The Gaspards of Pine Croft: A Romance of the Windermere

by Ralph Connor

The opinions of both gentlemen were soundly based. The firm of Tussock, Gaspard and Dalton were making money and making it fast, making it by hard, driving work, transforming uncouth, broulé land left hideous and unsightly by axe and fire into smooth and fair building lots for the dwellings of men: fine constructive work; buying by the acre in the rough, selling by the foot in the finished product, and multiplying their investment ten, twenty, one hundred fold. These were the days of the youth of the vigorous, growing Canadian city, the commercial capital of a great province, situated upon one of the world’s great harbors and reaching across the wide Pacific for the trade of the awakening nations of the Orient.

The prospects of the company holding together were perhaps brighter than many of their friends imagined. The bonds that bound them each to the others were other than financial. The head of the firm was Dan Tussock, the organiser and driver of work. With thirty years’ experience in dealing with men, material and machines in all kinds of constructive work, he had mastered the secret of how to apply power to raw material for the service of mankind, which is the secret of industry, as had few in that bustling, rushing, up-building province of British Columbia. Associated with him was the young lawyer, Dalton, a master of all technicalities of his profession, a shrewd negotiator, an alert watch dog against all such predatory creatures as had made prey of Dan Tussock during his checkered and eventful life. With them, the youth Paul Gaspard, inexperienced in the ways of men, ignorant of affairs, but furnished in rich measure with the priceless endowments of a clear, high mind, with instincts for things right and fine, and a heart vastly capable of unlimited loyalty to a friend, even to the obliteration of self.

Already they had cleaned up and disposed of their first acre of land at good profit, and were now embarked in a still more extensive enterprise, the clearing and marketing of a new subdivision of the city. Besides this, in Tussock’s mind new enterprises were taking shape, timber limits and lumber mills were visualising themselves; for Dan Tussock had once been known as one of the lumber kings of the Pacific coast.

The financial affairs of the partnership, the receiving, banking and disbursing of moneys, were in the hands of Paul. It had been settled in joint conference that a certain fixed allowance should be paid to each of the partners, but nothing without the signature of the treasurer. And with loyal adherence to the pact, Tussock and Dalton drew their share and, what was of infinitely greater importance, were living within their means. Both men had passed their word to each other and to Paul that during the life of the partnership no drop of strong drink should pass their lips. To Dan Tussock this involved no serious self-denial, for that indomitable worker loved doing big things and while engaged in worth-while enterprises he was in little danger from the temptations which lay in wait for him during his idle days. But to Dalton the pledge to abstinence from drink was a different matter. Day by day and night and day the desperate, dreary fight went on, and there were nights when but for his environment he would have given up in despair and rushed out to his old haunts, seeking relief from the terrific craving that was gnawing like a vulture at his vitals. In this fight, however, he was more fortunate in his fighting ground than ever before in his life. First of all, he was driven with work. In the office with the change in his habits he found himself entrusted to an ever increasing degree with matters of importance, and after office hours the affairs of the new company so fully occupied his time and engaged his energy that he was only too glad when night came and he yielded himself to the comfort and cheer which his new home with the DeLaunays afforded him.

That home, after an exhausting day of work and struggle with the gnawing craving for drink, from which he was never wholly free, was to him a very gate of Heaven. There he found clean and cheery comfort, the charm of bright and cultured companionship, and music, always music, for which fortunately he had an absorbing passion. From many an hour of despairing conflict he was saved by the DeLaunay piano under the manipulations now of the old master when he was in form and again of Paul when he could spare the time. A royal evening there was at least once a week, when the old organist who had taken charge of Paul’s musical development would seize upon the young man and take him through a book of Mozart’s duets. Or, if Dan Tussock was in his corner with a pipe and appearing too terribly bored with what he called “high falutin’ noise,” Paul would go through a collection of reels, strathspeys and jigs, which would set Dan’s pulses jumping and his feet shuffling time.

There were other evenings when Dalton would give an hour to the overseeing of Paul’s engineering studies, for that young man was hard at work for examinations; or it might be to the discussion of the newest works on Biblical criticism, furnished by Rev. John Wesley Robinson.

But for four nights of the week and for every Saturday afternoon the DeLaunay household had made itself responsible for the Waterside Mission.

In Dan Tussock’s philosophy of life, success in that lifelong struggle against the unsleeping foes that dogged the footsteps of his friend Dalton and himself was bound up with three fundamental essentials, in his own words, “somethin’ to work at, somethin’ to work for, and a friend that keeps a-climbin’.” To these Paul had suggested a fourth, without which the others would prove ineffective, “a Keeper.”

Paul, however, was a chap who never talked religion. His religious faith was that of a child, unspoiled by convention and untrammelled by formulæ. His reading and his talks with Dalton had helped him through a dark and terrible passage in his spiritual experience, helped him back to his faith in his Bible, a faith more intelligently based than formerly and therefore more in touch with the work-a-day problems of life. His faith in the reality, in the friendliness of God, his mother’s God, the God of his childhood days, had never been touched. He was forced to acknowledge his inability to get much out of the sermons of the young and brilliant preacher of the First Methodist Church. They were too academic for him, they left him cold and doubting. But in the preacher’s talks to the Mission folk and especially to the boys and the men Paul found something to “chaw on,” as Dan Tussock said. The preacher was more human, more real, more vitalising, more in touch with the practical things of life. Tussock’s summing up of the difference between the pulpit discourses and the Mission talks, after he had tried both and rejected the former, was accepted by Paul as satisfactory: “In church he looks like he’s earnin’ his money. In the Mission he’s after the boys.” But Dalton would have none of this. “Get out, Tussock,” he said. “Robinson is all right. He has all sorts of fools to handle. In the pulpit he deals with a lot of highbrow theorists and a lot of dyed-in-the-wool hard-shell old time Methodists, who need a jolt now and then to remind them that they are alive. In the Mission he has his coat off, fighting the devil and hell, and, as you say, he’s after the boys.”

By the end of the summer the new Mission house was opened, free of debt, and splendidly equipped for its work. At the opening function, by skilful and united team play on the part of the preacher and Paul, Dalton found himself forced to occupy the chair, to the great advantage of the meeting, while Dan Tussock, to his confusion and disgust, found himself “floor manager and general push of the show,” as he afterwards declared to his friend, Miss DeLaunay, who had come to be his confidante and who had assumed a sort of maternal responsibility for the big-hearted, simple-minded, lonely man.