The two years spent in building, equipping and stocking operations in connection with the establishing of the Pine Croft Ranch constituted for many years the high-water mark for princely expenditure in British Columbia, which is saying a good deal. For many months the Golden-Crow’s Nest trail was periodically choked with caravans of pack ponies and freight wagons piled high with a weird assortment of building material and equipment and household furnishing, later enlivened with lines of thoroughbred Holsteins and Percherons. The Windermere Valley was thrilled with the magnificence of the whole enterprise. The Vancouver Free Press chronicled the event in laudatory terms:
“The establishing of the Pine Croft Ranch upon such an assured foundation is at once a testimony to the far-sighted policy of our enterprising and gifted fellow-citizen, Hugh Gaspard, Esq., and an evidence that a new era has dawned for our Province. The capitalists of the homeland have hitherto been blind to the unrivalled agricultural and ranching possibilities of our wide-sweeping British Columbia valleys. Mr. Gaspard is very shrewdly anticipating the advent of an almost limitless market for the products of his ranch by the construction of another great railroad through the mountains, with lateral colonisation lines to the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It is also no small tribute to the engineering genius of Mr. Gaspard that he has foreseen the vast resources of the Windermere Valley in water power for mining operations which are sure to follow the railway development of that part of the Province. Altogether, it is not too much to say that the establishing of the Pine Croft Ranch inaugurates a new era in the development of our Province.”
The Pine Croft Ranch was situated about halfway down the Windermere Valley, between Golden and the Crow’s Nest Pass, in one of the mighty loops of the Columbia River, and comprised within its bounds mountain and valley, lake and stream, grass lands and park-like forests, a wonderland of picturesque and varied beauty.
For the site of his ranch bungalow, Gaspard chose one of the park-like forest benches of the Columbia, set out with tall red pines with polished boles running up one hundred and fifty feet to spreading green tufts. It was built of red pine logs, with low roof and wide verandahs, and flanked on one side with gardens, riotous with flowers of all kinds and colours, some gathered from their native wilds near by and others transplanted from their native haunts in Scottish glens and moors. On the other side of the bungalow ran a little river, tumbling noisily and joyously from the upper branches of the Columbia River below. It offered to the eye a satisfying picture of homely beauty, kindly, cosy, welcoming. Beyond the riot of flowers a grass paddock of some five acres reached to the corals and stables.
Within the bungalow everything in furnishing and adornment suggested comfort and refinement. In the living room the walls of polished pine logs were hung with old tapestries, the rich red brown of the logs relieved by the gleam of old silver from diamond-paned cupboards and bits of old china and Oriental jade, with a rare collection of ancient pewters disposed here and there. The note of easy comfort in the room was emphasised by the Persian and Assyrian rugs, with the skins of grizzly and cinnamon bear upon the floor, together with the solid, deep-seated chairs and sofas upholstered in leather. Altogether, it was a wholly livable room, in which everything in the way of furnishing and adornment spoke of sound and educated taste. Opposite the main door, a stone built fireplace of generous size gave promise of cheer throughout long winter evenings. On each side of the fireplace a door led to dining room and kitchen respectively, while through a curtained archway on the left a corridor ran, flanked on either side with bedrooms. On the remaining side of the living room, folding doors opened upon a sunny room looking toward the north and west, enclosed on three sides with panelled glass. This room, from its appointments and furnishings, obviously did double duty as studio and work room.
To this home in the British Columbia wilds, far from the homeland and friends of the homeland, remote from the great world and its allurements, he brought as his wife the daughter of a West Country laird. A young girl she was, fresh from her English school, the first fine bloom of her girlhood still upon her, the sweet purity of her soul unspoiled by the defiling touch of our modern society, her high spirit unbroken, her faith in man and in God as yet unshaken.
The manner of his coming upon her was of a piece with the romantic passion within which his spirit enshrined her. Upon one of his tramps along the West Coast he found himself on an evening in a driving fog, hopelessly lost and with the prospect of a dreary night in some cheerless wind-swept cave. Out of the mist, sprite-like, she came, her blue eyes looking in upon his soul from an aureole of misty golden curls, and led him, her captive on the moment and forever after, to her home. That evening was the beginning and the end for them both. He talked and she listened. She sang and he played. Of the Windermere and its wonders he told her, drawing the very soul out of her till, by the sweet pain in her heart, she knew that when he said the word she would follow him to the world’s end. And to the Windermere he brought her, proud of her beauty and her grace, wondering at her love of him and praising God for his good fortune.
Ten years they lived there together, ten happy years untouched by grief, but for the day when they laid up on the hillside under the pines her little girl, her very replica in exquisiteness of beauty. Then shadows came. Her strength began to fail and though her high courage kept the truth from her husband the knowledge of it grew in the hearts of them both and shadowed their lives with a nameless fear of what might be.
CHAPTER II
“And what’s ‘fore-ornained,’ Mother?” The hazel grey eyes searched the face, pale and luminous as if with an inner light, leaning toward him. “What’s ‘fore-ornained?’”