Anne was just going to ask what his life-book was when the First Mate created a diversion by springing upon Captain Jim’s knee. He was a gorgeous beastie, with a face as round as a full moon, vivid green eyes, and immense, white, double paws. Captain Jim stroked his velvet back gently.
“I never fancied cats much till I found the First Mate,” he remarked, to the accompaniment of the Mate’s tremendous purrs. “I saved his life, and when you’ve saved a creature’s life you’re bound to love it. It’s next thing to giving life. There’s some turrible thoughtless people in the world, Mistress Blythe. Some of them city folks who have summer homes over the harbor are so thoughtless that they’re cruel. It’s the worst kind of cruelty — the thoughtless kind. You can’t cope with it. They keep cats there in the summer, and feed and pet ‘em, and doll ’em up with ribbons and collars. And then in the fall they go off and leave ’em to starve or freeze. It makes my blood boil, Mistress Blythe. One day last winter I found a poor old mother cat dead on the shore, lying against the skin-and-bone bodies of her three little kittens. She’d died trying to shelter ‘em. She had her poor stiff paws around ‘em. Master, I cried. Then I swore. Then I carried them poor little kittens home and fed ’em up and found good homes for ‘em. I knew the woman who left the cat and when she come back this summer I jest went over the harbor and told her my opinion of her. It was rank meddling, but I do love meddling in a good cause.”
“How did she take it?” asked Gilbert.
“Cried and said she ‘didn’t think.’ I says to her, says I, ‘Do you s’pose that’ll be held for a good excuse in the day of Jedgment, when you’ll have to account for that poor old mother’s life? The Lord’ll ask you what He give you your brains for if it wasn’t to think, I reckon.’ I don’t fancy she’ll leave cats to starve another time.”
“Was the First Mate one of the forsaken?” asked Anne, making advances to him which were responded to graciously, if condescendingly.
“Yes. I found HIM one bitter cold day in winter, caught in the branches of a tree by his durn-fool ribbon collar. He was almost starving. If you could have seen his eyes, Mistress Blythe! He was nothing but a kitten, and he’d got his living somehow since he’d been left until he got hung up. When I loosed him he gave my hand a pitiful swipe with his little red tongue. He wasn’t the able seaman you see now. He was meek as Moses. That was nine years ago. His life has been long in the land for a cat. He’s a good old pal, the First Mate is.”
“I should have expected you to have a dog,” said Gilbert.
Captain Jim shook his head.
“I had a dog once. I thought so much of him that when he died I couldn’t bear the thought of getting another in his place. He was a FRIEND — you understand, Mistress Blythe? Matey’s only a pal. I’m fond of Matey — all the fonder on account of the spice of devilment that’s in him — like there is in all cats. But I LOVED my dog. I always had a sneaking sympathy for Alexander Elliott about HIS dog. There isn’t any devil in a good dog. That’s why they’re more lovable than cats, I reckon. But I’m darned if they’re as interesting. Here I am, talking too much. Why don’t you check me? When I do get a chance to talk to anyone I run on turrible. If you’ve done your tea I’ve a few little things you might like to look at — picked ’em up in the queer corners I used to be poking my nose into.”
Captain Jim’s “few little things” turned out to be a most interesting collection of curios, hideous, quaint and beautiful. And almost every one had some striking story attached to it.
Anne never forgot the delight with which she listened to those old tales that moonlit evening by that enchanted driftwood fire, while the silver sea called to them through the open window and sobbed against the rocks below them.
Captain Jim never said a boastful word, but it was impossible to help seeing what a hero the man had been — brave, true, resourceful, unselfish. He sat there in his little room and made those things live again for his hearers. By a lift of the eyebrow, a twist of the lip, a gesture, a word, he painted a whole scene or character so that they saw it as it was.
Some of Captain Jim’s adventures had such a marvellous edge that Anne and Gilbert secretly wondered if he were not drawing a rather long bow at their credulous expense. But in this, as they found later, they did him injustice. His tales were all literally true. Captain Jim had the gift of the born storyteller, whereby “unhappy, far-off things” can be brought vividly before the hearer in all their pristine poignancy.
Anne and Gilbert laughed and shivered over his tales, and once Anne found herself crying. Captain Jim surveyed her tears with pleasure shining from his face.
“I like to see folks cry that way,” he remarked. “It’s a compliment. But I can’t do justice to the things I’ve seen or helped to do. I’ve ’em all jotted down in my life-book, but I haven’t got the knack of writing them out properly. If I could hit on jest the right words and string ’em together proper on paper I could make a great book. It would beat A Mad Love holler, and I believe Joe’d like it as well as the pirate yarns. Yes, I’ve had some adventures in my time; and, do you know, Mistress Blythe, I still lust after ‘em. Yes, old and useless as I be, there’s an awful longing sweeps over me at times to sail out — out — out there — forever and ever.”
“Like Ulysses, you would
‘Sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars until you die,’”
said Anne dreamily.
“Ulysses? I’ve read of him. Yes, that’s just how I feel — jest how all us old sailors feel, I reckon. I’ll die on land after all, I s’pose. Well, what is to be will be. There was old William Ford at the Glen who never went on the water in his life, ‘cause he was afraid of being drowned. A fortune-teller had predicted he would be. And one day he fainted and fell with his face in the barn trough and was drowned. Must you go? Well, come soon and come often. The doctor is to do the talking next time. He knows a heap of things I want to find out. I’m sorter lonesome here by times. It’s been worse since Elizabeth Russell died. Her and me was such cronies.”
Captain Jim spoke with the pathos of the aged, who see their old friends slipping from them one by one — friends whose place can never be quite filled by those of a younger generation, even of the race that knows Joseph. Anne and Gilbert promised to come soon and often.
“He’s a rare old fellow, isn’t he?” said Gilbert, as they walked home.
“Somehow, I can’t reconcile his simple, kindly personality with the wild, adventurous life he has lived,” mused Anne.
“You wouldn’t find it so hard if you had seen him the other day down at the fishing village. One of the men of Peter Gautier’s boat made a nasty remark about some girl along the shore. Captain Jim fairly scorched the wretched fellow with the lightning of his eyes. He seemed a man transformed. He didn’t say much — but the way he said it! You’d have thought it would strip the flesh from the fellow’s bones. I understand that Captain Jim will never allow a word against any woman to be said in his presence.”
“I wonder why he never married,” said Anne. “He should have sons with their ships at sea now, and grandchildren climbing over him to hear his stories — he’s that kind of a man. Instead, he has nothing but a magnificent cat.”
But Anne was mistaken. Captain Jim had more than that. He had a memory.
CHAPTER 10
LESLIE MOORE
“I’m going for a walk to the outside shore tonight,” Anne told Gog and Magog one October evening. There was no one else to tell, for Gilbert had gone over the harbor. Anne had her little domain in the speckless order one would expect of anyone brought up by Marilla Cuthbert, and felt that she could gad shoreward with a clear conscience. Many and delightful had been her shore rambles, sometimes with Gilbert, sometimes with Captain Jim, sometimes alone with her own thoughts and new, poignantly-sweet dreams that were beginning to span life with their rainbows. She loved the gentle, misty harbor shore and the silvery, wind-haunted sand shore, but best o
f all she loved the rock shore, with its cliffs and caves and piles of surf-worn boulders, and its coves where the pebbles glittered under the pools; and it was to this shore she hied herself tonight.
There had been an autumn storm of wind and rain, lasting for three days. Thunderous had been the crash of billows on the rocks, wild the white spray and spume that blew over the bar, troubled and misty and tempest-torn the erstwhile blue peace of Four Winds Harbor. Now it was over, and the shore lay clean-washed after the storm; not a wind stirred, but there was still a fine surf on, dashing on sand and rock in a splendid white turmoil — the only restless thing in the great, pervading stillness and peace.
“Oh, this is a moment worth living through weeks of storm and stress for,” Anne exclaimed, delightedly sending her far gaze across the tossing waters from the top of the cliff where she stood. Presently she scrambled down the steep path to the little cove below, where she seemed shut in with rocks and sea and sky.
“I’m going to dance and sing,” she said. “There’s no one here to see me — the seagulls won’t carry tales of the matter. I may be as crazy as I like.”
She caught up her skirt and pirouetted along the hard strip of sand just out of reach of the waves that almost lapped her feet with their spent foam. Whirling round and round, laughing like a child, she reached the little headland that ran out to the east of the cove; then she stopped suddenly, blushing crimson; she was not alone; there had been a witness to her dance and laughter.
The girl of the golden hair and sea-blue eyes was sitting on a boulder of the headland, half-hidden by a jutting rock. She was looking straight at Anne with a strange expression — part wonder, part sympathy, part — could it be? — envy. She was bare-headed, and her splendid hair, more than ever like Browning’s “gorgeous snake,” was bound about her head with a crimson ribbon. She wore a dress of some dark material, very plainly made; but swathed about her waist, outlining its fine curves, was a vivid girdle of red silk. Her hands, clasped over her knee, were brown and somewhat work-hardened; but the skin of her throat and cheeks was as white as cream. A flying gleam of sunset broke through a low-lying western cloud and fell across her hair. For a moment she seemed the spirit of the sea personified — all its mystery, all its passion, all its elusive charm.
“You — you must think me crazy,” stammered Anne, trying to recover her self-possession. To be seen by this stately girl in such an abandon of childishness — she, Mrs. Dr. Blythe, with all the dignity of the matron to keep up — it was too bad!
“No,” said the girl, “I don’t.”
She said nothing more; her voice was expressionless; her manner slightly repellent; but there was something in her eyes — eager yet shy, defiant yet pleading — which turned Anne from her purpose of walking away. Instead, she sat down on the boulder beside the girl.
“Let’s introduce ourselves,” she said, with the smile that had never yet failed to win confidence and friendliness. “I am Mrs. Blythe — and I live in that little white house up the harbor shore.”
“Yes, I know,” said the girl. “I am Leslie Moore — Mrs. Dick Moore,” she added stiffly.
Anne was silent for a moment from sheer amazement. It had not occurred to her that this girl was married — there seemed nothing of the wife about her. And that she should be the neighbor whom Anne had pictured as a commonplace Four Winds housewife! Anne could not quickly adjust her mental focus to this astonishing change.
“Then — then you live in that gray house up the brook,” she stammered.
“Yes. I should have gone over to call on you long ago,” said the other. She did not offer any explanation or excuse for not having gone.
“I wish you WOULD come,” said Anne, recovering herself somewhat. “We’re such near neighbors we ought to be friends. That is the sole fault of Four Winds — there aren’t quite enough neighbors. Otherwise it is perfection.”
“You like it?”
“LIKE it! I love it. It is the most beautiful place I ever saw.”
“I’ve never seen many places,” said Leslie Moore, slowly, “but I’ve always thought it was very lovely here. I — I love it, too.”
She spoke, as she looked, shyly, yet eagerly. Anne had an odd impression that this strange girl — the word “girl” would persist — could say a good deal if she chose.
“I often come to the shore,” she added.
“So do I,” said Anne. “It’s a wonder we haven’t met here before.”
“Probably you come earlier in the evening than I do. It is generally late — almost dark — when I come. And I love to come just after a storm — like this. I don’t like the sea so well when it’s calm and quiet. I like the struggle — and the crash — and the noise.”
“I love it in all its moods,” declared Anne. “The sea at Four Winds is to me what Lover’s Lane was at home. Tonight it seemed so free — so untamed — something broke loose in me, too, out of sympathy. That was why I danced along the shore in that wild way. I didn’t suppose anybody was looking, of course. If Miss Cornelia Bryant had seen me she would have forboded a gloomy prospect for poor young Dr. Blythe.”
“You know Miss Cornelia?” said Leslie, laughing. She had an exquisite laugh; it bubbled up suddenly and unexpectedly with something of the delicious quality of a baby’s. Anne laughed, too.
“Oh, yes. She has been down to my house of dreams several times.”
“Your house of dreams?”
“Oh, that’s a dear, foolish little name Gilbert and I have for our home. We just call it that between ourselves. It slipped out before I thought.”
“So Miss Russell’s little white house is YOUR house of dreams,” said Leslie wonderingly. “I had a house of dreams once — but it was a palace,” she added, with a laugh, the sweetness of which was marred by a little note of derision.
“Oh, I once dreamed of a palace, too,” said Anne. “I suppose all girls do. And then we settle down contentedly in eight-room houses that seem to fulfill all the desires of our hearts — because our prince is there. YOU should have had your palace really, though — you are so beautiful. You MUST let me say it — it has to be said — I’m nearly bursting with admiration. You are the loveliest thing I ever saw, Mrs. Moore.”
“If we are to be friends you must call me Leslie,” said the other with an odd passion.
“Of course I will. And MY friends call me Anne.”
“I suppose I am beautiful,” Leslie went on, looking stormily out to sea. “I hate my beauty. I wish I had always been as brown and plain as the brownest and plainest girl at the fishing village over there. Well, what do you think of Miss Cornelia?”
The abrupt change of subject shut the door on any further confidences.
“Miss Cornelia is a darling, isn’t she?” said Anne. “Gilbert and I were invited to her house to a state tea last week. You’ve heard of groaning tables.”
“I seem to recall seeing the expression in the newspaper reports of weddings,” said Leslie, smiling.
“Well, Miss Cornelia’s groaned — at least, it creaked — positively. You couldn’t have believed she would have cooked so much for two ordinary people. She had every kind of pie you could name, I think — except lemon pie. She said she had taken the prize for lemon pies at the Charlottetown Exhibition ten years ago and had never made any since for fear of losing her reputation for them.”
“Were you able to eat enough pie to please her?”
“I wasn’t. Gilbert won her heart by eating — I won’t tell you how much. She said she never knew a man who didn’t like pie better than his Bible. Do you know, I love Miss Cornelia.”
“So do I,” said Leslie. “She is the best friend I have in the world.”
Anne wondered secretly why, if this were so, Miss Cornelia had never mentioned Mrs. Dick Moore to her. Miss Cornelia had certainly talked freely about every other individual in or near Four Winds.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” said Leslie, after a brief silence, pointing to the exquisite effect
of a shaft of light falling through a cleft in the rock behind them, across a dark green pool at its base. “If I had come here — and seen nothing but just that — I would go home satisfied.”
“The effects of light and shadow all along these shores are wonderful,” agreed Anne. “My little sewing room looks out on the harbor, and I sit at its window and feast my eyes. The colors and shadows are never the same two minutes together.”
“And you are never lonely?” asked Leslie abruptly. “Never — when you are alone?”
“No. I don’t think I’ve ever been really lonely in my life,” answered Anne. “Even when I’m alone I have real good company — dreams and imaginations and pretendings. I LIKE to be alone now and then, just to think over things and TASTE them. But I love friendship — and nice, jolly little times with people. Oh, WON’T you come to see me — often? Please do. I believe,” Anne added, laughing, “that you’d like me if you knew me.”
“I wonder if YOU would like ME,” said Leslie seriously. She was not fishing for a compliment. She looked out across the waves that were beginning to be garlanded with blossoms of moonlit foam, and her eyes filled with shadows.
“I’m sure I would,” said Anne. “And please don’t think I’m utterly irresponsible because you saw me dancing on the shore at sunset. No doubt I shall be dignified after a time. You see, I haven’t been married very long. I feel like a girl, and sometimes like a child, yet.”
“I have been married twelve years,” said Leslie.
Here was another unbelievable thing.
“Why, you can’t be as old as I am!” exclaimed Anne. “You must have been a child when you were married.”
“I was sixteen,” said Leslie, rising, and picking up the cap and jacket lying beside her. “I am twenty-eight now. Well, I must go back.”
“So must I. Gilbert will probably be home. But I’m so glad we both came to the shore tonight and met each other.”
The Complete Works of L M Montgomery Page 114