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 kitchen
An' 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 mouth
And cherry were her cheeks;
And cleir, cleir was her yellow hair
Whereon 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.