So Red Murdo, flown as he was with a lowly man's pride, which tends to an unbalancing, must launch upon an expedition of no common sort. It embellishes a ballad of which only two lines come to me as I write:
"There's four-and-twenty milk-white nowt, twal o' them kyeIn the woods of Glen-Tanner, it's there that they lie."
Beyond what the lines tell of a bold piece of rieving and spulzy by Jock Farquharson's henchman, and done for him, I need not trouble to instruct you, because the event only leads into our chronicle as by a tributary wind. When there is a mystery, and you cannot fathom it by direct evidence, you are driven back on motives. They are, in fact, the nut and kernel of what lawyers call circumstantial evidence, a fitting together of suspicions which have made the coffin of many an honest Highland rebel.
I sought to keep my soldiers as unseen as a not over-great distance from Marget and her mother at the Dower House would permit. Naturally the Hanoverian uniform was a sore sight for their eyes, and even a personal grief, in that it recalled dear ones who had perished on the losing side. My desire to spare them was known to my men, who, in the same spirit, would often walk a mile round not to show themselves to the desolated inmates of the Dower House.
But it was essential, if anything unusual were to happen there, that we should know, since it was part of our charge to protect Marget and her mother from perils incidental to an unsettled country. Therefore, I had a private understanding with an old retainer of the family that he was to hasten to me, should protection at the Dower House ever be necessary.
This he was to do quietly, before giving any general alarm, as that might not prove necessary, and also because I remembered an old Highland wisdom, "Never cry fire, unless you want the heather to catch." Its bearing, as you will grasp is on strifes and feuds set alive, not on the actual burning of heather, which is done to let grass, for the sheep beasts, grow without being choked.
Well, on a night which I recall for its dense blackness, there came a tap, tap, tap, three of them, slowly and distinctly, at the small window of my room in the Castle. I knew by the method of the disturbance that it was not an accident, but I was on my feet and peering hard into the outer darkness before I realized that here was the prearranged signal of danger at the Dower House.
A hand moved close to the window, signalling me, and I motioned back, though, on either side, all this was divined, as divination takes place in the dark, rather than seen at all. I picked up my sword, which always stood in a certain corner of my room, pulled the door gently towards me and stepped softly out on to the grass, which grew close up to the Castle walls.
"Come ye, fast, Captain Gordon," quietly said a figure gliding beside me, and without another word we made for the Dower House. When I felt myself beyond ear-shot of the sentry, I asked:
"What's happened—what's wrong?"
"I'm no' exac'ly sure," was the old retainer's answer, "but men hae been surroundin' the place, as if to attack it. They wakened me, bein' a light sleeper, because they made sounds different fae' the ordinary. It was like men crawlin' amon' the grass on a plan, and I slippit doon for you."
"What had we better do?" I asked formally, and not because I expected any answer, for I had decided to get into the Dower House without alarming anybody, if that could be done.
We managed to open a window and step through it, but then the dogs sleeping inside set up an alarm. This quickly awoke everybody, and the confusion set affairs moving outside, where I heard a voice that seemed familiarly like Red Murdo's cry hoarsely:
"Lie close, lie close!"
Presently Marget and her mother, who had both dressed hastily, came to the stair-head, holding a glimmering light over the darkness beneath. Behind them crowded their few scared domestics, and odd the whole scene looked, although, indeed, between keeping off the barking dogs and wondering what was to happen outside, I had no desire or time to study it.
"Who's there?" called Marget, in a not uncomposed but expectant voice, and I answered, telling in a few words what I knew. Quick in thought and action she thanked me for coming, and said she would just get her cloak. She took her mother with her, but in a moment was back again asking, "How can I be of service?"
She carried a stout walking-stick, and I looked at it as she came down the stairs to where I stood in the lobby, her mother following. "Yes," she said, "my hand lighted on it somewhere, perhaps because it has been through troubles and wars and is in the presence of more. Shall we say that the fighting instinct, even in a stick, leaps to the call?" She laughed quietly, but with a concerned note in the laugh, and I knew she was thinking of her mother's safety and health, both threatened by this strange incursion of ill-disposed men.
Wishful as one would be at such a moment to magnify a trifle, in order, if possible, to occupy an anxious woman's mind, I remarked, "Oh, a stick can be a very sound weapon in a good hand."
"It's about all that the orders of search and suppression have left us Jacobites," remarked Marget; "openly confessed, anyhow, for I suppose there may be a small, concealed arsenal or two, even among our Corgarff hills."
Nothing, apparently, had happened outside in those tense minutes, and it was the strain of waiting which made us resolutely talk of nothing—but a stick. There had been no further cry since the "Lie close" already mentioned, and it, no doubt, had been a mischance on the part of Red Murdo. All was silence and black without, and within all quiet alarm, such as you get when a household suppresses itself in obedience to some demand.
It was an oppressive silence, this waiting, and I was glad to hear Marget tap the floor with her sinewy hazel and say merrily, thinking to lighten her mother's concern, "My grandfather insisted that a stick with a nob was no stick for a Highland gentleman. It escaped, he would say, when it was most needed, and that might, at times, leave the best of Highland gentlemen by the wayside." Joking, under difficulties!
She paused, for there arose a crack-cracking as of men coming closer among the scrub of heather and fern which surrounded the Dower House, only it was quite momentary. The stick which she had half-lifted, an unconscious act of readiness for defence, tapped back on to the floor, and my sword-point made a sharper rattle, though I was unaware that my hand had even moved it. The tyranny of doing nothing began to be intolerable and to insist on an issue, be it what it might.
Think of the situation for me, and although I am, I hope, neither more selfish nor more cowardly than other men, I could not help doing that. Here was I, the chief and head of his Majesty's garrison at Corgarff Castle, standing defence on the door-step of a Jacobite household. Why was I there at all? What was I there to accomplish? How was I to do this unknown something and return with composure to my quarters, secure in my loyalty to King George and his ministers?
Moreover, what had I come out for to see? A mere expedition of burglary by a band of hungry caterans who took the chattels of friend or foe indifferently? Possibly that was all. Then I could have fetched half-a-dozen soldiers and apprehended those same footpads, or, at all events, driven them to the hills again. But at the head of what defensive force did I find myself? Why, a few domestics without resource enough even to escape from the danger, a dear old lady who anxiously wanted to mother the trouble about her, and a young woman of nerve and resolve, my only stand-by.
There, for it was a new discovery in our relationship, I realized that to have Marget by me was a very welcome comradeship, and, somehow, so natural, that it made the other things of no burden. I was curiously happy, and could have left matters at that, but what to do, what to do?
There must, in all of us, be an instinct for our keeping, when we are in danger. Give it headway and you will probably win through, as a thirsty horse knows how to reach a springwell among the hills. Argue with it and it says, "Take your reasoned method, your road of the better judgment, but don't blame me, your natural guardian, if you come to harm."
With this I got the strong intuition, possibly communicated to my mind or heart by Marget's nearness, that here was no ordinary raid for spoilage. Something else of a personal and intimate sort was behind, I was sure of it, something to which acute danger attached for my dearest wishes.
When you are, in small authority, set over the people of a locality, you are apt to develop a small official mind which obscures the power of seeing, understanding, divining. Such an attitude, as I had painfully seen in various parts of the Highlands, fretted the great sore of defeat that lay upon the Jacobites, whereas the effort should have been to heal it. My own mind I had tried to keep fresh and free in all my relationships at Corgarff, impelled, may be, by a nature which liked, possibly out of vanity, to give sympathy. From this and a mute speaking with one near and dear, I now had my personal reward, for I understood. Marget was the trophy sought in this dark raid, and she was to be the Black Colonel's trophy.
"Action, front!" I said to myself, in one of the drill-book commands. Offence is always a soldier's best defence, although it is a sailor's phrase, so I would go out and make a reconnaissance from the back of the Dower House. This should cause the invaders to show themselves, and might, if they thought the move stood for any force, even alarm them into a quiet retreat, which, for several reasons, was what I most desired.
Quickly I told Marget of my intention, and the need for it, and asked her to remain on guard where she was. She answered briskly, a woman determined to be brave and not a burden, that nobody should enter the place without feeling the weight of her grandfather's stick. She added, and here came in the other woman, that I was not to be long absent. This touched me sweetly, for it showed that Marget was thinking less of her own safety, or, at the moment, even of her mother's, than of mine in the night outside. Honestly, I went dancing from her side with a wine of joy in me that I had never tasted, for she had shown that I was something to her, perhaps more than something. I might have been drunk, and if I had I could not have been more lost than I was in the darkness behind the Dover House, because it instantly swallowed me up.
There is a darkness to which, after a little, the eye so accustoms itself that it can see trees and rocks and even faces in contour. There is another darkness which seals the eyes and numbs the mind and even weights the feet as with lead. This was that night's darkness, so pall-like that I was simply lost in it.
Nevertheless, calling up all my sense of locality, and feeling the way lightly with my bare, ready sword, I started to make a circle of the Dower House. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty cautious steps, with my sword-point probing the way, and it touched something soft and yielding. That something a-sort of whimpered, as a dog caught poaching would, or as a man might who felt a quick pain. A sword-prick stings, and the something leapt erect and with a curse turned at me, when I instinctively fell on guard. Another sword struck at mine, my blade slid up this other, caught in the handle and wrenched it from the unseen hand. The weapon fell among the bracken, but my man thought more of getting away than of looking for it, so he doubled round a tree and was gone.
Evidently I had struck the investing circle, and I went on cautiously, but never another figure did I perceive, though, before me, ran many soft noises of as many retreats. Finally there was a suppressed rush away, and with that I arrived at the front door of the Dower House to hear a mother's cry of distress, "Marget, Marget! oh, Marget, Marget!"
"Where is she?" said I anxiously.
"She grew alarmed for you," answered her mother more anxiously, "and went out, although I tried to keep her. Hardly had she gone when I heard a smothered sob, and then there was a hustle of feet as if she were being carried oft by force."
There was a boding of ill in her cry, like a coronach, and the domestics took it up in sympathy, as Highland women will. "Marget! Marget! Mistress Marget!" rose the cry, and we became aware that all the inmates of the castle were stirring to it. But never a response came from Marget, never a token from the raiders, and it was forced on me that she and they were both gone from us.
We called on her, and searched for them until the dawn came, but only found the sword which I had encountered, and I knew it as one the Black Colonel had long worn, and then, when he himself got a better, that with the "S" for "Stuart" on its handle, had given to Red Murdo. The larger knowledge, brought by the dawn, was that the raiders had vanished as secretly as they had come, and that they had, beyond doubt, taken Marget with them. For though—
"We sought her baith by bower and ha',The lady was not seen."
XIII—The Wound of Absence
You will probably know what it is to lose somebody who by physical fragrance, the mystery of a common spirituality, or both, has become essential to you. The wound is twice as bitter if, until the parting, you were unaware how much that presence really meant. It is as if you had come into a new world of your own and then found it vanish, before you could take possession.
I had no doubt, thanks to the hearing of his voice and the leaving behind of his sword, that the raiders were headed by Red Murdo, the Black Colonel's henchman. Actual light came during the morning, in the form of a message by word of mouth: "I am a prisoner in the topmost room of Lonach Tower, and Red Murdo and his men are camped below."
When the Highland woman who brought it had said that, she melted away again without taking bite or sup. She lived in the ruin of Lonach Tower, and that was how Marget had been able to send her with the message. She could not be too long absent, however, or she might be missed by Red Murdo, whom, she said, she had left snoring out his lost night's sleep.
I found a Highlander who had engaged in relations with Red Murdo, though their nature need not be mentioned, and who was anxious to score them off for a settled life. Working on that, I told him to go to Lonach Tower, where he would find Red Murdo, and say the Black Colonel was waiting at a fold of the hills, which I named—waiting to hear how the night's work had fared! That, as you will mark, was the nice significance of the message, which I hoped would move Red Murdo and his merry men—his master waited "to hear how the night's work had fared!"
If the Black Colonel was behind the business it would seem a natural message, nay, a command, and my messenger went off with it. When he had gone, I picked out a dozen of our best soldiers, and, hinting the mission, without explaining it, we followed at a distance. We halted behind the last peak of the hill which looks down on Lonach Tower and awaited events.
We saw the receding Highland figure wend slowly towards the bare, lean turret, and, when he reached it, my eyes lifted to its queer little windows, seeking to look through them. They gave no sign of anybody inside, and, indeed, the mullioning of time had so dimmed them that, perhaps, the outside world could hardly be seen from within.
My Highlander hammered at the one entrance door, and he had to hammer a while before it opened to him. Then it only opened partly, as if the guardian kept a shoulder to it, while he spoke the visitor. Next it shut again, leaving my man outside, but evidently the colloquy had not finished, for he waited.
Ten minutes more and the door drew wide, as we could see, and Red Murdo came out, his comrades with him, and there was more questioning of the bringer of news. Evidently he played his part well, perhaps because, knowing nothing of what lay behind, he simply stuck to the terms of his delivery, for presently Red Murdo's party set off towards the meeting-place I had named for them.
Here was my time to act, and I only waited until the coast, or rather the valley, was clear. When the tartans of Red Murdo's party had fluttered out of sight, in obedience, as they fancied, to the commands of their chief, I got my fellows quickly a-foot for Lonach Tower and she who was a captive there.
The heavy oaken, iron-clasped door had been locked by the departed raiders, and no sign of any tenant within fluttered out to us. Half-measures are no more useful in opening bolted doors, of which you have not the key, than they are in accomplishing other difficult things. So, finally, we put our collective weights against it, pushed hard and steadily, and when the weather-worn bars and hinges gave way, tumbled headlong into the old keep.
Nobody was in the ground-room floor, nothing, except the untidiness left by half-a-dozen rough men, and I mounted the narrow stair and tried the room above. Again we had to use force, and when the door flew inward I almost landed in the lap of Marget Forbes. There she was, bound to a rough seat, in the middle of the room, with a cravat tied round the lower part of her face, to keep her silent. Gently but swiftly I undid the gag, and after that cut the rough tow which bound her to the seat. Being thus freed, she told me, with an agitation which I tried to still, what had happened just before we came and on the previous night.
Red Murdo, she said, when she could speak, had told her, with awkward apologies, that he did not want to be unchivalrous but that he and his men were called away for a little and that he must make siccar about her custody, and no alarm giving, against his return. She had ceased asking him why she had been forcibly abducted and what was intended for her, because on that he would say nothing except, "You are quite safe, my young lady, quite safe. We may be plain fellows, but we are Highland men towards a woman, especially towards Mistress Marget Forbes of Corgarff." "But how," I asked, for she had now somewhat recovered her nerve and composure, and the agreeable surprise our arrival had caused her, "how did you fall into their hands at the Dower House?"
"Oh," said she, "that was simple. You went out to reconnoitre, and, hearing in the stillness, words and a noise like a passage of swords, I became anxious about you. Under this impulse I opened the front door and stepped out a few yards when a Highland plaid fell round my head, silencing me effectually before I could shout an alarm, and I was borne swiftly away by two men. My astonishment was so great that I am not sure if I attempted to resist until I was some distance from the Dower House. Then two other men relieved my captors in carrying me, and by stages, for I absolutely declined to walk a step, I was brought here and placed in this room."
"Where you have been unable to give any alarm?"
"That you can see, and all I knew was that Red Murdo was the leader of my captivity, because he grumbled about having been stabbed in the leg and about losing his sword. 'What,' I asked, 'could he and his master, the Black Colonel, want by spiriting me away?' But Red Murdo wouldn't answer the question, and I haven't been able to answer it myself. Somehow I have felt that no personal harm was intended me because my captors, if not exactly friends, were not strangers, but men in some relationship to our own people. Mostly I have been anxious for the anxiety of my mother," and her eyes looked concern at me.
"Well," I said, "we shall relieve that anxiety very soon now; you have probably had enough of Lonach Tower, which, I notice, is sadly in need of the repairer. Let us go home!"
I said that last word out of my heart, and I thought Marget answered with a gleam which comes into a woman's eyes only when her heart is somewhere behind it. We went down the slender, creaky stair, the soldiers following, and came to the door, where, if you please, we ran slap into the Black Colonel, Red Murdo, and the other caterans. In the unexpected lies drama, and here, indeed, was a dramatic confronting. We stared at each other for a moment as if asking who was to speak first, and, like himself, the Black Colonel managed to do it.
"I heard only an hour ago," he said, "of a lady in distress in this old house. I have come, at my best speed, to help her, as who would not, when that lady is Mistress Marget Forbes."
"Would it not have been better," I cut in, "if you had heard of her distress before and come earlier to remedy it?"
"Possibly," he answered, "but if I had been earlier, Captain Gordon, I might not have met you here. So you see," he added challengingly, "there are compensations, although these are things, as far as my experience goes, with which we could often dispense."
"Well," said I, "I have been able to render first aid to Mistress Forbes, but it would be a satisfaction if you could explain to us how she came to need it."
"Explain! How can I explain?"
"You have cultivated a name for gallantry, Colonel"—he bowed—"and it would be gallant to a lady if you would say why Red Murdo invaded the Dower House last night and carried its young mistress away?"
"Did he, the villain? He did not tell me of that, when I ran into him and his following this morning. He said he came to where we met, in response to an order from me. There was no such order, though it is true that I was keeping an open eye for Red Murdo, a habit I have when I know he is abroad, lest he might have anything for me."
By this time it was clear that the Black Colonel had commissioned Red Murdo to kidnap Marget in order that he might rescue her, and, by the act of so doing, advocate his plans towards her. He was denying it now that he found in Lonach Tower not Marget alone and a captive, but Marget with a good, stout bodyguard to look after her.
She had not spoken so far, partly because she had not been directly addressed, partly because, as I could see, she was in a hot fury with the Black Colonel. But the strange fascination of the man was working on her, as I could also see, and, woman-like, speak she would or die.
"If," she demanded of him quietly, slowly, for she had herself in hand, "you had anything special, even private to say to me, why did you not come to the Dower House instead of sending your handy men to scare us all and run off with me? Whatever you hoped to gain, that, you must know, was not the way to gain it."
The Black Colonel looked at her composedly for a moment and said, "Mistress Marget, I am the last person in the world to think that any form of duress would influence your actions. On the other hand, since the opportunity has come, I make bold, even in the presence of Captain Gordon and our respective followers, to say a word in frankness, out of regard for you and your house. There are events pending which might go far to re-establish your family, and you should know about them, not merely indirectly but directly from me, who am deeply concerned in the business."
Marget blushed and flushed and glanced at me, as if asking me to protect her from what was very like a manifesto for public knowledge, thrust upon her when she could not help it. Her unconscious appeal warmed my heart like the sun, but I held back, preferring she should give the word which would, once and for all, put the Black Colonel in his place.
"By what right," she said with dignity, "do you address your proposals to me as you have done? You have schemed them in an underground way. Must you commit the affront of offering them to me in public, after using force to bring me here?"
"I have told you," broke in the Black Colonel, "what I know of Red Murdo and his doings on this morning, and if you do not believe me, why, I cannot help it. It may be that I had a plan for meeting you face to face, but no plan like what has now emerged."
"No," said I, intervening, "your plan was to find Marget alone in this eerie place, to work on her woman's feelings, her anxiety for her mother, her regard for her house, all that you might commit her with the Crown authorities as assenting to the secret negotiations which you are ripening."
"Doesn't that reflection come oddly from an officer of the Crown," he retorted, "because I have not heard you have resigned your commission? You should leave it to us who are not honoured with service under the foreign king, to flout his Majesty."
"There are moments, Jock Farquharson," I hotly replied, "when one's first duty is to be a man, and this is such a moment. I tell you if you do not drop your persecution of this lady you will have to count on a forthright quarrel with me."
"A pretty speech, my Captain Gordon," he said, adding: "Pretty speeches have a habit of coming from those whose tongues are their boldest weapons."
"You credit me," I said warmly, "with an accomplishment which I may or may not have; you assail me for want of a quality which I beg you to permit me to prove here and now."
There was no mistaking that, and he and his men looked their understanding. My feelings were what you can imagine, but I spoke deliberately. Perhaps I realized the need for quiet resolution rather than temper, which is ever too brittle a weapon to work well. As I understood, the Black Colonel, having failed to get Marget into his hands, with the object of mentally coercing her, now wanted to break me, if he could, in her presence. There was no end to the man's resource when the bad side of his character got going, and no measure at which he would stick.
His insult to me had been spoken in a voice loud enough to be heard by everybody. He so meant it to be heard, but my reply, an instant acceptance of his challenge, surprised him for a moment. He looked at me, hesitating what to say, and I looked at him with a perfectly clear purpose in my face. We both looked at Marget, at his Highlanders and at my men, knowing that with all these for witness of what had happened, more must follow.
Deep down in my heart I felt relief, because I was sure that some day we must fight out the odds between us, and when you come to that pass with any man, it is best it should be settled. They say that delay is fatal in love and deadly in war, and with me the two risks combined, for mine was both a question of love and a question of war.
"Is it elegant," the Black Colonel said in a purring voice of which I knew the worth, "that two men who are kinsmen in a degree, should fight, in the presence of a young lady who is a kinswoman?"
"You should have thought of that before," I quickly retorted.
"I agree with Captain Cordon," said Marget, interrupting us, "for Icome of a people who have never been afraid to see trouble through, andI beg of you, Colonel Jock Farquharson, not to let me stand in the way.Nay, if you will accept me, I shall be referee!"
I bent my head to thank her for this, and he bowed in the over-polite fashion which he had learned among the French. By this time our respective followers, now taking a fight for granted, had lined themselves up to watch it, one set of men in one row, the other set in another, with space between them. A spirit of the love of combat for combat's sake, shone in their expectant eyes and echoed in their suppressed, excited talk.
There had once been a small garden attached to the Tower of Lonach, but it had been so overgrown with grass, and the grass had been so industriously eaten by sheep and deer, that now it was a rough, hard green, an entirely good place for swordsmen. On it, as the sun began to dip behind the hills, we took our stand, with my sergeant for second to me, while Red Murdo filled the same office towards the Black Colonel.
Things had happened so swiftly that I had scarcely time to think, and perhaps that was well, for thought never nerves you in such business as I had before me. There was I confronted with one of the best swordsmen in the Highlands, while I was—well, passably good. He was bigger, stronger, a more heroic, more impressive figure altogether than I was, and these pictorial attitudes count by the impression they make. I had to rely on a cool head, a nimble wrist, and I must in no wise depart from the style of fighting by which alone, as I well knew, I could hope to hold my own.
The Black Colonel would be sure, following the untutored Highland manner, and keeping his French training in reserve, to attack furiously, hoping so to destroy me at the beginning. My plan, based upon the barracks and camp training of a regular soldier, was to parry with him, to hold him off, to wear him down, and then, if I had the luck, which Heaven give me, get a blow home.
Marget, for all her courage, had walked over to a far corner of the green, where, however, she could still see us, because my soldiers and the Black Colonel's men stood aside to let her do that. Their common instinct for a fight flamed while they waited, but I knew that there would be no interference from either party of retainers, however things fell out, and so I had no anxiety as to the quarrel going beyond the Black Colonel and myself. All men of Highland degree were brought up to believe that honest disputes could be settled better by combat than anyhow else, and, indeed, they almost have a traditional reverence for the broad-sword of their country.
Nobody called on us to begin, but when the Black Colonel and I, our few preparations made, had looked at each other for a minute from the measured distance which divided us, we both advanced. As I had expected, he came with a rush, and if it had not been for my sound training in defence he might have smitten me at once. As it was, by a turn which seemed new to him, I caught his sword under the point and lifted it lightly upward into the empty air. He almost flew past me with the motion which he had gathered, and we both had to face squarely round in order that we might continue.
This time, apparently, he meant to be more deliberate, thinking, perhaps, that if he missed me again with one of his wild lunges, he might meet the sting of my thrust. He played with me, and I responded to his caution, so far as he could be cautious, in the same spirit. Our swords were of equal length and about the same weight, but he had a longer arm than I, as well as a stronger one. Still, I made up for this, as he began to realize, by quicker work in what might be called the smaller craft of fighting. I could be here and there and somewhere else with my sword, while he was making a parry or a lunge or a level stroke, for he tried everything.
Now his sword ran safely under my left arm where I guided it, and the point of mine caught the breast-high edge of his kilt, where the cloth is closely plaited and therefore very resisting. My blade bent so that if it had been other than the finest steel it might have snapped. Then the grip in the cloth broke, the sword was free again, and we were without hurt, only the battle was growing warm.
Its contagion had agitated the men looking on, to a point where, forgetting themselves, they began to shout encouragement to us severally, the Black Colonel's men to him, mine to me. Red Murdo was urgently demonstrative, and my sergeant, as he afterwards told me, kept an eye on him lest he should be tempted to intervene. In the distance Marget, as I saw momentarily, stood still and quiet, but there was a fixed anxiety in her face, and the woman's horror of two men seeking to take each other's life on her account!
Now came the third bout, and knowing the limits of my strength I determined to make it the last, if I could. The Black Colonel, it encouraged me to notice, had also grown a little tired. His rush and dash were less strong when he came at me, and I thought I caught in his eye a new doubtfulness of success. He was famed for the quickness with which he could finish a duel, and probably he had also decided to settle this one at the third time of asking.
We parried and thrust, sword to sword, and I was driven to give way a few paces by the Colonel's onslaught. This led him to take risks, as I had hoped he might. Let him tire out his sword arm with heavy lunges and elaborate recoveries, while I kept myself on guard, and then, perhaps, my turn would come, for getting him. It did come, but it came, as most things come, in an unexpected fashion.
Sweating like a man in a fever, with his eyes wild and savage, the Black Colonel at last fairly flung himself on me. My face was also streaming with perspiration, but my head remained cool, perhaps because I felt that Marget was looking on. A warm heart and a cool head should neighbour an ordeal, and, in that assailing of me, my maintenance of this combination was everything.
As he leapt forward, purposing to overwhelm me, the Black Colonel's foot appeared to catch an uprising tuft that had been left unnibbled by the sheep, possibly on account of the coarse toughness of its grass. He lost his balance and shot heavily at me, holding his sword straight out, as if to drive it through me. Here was my chance, for he could not, in this act of falling, change the position of his weapon. I did that for him by a mere touch, and it ran by me, near, it is true, but without hurting me. Mine, on the other hand, pierced the muscle of the Black Colonel's right arm, and instantly his sword fell from his hand, rattling close to my foot. The blood spurted from him to the cry of the onlookers, "Ah, he's ill hit," for he looked it, lying there on the ground with a long, red gash in his arm.
"No," he said, slowly rising, "I am not ill hurt, but I am hurt in a measure which will keep me from fighting any more this afternoon. Here I am with a useless right hand, and I have never learned to use the left, so we must stop."
By this time Marget had come up, offering to bind the Black Colonel's wounded arm, and staunch the bleeding, a task which Red Murdo had already begun, only his hands were clumsy at it. Marget made him take off the strip of tartan which he was twisting tightly round the forearm and put her linen handkerchief nearest the wound. This tender and thoughtful attention seemed to soften the field of battle, and presently I found myself picking up the Colonel's sword and returning it to him.
"Thank you," he said; "I can only carry it in my belt at present, but I would not like to lose it, for it has proved you a better swordsman than I had expected."
Handsomely said, was it not? But we are always inclined to think a compliment to ourselves fitting, especially when it comes from an enemy as formidable as Jock Farquharson was.
"I hope, sir," I answered without undue gravity, "that I have earned the compliment and I accept it, as I accepted your challenge, without reserve. Now, I suppose, our meeting is finished, and so we may each go our own way. Mistress Forbes, will you allow me to see you home?" and I turned towards her.
She took my arm and we walked quietly from Lonach Tower and quietly across the hills to the Dower House, neither of us saying much on the way, possibly because our thoughts were not for the six soldier men who strode behind us.
XIV—The Cards of Love
A man who serves the cause of a good woman is serving well, her and himself, even if he only waits in the garden of the emotions. He is probably helping that woman in subtle, beautiful ways, to be herself, to realize the full majesty of her womanhood, which otherwise she might miss. I had the highest wish to help the interests of Marget, and if my heart beat an accompaniment, that was only another test of my sincerity.
There, perhaps, I have written as if I had grown sure of Marget, which I had no right to be, which no man can ever be of any Marget, else romance would perish. Typical of other youth and maid stories was ours, a story without a beginning, a middle, or an apparent ending; a sort of skein of hope and unspoken understanding such as links two people, until they come closer or drift apart, ships that pass in the night that should be the morning.
When did we begin to care for each other, if that state of regard as between us was to be assumed, because people do ask themselves such questions, and if they do, why not admit it? When does a flower begin to bloom? Who can tell? You see it, one unheralded high-noon, as if it were just ready to burst beautifully upon its world. So it is, still much depends on how the world is going to treat it. The flower blows, if sunshine greets and warms it. But let the sky be grey, sombre, leaden, and that flower cometh not to its full kingdom—cometh not, she said.
We had not spoken, Marget and I, to each other of love; we had not called it by a name to each other; we had only felt and dreamt it. Possibly, that is the natural course of a simple, true love, for it is undemonstrative. It likes the half-lights of the dusk, to live in the shadow of its silvery clouds, and to arrive round corners, if only that it may have a safe way of escape, should it be frightened. Ever it likes running away, and, better still, it likes being pursued!
All this goes with one dark little story of my love for Marget, and I would only tell it under the compulsion of a full-breasted honesty, because I judge it to be sacred to her as well as to me. It was when I first felt as if something hitherto unknown to me had come into my life at Corgarff. I had seen Marget once, with interest, because she was good to look upon, the second time with pleasure, because she seemed to see me, the third time with a sense of awkwardness, as if a mysterious contact had arisen between us.
Words will not take me nearer to the uncanny, covetous feeling than that, for they are bald, empty contrivances invented of this world and not, like love itself, the fruit of the spirit world. But perhaps you will understand, certainly if you have experienced yourself, and, understanding so much, you will be able to follow what came next.
Marget had been going somewhere, taking a mere walk, perhaps, and I had said, "May I not come," and she said, "No, there is really no need," and I did not go.
Unknowing youth! I saw my condemnation in her eye as she went her path resolutely, turning neither to the right nor to the left, a maiden determined to give me a lesson in this; that love, even when it is only dawning, loves to be assailed. That was a chapter of the spiritual story which lay within the outer story of our doings in Corgarff. You may say that it was a trifle, a thing not worth recalling, and that would be true for everybody except Marget and myself, who knew better then and confessed it to each other afterwards, because it was a first flicker of realization.
And, indeed, behind my marchings and counter-marchings around the grim old Castle of Corgarff there lay a mystery of feeling nearer to me than any call of arms could be. It was always present, the most potent influence that can exercise a man, born of one woman and in love with another. No doubt Marget and I shirked any admission, but it was in our bearing towards each other, that whisper of the heart's throne which calls and is answered.
This feeling was my settled comfort now that a cloud of events, as I assessed them, was hurrying the Black Colonel into a new necessity towards his personal aims and so towards Marget and myself. The "rough, raging, roaring, roystering, robustious rascal" side of him, and the description is not mine but taken from an extant document, had long been filling up. Presently it would overflow in happenings urgent enough to sweep our pilgrimage along like a high wind on the high hills of Corgarff.
They began with a fall out between the Black Colonel and his Red Murdo, some little time after the duel at Lonach. To get his injured but recovered sword-arm in trim again the Colonel had taken to practising on his man, also a sufficient swordsman, though always liable to make a foul stroke. This time he had to defend himself from a sudden, half-angry, half-playful, wholly energetic assault on the part of his master, and that without a sword in hand.
What do you think he did, this Red Murdo, when the Colonel's provoking blade had positively pinked him in the leg, above the garter and drawn blood? He picked up Jock Farquharson's pet dog, a wise and lively Scots terrier, and flung it, a protection against further pinking, on the sword-point, with the remark, "A good soldier never lacks a weapon."
The Black Colonel was fondly attached to his dog, and its death, for it died from the wound, upset him into other troubles. It is often the way, when one thing goes wrong that many things go wrong, time getting out of joint generally. Naturally, too, if we remember that life is a delicate machine which a small first unbalancing will throw into disorder, as take the Black Colonel in witness.
It became necessary for him to "raise the wind," as he spoke of the process, and to that end he sent Red Murdo on a foraging expedition. This worthy, wishful to do the business with as little trouble as possible, went after the first batch of cattle he could find. He planned to get them away in the dark of night, have them at a safe distance by morning, and then, at his leisure, drive them to a southern market and bring back to the Black Colonel what he got for them, less his own expenditure on victuals and drink, and the due entertaining of other gentlemen of the same kidney, met on the road, because its comradeship had to be justly handselled.
Now, shrewdly, as a matter of precaution against raiders high, or kern lowly, the owner of the grazing kine had put a white beast among them. Consequently when he was wakened by a loud lowing and came forth to find the reason, he saw that his cattle were being stolen away, for there walked the white one, a guiding star to his eye. He followed the drove quietly at a distance, summoning friends as he passed their several homes, and when he had gathered recruits enough, and while it was still dark, he set upon Red Murdo and his thieves, gave them the heartiest beating you could fancy, and re-captured the cattle.
This attempt to steal the kine was laid at the door of the Black Colonel, rightly so, and when he heard of it and its failure he swore at Red Murdo, saying he had lost all a henchman and provider's artistry. He was one of those men, very numerous in the world, who could ill-support a failure made by himself, and could not bear it at all when another failed who was acting for him.
"Why," he rated Red Murdo, "you can neither steal nor lie, as a Highland gentleman's ghillie should. You would have me do those petty things myself, and they are not for me, although, mayhap, I'd be equal enough to them."
Red Murdo answered nothing to his enraged chief, but perhaps made up for his silence by some hard thinking. When a rebuke is taken silently the wrath behind it is apt, in average human nature, to simmer out, but the Black Colonel's black fire burned on.
"Why," he roared, "didn't you think of an expedient to keep those cattle, the white one and all, for very probably it was a beast to fetch a good price? Where were your wits? You recollect when, for an act which has since been counted brave, I had to fly with half-a-dozen men on my heels, and how, coming to a mill, and nobody being there, I put on the miller's dusty suit. I was asked by my pursuers, sure that they had seen the man they pursued disappear into the mill a few minutes before, 'Did any one enter here?' 'Only the miller is here,' I told them, and, as it seemed so, they went their way, and, after a while, I went mine."
"But," said Red Murdo, "they wid na' hae believed me if I had sworn a score o' oaths that I was the miller. I'm nae sae good at swearin' untrooths as some folk you ken!"
"Possibly," quoth the Colonel loftily. "To be believed one must, after all, look one's words and you might find it a difficulty. But still a ghillie of better strategy would have kept those cattle and, what is worse, my friend, saved the suspicion which has fallen upon me."
"Nae for the first time," Red Murdo shot at the Black Colonel.
"It's not first times that matter," he retorted more quietly, being pleased, in a manner, with Red Murdo's spirit; "it's last times that count, and the need is to take care of them."
Possibly the Black Colonel might have met his material troubles for a while longer without having to fly from them, because he was full of stratagems. But on the sentimental side he fell into an affair of much sadness for a comely lady who, at her mid-age, should have known better, though, indeed, the forties have their storms, like the sea latitudes sailors call the "roaring forties." Delectable as detail might be, and desirable to illumine what all befell, I must, for I am no scandal-monger, be content to give you the romance and the tragedy in three snatches of verse begotten by the same.
First, you must make what you like of—
"She kept him till mornin', then bade him begane,And showed him the road that he might na be ta'en."
Next, you have the news let loose, for—
"Word went to the kitchenAn' word went to the ha'."
Finally, when my lord of the lady rides home from a far journey and hears that news, and meets her, he goes red, wud mad and—
"O bonnie, bonnie was her mouthAnd cherry were her cheeks;And cleir, cleir was her yellow hairWhereon the reid blude dreips."
There the Black Colonel had found a tangle which he could not cut through, and he sought a side-way out. How he discovered it he was good enough to inform me, though I had no claim to his confidence, in an epistle drafted in his best style, which reached me at Corgarff, hard on the tidings of what had made the necessity for it.
"To Captain Ian Gordon, for his privy knowledge only," it opened, and it continued, in his usual, even manner, for, mind you, he had the trick of writing, as well as the odd weakness towards it already remarked on, all of which appears in what follows, so:
"It may oblige your calculations that I have a proposal through proper channels to go on a special mission to New France, where a state of war now exists between the British and the French. Ordinarily I should have hesitated to take a step which would remove me, even for a time, from my most particular affairs here, these being familiar to you.
"The offer is put to me, however, as part of earlier overtures in those same affairs, and that recommends it. Moreover, there are urgent private reasons, not here to be gone into, but perhaps to be j'aloused by you, which favour an early change of air and scenery for yours dutifully. Accordingly I am departing for North America by the first government ship on to which I can be smuggled, that, as I grimly note, being the elegant word used in a dispatch of instruction to my hand.
"You cannot fail to be curious as to the nature of my mission, and I shall inform you thereon so far as its delicate nature permits. I am offered by Government—your Government—a free pardon for the past and a captain's commission in Fraser's Regiment of Highlanders, now in Canada with General Wolfe, if I succeed in the undertaking which is this . . . but its delicacy tries my power of pen.
"Briefly I, a proscribed Jacobite, am to depart from Scotland, find my way to Canada, and offer my sword and service to the Marquis Montcalm commanding his French Christian Majesty's troops for the defence of Quebec. There I am to keep an open eye, and a close tongue, for all and every information of possible use to General Wolfe, and transmit the same to him personally, by what safe channels I can devise. He is to be informed of my mission, and he alone, and that's all, though it may be enough for you to digest, as it has been, I beg you to believe, for me.
"Will you, I pray, make my humble excuses to Mistress Marget Forbes and her mother, and accept them for yourself, and you may rely upon hearing from me oversea, because I have no intention to relinquish a shred of my attachment to my native Highlands and the well-being of the name I bear; whereof it is the purpose of this epistle to inform you, as between one man of honour and another."
News indeed, intensely personal, therefore intensely interesting news, and I let it be known without delay at the Dower House, taking care, in delicacy, not to seem curious as to the impression it made there. Somewhat later I had intelligence of the actual sailing of the Black Colonel for New France, across the Atlantic, with his inseparable Red Murdo, whom, I was sure, the adventure would suit grandly, though he probably would not be told its secret meaning.
Then came a long silence, and I began to wonder whether the Black Colonel had not, somewhere and somehow, been caught in the last kink of his pre-destined hair-rope. While I wondered, off and on, in this sense, and our small world of Corgarff drifted uneventfully on, a much-worn, salt-sprayed letter reached me, and I recognized in it the Black Colonel's writing.
What account had he to give of himself?
XV.—News from Somewhere
"Quebec," the Black Colonel had written above the first sheet of his letter and he had forgotten to put any date, so I was left to guess how long it had taken to reach me. Nor did it bear any form of address to myself, but just began abruptly, "I do not suppose you will be specially glad to hear of me in this land of New France. There was, however, an understanding that I should write you, and I am doing it by a sure and confidential messenger." Then it went on as follows, for I transcribe it fully, as is needful for the conveyance of its atmosphere and even a certain quality of elegance natural to the writer:
"No man is happy who has had disappointments like me, but, at least, I survive and am usefully occupied. If I may say it, my not inconsiderable fame in our native Highlands had gone ahead of me to this country. That made it easy to secure service in one of the French corps in Quebec, for I speak the language, as you know, with no undue stranger accent, and it always brings me gay memories of hours in Old France.
"The regimental wages are not great, and they are not paid with exact punctuality, because there are too many empty hands waiting between his French Christian Majesty's coffers and his soldiers in Canada. But that, to a man like myself who wants little of the so-called comforts of life, and has, moreover, other sources, is no great hardship, and there are comfortings, sometimes, in unexpected quarters.
"The French, who know the art of romance, and how to spin it to the last drop without getting to the dregs, have already peopled this new land of theirs with colour, but I doubt me if it will last, which is their affair, not mine, or yours. King Louis himself is indulgent to the human colouring of his dominion, in that he sends out shipments of wives from the Old Country for the French settlers.
"Therefore they are called 'King's girls,' and being flowers of a kingdom which has bloomed rarely with women, they are in much demand. It is a joke, when a ship-load arrives, that the plumpest are married first, and this, I gather, for two reasons: Being less active, it is thought they will more readily stay at home, as honest married women should, and, being well covered—not fat, oh no! not that—that they will the better resist the icy cold of New France in the winter. For myself they do not interest me, not on account of the reason which drove my late Count Frontenac here, he having in the Old Country a shrewish wife whose temper he could not bear, but because I have found attractions more to my taste, of which you shall know something.
"I may admit, with some assurance, that my luck in the regard of the sweet sex, holds amid the altered conditions in which I find myself. Those French women have not the freshness, and I am certain not the innocence—you will admit me a judge on both counts—of my own country-women in the Scots Highlands. But they have a wondrous charm, a quality of attractiveness which is as deadly to a Highlander as if a dirk slit his heart. I speak, you may think, in poetry numbers, but you must do that, if, speaking of women, you would do them justice, and, incidentally, yourself. We have all sorts and most conditions of women, and the trade in laces and ribbons and the gew-gaws with which they adorn themselves, is wonderful for so small a place as Quebec. No sooner does a consignment of finery come in than it is snapped up, and the men, too, are admirable dandies, ruffling it, some of them, as if Louis Quatorze himself were here with his Court.
"Now, only last night I was at the party of the Intendant Bigot, and a gay crowd we were until the small hours of the morning grew again. His Excellency, the Marquis Montcalm, has the Frenchman's natural love for pleasure, but he is a serious, honest man who resolutely puts his duty before it. Monsieur Vaudreuil is more the gentleman of pleasure, a governor with a large token of the gallant in him, but for chicane, knavery and devilry commend me to this fellow the Intendant Bigot. They say he grows richer every day by robbing his gracious master, the King, first, and the King's subjects next. I cannot speak with authority of that, and it matters not, but I can tell you of what goes on at his chateau, the Chateau Bigot, because, as I write, I am scarcely cool from its doings.
"There was Bigot himself as master of the revels, a short, stout, awkward man of more than middle-age, who did not well become the part. He is, I must add, coarse for my taste, and by his appearance you might judge him capable of any venture in the getting of money. He would say in his cynical, loud way that the end justifies the means, and with him the end is Angélique des Meloises. She is probably going to be the Delilah of New France, the woman who is shearing it of its upholding strength, but she is fine.
"Ah, ha! the name of Angélique is fresh to you, has no meaning, and I see you halting and asking me to tell you more of her. But here she is a household word—or, should it be, by-word?—and I, a stranger, am counted fortunate in having come close to the rustle of her skirt. That skirt, you can believe me, is in many fabrics, and ever of the best, and, though I cannot confirm it, the other women of Quebec say that no parcel of lace, or silk, or satin, freshly sent by Old France to New France, is free of being tampered with by Bigot in the pleasuring of his mistress. Without that news in your ear, you would not, my friend, comprehend the Chateau Bigot.
"Angélique was not the first flame with whom the old sinner has lit his fires in Canada, for there was Caroline, the Algonquin maid, not to mention others. Bigot, the story goes, had been hunting and, be it conceded, he is, for a Frenchman, a sound shot, and had lost himself in the wilds. Presently, while he pondered on his course, there appeared a fascinating Indian girl, and he made her guide him to his chateau and there kept her. The woman pays in such affairs, be she white, brown, or black, all the complexions I have seen, and that Indian lass came to a sad end, being found stark one morning in bed, with a knife through her lissom body.
"But that was Bigot of the Garden of Eden, the primitive savage of passion who would have his apple without having to eat the punishment, so far, anyhow, though, I suppose, the devil, who has seven-league boots when he likes, will overtake him. If he were to do it now he would find him engrossed in the smiles and, maybe, the caresses of Angélique. I have, myself, pretended to be some judge of woman-folk, and Angélique pleases me in divers manners. That is an admission I would not mind making to herself, though, to be sure, I have found it the silent gallantry towards women which reaps most harvest. She is, by marriage, Madame Pean, wife of a creature whom Bigot uses, and she is a note of lovely abandon which a man with half my insurgency would like to pluck an' he could.
"We have been introduced, Madame Angélique and I, for here all goes by the most correct form on the surface. We have even drunk from the same cup of wine, because she preferred me hers yester-night, saying, 'To our gallant recruit Monsieur Inverey, and to his gallant nation, les Ecossais.' Ah, the laughing witch! You should have seen the languor in her eyes, the blushing red of her lips, the delicate contour of her arm, as she raised her glass to me and then bade me empty it.
"'Ah,' said I, bowing and taking it from her hand, against whose baby pinkness the champagne sparkled; 'ah, it is good to see, chère Madame, that you know the ceremony of the Loving Cup, and how, elegantly, to express it.' My phrase of the Loving Cup took her, I saw, it and my significance in using it, and her dark eyes, her pouting lips, and the turn of her lovely head, all had a new meaning as, saying, 'To our Lady Venus, in New France,' I emptied the glass and set it on the table beside her.
"We fell a-talking, Madame Angélique and I, and she was good enough to praise my French, and I said that, alas! it was not sufficient to do justice to her charms. She flushed with pleasure, and said archly that she wished her husband, Monsieur Pean, or even her very good friend the Intendant, would pay her like compliments. 'But,' she added, 'you Scotsmen are so gallant and so truthful,' and in her sweet French the token rang true. With it she raised her eyebrows, expecting me to confirm her raillery, which I did, for I said, 'Madame, truth is the only gallantry that tells twice, and so I am content to employ it, for I hope we are to be friends.'
"It was a bold measure to take, but Madame Angélique, I judged, with her on-coming air, was precisely the woman who would respond to bold measures. She is none of your woo-me-slowly ladies, her bosom, as it rose and fell in her French laces, being eloquent of that. She is a singularly fine animal to whom Providence has, by an unusual generosity, given a soul, though mostly, maybe, it hides in the silken dalliance which is the note of Angélique.
"You will perceive, my old friend and, I hope, old enemy, that I present to you a whole bouquet of charms: beauty of form, the radiance of a personality, and brains with an edge to flatter or flout. Very rarely does Providence dower so many graces to one woman, but they are all in Madame Angélique. Moreover, she has the subtlest of sex strategy, for in greeting me she made a stumble with her lace petticoat so that I might catch the daintiness of her foot and ankle. She also has the swiftest, as well as the softest of glances, and I felt it travel from my brogues to my head, approving the journey, I fancied.
"I have been particular about Madame Angélique because she is a woman in a thousand, this frail beauty of New France, its Madame de Pompadour in brilliance, however the comparison may hold in virtue, and because, if I prosper at all in the friendship, I hope to hear from her the inner news of events here which, by its usefulness to General Wolfe, is to lead me far in my home desires. When I left Scotland I had a sore heart, for truly it fills that heart, but you will gather that I have found a fresh land which also has its milk and honey.
"How much of them shall I sip? That's the gamble, and time will tell, but it is a great gamble in which I am enlisted, and, by my faith, I like a gamble. It stirs the blood in me, makes it run as it ran when I made love to my first sweetheart, and a strapping lass she was, though, alas! I have almost forgotten her very existence. Poor Carrie! I wonder, I wonder, but hi, ho! what use to ask of the flowers of yesterday, where are they?
"Only, my dear Captain Gordon, I wish I could have taken you with me last evening to that romp at the Chateau Bigot. Yes, I remember, your tastes are different from my own—less elastic, shall we say?—and you might not have come. Well, set love and gambling and sport, all done with abandon, in a choice, beflowered fold of this New France country and you may realize what you have missed and I have seen.
"Revelry! That is not the word for the night, and it took all the seriousness in me to recall that I had other interests among the revellers besides theirs. My elegance in our Highland dress, for to be sure I wore it, cost me many a temptation, and if Madame Angélique, late in the evening, had gone a minute longer with her whimsical measurings of my leg where it garters, why, sir, I should have made a fool of myself. But she merely said she wanted to test whether I was not modelled to perfection for dancing the Highland dances, and wouldn't I oblige her and the company?
"Monsieur Bigot, lolling in a chair, beslippered, be-hosed in the fatness of his limbs, be-waistcoated round his windy paunch, wearing velvet knee-breeches and a plum-coloured coat, what should he do, for his ears miss little, but catch this remark and, wishing, I suppose, to keep me from any further impressing of Madame Angélique, he cried, 'Surely, surely, let us have a Scottish dance from our gallant friend, Comte Farquharfils!'
"He ennobled me in one breath, and in the next made French of the ancient surname I bear, but that was of no consequence, and his cry was taken up instantly by his guests: 'Beautiful ladies and gallant gentlemen,' he went on, 'the Chevalier Ecossais—more ennobling of me!—will entertain us with a dance of his native country!'
"For a moment I was abashed with confusion, yes, sir, believe it or not, because this was a thing which had not come into my plans. But I have not lived for ten years by my wits and my sword without learning to make rapid resolutions, and I decided to dance, not alone! The gallants and the ladies had now formed a circle, and I said very quietly, 'I am honoured, Monsieur L'Intendant, and your desire will be to me a pleasure, if Madame will permit.'
"A glance of curious inquiry went round the circle as I looked at Madame Angélique, a radiant and bewitching picture, standing at the end of the room, eager to see the Scottish dance for which she had made measurements—yes, yes! Perhaps some of the company had penetrated the real purpose of Monsieur Bigot's interference as being what I have said, and in that case they saw a challenge in my acceptance of his invitation.
"But he was prompt to the occasion, for he said in his lordliest fashion, 'Madame, I am sure, will be happy to permit,' and he bowed to Angélique, who, in turn, bowed to me her gracious permission for a dance Eccosais. Neither had counted on what was to happen, for I quietly walked over to her, invited her to take my arm, and, while every one wondered, led her into the middle of the room. I did this amid a buzz of surprise, and I heard one gallant say, 'Parbleu, this Scotsman asked the lady's patronage and takes herself.' Neatly put, I thought, and the French mind is neat, as well as swift.
"The music struck up as I passed my right hand about the responding waist of Madame and lifted her elegance through a Highland round-dance. There was no need to lift her through it a second time, because the god of dancing was in that woman's feet, and between us we fairly wove poetry on the polished floor. Never, after the first moment, was there such a partner as Angélique; never, perhaps, if I may be allowed the conceit, such a pair of partners, a picture, my friend, a picture!
"As we warmed to the dance we lost all sense of an audience, and only drank the intoxication of the music. At first there had been a cold silence around us, but we infected it with our own sultry spirit and melted it. 'Bravo!' shouted the Frenchmen, and 'Divine!' said the ladies, and I took the praise of the women and Madame Angélique the praise of the men, a fair division, pleasing to us both.
"Monsieur Bigot alone remained aloof from praise, and as we turned once very close to him—so close that he wilted in the hot draught made by our wrapt figures—I saw a hard look come into his eyes and a hard expression cross his coarse mouth. When we finished at last and I had conducted Madame Angélique to a chair and thanked her, a huzza rang to the roof, but the Intendant took no part in it. He did, however, approach me with what others thought to be words of congratulation, only you shall judge when I repeat them.
"'You dance like the devil himself,' were his words, 'but you had better not dance again with Madame Angélique or you may find yourself in the devil's company. We have other uses in Quebec for you than this, and your native Scottish wisdom will convince you of it without more ado.'
"Well, the thing was done, the harm or good of it, for one cannot always act with deliberation, and never, I should say, when Madame Angélique beckons, for she is a witch incarnate. Rarely is it any use revising what has been done, and, frankly, I would not have missed that dance even if it were to have cost me my head. At the moment I am not sure whether or not it has cost me my heart; temporarily, shall I say, keeping on the safe side of truth?
"Anyhow, my dear Captain Ian Gordon, you will be made aware by these greetings, should they reach you in the goodness of time, and the friend who carries them, that I am having an experience which agrees with me, and so I sign myself with the more heartiness,
"Your very faithful"JOCK FARQUHARSON OF INVEREY."
XVI—The Wooin' O't!
There are two kinds of people who make a difference in our lives when they leave us: those we like and who like us, and those we do not like and who dislike us, for that is one way in which the world wags.
We feel, in the first case, a quick sadness, we dwell on happy memories, now tinted to a soft melancholy, and we ask ourselves, "Have we been all to them we could have been, and they the most to us?"
Our feeling in the second case is one of relief, coupled with the passing of an influence which, if not sympathetic, may yet have been a stimulus to us. Something that has been roused in our nature, goes back into its hidden place with the cause which unhappily called it out, rivalry, perhaps. It is a whip that may carry you to the top of a hill when otherwise, tempted by a warm sun and a soft wind, you might recline on a half-way bank of heather. Ah! it is good to day-dream at the sun, our Highland sun, which plays hide-and-seek with the sailing clouds.
But, may be, the incomplete parting is the best, that which has many things unsaid, silences which are not silent; because it leaves room for the imagination, lets us gild the picture in the roses of hope.
The going of the Black Colonel had meant a difference for myself certainly, and also, I could suppose, for Marget and her mother. But it was a mixture of the two feelings which I have suggested, because, in a fashion, I had a regard for the man, as well as something else, and to the ladies of the Dower House he was both the kinsman and the venturer who wanted to be more. I admired his manly qualities and was willing to clothe the others in a veil, as long as he did not make that impossible. They had the bond of family with him, a quiet pride in his championage of the Stuart side, which had been theirs, and, well, they wished no more of him. But what, perhaps, we mostly felt, Marget and I, without daring for a moment to confess as much, was that some element which kept us apart, and might, unhappily, even divide us, had passed across the sea to the New World with the Black Colonel.
We began unconsciously, and then, I suspect, noticeably, to grow closer, to live the vital little things of life nearer to each other, as it this were natural. That, perhaps, is the most critical period in the mating of two young people, as you may learn from the delicate nurturing of Mother Nature herself in the spring-time, when the earth grows warm. They are so in the thrill of emotion, that they have no thought for the building of the permanent house of the spirit in which they are to dwell. But it goes forward about them and otherwise the prospect would be bleak for them, sad for them, and sadness should not come to lovers in the honeymoon of their hopes.
"I suppose," Marget said to me one evening while we chatted in the Dower House and her mother, tempted by the long summer light of the north, read in the garden, "I suppose you really have nothing to do now that the Black Colonel is gone, and his disturbance—for you—with him."
"Oh," answered I, "there are still things to do, things, some of them, which I don't like, as my military superiors down there in Aberdeen town may be suspecting, for only last week, you know, they sent up a troop of horse to make a special search of Corgarff for any hidden Jacobite powder and shot. What happened you also know. Our friends of your Stuart faith heard of this expedition long before it arrived, filled their knapsacks with bannocks, and went to the hills. The troopers came, found, by persistent search in deserted homes, a few barrels of Spanish powder, some hundreds of bullets and a broken cannon, and threw them all into the Water of Don. It was not very exciting, especially to me, because it was a kind of censure; but nothing worse happened than the breaking of a drunken trooper's neck, by a fall from his horse. Here was one more way of death, not a pretty way, for the man's commanding officer said jocosely, 'The idiot, he must have come upon bad drink in his searches, and a bad woman is less dangerous.'"
"Your statement," said Marget, "is, I see, a confidential apology to me for the ongoings of those set over us and you! I hope you don't spend too many hours in reflections as unprofitable as the subject of these," and she made, with this advice, to be a very serious young woman.
"What," I asked, "would you have me do with my spare time?"
"I'm afraid I don't know."
"Well, if you don't, who does?"
"I think I see a compliment in what you say, but I'm not quite sure."
"It's against rules, isn't it, to repeat a compliment? It would be no compliment then."
"The more need to make it clear at first."
"I thought I had."