The Black Colonel Part 2

"Don't let it be one of the Black Colonel's flames," said the lieutenant with a laugh, as he went out again, without the answer he had not expected, being himself a gentleman. "It needs a long spoon to sup with that dark devil at any time, but come between him and his rustic gallantries and you'll need a longer spoon than Corgarff Castle happens to possess."

The Black Colonel and I, as you will have gathered, were on different sides in politics, though we belonged to neighbouring clans which had many a.s.sociations; he a Farquharson, I a Gordon. He was Jock Farquharson of Inverey, the last of his house, as I can say looking back on him, and doomed, so a woman of second-sight had declared, when he was born, to be the last; while I, Ian Gordon, was a cadet of the Balmoral Gordons, captain in his Majesty's Highland Foot, with no more to expect than what my commission brought me, and that was little enough.

He was a Jacobite, keeping that rebel flame alive in the Aberdeenshire Highlands, when, on the heels of the "Forty-Five," a red and woeful time, we were half-heartedly scotching it with garrisons in the Castles of Braemar and Corgarff. Yes, I wore the scarlet tunic of King George, thanks to family circ.u.mstances which had woven themselves before I was born, but the tartan lay under it, next my heart. We were rivals in war, thrown on different sides by the fates which gamble so strangely with mere men. Was there to be a still more vital rivalry? As has been hinted, I had more than rumours of the Black Colonel's strange powers among women. What if he had Marget Forbes in his dark eye?

Wherever the heart is concerned you have intuition, and that is why a woman has more of such super-sense, or rather, I would say, of wonderously delicate feeling, than a man. She needs it, being oftener heart-strung, because the wells of her heart are more emotional.

I suspected, from the first, why the Black Colonel wanted to meet me, and for no other reason would I have consented to meet him. But our meeting had been so brief, so disturbed, so futile as regards its purpose, that I had got no light from him whatever. Still, ever since then I had been seeing, in the mirror of life, the face of Marget Forbes, a daughter of the clan whose name she bore, a handsome la.s.s with a long pedigree, heiress to the lands of Corgarff, now forfeit for the Jacobite cause, when they should come back to her line, and incidentally, but all importantly, a kinswoman both of Jock Farquharson and myself.

Memory is rarely honest with us, because it is imperfect, and unconsciously we tell the best account of things, but I fancy I was wondering on this text when there came at my door the sharp rap of bony, hurried knuckles. "Enter!" I said, and in marched the corporal of the guard. His hand went easily to the salute. He had a message in his face.

"What is it?" said I, for I expected nothing of moment, beyond a poor devil of a Jacobite captured, or a "sma' still" raided and its rude whisky drunk by the red-coat raiders until they were merrily "fou."

"Sir," he answered in the parade voice which the regular soldier soon acquires, this, softened by his nice Scots drawl, "Sir, there's a man outside an' he says he's a letter for you and that he maun gie it to yoursel'."

"What's he like? Where does he come from? Is he friend or no friend?"

"Canna' say, sir. I should think no friend. He's short and swack o'

body, red of hair and face, wears a kilt o' Farquharson tartan, and winna' say where he comes frae. He has a letter for you, sir, and is to deliver it himself, an' that's a' he'll tell."

"Bring him in," I ordered, and in came, as, by now, I half expected, Red Murdo, the Black Colonel's henchman. I had seen him before, and by hearsay was more than familiar with his repute as an excellent servant to his not so excellent master.

"A letter," he whispered in his hoa.r.s.e voice, as if he did not want the corporal to hear. I took the letter, and before I could even break the seal he was gone again, without motion of salute or further word, all quite in the Black Colonel's manner of doing things.

It was addressed "To Captain Ian Gordon," and when I opened the envelope and unfolded the contents I found them to commence with these same words and no other form of ceremony. I instantly knew the strong, irregular, aggressive and yet persuasive handwriting to be that of the Black Colonel, but unconsciously, as a girl tries at the end of a story to find whether happiness be there, I turned to the signature--"your kinsman, Jock Farquharson of Inverey." What went before, when I had time to master it, was this:

"These greetings, which I am inditing in the cold safety of the Colonel's Bed, a fastness where no enemy has yet tracked me, though all my true friends in the countryside know the secret roads to it, will be delivered to you by my faithful Red Murdo, who deserves blessings, whereas I sometimes give him curses; and their purpose is to tell you explicitly why I asked you to meet me in the Pa.s.s the other evening, since events, on which I here offer no comment, made it impossible for us to have any plain, forthright talk.

"I'll reveal the heart of my business by recalling that there is a long a.s.sociation between our families, who have always been friends and enemies, and that the Corgarff Forbeses also come into this a.s.sociation, and continue it, in a fashion which takes me to our personal quarrel of Stuart and Guelph, because, by the exercise of a little ingenuity, such as is permissible, and a kinsmanship such as is proper, there may emerge good seasoning for us all.

"Pray remember that if the Corgarff Forbeses were to fail in issue, and there is only one life between them and that failure, the life of a young unmarried lady, I, by descent on the distaff side, which I need not outline in particularity, would be heir to the estates; only as a Jacobite outlawed, a broken man, I can inherit nothing, not even possess, little as it is now, my own in peace.

"But, if I am not ill-informed, and news travels among the hills as swiftly as, we are told, it travels in the desert, King George's advisers would gladly return the Corgarff estates to the Forbes family if that family had a strong man at its head and so such an influence as would keep the region, always a key to the Highlands, I will not exactly say in order for the German king, because that would be a tactless fashion of arranging, but wean it gradually from its sympathy for Prince Charlie, and his house of misadventure and ill-luck.

"Now, if you will be good enough to a.s.sume in me qualities for this mission and the willingness to undertake it; if you will accept the circ.u.mstance that it would merely be a case of a remote legal heir coming into his own by a round-about way; and if you will set those facts in what I consider the national importance of the matter and help it forward in a form so delicate and chivalrous that I must not even hint it, why, you will be rendering a potent service to the cause which enlists you and which might, who knows, enlist me also!"

That was the letter, considered in language, crafty in purpose, really, an overture for the hand of Marget Forbes, and I sat far into the night, while my peat fire died out in Corgarff Castle, wondering how I was to answer it, and, even more, how I myself stood towards the acute personal situation which it created. For I saw that the Black Colonel meant to make love and do business at the same stroke, not for the first time, perhaps, in his life of emprise; and certainly here was no new thing in the world's queer story.

_V.--A Cairn of Remembrance_

It is a good way, when you are in doubt, to wait and let events shape a decision, and this was how I came to regard the Black Colonel's letter.

He had set me a pretty puzzle in his written words, because, contrasted with the light touch-and-go of spoken words, these always seem to have something fateful in them, as of a king's signature to a decree.

Moreover, I was vaguely conscious of being the guardian of a woman's instinct for safety, an instinct which arrives with the cradle and only goes with the grave, and that made me feel somewhat helpless; a man in depths he cannot fathom, for such is the uncharted sea of womanhood.

Marget Forbes and her mother lived in the Dower House, thrown to them, as a piece of bread might be tossed from a rich man's table, when Corgarff was declared forfeit and the castle occupied by soldiery. Her men-folk had been out with Charlie and had not come back from Culloden, as the Cairn of Remembrance on the hills might have told any seeker for them. Each clansman, as he departed, had put a stone to it, and none had returned to lift that stone again, so it became a tombstone.

They were dead for ever to Corgarff and to the lands which had been the property of their forbears, almost since time was in those blood-heathered Highlands. Families rose and fell, for family reasons, or as the clans to which they belonged prospered or had adversity.

Thus vital changes in a corner of the Scottish Highlands, like this of ours, were more frequent than the historians, men apt to a.s.sess on surface generalities and neglectful of the hidden human wells, usually make out.

But, as the changes took place within what I may call the ring-fence of the clan system, they really only mattered to those who were directly concerned. Corgarff Castle, however, had been held by the same Forbes family in direct, unbroken line, partly because its successive chiefs had strong right arms, partly because the domain had little to make anybody else covetous. The Sabine women whom the old Romans took, would have been the beautiful ones, and it is the same with the face of Mother Earth. What appears best is taken first!

There was no great personal bitterness in the Aberdeenshire Highlands as between clans or families who were on different sides in the "Forty-Five." The ambition, or the greed of chiefs, often determined the sides, and a consciousness of that made lesser men tolerant with each other. Thus, an acquaintanceship between Marget and her mother and myself, although begun under a certain stress of circ.u.mstance, pa.s.sed naturally into friendship, and, on my part, into something warmer. We were of the same Celtic strain, and, in the heart and mind of upbringing, blood tells all the time. But I had not seen much of them, and nothing at all since the tale of the Black Colonel's escape in the Pa.s.s had set the countryside talking and, doubtless, secretly rejoicing.

It was a fine thing, a very fine thing, that he should have escaped from the red-coats so perfectly, so dramatically. They were the living tokens of a government which, on every ground of sentiment, was alien to the Highland people, a government, moreover, that had been tactless in its plans and its acts. The Black Colonel stood for a native royal cause which had colour and flair, even if its genius for government had been exhausted.

We soldiers were only disliked for what we represented, for the dry Hanoverian salt we ate, not for ourselves, because most of us were Highland by bone and heart. The Black Colonel was liked for what he represented, rather than for himself. He had, indeed, a way of commandeering other men's goods, when he needed them, that was inconvenient to those others. But there was a strong local pride in his name and achievements, as the name and achievements of a first-rate fighting man, whose sword-handle held in its silver-work the letter "S," standing for Stuart, an allegiance and a challenge never hidden by him.

Naturally, like every other Forbes, Farquharson, or Gordon--I omit none with those names--Marget would be quietly rejoicing over the Black Colonel's success in out-manoeuvring us. I say "us," although I was not in the pursuit, a fact, I reflected, which might relieve me a little of Marget's scorn if she knew. Did she know? Had gossip carried her that news also? It could not tell her that I was out of the chase after the Black Colonel, because I was meeting him privately, and that her affairs were the occasion of the meeting.

Of the dangers wrapped in all this, I was to have an inkling when I did meet Marget, and that came about as if it did not matter, as if nothing matters! I had been up the Don valley with a patrol, was returning, and scarce a mile from Corgarff Castle, when I saw a woman's figure ahead, going my road, a very soft and gracious sight, believe me, against the hill-side. Soon, thanks either to my eyes which could then see far, or to a man's feeling of instinct for the presence of a woman who interests him, I discovered that it was Marget Forbes. She turned round, perhaps at the approaching sound of our steady tramp, or perhaps moved by some unconscious woman's sense, and, as my men pa.s.sed on and I fell behind them, she said, "Ah, Captain Gordon, where have you been these many days? Chasing the Black Colonel, eh?"

It was said easily, with a half-smile, as if she were alluding to something which had happened since we last met, as, indeed, it had. It was good, however, that the light was failing, because I could feel my face burn, not with shame, but with a confusion in which there was more than the Black Colonel.

"Oh no, Mistress Marget," I answered, "one cannot always be in the company of the Black Colonel, however interesting some of us may find him." This, observe, was intended as a delicate touch for her, but it probably struck her as clumsy, so much finer is a woman's feeling than a man's.

"You found him interesting then," she merely replied. "I'm glad to hear that, because, as a distant relative of ours, he is really one of the men-folk of the family. Perhaps he has some of the nature which, so they say, characterizes our women? His Forbes grandmother or great-grandmother, whichever she was, would have pa.s.sed it on to him."

She stopped when she noticed the sweet conceit into which she had fallen, for certainly what she had claimed in name of the Forbes women, was richly present in herself. She had sparkle, bloom, charm, that witching, elusive, mixed something in a woman which n.o.body can describe but which every true man feels, and she looked it all in the gloamin'

of that perfect Highland evening.

"My dear Mistress Forbes," I said more formally, "I could forgive the Black Colonel much if I thought he had any of the qualities of your Forbes women-folk. As it is, I envy him your championship," at which she looked at me with considering eyes.

"A woman naturally champions all her men," she said with a deft smile for me, as being also a relation, "and it would be sad if she didn't; but I have never yet seen the Black Colonel. He has not come our way, although, no doubt, we should, for what has been, make him as welcome as your men, quartered in our old castle, might permit."

"Naturally! Why not?" I said, for I understand her feelings though, somehow, the remark stung me a little. "Perhaps," I added, "you may have your wish gratified and meet him one of these days."

"Do you mean as a prisoner," she asked quickly.

"No. I mean that when the Black Colonel wants to call on anybody, he does not let danger or ceremony stand in his path. So far, I take it, there has been no occasion for you to make his personal acquaintance, and may that continue."

"Why should you say that? Whether he be good or ill, he is a picturesque figure, a stout fighter, a man who has stood up for his faith through thick and thin, and, moreover, one of us. I have heard the things that are said about him, things no woman cares to hear about a man, but to hear is not to believe, is it? Only," and Marget laughed quietly, "here am I defending a rank Jacobite to the Georgian commander of Corgarff Castle, whose business it is to lay that rank Jacobite by the heels--if he can!"

"Oh, we'll catch him some day," I lightly, rather wryly, observed, "but his luck does serve him well."

"There's often a reason for luck," answered she; "more in it than just luck. Now, if a company of soldiers went after a man of resource, like the Black Colonel, would their chance of catching him not be less if they had no captain leading them? A boyish lieutenant may have energetic qualities, but they are hardly likely to be a match for those of the Black Colonel."

We were getting on to ground perilous for me, because Marget had evidently heard something and was determined to test it at first hand.

Behind the curiosity there seemed, judging by her tone, to be a fight going on between friendliness and pique. It is a dangerous mixture for a man to have to counteract in a woman, because, responding to the friendliness, he may make admissions which increase the pique.

Therefore I sought to give our talk a turn by saying, "Everybody seems to know everything there is to be known about the Black Colonel's escape, so there's an end of it--until next time."

"But, Captain Gordon, although one knows generally, one may still keep wondering--may one not? A woman always wonders; it is one of her privileges, and often wonder is kinder to her than certainty."

"Wonder, dear lady, is a hard thing to gratify, being illimitable, like . . . !