Anne's House of Dreams - L. M. Montgomery [48]
‘We must let the New Year in,’ he said.
Outside was a fine blue night. A sparkling ribbon of moonlight garlanded the gulf. Inside the bar the harbour shone like a pavement of pearl. They stood before the door and waited – Captain Jim with his ripe, full experience, Marshall Elliott in his vigorous but empty middle life, Gilbert and Anne with their precious memories and exquisite hopes, Leslie with her record of starved years and her hopeless future. The clock on the little shelf above the fireplace struck twelve.
‘Welcome, New Year,’ said Captain Jim, bowing low as the last stroke died away. ‘I wish you all the best year of your lives, mates. I reckon that whatever the New Year brings us will be the best the Great Captain has for us – and somehow or other we’ll all make port in a good harbour.’
17
A FOUR WINDS WINTER
Winter set in vigorously after New Year’s. Big white drifts heaped themselves about the little house, and palms of frost covered its windows. The harbour ice grew harder and thicker, until the Four Winds people began their usual winter travelling over it. The safe ways were ‘bushed’ by a benevolent Government, and night and day the gay tinkle of the sleigh-bells sounded on it. On moonlit nights Anne heard them in her house of dreams like fairy chimes. The gulf froze over, and the Four Winds light flashed no more. During the months when navigation was closed Captain Jim’s office was a sinecure.
‘The First Mate and I will have nothing to do till spring, except keep warm and amuse ourselves. The last lighthouse keeper always used to move up to the Glen in winter; but I’d rather stay at the Point. The First Mate might get poisoned or chewed up by dogs at the Glen. It’s a mite lonely, to be sure, with neither the light nor the water for company, but if our friends come to see us often we’ll weather it through.’
Captain Jim had an ice boat, and many a wild, glorious spin Gilbert and Anne and Leslie had over the glib harbour ice with him. Anne and Leslie took long snowshoe tramps together, too, over the fields, or across the harbour after storms, or through the woods beyond the Glen. They were very good comrades in their rambles and their fireside communings. Each had something to give the other – each felt life the richer for friendly exchange of thought and friendly silence; each looked across the white fields between their homes with a pleasant consciousness of a friend beyond. But, in spite of all this, Anne felt that there was always a barrier between Leslie and herself – a constraint that never wholly vanished.
‘I don’t know why I can’t get closer to her,’ Anne said one evening to Captain Jim. ‘I like her so much – I admire her so much – I want to take her right into my heart and creep right into hers. But I can never cross the barrier.’
‘You’ve been too happy all your life, Mistress Blythe,’ said Captain Jim thoughtfully. ‘I reckon that’s why you and Leslie can’t get real close together in your souls. The barrier between you is her experience of sorrow and trouble. She ain’t responsible for it and you ain’t; but it’s there and neither of you can cross it.’
‘My childhood wasn’t very happy before I came to Green Gables,’ said Anne, gazing soberly out of the window at the still, sad, dead beauty of the leafless tree-shadows on the moonlit snow.
‘Mebbe not – but it was just the usual unhappiness of a child who hasn’t anyone to look after it properly. There hasn’t been any tragedy in your life, Mistress Blythe. And poor Leslie’s has been almost all tragedy. She feels, I reckon, though mebbe she hardly knows she feels it, that there’s a vast deal in her life you can’t enter nor understand – and so she has to keep you back from it – hold you off, so to speak, from hurting her. You know if we’ve got anything about us that hurts we shrink from anyone’s touch on or near it. It holds good with our souls as well as our bodies, I reckon. Leslie’s soul must be near raw – it’s no wonder