Amaranth's Garden Read online



  About the Book

  "It seems, Miss, your father drew out that money yesterday, and took it all out in gold. The Rector happened to be in the Bank at the time, but was on his way to town, and could not stop to talk to your father just then, though he wondered to hear him say he had come to draw out everything, as treasurer of the fund." Amaranth Glyn's comfortable life comes to an end when the church funds disappear. Her father, the church treasurer who drew out the money, is also missing, to be followed shortly by her mother. The disgrace this brings on the family means Amaranth's marriage plans are cancelled. Amaranth is a competent artist and moves away with her young brother to try to earn a living. There are rumours that her parents are in France and even in Peru. Caring for her sick brother, Amaranth wants life to be as it was before the financial scandal forced her to leave her family home and the garden she loved.

  Amaranth's Garden

  Margaret S. Haycraft

  1855-1936

  Abridged Edition

  Original book first published 1890

  This abridged edition ©Chris Wright 2017

  e-Book ISBN: 978-0-9935005-6-5

  Published by

  White Tree Publishing

  Bristol

  UNITED KINGDOM

  [email protected]

  Full list of books and updates on

  www.whitetreepublishing.com

  Amaranth's Garden is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this abridged edition.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Author Biography

  Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  About White Tree Publishing

  More Books from White Tree Publishing

  Christian non-fiction

  Christian Fiction

  Books for Younger Readers

  Author Biography

  Margaret Scott Haycraft was a contemporary of the much better known Christian writer Mrs. O. F. Walton. Both ladies wrote Christian stories for children that were very much for the time in which they lived, with little children often preparing for an early death. Mrs. Walton wrote three romances for adults (with no suffering children, and now published by White Tree in abridged versions). Margaret Haycraft also concentrated mainly on books for children. However, she also wrote several romances for older readers. Unusually for Victorian writers, the majority of Margaret Haycraft's stories are told in the present tense.

  Both Mrs. Walton's and Margaret Haycraft's books for all ages can be over-sentimental, referring throughout, for example, to a mother as the dear, sweet mother, and a child as the darling little child. In this abridged edition overindulgent descriptions of people have been shortened to make a more robust story, but the characters and storyline are unchanged.

  A problem of Victorian writers is the tendency to insert intrusive comments concerning what is going to happen later in the story. Today we call them spoilers. They are usually along the lines of: "Little did he/she know that...." I have removed these when appropriate.

  The loss of £500 in 1890 may not sound much, but in income value it is worth £60,000 pounds today. I mention this in case the loss sounds insignificant!

  Margaret Scott Haycraft (1855-1936) also wrote under her maiden name of Margaret MacRitchie. Some of her original unedited stories are available from at least one publisher as recent paperbacks. There are plans for White Tree to publish one more abridged eBook by Margaret Haycraft – Rose Capel's Sacrifice, about a family who have to give up their only.... Unless you already know the story, you will have to wait to find out!

  Chris Wright

  Editor

  NOTE

  At the end of this book are advertisements for our other books, so the story may end earlier than expected! The last chapter is marked as such. We aim to make our eBooks free or for a nominal cost, and cannot invest in other forms of advertising. However, word of mouth by satisfied readers will also help get our books more widely known.

  Chapter 1

  "WHAT'S the matter, Mother?"

  "Nothing, darling; I'm only tired -- you know the spring weather is always trying."

  "You always say nothing, Mother. You forget that I'm nearly eighteen. Am I not old enough to share your worries, and help you just a little?"

  Amaranth kneels down and rubs her head against her mother's shoulder. Mrs. Glyn touches the brown waves of hair with caressing fingers, and a tender smile chases her look of weariness.

  "Help me, Amaranth? Your cheerful disposition is my best comfort day by day. Nobody can be dull while you go singing about the house, my pet. What could I do without you and little Eddie? God has been very good to me to give me two such children."

  "Ah, but I want to know just what makes your forehead go so wrinkly, Mother. If you don't take care, you'll get white hairs like father; and you know how proud I am of your splendid dark braids."

  "Hush, hush, you silly child! I thought you were going boating this afternoon."

  "Oh, I dare say Ardyn will come for me presently," says Amaranth, with a merry look and a vivid blush. "But you're trying to change the subject, Mother. Do tell me what's troubling you. Are we short of money again?"

  Mrs. Glyn looks at her daughter's cloudless face. As long as she is able, she will keep those laughing eyes free from the gloom associated with baker, butcher, grocer, and landlord.

  Like most mothers, Mrs. Glyn knows the world will cloud Amaranth's sunshine soon enough, and she steps between her daughter and the cares of money. "Father is expecting to hear from London soon, my pet," she says. "If he sells his book we shall do very well."

  "Why, Mother, he's sure to sell it. Of course I don't understand science at all, but Ardyn thinks it's wonderful. I'm positive that sooner or later Father's book will make our fortune. What a dreadful time those publishers take to consider it, though! "

  Mrs. Glyn does not tell her that five times already the bulky manuscript of A Scientist's Dream has been returned with courteous but decisive letters of refusal. Amaranth gets her shady hat and summons Tim -- the mite of a mongrel that followed Eddie home one day and received tender adoption -- and goes flitting down the garden, singing the refrain of a light, lilting ditty:

  "Dame Durden kept five serving maids

  To carry the milking pail;

  She also kept five labouring men

  To use the spade and flail."

  The echoes bear the happy song to Mrs. Glyn as she sits by the window and watches the drops of the late shower blown from the lilac branches. Outside, the scene is bright and cheerful. Every blade of grass is fresh and twinkling; the birds fly from bough to bough full of joyous music, the bees are stirring with a pleasant hum among the first roses of the year. But within, she bows her head, and again opens the order books of grocer and butcher, and reads anew the letter from the landlord's solicitor, reminding Mr. Glyn that his long lease of The Bower has nearly expired, that his rent is greatly in arrears, and that another lease cannot be granted on the same v
ery moderate terms.

  She is conscious now that she has acted unwisely in standing so persistently between her clever, intellectual husband and their daily needs. Things have come to such a state that she has been compelled at last to give him some notion of their difficulties, and the shock has been all the greater to him by reason of his previous freedom from thought of money.

  "Is ruin staring us in the face today?" she asks herself, trembling for her children's sake. Then, in some feeling of the helplessness of her own early years, she puts her hands together, and the tears roll down her cheeks as she silently confesses her mistakes, her failures, her errors, and crying in her blindness to Him who has taught us to call Him "Our Father."

  The Bower is an old-fashioned, rambling, redbrick house on the borders of Bryantwood, one of the prettiest villages in the south of England. Within the memory of the oldest inhabitant it has been tenanted by a Glyn, though still the property of the lord of the manor, for the Glyns are not naturally accumulative, and one after another has resolved to purchase the old family residence, and resolved in vain.

  The present Mr. Glyn has held The Bower on a long and generous lease, and he has never faced the possibility that the landlord, on its expiry, might think fit to raise the terms, or prefer a tenant more prompt and regular in his payments. Stephen Glyn, having been an only son, was destined from his cradle for the solicitor's office in Bryantwood High Street, which for many long years had belonged to his father and grandfather. Even in boyhood he showed a distaste for the law, and a repugnance to the dusty, dingy room with faded curtains and high blinds, where the elder Glyns transacted the business that seemed to him so "much ado about nothing."

  Stephen Glyn's heart was far from legal deeds and parchments, official boxes and papers, and all the methodical manners and customs of the ancestral office. He liked to get as far from the regions of the law as possible, to wander in the forest and acquaint himself with the nature and character of the trees, and explore their varied, wondrous ways; to bring home flowers and insects, and study them in the attic which was sacred to what the servants called "Master Steve's messy goings-on," and to chip away at bank and wall on geological information intent.

  Stephen Glyn might have made a first-rate naturalist, a renowned scientific professor; but he makes a very bad solicitor, and ever since the legal connection came into his hands the glory has departed from the time-honoured offices of Glyn and Son.

  The newly-fledged solicitor, young Fleming, who has lately opened offices further down the street, will undoubtedly carry all before him as regards the confidence of county magnates and their tenants.

  If one thing could shake the faith of Bryant-wood more than another, it would be the fact which is Amaranth's and her brother Eddie's boast and pride -- that Mr. Glyn has entered the lists of authorship, and has recently written a book. It seems in certain minds to be a rooted conviction that anyone who can write a book can do nothing else. An author is regarded by them with a sort passion and patronage halfway between the pity they extend to a foreigner and the leniency they show to children.

  "'Deed, and it's sinful waste of time," was the judgment of Mr. Glyn's general servant, Susan. The household has gradually shrunk to Susan and a lad called Dickey from the village. As Susan peered through the study window, and beheld her master, pen in hand, absorbed in hieroglyphics which, as she could neither read nor write, really held in her estimation some remote connection with the Evil One. Susan, good Methodist as she was, could have found it in her heart to say a charm backwards, when Mr. Glyn, joined to his manuscript, could not be lured to his meals even by the fragrance of her favourite dumplings.

  And perhaps Susan was right about the "waste of time" under these circumstances. She knew her wages were owing; she knew the forbearing trades people were growing clamorous for payment at last; and she knew that Mrs. Glyn was longing in vain to get her disabled boy the benefit of London advice. Susan justly argued that "Master did ought to be at the horfice, and not writing down a pack of nonsense about hants and hearwigs. As if folks wasn't pested enough with hearwigs every summer a-getting into the butter, without wanting to read no books about them!"

  Mrs. Glyn has a small -- a very small annuity of her own. "I will not touch it, dear," said her husband on their marriage. "You must spend it on yourself." And both of them have unconsciously multiplied its minute resources, mentally falling back upon this fund, till the wife, at least, has learnt long since, it is but as a drop in the bucket of their needs; and the paramount idea, next to the happiness of her children, has been how to stretch this income and the scanty supplies Mr. Glyn has been able to give, so as to live honestly in the sight of the good trades folk of Bryantwood.

  A day or two ago, however, Mrs. Glyn was obliged to show her husband the landlord's letter and a glimpse of the household books. Poor man! That very morning, sorely discouraged, he had left the book in which he had so yearningly believed, like the dove from the ark, in search again of a resting-place. Worn and nervous, and shocked to realise the weight his wife had carried on her shoulders, and the pressing claims surrounding him, he had feverishly assured her he would "look into matters" and get in some overdue accounts, and pay his creditors. But she can see he is in no mood for business just now. His heart is travelling with his book.

  Even now, perhaps, while she is puzzling over these accounts, he is absorbed with his microscope and a couple of gnats at the office. At breakfast he was dreamy, abstracted, absent-minded, a mood that has grown on him of late. Mrs. Glyn hopes little from his assurance that he will "look into things," and is inclined to blame herself for having carried to him at last some share of the burden that so long has pressed her down.

  A sweeter garden than that of The Bower none need crave to tread. Truly it is in want of tending. Paths are a little tangled here and there, the grass is bespangled with daisies and buttercups, the wallflowers, deep, rich, velvety, brimming over with perfume, seem growing at their own sweet will, hanging in many cases over the walks; but it is too big a garden for Amaranth and the young lad, Dickey, to keep in apple-pie order. To many its very wild luxuriance holds a witching charm. By-and-by there will be plenty of fruit overhead and on the sunny walls. Now for fruit there is only blossom, and the first glimpse of that which the coming days will behold in perfection.

  On one side of the garden is the sweetbriar-walk, which the bees know well, and which sends its fragrance even to the river that washes the border of the lawn. Then there is a long, winding yew shrubbery, full of tortuous turns and twists, where Dickey too often plays hide-and-seek with an imaginary comrade, and returns no more to his raking and weeding.

  Amaranth believes the rosebuds open in her garden first of all, and linger here the latest; already they are beginning to unfold their radiant hearts, and beneath them the violets are hiding in the green grass. Daffodils are dancing and nodding at the ruddy nasturtiums just peeping in the sunshiny beds, and marigolds, like gleaming sentinels, stand up bright and brave all along the border.

  Between bushes of lavender and scented ways of thyme and marjoram is a path that leads to a door in the wall, and through this door you pass out into Bryantwood Forest. The wild flowers in the woods come creeping up close to Amaranth's garden, and the nightingale that sings in the forest trees flings her music into the heart of the girl as she stands among her roses.

  To Amaranth, the beautiful, mysterious forest is only part of her garden. She is too light-hearted to be subdued even by the still, calm depths among the pines. It is not so very long since she used to sit poised among the branches in the heart of the woods, and the birds, familiar with her presence, would put their heads from side to side and turn their bright eyes upon her, and go on building their nests.

  Now she is in long dresses, and much to her inward discomfort, she has made the sacrifice to propriety of "doing up" her hair; but at heart she is still a girl, notwithstanding the fact that she has begun to blush at the sight of a certain boat upon the river -- and
in that boat she beholds, as expected, a young man.

  "Why, Amaranth, how late you are! Come along, I want to take you over to Fairy Island. Can't Eddie come?" he adds, a little unselfishly; but there is not a trace of selfishness about Ardyn Home, from his dark-blue eyes, warm with a beautiful light as he turns them upon Amaranth, to the strong, tender hand he holds out to her as she nears the river.

  "Eddie has gone out with Dickey," says Amaranth. "They've gone to get frogs for father. Eddie seems so well today, I believe he'll soon grow out of his weakness, Ardyn. Now, Tim, do you want to see the Fairy Island? Sit up and don't overbalance, for you never would learn to swim."

  The little mongrel, half terrier, a little of the bull, and a good deal of the nondescript, sits up gravely by his mistress, every iron-grey hair ready to tremble at the first appearance of danger, but eyeing Ardyn Home with all the trust of his canine heart.

  "Ardyn, isn't this a perfect day?" says Amaranth. "Every leaf, every flower seems happy today. And see the long line of sunbeams on the water! What a glorious world this is. How can heaven be lovelier than earth, Ardyn?"

  "We shall see God face to face," says Ardyn, softly, turning his bright young face to the glowing sky.

  "Yes, I forgot that," says Amaranth, simply. "It seems to me, Ardyn, when I kneel down to pray, I can do little else now but thank Him. How will we feel when we really see God, I wonder? I wish I were a man sometimes, Ardyn; I should like to have been a clergyman, like you, and spent my days in work for God."

  "You are working for Him, dear," says the young student, "while you are taking care of little Eddie, and helping Susan, and brightening your home and blessing us all. I never knew the meaning of home till I came to live at The Bower, Amaranth. Now, wherever I am, at Cambridge or in town, or with my uncle here at the Rectory, I always think of my rooms and Amaranth's garden as my home."

  "I remember your first coming, Ardyn," she laughs. "How shy and bashful you were then! Little did I think the time would ever come when I would deign to trust myself with you on the river. I felt so much bigger and older than you then -- but you have improved."