The Black Colonel Part 12

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 a.s.surance, that my luck in the regard of the sweet s.e.x, 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, coa.r.s.e 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 Angelique 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 Angelique 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.

"Angelique 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 la.s.s 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 pa.s.sion 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 Angelique. I have, myself, pretended to be some judge of woman-folk, and Angelique 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 Angelique 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 gla.s.s 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, chere 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 gla.s.s and set it on the table beside her.

"We fell a-talking, Madame Angelique 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 Angelique, 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 Angelique.

"You will perceive, my old friend and, I hope, old enemy, that I present to you a whole bouquet of charms: beauty of form, the radiance of a personality, and brains with an edge to flatter or flout. Very rarely does Providence dower so many graces to one woman, but they are all in Madame Angelique. Moreover, she has the subtlest of s.e.x 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 Angelique 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 la.s.s 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 Angelique, 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 Angelique, he cried, 'Surely, surely, let us have a Scottish dance from our gallant friend, Comte Farquharfils!'

"He enn.o.bled 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 enn.o.bling 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 Angelique, 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 Angelique, 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 Angelique; 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 Angelique 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 coa.r.s.e mouth. When we finished at last and I had conducted Madame Angelique 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 Angelique 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 Angelique 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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.