Anne's House of Dreams (5 page)

Amid the laughter that followed Mrs Doctor Dave urged Captain Jim to stay and have supper with them.

‘Thank you kindly. ’Twill be a real treat, Mistress Doctor. I mostly has to eat my meals alone, with the reflection of my ugly old phiz in a looking-glass opposite for company. ’Tisn’t often I have a chance to sit down with two such sweet, purty ladies.’

Captain Jim’s compliments may look very bald on paper, but he paid them with such a gracious, gentle deference of tone and look that the woman upon whom they were bestowed felt that she was being offered a queen’s tribute in a kingly fashion.

Captain Jim was a high-souled, simple-minded old man, with eternal youth in his eyes and heart. He had a tall, rather ungainly figure, somewhat stooped, yet suggestive of great strength and endurance; a clean-shaven face deeply lined and bronzed; a thick mane of iron-grey hair falling quite to his shoulders, and a pair of remarkably blue, deep-set eyes, which sometimes twinkled and sometimes dreamed, and sometimes looked out seaward with a wistful quest in them, as of one seeking something precious and lost. Anne was to learn one day what it was for which Captain Jim looked.

It could not be denied that Captain Jim was a homely man. His spare jaws, rugged mouth, and square brow were not fashioned on the lines of beauty; and he had passed through many hardships and sorrows which had marked his body as well as his soul; but though at first sight Anne thought him plain, she never thought anything more about it – the spirit shining through that rugged tenement beautified it so wholly.

They gathered gaily around the supper table. The hearth-fire banished the chill of the September evening, but the window of the dining-room was open and sea breezes entered at their own sweet will. The view was magnificent, taking in the harbour and the sweep of low purple hills beyond. The table was heaped with Mrs Doctor’s delicacies, but the
pièce de résistance
was undoubtedly the big platter of sea-trout.

‘Thought they’d be sorter tasty after travelling,’ said Captain Jim. ‘They’re fresh as trout can be, Mistress Blythe. Two hours ago they were swimming in the Glen Pond.’

‘Who is attending to the light tonight, Captain Jim?’ asked Doctor Dave.

‘Nephew Alec. He understands it as well as I do. Well, now, I’m real glad you asked me to stay to supper. I’m proper hungry – didn’t have much of a dinner today.’

‘I believe you half-starve yourself most of the time down at that light,’ said Mrs Doctor Dave severely. ‘You won’t take the trouble to get up a decent meal.’

‘Oh, I do, Mistress Doctor, I do,’ protested Captain Jim. ‘Why, I live like a king gen’rally. Last night I was up to the Glen and took home two pounds of steak. I meant to have a spanking good dinner today.’

‘And what happened to the steak?’ asked Mrs Doctor Dave. ‘Did you lose it on the way home?’

‘No.’ Captain Jim looked sheepish. ‘Just at bedtime a poor, ornery sort of dog came along and asked for a night’s lodging. Guess he belonged to some of the fishermen ’long shore. I couldn’t turn the poor cur out – he had a sore foot. So I shut him in the porch, with an old bag to lie on, and went to bed. But somehow I couldn’t sleep. Come to think it over, I sorter remembered that the dog looked hungry.’

‘And you got up and gave him that steak –
all
that steak,’ said Mrs Doctor Dave, with a kind of triumphant reproof.

‘Well, there wasn’t anything else
to
give him,’ said Captain Jim deprecatingly. ‘Nothing a dog’d care for, that is. I reckon he
was
hungry, for he made about two bites of it. I had a fine sleep the rest of the night but my dinner had to be sorter scanty – potatoes and point, as you might say. The dog, he lit out for home this morning. I reckon
he
weren’t a vegetarian.’

‘The idea of starving yourself for a worthless dog!’ sniffed Mrs Doctor.

‘You don’t know but he may be worth a lot to somebody,’ protested Captain Jim. ‘He didn’t
look
of much account, but you can’t go by looks in jedging a dog. Like meself, he might be a real beauty inside. The First Mate didn’t approve of him, I’ll allow. His language was right down forcible. But the First Mate is prejudiced. No use in taking a cat’s opinion of a dog. ’Tennyrate, I lost my dinner, so this nice spread in this dee-lightful company is real pleasant. It’s a great thing to have good neighbours.’

‘Who lives in the house among the willows up the brook?’ asked Anne.

‘Mrs Dick Moore,’ said Captain Jim – ‘and her husband,’ he added, as if by way of an afterthought.

Anne smiled, and deduced a mental picture of Mrs Dick Moore from Captain Jim’s way of putting it; evidently a second Mrs Rachel Lynde.

‘You haven’t many neighbours, Mistress Blythe,’ Captain Jim went on. ‘This side of the harbour is mighty thinly settled. Most of the land belongs to Mr Howard up yander past the Glen, and he rents it out for pasture. The other side of the harbour, now, is thick with folks – ’specially MacAllisters. There’s a whole colony of MacAllisters – you can’t throw a stone but you hit one. I was talking to old Leon Blacquiere the other day. He’s been working on the harbour all summer. “They’re nearly all MacAllisters over thar,” he told me. “Dare’s Neil MacAllister and Sandy MacAllister and William MacAllister and Alec MacAllister and Angus MacAllister – and I believe dare’s de Devil MacAllister.”’

‘There are nearly as many Elliotts and Crawfords,’ said Doctor Dave, after the laughter had subsided. ‘You know, Gilbert, we folk on this side of Four Winds have an old saying – “From the conceit of the Elliotts, the pride of the MacAllisters, and the vain-glory of the Crawfords, good Lord deliver us.”’

‘There’s a plenty of fine people among them, though,’ said Captain Jim. ‘I sailed with William Crawford for many a year, and for courage and endurance and truth that man hadn’t an equal. They’ve got brains over on that side of Four Winds. Mebbe that’s why this side is sorter inclined to pick on ’em. Strange, ain’t it, how folks seem to resent anyone being born a mite cleverer than they be.’

Doctor Dave, who had a forty years’ feud with the over-harbour people, laughed and subsided.

‘Who lives in that brilliant emerald house about half a mile
up the
road?’ asked Gilbert.

Captain Jim smiled delightedly.

‘Miss Cornelia Bryant. She’ll likely be over to see you soon, seeing you’re Presbyterians. If you were Methodists she wouldn’t come at all. Cornelia has a holy horror of Methodists.’

‘She’s quite a character,’ chuckled Doctor Dave. ‘A most inveterate man-hater!’

‘Sour grapes?’ queried Gilbert, laughing.

‘No, ’tisn’t sour grapes,’ answered Captain Jim seriously. ‘Cornelia could have had her pick when she was young. Even yet she’s only to say the word to see the old widowers jump. She jest seems to have been born with a sort of chronic spite agin men and Methodists. She’s got the bitterest tongue and the kindest heart in Four Winds. Wherever there’s any trouble, that woman is there, doing everything to help in the tender-est way. She never says a harsh word about another woman, and if she likes to card us poor scallawags of men down I reckon our tough old hides can stand it.’

‘She always speaks well of you, Captain Jim,’ said Mrs Doctor.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I don’t half-like it. It makes me feel as if there must be something sorter unnatteral about me.’

‘Who was the first bride who came to this house, Captain Jim?’ Anne asked, as they sat around the fireplace after supper.

‘Was she a part of the story I’ve heard was connected with this house?’ asked Gilbert. ‘Somebody told me you could tell it, Captain Jim.’

‘Well, yes, I know it. I reckon I’m the only person living in Four Winds now that can remember the schoolmaster’s bride as she was when she came to the Island. She’s been dead this thirty year, but she was one of them women you never forget.’

‘Tell us the story,’ pleaded Anne. ‘I want to find out all about the women who have lived in this house before me.’

‘Well, there’s jest been three – Elizabeth Russell, and Mrs Ned Russell, and the schoolmaster’s bride. Elizabeth Russell was a nice, clever little critter, and Mrs Ned was a nice woman, too. But they weren’t ever like the schoolmaster’s bride.

‘The schoolmaster’s name was John Selwyn. He came out from the Old Country to teach school at the Glen when I was a boy of sixteen. He wasn’t much like the usual run of derelicts who used to come out to P.E.I. to teach school in them days. Most of them were clever, drunken critters who taught the children the three Rs when they were sober, and lambasted them when they wasn’t. But John Selwyn was a fine, handsome young fellow. He boarded at my father’s, and he and me were cronies, though he was ten years older’n me. We read and walked and talked a heap together. He knew about all the poetry that was ever written, I reckon, and he used to quote it to me along shore in the evenings. Dad thought it an awful waste of time, but he sorter endured it, hoping it’d put me off the notion of going to sea. Well, nothing could do
that
– mother come of a race of sea-going folk and it was born in me. But I loved to hear John read and recite. It’s almost sixty years ago, but I could repeat yards of poetry I learned from him. Nearly sixty years!’

Captain Jim was silent for a space, gazing into the glowing fire in a quest of the bygones. Then, with a sigh, he resumed his story.

‘I remember one spring evening I met him on the sandhills. He looked sorter uplifted – jest like you did, Dr Blythe, when you brought Mistress Blythe in tonight. I thought of him the minute I seen you. And he told me that he had a sweetheart back home and that she was coming out to him. I wasn’t more’n half pleased, ornery young lump of selfishness that I was; I thought he wouldn’t be as much my friend after she came. But I’d enough decency not to let him see it. He told me all about her. Her name was Persis Leigh, and she would have come out with him if it hadn’t been for her old uncle. He was sick, and he’d looked after her when her parents died and she wouldn’t leave him. And now he was dead and she was coming out to marry John Selwyn. ’Twasn’t no easy journey for a woman in them days. There weren’t no steamers, you must ricollect.

‘ “When do you expect her?” says I.

‘ “She sails on the
Royal William
, the 20th June,” says he, “and so she should be here by mid-July. I must set Carpenter Johnson to building me a home for her. Her letter come today. I know before I opened it that it had good news for me. I saw her a few nights ago.”

‘I didn’t understand him, and then he explained – though I didn’t understand
that
much better. He said he had a gift – or a curse. Them was his words, Mistress Blythe – a gift or a curse. He didn’t know which it was. He said a great-great-grandmother of his had had it, and they burned her for a witch on account of it. He said queer spells – trances, I think was the name he given ’em – come over him now and again. Are there such things, doctor?’

‘There are people who are certainly subject to trances,’ answered Gilbert. ‘The matter is more in the line of psychical research than medical. What were the trances of this John Selwyn like?’

‘Like dreams,’ said the old doctor sceptically.

‘He said he could see things in them,’ said Captain Jim slowly. ‘Mind you, I’m telling you jest what
he
said – things that were happening – things that were
going
to happen. He said they were sometimes a comfort to him and sometimes a horror. Four nights before this he’d been in one – went into it while he was sitting looking at the fire. And he saw an old room he knew well in England, and Persis Leigh in it, holding out her hands to him and looking glad and happy. So he knew he was going to hear good news of her.’

‘A dream – a dream,’ scoffed the old doctor.

‘Likely – likely,’ conceded Captain Jim. ‘That’s what
I
said to him at the time. It was a vast more comfortable to think so. I didn’t like the idea of him seeing things like that – it was real uncanny.

‘ “No,” says he, “I didn’t dream it. But we won’t talk of this again. You won’t be so much my friend if you think much about it.”

‘I told him nothing could make me any less his friend. But he jest shook his head and says, says he:

‘ “Lad, I know. I’ve lost friends before because of this. I don’t blame them. There are times when I feel hardly friendly to myself because of it. Such a power has a bit of divinity in it – whether of a good or an evil divinity who shall say? And we mortals all shrink from too close contact with God or devil.”

‘Them was his words. I remember them as if ’twas yesterday, though I didn’t know jest what he meant. What do you s’pose he
did
mean, doctor?’

‘I doubt if he knew what he meant himself,’ said Doctor Dave testily.

‘I think I understand,’ whispered Anne. She was listening in her old attitude of clasped lips and shining eyes. Captain Jim treated himself to an admiring smile before he went on with his story.

‘Well, purty soon all the Glen and Four Winds people knew the schoolmaster’s bride was coming, and they were all glad because they thought so much of him. And everybody took an interest in his new house –
this
house. He picked this site for it, because you could see the harbour and hear the sea from it. He made the garden out there for his bride, but he didn’t plant the Lombardies. Mrs Ned Russell planted
them
. But there’s a double row of rose-bushes in the garden that the little girls who went to the Glen school set out there, for the schoolmaster’s bride. He said they were pink for her cheeks and white for her brow and red for her lips. He’d quoted poetry so much that he sorter got into the habit of talking it, too, I reckon.

‘Almost everybody sent him some little present to help out the furnishing of the house. When the Russells came into it they were well-to-do and furnished it real handsome, as you can see; but the first furniture that went into it was plain enough. This little house was rich in love, though. The women sent in quilts and table-cloths and towels, and one man made a chest for her, and another a table and so on. Even blind old Aunt Margaret Boyd wove a little basket for her out of the sweet-scented sand-hill grass. The schoolmaster’s wife used it for years to keep her handkerchiefs in.