The tower gardens : a novel

Front matter

THE TOWER GARDENS.

gelect "pooets.

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Contents

CHAP. rAGB

II. — Knowe Farm ..... 12

III. — Alone 30

Chapter I. Jessie

IT was the night of the seventh of April. Jessie Bayliss had drawn up a little round table so near to the fire that it was a marvel its one mahogany leg did not ignite ; it was already rough with minute blisters, the result of many scorchings.

On that little round table was an elderly black straw hat, some weather-worn black velvet and sundry bows of crape, soft with age.

The crape, as a trimming, had had its day, and a long one too. Its owner had just been using it to rub up the velvet with which it had shared eighteen months of very hard

VOL I. B wear, in the rains and mists of the North Countrie.

Out of these unpromising materials Jessie had been trying for some time to make a new and beautiful covering for one of the prettiest heads to be found on the Scotch side of the Western Borders — her own.

She had made several attempts. She possessed, or thought she possessed, a masterful way with such things ; but to-night that gift failed her. Alison, her cousin, having succumbed to a bad cold, was in bed and asleep ; Jessie had no one else to encourage her, no one to admire her cunning devices, to sympathise with her failures, to urge her to try again ; no one to talk to, to laugh at ; so she pulled her work to pieces, stuck her long needle into the solitary reel of black cotton, and turned shivering to the fire. It was a bitter night.

The toes of Jessie's slippers were scorching, but to get warm all over was impossible ; and Jessie's fire was not built up with customary Birrendale generosity.

It was April by the calendar; in London, in the Tower Gardens, the lilacs were in bud ; in Birrendale it was winter then, as it had been for nearly six long months.

I almost wish Jessie had not turned away from the lamp-light when she did, because you might have seen her features a little better then ; and they were distinctly worth looking at.

But perhaps it was as well ; poor child, she was not at her brightest that night ! Who could be while the wind was howling round the house like a pack of famishing wolves, with a fierce dismal sound that brought to mind only too vividly that other more terrible wolf that Jessie knew, only too surely, was already sniffing about the door of her own home?

Jessie shuddered and sighed.

" Once before, when I was a little girl, I had the same dreadful, eerie feeling that haunts me now so often, whenever I hear that noise," she said to herself. " Aye ! but it's dreary, dreary, dreary! Oh, if that river would only leave off rushing and tearing on these rough nights ! If that wind would only leave off howling ! I never can help thinking of my father being drowned ! It brings back all that awful time so horribly ! What is going to be the end of this ? — it can't go on ! We shall all be dead soon, if it lasts much longer." And she looked into the fire very sadly.

It was Jessie's part to supply brightness in that desolate household, and for the most part

B 2 she supplied it liberally. As a rule her brightness was as natural and spontaneous as a sunbeam's, but to night it had died down ; she had not enough for herself, and none for other people.

" Auntie's all alone, I must go to her, I suppose," she thought ; but to go to her seemed a very disagreeable duty.

" She doesn't need me," she said. " She won't speak a word to me. She will only make me more eerie. Well, I must go ! Duty's duty ! I hope Alison's cold will be better to-morrow. I really must have some one to talk to ! Ah ! " and instead of rising to go to her aunt, she bent nearer the fire — "Ah! Mac Carruthers ! I suppose you're enjoying yourself finely in the sunny south ! " she went on, addressing a young man who was often in her thoughts, and just then in her mind's eye. " How I should like to be in a warm place, where the sun shines ! — or — I don't think I could be very miserable anywhere with Mac Carruthers ; " this last sentence, however, came from a different part of her consciousness than any of her previous thoughts, and it made her smile, which she did freely upon the least provocation. And it also made her linger over the fire.

She certainly had the most exquisite

JESSIE. S

mouth! She always had had; even as a child everyone had wanted to kiss it. The mouth itself was sweetly, beautifully drawn, delicately modelled, sensitive to the slightest emotion; now bending with a smile into free and winning curves, now straightening into a wistful pathos, but always beautiful and very tempting.

A thought made Jessie blush deeply ; she raised a hand to her cheek and lightly touched that blush with her finger tips, as if to brush it away. Then she sighed ; but it was quite a different sigh from any that had within the last hour gone before it.

"And to think how that fellow's enjoying himself! " she said. "I'm certain he's enjoying himself, and I'm — sh-o-o — sh-o-o — shiveruig!

She couldn't quite make out whether she saw in the fire a grand foreign table d'hote, such as she had read about, or an equally splendid foreign ball-room.

" But whichever it is," she went on after a while, " I can be certain as to what he's doing : flirting, of course."

A dozen different thoughts and feelings went with the words.

"And I'd be flirting, too, if I had the chance, I suppose," she added, presently. " That is, I don't ' suppose,' I know. After all, what does* it mean? Only that one likes to amuse and be amused. Well, then comes the question, whether — whether? " — the pause and thoughts not to be put into words. " Falling in love must be — is — why something very different, something very awful. I ought to know what it is. Poor, poor, sweet, dear little mother ! I ought to know ! " she said, solemnly, and with a shudder, that was not all due to the bitter cold, " Ah me ! Ah me ! why do I keep thinking of her — of her and of my father so much to-night? It is that dreadful rushing, roaring of the Birren ! Oh ! if it would only cease. I must go and look after Auntie. But, I wonder, now, I can't help wondering, what Mac's doing. Yes, I think, do you know I rather like poor old Mac ! And he ? Oh ! I'm only one among half-a-hundred by this time! 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder' — of somebody else. Very true, but supposing there isn't somebody else to grow fond of, or only the Boy Baird, what then? No, I can't stand that howling wind any longer. It wails so for the poor drowning people. Oh ! " with a sudden cry of grief, " it's the seventh of April, the day my father was drowned ! I must go ! — I must go ! "

She sprang up, hurriedly put out the candle, and noiselessly opening the bedroom door, went into the passage that ran through the house. It was dimly lighted by one small benzoline lamp. She flew along the corridor, frightened by all sorts of vague terrors. The Dale's people said the glen below that house was haunted. Her own shadow, large and ghostlike, caught her up, passed her, went before her on the wall. She ran on, scarcely daring to breathe.

In the hall, at the end of the corridor, where burned another small, cheap lamp, might partially be seen a squatting Indian idol, sundry swords and other war-like trophies, and a couple of hats that had once belonged to Jessie's uncle, the late Captain James Bayliss, her father's brother.

She rushed across the hall and into the dining-room, which, although well furnished in modern light oak, looked to her unspeakably desolate.

Her aunt, Mrs. Bayliss, a pale-haired woman with a wind-spoiled complexion, dressed in the grimmest widow's weeds, was sitting near the fire, looking over papers. She always made the place seem desolate ; but she was, at any rate, a living person ; that was something to Jessie. Any living person was better than those ghostly shadows.

" How is Alison ? " Mrs. Bayliss asked, without looking up ; there was that on her heart that made it impossible for her to face her niece.

" Asleep," returned Jessie, seating herself on the little stone wall that bounded the tiled hearth, and shivering with cold and a nameless dread.

" Then no doubt she'll be better to-morrow," said Mrs. Bayliss, turning the page of a letter.

"I'm sure I hope so," said Jessie, "I'm wretched without her."

Mrs. Bayliss, Alison's mother, made no further remark ; but went on with her papers for some time.

"I expect the last little calf will be dead before the morning," she said, presently, in a tone of calm despair.

Jessie said nothing, but she felt a strange — no, not at all strange, only too common — a soreness about her heart.

" Everything dies here. We shall be dead soon," she said, half under her voice. Mrs. Bayliss heard the remark, but made no reply ; she knew it was only too probable.

Out of doors the wind howled like a whole starving menagerie ; within Jessie and her aunt sat in most oppressive silence for some time.

JESSIE.

a

If you wrote to uncle John — to your brother, Mr. John Harbuckle — don't you think he would help us, Auntie? I'm quite sure he would — and be glad of the chance," Jessie ventured at last to say. She had been wanting to say this for several days past.

Mrs. Bayliss rose— went to the mantelshelf and gazed steadily at a large coloured photograph of the late Captain in his uniform.

Then she turned and looked down at her niece on the stone coping of the hearth.

"Jessie," she said, with bitter emphasis, "my brother John, like the rest of the kind people, will be very glad to help us — in his own way. They'd see us starve sooner than help us in our way."

" Because they know it would be no good, Auntie," said Jessie, dropping her voice. " It would only be throwing more money into the sea."

" When you are a widow, my dear, it will be time for you to advise widows ; not before," continued Mrs. Bayliss, emphatically, her voice hard with intense emotion. "Your mother, Jessie, would not have blamed me — she was a widow, and she knew!'

Jessie was effectually quelled.

She sat in silence until the clock struck ten, io THE TOWER GARDENS.

and then vanished to her own room, sad, lonely, and shivering.

By a rather strange coincidence, as events showed on that night, Jessie dreamed, when warmed with sleep, that she was walking along some well-remembered shore, by a placid sea, with her mother, who had now been dead more than seven years. She had dreamed of her many and many a time before, but always had awakened in distress ; for, hitherto, that mother's face had come to her full of the same terrible look of bewildered anguish it had worn during the awful months that had elapsed between the day on which Jessie had last seen her father and her mother's own death.

That night, in her dream, Jessie and her mother both walked quietly hand in hand, as they had done on summer holidays long ago, and Jessie, without any fear, looked up into her mother's face.

The mother smiled gently and was gone.

Jessie awoke — for a moment, calm and happy as she used to be when a child at home, before the dreadful days came.

" Thank God I have seen you happy once more, dear ! " passed through her heart and brain. " Thank God, I have seen your smile again."

JESSIE. ii

But she opened her eyes. The placid summer waves were gone ; the room was full of cold moonlight ; the ravening wind was still unsatisfied ; the angry stream was still tearing wildly down to the Solway.

Chapter II. Knowe Fakm

AMONG the rounded hill tops that gently rise above the Scotch bank of the Solway is an eminence of so peculiar a form that it has become a land mark for the whole country side it dominates.

With massive squareness and broad flat summit it stands out bold and abrupt above the soft and graceful curves of a low range, like a gigantic rampart or colossal earthwork made by man rather than by nature. I will call it Mount Agricola ; for the Eomans, who always knew a good site, fortified this great mound ; and even now, in a solemn, grey twilight, when the stern green hill is dark as the stem of a spruce fir, it requires but a slight effort of the imagination to see a ghostly sentry still on duty among the mists that hang around its head.

That broad flat head is the highest ground for many a mile around. From it, on a clear summer day, when the wild thyme is bloom-

KKOWE FARM. 13

ing and the sheep are browsing on the hill side, one may see more counties, English and Scotch, than I care to mention. It looks over a lovely borderland, all fertile dales and green or wooded hills, following each other, in a seemingly endless succession, in great wave-like lines ; as if a tumbling sea, without losing its form, had been changed into solid earth.

Down from those hills wander numberless little burns, that fall into larger streams as those streams hasten to join a swift river rushing to meet the Solway, before that Solway's tide has all run out to the great ocean, that is shining in the far distance like the dove in the Psalms, covered with silver wings and her feathers like gold.

One of the streams that run down to the Solway is the Birren Water, and it was in Birrendale that Mrs. Bayliss and the girls lived.

This is how they came to be there.

About four years and a half before the date of that April evening when Jessie talked to herself over the fire, two men were walking by the side of a salmon pool in the Birren. It was an exceptionally beautiful autumn afternoon, there was a sound of rushing water in the distance, but the deep pool was very still -t the heavily wooded banks were only yet touched here and there with gold and brown. On one side of the water, long branches dipped into the stream ; on the other, tall firs, straight as cathedral columns, dwarfed the men who were walking between the great trees, and a bank, that would have been but one tangle of fern, bramble and meadow sweet, had not the old red sandstone cropped up here and there, supplying the needful drawing that made confusion picturesqueness.

All was very still and solemn; the bright sunlight that was fast ripening the oats on the uplands beyond the woods could hardly penetrate through the great boughs of silver fir over head.

The two men went on for some little distance in silence, at length one spoke.

" A fine fish, but he just broke me ! " he said, dolefully. "I'll not sleep to-night for thinking of him ! "

The younger man, Captain James Bayliss, had already heard this lament a dozen times or more. He was tired of it.

': Lucky beggar you to have no more

serious trouble to keep you awake ! " he

replied, in a tone conveying the impression

that his thoughts and words were far apart.

" Well, your sleep ought to be sweet enough after that unexpected windfall ! " retorted the other, as if slightly wounded by his companion's unsympathetic tone.

" That's just it ! " said Bayliss, " it is that windfall that won't let me rest."

" Aye ! " threw in Major Johnstone. (There are a great many Johnstones about the Western Border ; they and the Maxwells had a civil war of their own of very respectable dimensions in the days of Queen Elizabeth — of James the Sixth, I should say, there is no Queen Elizabeth in Scotland.)

" The question constantly agitating me now, is, how to invest that money to the very best advantage," continued Captain Bayliss, with a curious mixture of anxiety and self-importance in his tone.

Here they turned from the bank of the stream and took a rough brae-side path, beyond which a burn merrily trickled down over masses of red rocks to the river the two men had just left.

" Ah ! happy thought ! I know where we can get some tea!" exclaimed Major Johnstone, as Captain Bayliss paused, as if waiting for his friend's advice " this is Mackenzie's place."

"You don't say we're on private grounds? " said Bayliss, who was then paying his first visit to Birrendale, " I thought we were at least a hundred and fifty miles from tea and civilization."

They turned a corner of the woodland path and came suddenly upon a small plateau above the river and the banks.

Here, in the full sunshine, was a carefully kept lawn, where the children, in Japanese hats with great red bows, were playing croquet. Beyond the lawn was a broad drive and a red sandstone house, all ground floor.

" What a delightful bungalow ! the very place I've been dreaming of ! " exclaimed Bayliss, very much awake all at once.

Two of the children, a boy and a girl, catching sight of the Major's well-known figure, ran up to him.

" Where's the fish? We saw you playing him ! We saw you, but you didn't see us ; you were too busy to look up. Has Muir taken him home ? " asked the girl.

"He just broke me and got away!" said the Major, shaking his head ruefully ; " and we've nothing but a dozen herling and five wee trout, and never a fish at all."

" Arn't trout fish ? " asked the boy, a little southern visitor.

The girl laughed and the Major laughed.

" A salmon's a fish here ! Why, don't you know that ? You don't know anything ! " said the girl.

" Will your mother have some tea for us ?" asked Major Johnstone.

" Yes, I know she will. But it's our turn to play now. so we must go," and off ran the children.

The men went to the drawing-room window ; it was open , several ladies were within — tea was going on.

The men refused the invitation to enter ; they stood by the window lamenting their ill luck. The ladies gave them tea in cups on which were painted sprays of purple heather. Captain Bayliss, who was English, noticed among the sugar at the bottom of his cup a Scotch thistle, with which national emblem the cosy over his hostess's tea-pot was also adorned.

While Major Johnstone was finishing his little chat with the ladies, Captain Bayliss turned his back to the window for a minute or two, and looked at the view of stream and wood, visible through a carefully cut opening among the trees. The mingling of clear, crisp air and warm autumn sunshine, through which he saw it all, made it seem to him quite perfect, for " Autumn," as the poet says, " is Scotch."

VOL. I. 0

" What a sweet spot ! What an exquisite picture of refined domesticity ! " James Bayliss exclaimed, as he and the Major moved off between great banks of rhododendron towards a country road. Alas ! alas ! for the poor Captain, his doom was sealed.

" Aye," - assented the Major. ''It's just perfect ! "

" The fact is," said Bayliss, uneasily, as if about to make an admission that was open to criticism, "I'm looking out for a place myself."

" Mackenzie will be leaving soon. His uncle's dead, and he succeeds to the Nithsdale property," said Johnstone, with a backward turn of his head to indicate emphatically the owner of the grounds they were going through.

"Is he? Then I'll take it," exclaimed Bayliss, " if it's anywhere within my range."

" Well, I'll be glad of you for a neighbour. You'll find plenty of old Indians round about here," said Johnstone.

" The fact is," and Bayliss paused, " I'm going in for farming."

The Major stopped short, and stared aghast.

" The man's daft ! " he cried.

"I never was saner in my life," returned Bayliss, somewhat nettled.

" Never saner ! Then it's a wonder they've let you be at large so long," retorted Johnstone.

" What do you mean, Johnstone ? " demanded Bayliss, with rising temper.

" Mean ? I mean that if you need to get rid of your money, just pitch it into yon salmon pool, but don't "

" But, my dear fellow, I've gone into the thing thoroughly ; I've been studying it for some time now. I've worked it all out to a nicety. It must pay if it's properly managed ; it can't fail ! Eggs, three farthings a dozen ; butter, sixpence a pound ; fowls, two-pence

" Ho ! ho ! That's your line, is it ? Then I know what you've been reading. I'd lay an even bet your portmanteau's crammed full of pamphlets. Put that trash into the fire ! "

" Trash ! But I mean to carry it out," cried Bayliss, with considerable temper.

" Then you're a gone coon, as sure as ever that fish broke me to-day ! By the way, when we had that long palaver at the club, last spring, I thought you told me you were going in for art ; for art — and, if my memory serves me, for literature ? "

" Well," said Bayliss, with hesitation ; "yes," they were upon the high road by this time, "yes, and I'm going in for art

c 2 still. I had some first-rate lessons last winter in Paris ; and I've just begun a portrait of my wife, that everyone says is quite a striking likeness ; really, I don't see that art need interfere with farming."

" And the literature ? "

" I don't mind admitting I dropped some money there," said Bayliss, with evident reluctance.

" You don't mean to say you bought a newspaper?" exclaimed the Major.

" Why, no ; it wasn't quite so bad as that ; I was not quite so far left to myself. I — hem ! — I worked up some of my own Indian experiences into a novel, and "

" Hasn't the same thing been done before? " asked Major Johnstone, without waiting for the close of the sentence. " Didn't Grey, and long Jim Smith, and MacArthur, and several others, attempt something of the sort ? "

"Yes, but not just in my way, I fancy. Seriously, though, I can't help believing that my book would have been a great success, only, you see, so few publishers know India as we know it."

" True ! but perhaps they know the British public rather better. So you published on your own account ? "

" I paid for the publishing, certainly ; and then the beggar bolted, by Jove ! and I lost my money, book and all. I've cut literature."

" I am glad to hear it."

" Yes, I've cut literature altogether, although I've a Manual of Fortification seething in my brain that's really too good to be lost to the Service. But there, I won't think of it ; I'll strangle it ! My mind now is wholly given to farming. My wife has long fancied she could manage a farm ; now I've this little bit of money to lay out, I should be a brute if I didn't get her one."

" Still a model husband ? "

" My wife says so."

" Well, she ought to know ! Now here's a Birrendale farm. How do you think Mrs. Bayliss would like to live in that white-washed house with the drab window frames ? "

" Of course I don't mean that sort of thing. We should live, say, at the place we have just left."

" Then you think Mrs. Bayliss wouldn't care to come out in that yard in the depth of winter and slice turnips for a couple of dozen cows? The people here all work early and late, live hard, and only just make both ends meet."

" Ah, but I am going to bring modern science to bear upon it," said Captain James Bayliss, knitting his brows with great energy.

" You won't beat the science of a Birrendale farmer, depend upon that ; why, yon barleyfield was a moss a dozen years ago ! But, joking apart, Bayliss, think of your wife and those two very nice girls, and don't, there's a good fellow, don't turn farmer ! Unless, indeed, you're positively anxious to die penniless ; in which case the farm will enable you to do so very comfortably."

As well might Major Johnstone have attempted to reason a young man out of a wished-for marriage as Captain Bayliss out of a new hobby.

Before many months had passed, James Bayliss, for the time being the happiest man in the world, was the owner of Cauldknowe, that charming place where they had had those insidious cups of tea, and also of the Knowe farm adjoining.

The Major shook his head when his friend told him of his purchase.

" Well, Bayliss, if you will cut your own throat you must" he said ; " but I am sorry mine should have been the hand that passed you the razor."

James Bayliss and Mary his wife both agreed that if a thing was worth doing at all, it was worth doing well. Cauldknowe was to be the first really settled home they had had in all their married life, for hitherto they had been moving about at duty's call; but now the Captain had retired from the Service and they were free to make a home for themselves. Their goods and chattels were but few, which was, they thought, fortunate, as it gave them an excellent opportunity of putting entirely new furniture into Cauldknowe ; and, as every one knows, furniture is now very much better than it was at the time James and Mary Bayliss were married; besides which, the Captain rather prided himself on his artistic culture, and was glad of the opportunity of displaying the progress he had recently made in decorative art.

So they spent a good deal of money upon Cauldknowe.

Then the Knowe farm had been, the Captain thought, much neglected. It required fresh draining, new steading, fresh and expensive machinery, before modern science could be effectually brought to bear upon it.

So they spent a great deal of money upon the Knowe farm.

Spending money was still a new luxury to them : they enjoyed it very much, more than they had ever enjoyed anything before, since their honeymoon.

There was a brief time in the lives of James and Mary Bayliss, and the girls, Alison, their daughter, and Jessie, their niece, during which they lived in an earthly paradise ; there was one brief Scottish summer, one glorious Scottish autumn, when all was radiant with happiness and hope ; a few months that in retrospect seemed as absolutely perfect as a sunny day in Birrendale.

And then came steady failure.

The winter snowed them up for many a week together ; the spring was black and desolate ; summer, long waited for, came not ; in antumn there was rain, and rain, and rain. The fields of ripe oats, the delicious fragrance of which had helped to lure the Captain to his ruin, gave place to acres of soddened stalks beaten down and discoloured by the tempest. It was October before the little that remained of the drowned hay could be got in ; but that fatal year was only the beginning of sorrows. Let us draw a veil over the miserable details.

Far better would it have been if James and Mary Bayliss had thrown the legacy into the salmon pool, by whose still depths it had been so blissful to sit together on summer evenings, while the girls made posies of blue-bell and meadowsweet, than to have sunk, not only their money, but themselves, in that alldevouring farm, that " daughter of the horseleech," that cried for ever, " Give ! give ! " but gave them nothing in return.

It was a heart-rending failure. Of course, everyone except themselves knew it must prove so ; but the more they lost on the farm the more desperately they clung to it.

The poor Captain, although he had no knowledge of farming, had plenty of theories, which, in spite of the ruin they brought on him, he cherished with the affection of a parent for his sickly offspring. He had always something new to try, and, at last, on one of his men objecting to use a new reaping machine, different from any he had ever met with, Captain Bayliss took the machine in hand himself, and was so badly injured that after many weary weeks of suffering and prostration, he was at last convinced that he had been wrong all the way through.