Free Anne's House of Dreams by Lucy Maud Montgomery Page B

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 hues in the open fireplace.
    ‘I put this fireplace in myself,’ remarked Captain Jim. ‘The Government don’t give lighthouse-keepers such luxuries. Look at the colours that wood makes. If you’d like some driftwood for your fire, Mistress Blythe, I’ll bring you up a load some day. Sit down. I’m going to make you a cup of tea.’
    Captain Jim placed a chair for Anne, having first removed therefrom a huge, orange-coloured cat and a newspaper.
    ‘Get down, Matey. The sofa is your place. I must put this paper away safe till I can find time to finish the story in it. It’s called
A Mad Love
. ’Tisn’t my favourite brand of fiction, but I’m reading it jest to see how long she can spin it out. It’s at the sixty-second chapter now, and the wedding ain’t any nearer than when it begun, far’s I can see. When little Joe comes I have to read him pirate yarns. Ain’t it strange how innocent little creatures like children like the blood-thirstiest stories?’
    ‘Like my lad Davy at home,’ said Anne. ‘He wants tales that reek with gore.’
    Captain Jim’s tea proved to be nectar. He was pleased as a child with Anne’s compliments, but he affected a fine indifference.
    ‘The secret is I don’t skimp the cream,’ he remarked airily. Captain Jim had never heard of Oliver Wendell Holmes, but he evidently agreed with that writer’s dictum that ‘big heart never liked little cream pot’.
    ‘We met an odd-looking personage coming out of your lane,’ said Gilbert as they sipped. ‘Who was he?’
    Captain Jim grinned.
    ‘That’s Marshall Elliott – a mighty fine man with jest one streak of foolishness in him. I s’pose you wondered what his object was in turning himself into a sort of dime museum freak.’
    ‘Is he a modern Nazarite or a Hebrew prophet left over from olden times?’ asked Anne.
    ‘Neither of them. It’s politics that’s at the bottom of his freak. All those Elliotts and Crawfords and MacAllisters are dyed-in-the-wool politicians. They’re born Grit or Tory, as the case may be, and they live Grit or Tory, and they die Grit or Tory; and what they’re going to do in heaven, where there’s probably no politics, is more than I can fathom. This Marshall Elliott was born a Grit. I’m a Grit myself in moderation, but there’s no moderation about Marshall. Fifteen years ago there was a specially bitter general election.