Anne's House of Dreams - L. M. Montgomery [26]
‘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 her. ‘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-harbour clans. Uncle Dave says they have several freaks over there.’
‘Uncle Dave is a little prejudiced, I think. You know all the over-harbour 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 sandstone 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 solitary – they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery – we may only wander, awed and spellbound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only – a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of the archangels.
Anne and Gilbert found Captain Jim sitting on a bench outside the lighthouse, putting the finishing touches to a wonderful, full-rigged toy schooner. He rose and welcomed them to his abode with the gentle, unconscious courtesy that became him so well.
‘This has been a purty nice day all through, Mistress Blythe, and now, right at the last, it’s brought its best. Would you like to sit down here outside a bit, while the light lasts? I’ve just finished this bit of a plaything for my little grand-nephew, Joe, up at the Glen. After I promised to make it for him I was kinder sorry, for his mother was vexed. She’s afraid he’ll be wanting to go to sea later on and she doesn’t want the notion encouraged in him. But what could I do, Mistress Blythe? I’d promised him, and I think it’s sorter real dastardly to break a promise you make to a child. Come, sit down. It won’t take long to stay an hour.’
The wind was off shore, and only broke the sea’s surface into long silvery ripples, and sent sheeny shadows flying out across it, from every point and headland, like transparent wings. The dusk was hanging a curtain of violet gloom over the sand-dunes and the headlands where gulls were huddling. The sky was faintly filmed over with scarfs of silken vapour. Cloud fleets rode at anchor along the horizons. An evening star was watching over the bar.
‘Isn’t that a view worth looking at?’ said Captain Jim, with a loving, proprietary pride. ‘Nice and far from the market-place, ain’t it? No buying and selling and getting gain. You don’t have to pay anything – all that sea and sky free – “without money and without price”. There’s going to be a moonrise purty soon, too – I’m never tired of finding out what a moonrise can be over them rocks and sea and harbour. There’s a surprise in it every time.’
They had their moonrise, and watched its marvel and magic in a silence that asked nothing of the world or each other. Then they went up into the tower, and Captain Jim showed and explained the mechanism of the great light. Finally they found themselves in the dining-room, where a fire of driftwood was weaving flames of wavering, elusive, sea-born