am sure it is keeping a tryst with the past.’

Laughing a little over her fancy, yet with something of a creepy sensation in the region of her spine, Anne kissed her hand to Gog and Magog and slipped out into the fog, with some of the new magazines under her arm for Leslie.

‘Leslie’s wild for books and magazines,’ Miss Cornelia had told her, ‘and she hardly ever sees one. She can’t afford to buy them or subscribe for them. She’s really pitifully poor, Anne. I don’t see how she makes out to live at all on the little rent the farm brings in. She never even hints a complaint on the score of poverty, but I know what it must be. She’s been handicapped by it all her life. She didn’t mind it when she was free and ambitious, but it must gall now, believe
me
. I’m glad she seemed so bright and merry the evening she spent with you. Captain Jim told me he had fairly to put her cap and coat on and push her out of the door. Don’t be too long going to see her either. If you are she’ll think it’s because you don’t like the sight of Dick, and she’ll crawl into her shell again. Dick’s a great, big, harmless baby, but that silly grin and chuckle of his do get on some people’s nerves. Thank goodness, I’ve no nerves myself. I like Dick Moore better now than I ever did when he was in his right senses – though the Lord knows that isn’t saying much. I was down there one day in house-cleaning time helping Leslie a bit, and I was frying doughnuts. Dick was hanging round to get one, as usual, and all at once he picked up a scalding hot one I’d just fished out and dropped it on the back of my neck when I was bending over. Then he laughed and laughed. Believe
me
, Anne, it took all the grace of God in my heart to keep me from just whisking up that stew-pan of boiling fat and pouring it over his head.’

Anne laughed over Miss Cornelia’s wrath as she sped through the darkness. But laughter accorded ill with that night. She was sober enough when she reached the house among the willows. Everything was very silent. The front part of the house seemed dark and deserted, so Anne slipped round to the side door, which opened from the veranda into a little sitting-room. There she halted noiselessly.

The door was open. Beyond, in the dimly lighted room, sat Leslie Moore, with her arms flung out on the table and her head bent upon them. She was weeping horribly – with low, fierce, choking sobs, as if some agony in her soul were trying to tear itself out. An old black dog was sitting by her, his nose resting on her lap, his big doggish eyes full of mute, imploring sympathy and devotion. Anne drew back in dismay. She felt that she could not intermeddle with this bitterness. Her heart ached with a sympathy she might not utter. To go in now would be to shut the door for ever on any possible help or friendship. Some instinct warned Anne that the proud, bitter girl would never forgive the one who thus surprised her in her abandonment of despair.

Anne slipped noiselessly from the veranda and found her way across the yard. Beyond, she heard voices in the gloom and saw the dim glow of a light. At the gate she met two men – Captain Jim with a lantern, and another who she knew must be Dick Moore – a big man, badly gone to fat, with a broad, round red face, and vacant eyes. Even in the dull light Anne got the impression that there was something unusual about his eyes.

‘Is this you, Mistress Blythe?’ said Captain Jim. ‘Now, now, you hadn’t oughter be roaming about alone on a night like this. You could get lost in this fog easier than not. Jest you wait till I see Dick safe inside the door and I’ll come back and light you over the fields. I ain’t going to have Dr Blythe coming home and finding that you walked clean over Cape Leforce in the fog. A woman did that once, forty years ago.

‘So you’ve been over to see Leslie,’ he said, when he rejoined her.

‘I didn’t go in,’ said Anne, and told what she had seen. Captain Jim sighed.

‘Poor, poor, little girl! She don’t cry often, Mistress Blythe – she’s too brave for that. She must feel terrible when she does cry. A night like this is hard on poor women who have sorrows. There’s something about it that kinder brings up all we’ve suffered – or feared.’

‘It’s full of ghosts,’ said Anne, with a shiver. ‘That was why I came over – I wanted to clasp a human hand and hear a human voice. There seem to be so many
inhuman
presences about tonight. Even my own dear house was full of them. They fairly elbowed me out. So I fled over here for companionship of my kind.’

‘You were right not to go in, though, Mistress Blythe. Leslie wouldn’t have liked it. She wouldn’t have liked me going in with Dick, as I’d have done if I hadn’t met you. I had Dick down with me all day. I keep him with me as much as I can to help Leslie a bit.’

‘Isn’t there something odd about his eyes?’ asked Anne.

‘You noticed that? Yes, one is blue and t’other is hazel – his father had the same. It’s a Moore peculiarity. That was what told me he was Dick Moore when I saw him first down in Cuby. If it hadn’t a-bin for his eyes I mightn’t a-known him, what with his beard and fat. You know, I reckon, that it was me found him and brought him home. Miss Cornelia always says I shouldn’t have done it, but I can’t agree with her. It was the
right
thing to do – and so ’twas the only thing. There ain’t no question in my mind about
that
. But my old heart aches for Leslie. She’s only twenty-eight and she’s eaten more bread with sorrow than most women do in eighty years.’

They walked on in silence for a little while. Presently Anne said, ‘Do you know, Captain Jim, I never like walking with a lantern. I have always the strangest feeling that just outside the circle of light, just over its edge in the darkness, I am surrounded by a ring of furtive, sinister, things, watching me from the shadows with hostile eyes. I’ve had that feeling from childhood. What is the reason? I never feel like that when I’m really in the darkness – when it is close all around me – I’m not the least frightened.’

‘I’ve something of that feeling myself,’ admitted Captain Jim. ‘I reckon when the darkness is close to us it is a friend. But when we sorter push it away from us – divorce ourselves from it, so to speak, with lantern light – it becomes an enemy. But the fog is lifting. There’s a smart west wind rising, if you notice. The stars will be out when you get home.’

They were out; and when Anne re-entered her house of dreams the red embers were still glowing on the hearth, and all the haunting presences were gone.

The splendour of colour which had glowed for weeks along the shores of Four Winds Harbour had faded out into the soft grey-blue of late autumnal hills. There came many days when fields and shores were dim with misty rain, or shivering before the breath of a melancholy sea-wind – nights, too, of storm and tempest, when Anne sometimes wakened to pray that no ship might be beating up the grim north shore, for if it were so not even the great, faithful light, whirling through the darkness unafraid, could avail to guide it into safe haven.

‘In November I sometimes feel as if spring could never come again,’ she sighed, grieving over the hopeless unsightliness of her frosted and bedraggled flower-pots. The gay little garden of the schoolmaster’s bride was rather a forlorn place now, and the Lombardies and birches were under bare poles, as Captain Jim said. But the fir-wood behind the little house was forever green and staunch and even in November and December there came gracious days of sunshine and purple hazes, when the harbour danced and sparkled as blithely as in midsummer, and the gulf was so softly blue and tender that the storm and the wild wind seemed only things of a long-past dream.