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."
"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 Black
Colonel make any bargain about our old Forbes property which need ever
call 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 the
_fleur-de-lys_ of 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 the _fleur-de-lys_ has 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.