"Men think such a lot of things which are too unsubtle, too clumsy, for a woman to comprehend. Yes, it is so."
"Men—myself—the Black Colonel?"
"He is far away; why bring him back?"
"Only because it may concern you, and anything which concerns you . . . is not to be spoken."
"It is more interesting to speculate on what might have happened if he had stayed, instead of running from his guns—no, I mean to his guns, for he was no coward. Discount a good deal from him and he remains a taking man. It flatters any woman to be coveted by a man of parts, good or bad. She likes the homage thus implied, and if she did not she would be no woman. She says to herself, 'What a pity that man should be in love with me because I would not have him at all.' With her next breath she says, 'A resolute lover, something like a lover, a great lover.'"
"The unconventional lover—and more," said I; "that's it, all down time, the primitive trait of sex, he who can lift a woman out of her groove into a surprise."
"Well," said Marget, "the Black Colonel has the right blood for an unconventional lover. You cannot make a Farquharson respectable by force, and I'm not sure about the Gordons!"
She looked at me with amusement in one eye and the rebel woman in the other and I laughed, and that was all. No; not all.
Such talks between Marget and myself may have seemed to lead nowhere, but actually they did. The unspoken side of them was full of those secrets which cannot be put into language, because they would perish in the effort. What is spoken may be good, but what is unspoken in love is still better. Behind the word, there hides the speech of the soul. You say one thing, and with the eye mean another, or you say it in a fashion only intelligible to a particular person. There is a telegraphy of souls, as well as of hearts and minds, and the lesson is never to believe your ears.
Things came to be understood between myself and Marget, and the Black Colonel had a part in this, far away as he had taken himself and his troubles. He was not out of the picture, because he might return to it, but we could paint him in or out as we liked, and that left us canvas room. One day he was returning to set us all by the heels again; another day he was gone, to return no more, leaving us to fashion our own lives, as we were doing.
"Marget," I asked, "suppose the Colonel comes back, is he to find us just as he left us?"
"Not very friendly—or more friendly?" she replied vaguely, teasingly.And then a little anxiously, as I thought, "Did you and the BlackColonel make any bargain about our old Forbes property which need evercall him back?"
"Dear me, no! But if it would give you pleasure to see him again soon, why, let us pray for his coming."
Marget was hurt at this, for she said, "I was only wondering whether the Black Colonel will renew the quest here, if he does not reach his ends through the New France venture."
That question was to be answered by a last long epistle from him, which came to me about this time, and which tells his further part in our story, a wandering story, like Jock Farquharson.
XVII—-A Song of Other Shores
"Quebec, North America.
My Worthy Kinsman,
"You have not written me in reply to a previous letter of mine, nor did I expect you would, but I hope you have not lost all interest in my fortunes, and I make sure that the great events which have happened here, in New France, must interest you, when told with some particularity by me.
"You will be well aware, before this reaches you, that thefleur-de-lysof his Christian Majesty, King Louis, no longer flies over the citadel of Quebec, and that in its place there blows the flag of His Britannic Majesty—whom God bless, I suppose! But of how all this happened you will only have general intelligence, and none about my own fortunate part in it.
"Well, it was not mere fortune, because I did exert myself strenuously to discharge the mission confided to me, and General Wolfe said privily, before he marched to a glorious victory and a glorious death, that I had succeeded beyond his expectation. But I should tell you that I had necessary audiences of him more than once, while I served with the French in Quebec, and these we managed with perfect secrecy, thanks to methods which I may not disclose, except that the high esteem felt by the French for the Black Colonel, and their faith in his honour, alone made them possible.
"Saying so much of General Wolfe, I wish to set down my own monument to his evident high parts as a soldier and a man. I found him modest in demeanour, graceful of manner, reasonable in attitude, altogether a gallant gentleman. He was simple and to the point, and when he had finished with you he dispatched you courteously, pleased with him and with yourself.
"His excellency, the Marquis Montcalm, who also did me the honour of various conversations, and who likewise fell gloriously, had qualities not dissimilar. He was a French gentleman with the grand manner, meaning he carried his air so quietly that you hardly knew its presence, except by feeling it. I will further say, in token to his attributes, that he was of a moral stature in whose presence I felt ashamed of my secret trade, a trade which a man can only follow once in a life time, and then because he must.
"Perhaps you will scarce believe that several times my tongue was bubbling to deliver all to his knowledge, and to throw myself on his mercy. His very trustfulness made that impossible, because in each of us there is a natural refusal to destroy confidence, wherever we find it. That would be uprooting a plant which does not grow strongly enough anywhere, and I, for one, love to cultivate it. 'So, so,' I hear you say, my friend!
"Certainly at times I wished that my Lord Montcalm would treat me with less consideration and not ask me questions about the British invading forces, because I gathered information from those questions, and, in truth, here was the basis of much I imparted to General Wolfe. He asked, did Monsieur Montcalm, in some detail, about the Highlanders of Fraser's Regiment, and said that, far away as he had seen them from the ramparts, they appeared so picturesque in their tartans as to be hardly associable with the even, undeviating, outward English character.
"I answered that there were greater similarities between the Highlanders of Scotland and the French than between those same Highlanders and the English, both having Celtic blood in them, and that this resulted in a natural brotherhood which even the hazards of war could not disturb, or only temporarily. Nay, I said once to his excellency that we Jacobites still look more over the water to France and to our Stuart King than we look, or ever may look, over the Scottish border to England.
"You will mark how I sprawl between my native land and this New France, as it was termed until the other month. A man's heart can be in many places, a woman's only in one, and my affections, I confess, have mostly been a divided allegiance. They have gone out and come home again, and now, thanks to my prosperity here, they have a tendency to abide where my epistle finds me. For there is grateful comfort in Quebec, and a freshness glad to experience, and the society remains merry, though thefleur-de-lyshas perished for ever. All the French women here in Quebec did not see, in its changed governors, a burial for the living, and some of them said, 'It is destiny; let us make the best of things.'
"But I anticipate events, and that would be to miss their drama and my own little share in them, a share with which, in the result, I am satisfied, although I could sincerely have wished the ways and means to be more aboveboard. However, you cannot remain the complete gentleman and make history, and my justification lies in this signal fact: that I inspired and counselled General Wolfe to his scaling of the cliffs at the one place where that was possible, a matter on which I beg you will see that right credit and justice be done towards Jock Farquharson of Inverey, commonly called the Black Colonel. He and I alone knew beforehand where exactly the escalade was to be, and it was a singular joy to share a large, potential secret with another able to make it good, as General Wolfe most handsomely did, though, once being shown how, no great difficulty remained.
"When, in the hurry of Quebec that fated morning, I heard Fraser's Highlanders had climbed the cliffs, swinging from foothold to foothold like the wild cats of their native mountains, I said to myself, 'This is, indeed, my venture, and it is fitting my own people should carry it out.' But how odd it is that two Highland threads should come together in such a fashion, only we Celts have been destined to weave many of the red warps of story. I had knowledge of the part my kinsmen were to play in the bloody gamble between General Wolfe and the Marquis Montcalm, and, without desiring to appear on the field of battle, which was no part of my diplomacy and not hard, with my privileges from the French, to avoid, I sought an elevation where I could behold the kilted Frasers drawn up in battle array.
"My certes, they made a brave picture, with the sun shining on the colours of their kilts and the cool Canadian breeze waving them as in a rhythm of martial motion. Ah! the heart aye warms to the tartan, and I could have given my soul, if it be left me, which I must hope, to stand in front of that red and green line, an officer of the Fraser's, as I have now become, by virtue of the successful completion of my contract. They awaited orders with impatience, for the headlong charge has ever been the natural form of battle with Highlanders, only the appearance of General Wolfe, fearlessly wearing a new, conspicuous uniform, and the entire confidence of his step forward and backward while history boiled in the pot, held them in like a rein.
"It was the French who joined battle first, making some confusion among themselves as they did so, because their several units fired differently. This wasted and scattered their salvoes, but they advanced gallantly to within forty yards of the British lines. Then General Wolfe ordered 'Fire!' and before its solid stroke the French reeled like trees stricken by lightning. Swiftly, then, the Highlanders leapt forward with bayonets gleaming, and in what I say of them—my own people—I say of the British army as a whole: it caught the French before they could reform, and thus the issue was already decided.
"Now here was a change on the message, my Comte Frontenac, in earlier years, returned to a British admiral who demanded his surrender. 'The only answer,' he swore, 'I will give will be from the mouth of my cannon and musketry, that he may learn that it is not in such a style that a man of my rank may be summoned.' It was a change, too, from the ill-success of General Wolfe's assault on Montmorency, over beside the little river falling into the big one, where the very elements were unfavourable.
"Montcalm won then, very fairly won, for his fire upon the British was of a nature which none could overcome. Monsieur Vaudreuil, the Governor, who, like the Intendant Bigot, had an eternal desire to reap where he had not sown, was so patronizing as to say after the Montmorency fight, 'I have no more anxiety about Quebec. Monsieur Wolfe, I am sure, will make no progress.' 'La, la,' as Madame Angélique would say when she teases me, what a poor prophet was his excellency Vaudreuil, but, indeed, prophecy has a trick of falling into incapable hands and I, being, I trust, capable, have rarely tried it.
"You needed my broad account of events in Quebec to do me justice, and that is why I have lingered over it. I have given you hints enough for the proper fitting of me into those events, as when, most casually, I hope, I mentioned my advising of General Wolfe precisely where to make his ascent to the Plains of Abraham. However, there are small personal items you cannot know, without they are told you, and very chiefly that refers to the ingenuity with which, my mission, as compacted, being done, I passed from the ranks of the vanquished French to those of the conquering British, where I had been expected.
"There was such confusion everywhere, such a tearing up of things, that I could do what I wished, and have it go unchallenged. Moreover, there was a want of bitterness between the contending parties, for one reason, possibly, because the deaths of Wolfe and Montcalm had softened enmity: and nobody has yet hurled the words 'traitor,' 'spy,' at me, and I feel I am not truly open to them, my task having been that of an intelligence officer on the highest scale. As much is recognized in the affability which I have continued to find among the French since the close of the siege, but they are by nature surprisingly agreeable, as I would wish, with my heart to subscribe.
"Why, man, and this will make you curious, if envy there be in you, young French ladies take pains and pleasure to teach British officers French, with what view I know not, if it be not to hear themselves praised, flattered and courted, without loss of time. To praise comes natural to me, to flatter is not amiss, and, as to courting, I judge you have always appreciated that in me. You may have doubted me in some respects; you had no doubts I fancy, in that particular.
"This quality of mine—I claim it a quality—has made me take, with growing kindness, to where I am, and the idea of coming home again, when it arises in my mind, I rather put aside. My natural dream is that I shall return, but mostly I am content to play with the fancy, to catch it up, put it aside, and again catch it up, and once more let it rest.
"There I am backed by the circumstance that I have no tidings whatever touching my plans, as declared to you, in regard to Corgarff, and I suppose that your thankless rulers have forgotten me. They were willing to use me as a pacifier, and when that did not promise an immediate result they found me of use in the war of New France. This service being completed, faithfully, honourably, I dare aver, and to the very letter of the bargain, I am, I repeat, for much I repeat, given my commission in Fraser's Highlanders. But, of a settlement in the larger spirit which the inclusion of Corgarff would have implied, I have no intelligence, and it is conceivable that I may get none.
"Therefore I may remain at Quebec with the Fraser Highlanders so long as they continue here, and, when they go hence, still remain as an independent gentleman, provided I were, by happy chance, shall I say? to find genial companionship. I am not old, not of the sort ever to grow actually old, but the excursions of life have wearied me, and I begin to sigh for a permanent holding ground, the anchorage of rest which should come to us all.
"That desire, if I may make you a great confidence, would satisfy itself in a woman of the qualities of Mistress Marget Forbes. I do no more than quote her because she is known to us both, and therefore she makes clear the exact shade of my meaning. But I imply no freedom with her name, except what the honouring of it carries, and if any man implied anything more she would know how to answer him. She has, I will say, the tang of the Forbes blood full in her, and I have always thought it warmer in its flow of both love and pride than the Gordon blood, although of that you should be a better judge than I am.
"One needs a wife of parts if one is, as I hope, to found a new clan in a new country, for, mind you, many of the Fraser Highlanders, when they end their period of enrolment, will prefer to settle in this lush, virgin country where the days go by like a dream. They will sit down on the untilled lands, and out of them find a competence of food and raiment, and they will marry French women who are buxom and healthy and will be good wives and mothers.
"Granted all this, and it follows that there will be materials for a new house of Inverey in some valley by the River Saint Lawrence, where the Red Man at present reigns in indolence. He who can sit on a knoll for an hour and let old Mother Earth spin her tune to the fathering sun, is ever a friend of mine. But the Red Man carries the pastime beyond me, unless when he is on the warpath, and then he is a devil. It would give me no compunction to reign with a hundred or more Fraser Highlanders, in a strath from which the Red Man has to be persuaded away, or driven by force. Perhaps I could even hold out a helping invitation to smaller 'broken men' still in the Aberdeenshire Highlands or elsewhere in dear Scotland, and that would please my self-importance.
"I renounce nothing, give up no legitimate claim that I have put forward for hand or land in our native country, but I see that I am come to leaving them unclaimed. Madame Angélique, to whom, mayhap, I have confided those consolations and aspirations, and who has a comely sense as well as comely looks, says very properly that changed circumstances carry other changes, and that even a Highland gentleman may recognize as much without loss of self-respect.
"Madame has, in the crash which sank Bigot's fortunes, come to plain faring, but I have made no difference in my friendship to her, and she, I feel, has increased hers towards me. She tells me she has no clamant ties left in Old France, any more than in New France, where the lustre of her powerful French friends has set, and my heart goes out to her in sympathy, and, I know not what more, except that she is a very fine woman and would adorn the home of. . . . Why give a name?
"You must make what you can of this scattered epistle and read it into my future because you may not hear from me again, or, if you do, only briefly in unlikelihoods. I am no practised writer, though I might have acquired the trade, and it is only out of a felt duty, combined with a personal regard of some durability, that I have set down, for you, those epistles of my doings far across the sea. Farewell, if it be farewell, and to Mistress Marget Forbes the like salutation, if she will accept it, as I am sure she will, when presented through you; and similarly to Madame Forbes, her mother, my humble duty.
"Always your well-wisher,"JOCK FARQUHARSON, late of Inverey."
XVIII—My Garden of Content
"Said Edom o' Gordon to his menWe maun draw to a close."
That close, whether to a love story or a life, should come in the quiet, natural way which Providence orders, unexpectedly almost, not in tumult and trappings.
I am of a family which has been accustomed to storm through the world, sometimes with all the world could give, at other times with mighty little. This element has got into our blood, become, you might say, a habit, and often, myself, I have felt its prickings. After all, it must be a finely insurgent thing to drive to the devil in a golden carriage built for two, or more; and the Gordons have never been accustomed to count their guests, so long as they made good company.
Then I had grown up at a time in our Highlands when the kettle of history was about to boil over, scalding a great many people in the process. The fiery cross of war carried its message from one valley to another and left its embers on new graves wherever it went.
You are asking what this excursion in deep waters has to do with Marget and myself and the Black Colonel, Jock Farquharson. It has everything to do with us, because it is the lamp of the road along which we journeyed. Anybody can count turnings in a path, but it is harder to catch the other-world glow which sees us past them to our desired haven.
We were in sight of it, and, although we said little, I knew that we both rejoiced exceedingly over the news which the Black Colonel sent in his last letter. When we met I looked at Marget as much as to ask, "Shall I say it?" And she looked at me answering, "No, you need not, because I understand."
It is a curious state this which, at some time or other, exists between two loving people cast for each other's welfaring. A delicate mystery lies in it, and that is an essential strand in every true affection, but it can readily be destroyed. Break it rudely, even shock it a little, and a chasm may yawn where, before, there was a silken thread of union, tender in its fibre, but beautifully elastic.
You may exclaim, when you read these confidences and remember others to which I have confessed, that I was not so awkward a lover as I sometimes appeared to be. No, I was not awkward in thought, but I could be, I know full well, very awkward in its expression as deeds. Often I would go wrong in form, rarely in feeling, if you can assume a man built on those colliding lines.
Marget has told me, in raillery, that she was more than once tempted to give me "a good shaking," as the woman's saying goes. It was not, perhaps, that she expected to shake much out of me, or to shake me out of myself, but that she would herself have been relieved by the exercise, for women, you see, are like that.
My reflection has to do with a day when we spoke of it as settled that the Black Colonel would never come back, that the whole episode which he represented was over, and that an open road, undisturbed surely by any more surprises and alarms, lay before us. How could I forget the scene, for it was to open out our true life, our deep, full love.
She looked at me as much as to ask had I been planning a stratagem, I the unsophisticated, which I had not. She looked again, and I saw she knew, that at long length, we were face to face with the soft realities which, hitherto, had remained dumb, or only whispered. I waited to take her in my arms, and she told me later her instinct expected me to do it, and I didn't. What poor fools men may be, to miss so much, and to place a good woman in the position of having her consent rebuffed, for that is to outrage her sex-respect.
I seem to remember that Marget turned her head away in despair with me, only she pretended to be watching the sun and the clouds as they dipped the hills in light and shadow. This threw her face into profile, and I thought I had never seen it quite so beautiful. There was an expectant vibrancy in it, from the fair forehead to the dimpled chin, but its flower of expression was in the flowing eye, the ripe mouth, and the tremulous lips.
"A wonderful scene," she said, her look lost in the river and the hills; "a scene which makes one think in parables, as the old men of Scriptures did."
"Parables," I replied, remembering, as I saw she did, "are very unuseful."
"Why do you say that?" she asked gently, still looking at the dance of sunlight and shadow upon the heather and the water.
"Oh, because they are," I said absurdly enough.
"That's a woman's reason," she observed, "and it should be left to a woman. Have you nothing more original to say?"
"Well, if I were to tell you a parable, a parable of my own, as you once told me one of yours, what would happen?"
"I'm sure I don't know," she laughed, "but why trouble about what may happen? A little risk gives a spice to life, and, anyhow, it can mostly be run away from at the last moment!"
"Then," said I, fairly and warmly hit by that, "it is the parable of a maid and a man, the old, old story, in a new setting. They met under cross circumstances, when things around them were difficult and their families took separate sides in politics and war. But if it had not been those very troubles they might never have met, or, what is even worse, have met too late, as maids and men often do. Perhaps trouble, because it brought them together in sympathy, also began to bring them together in heart, that being one road to affection. Love at first sight? Yes, for a winning face, an elegant figure, a silvery voice, or even a shapely foot. But that, surely, is the stuff of passion which may bloom in the morning and fade at night, not love the enduring as, I promise you, in my parable."
Marget nodded her head, unconsciously, as if some far voice were calling to her from the spreading country of red heath and green fir-trees, of dancing sunshine and rippling stream, that lay beneath us. She did not speak, and I went on:
"You do not in parables say much of people, and never by name, but I must tell you of my maid, the man, and of the other man who came between them—nearly! She was all simple charm, yet also of pulsing womanliness, the healthy product of a country life, a fair survival of many ordeals. Deep in her nature was that intense power of feeling which belongs to complete womanhood, as music belongs to an ancient fiddle. There were strings so sweet and subtle, so strange and strong, that she herself feared to play on them, and when the man appeared she greeted him as a friend, nothing more."
Marget waited as I paused, for when one's heart is in one's mouth words are hard to find, and I am not much in command of them at any time.
"The man," I resumed, "what shall I say of him, for he had no personal history. He had an old name, however, which he hoped not to sully, and he bent himself quietly to duty, as, crookedly and undesirably, it came his way. He found no call to do great things of the world, but rather to straighten out the small things of a wee corner of it, and there to keep the peace. The maid just came into his life, and he, in his plain way, thanked Providence and held his tongue, except when secrets would half slip out and tell-tale acts come about."
Marget made no sign as to whether or not she recognized the portrait, and thus I was brought up abruptly against the other man of our parable.
"He," I said, "had all the ruder qualities admired by women, those of manliness, which good women may like, and the others which the other women secretly like. It was not difficult to see him, both as a hero and as a villain, and either way the pull of romance lay about him. He had particular ambitions which brought him between the maid and the first man, and there was, thanks to certain elements in human ties and high affairs, a strong influence favourable to those ambitions. But, as chance or Providence would have it, he was translated to another land, and there he found such comfort and companionship that he decided to stay. This left the maid and the man who feared too much, free to be to each other what they desired; and there ends my parable."
"But," asked Marget with unsteady words which betrayed her agitation, "where is its moral? A parable must have a moral."
"Has it none?" I boldly asked her, taking her hand in mine, before she or I knew it, and kissing it and then her rosy, rebellious lips.
By-and-by she looked at me through wet eye-lashes and asked, "Shall I tell you a parable which had a moral, though maybe it has lost it," and her tears laughed.
"Do," I said; "I can stand the moral now, whatever it may be."
"It should be a severe moral for you," she whispered, "because you have been so foolish, so little understanding with me, yet I'll try and make it light. It also concerns a maiden and two men, but she only cared for one of the men, never at all for the other. Nor would all the family interests in the world have made her marry the other. The real man, well, he seemed not to know that there is a precipice of influences, of circumstances, for every woman, over which she may be let slip by his hesitation; and this without possibility of return, for, even if she could return, her sex pride would not let her."
"Ah," I whispered, "and the moral?"
"That you deserved to lose me; and that it would have broken my heart if you had."
We sat very close, hand in hand, mind in mind, heart in heart, and watched the sun go down behind the silent hills of our beloved Corgarff, both of us silent, like them.
Years have gone by since then, and they have proved to us how sure a conduct is the heart alike to happiness, and, though it matters less, to prosperity. March where the tune of its soft beating calls, and you are blessed. Traffic with it, and you miss the real lift of life, that which makes life good, whatever betides.
Marget and I had learned this in the school of sweet-hearting, and now we knew it in the joy of confiding words. Nothing else mattered, because it mattered all, but when the inner world is well the outer world responds to it in kind. The private happiness which we had won made a larger good fortune for us without, or at all events, we saw the morning radiance, not the morning mists.
Our poor ruined Highlands still lay under their covering of sorrow, as grass grows indifferently upon a grave. But they were mending, even while they suffered, for they had spirit in them. Virile men and womanly women do not cry all the time, but give thanks to God for his mercies and go forward.
It was my fortunate destiny to be helpful beyond myself at Corgarff, and I will tell you how. When gossip of a purpose of marriage between Ian Gordon and Marget Forbes reached high quarters, friends in the two political camps got to work on our behalf. The outcome was that before Marget Forbes became Marget Forbes, or Gordon, as the Scots legal form has it, the lands which were her peoples had been returned to her, a sort of wedding gift.
Good and bad news like not to travel alone, and what must a kinsman of my own, an aged bachelor Gordon, do, but say that instead of waiting for his estate until he was dead, and his will read, I should come into it and its perquisites at once, if only because there must be acre for acre exchanged, as between a Gordon and a Forbes. Thus our heart's house of joy was dowered with worldly goods, though I should, in justice especially to Marget, add that we laid no stress on that, apart from the usefulness towards others which it carried.
At such usefulness, I can fairly say, we laboured whole-heartedly from the hour when we took each other for better, and never a minute for worse, in the Castle of Corgarff, with Marget's mother saying, "Children, you have all my poor old heart, to keep the fire of your young hearts warm."
She was a gracious lady, and she dwelt with us until we bore her to the little churchyard on the hill-side, where there is a clump of trees to break the cold sough of the winds into a lullaby. By that time another Marget, beautiful of face like the Forbeses, lithe of limb like the Gordons—we never could agree whom she most resembled!—had been given to us. She was our guerdon of the reverent gospel of home, which is the high altar of this world, the source and sanctuary of our well-being as men and women.
We have tried to live up to that ideal, and none can do more, unless, indeed, it be to seek the perfect heights of the Sermon on the Mount itself. It is good to look upward there, even if one cannot hope to reach the golden peaks of that world without an end—Amen!