Anne's House of Dreams - Lucy Maud Montgomery (ebook reader macos .txt) 📗

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.