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 men
We 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!
THE END