The Black Colonel Part 7

Honour was satisfied, the hated oath of the kilt had not to be eaten by anybody, and I was glad.

_X.--The Way of a Woman_

Between you and me, I fancy that the average, natural woman likes to think any man who is after her a bit of the devil. It makes her pulse beat, if not her heart; it gives a fine spice to the pursuit, and she is confident there will be no capture, unless she wills it. Anyhow, I was not going to help the Black Colonel in his schemes by holding him up as a hero of that order, and he would have made the comment that he needed not the service from me.

Marget Forbes and I had fallen into the pleasant custom of lending each other such books as came the way of our remote land, and I called at the Dower House to leave her one, a newly imprinted volume ent.i.tled "Robinson Crusoe." I did not seem to wish to make meetings with her, though I was glad of them, so I chose a time, the mid-afternoon, at which she and her mother usually walked out. However, Marget was at home, and she called to me from the parlour, would I not enter and rest a minute? Necessarily I must step inside to say I would not wait, and necessarily I found myself sitting down near her.

"Mother," she said, "is on her weekly round among the sick and old, to whom a kind word from her is like gold, of which we now have none to give. Usually I go with her, but to-day she would have it that I looked tired, and she bade me stay indoors and rest. I'm glad you called and brought me a book, especially this wonderful 'Robinson Crusoe,' of which I have heard vaguely, and which they say is founded on the adventure of a Scotsman, Alexander Selkirk. You are always thoughtful, or shall I say sometimes?" and Marget looked as if she expected me to understand the qualification.

Was it a reproach that I did not come into her company often enough; was it a playful invitation to do so oftener; or was it the woman's primal instinct, old as Eve in the Garden of Eden, just to tease the man? I scarcely asked myself those questions. They ran through my mind with the kind of physical impulse which you feel in the presence of the possible woman. You are aware, then, of feelings and shadows of feeling which cannot be expressed. There is something in you which goes on speaking to the something in her, and you let it speak, glad, wondering, expectant, never sure, never sorry. Odd, isn't it, this language of s.e.x which says most when it says nothing by speech, which needs not speech, because it is spiritual, though springing, maybe, from the call of the blood.

Marget had been reading, and when she invited me in, and I went, she put the open book face downward on a little table, beside a half-made sampler. She saw my eye wandering to the volume, a mere mechanical curiosity on my part, and she picked it up with a laugh, saying, "There is no need to hide those pages, unless it be that they are dull."

"What is the book all about?" I asked idly.

"It is a French romance," she said, "in which a lovely heroine treads her way through an endless maze of difficult paths and a brigade of villains to what, I have no doubt, when I get there with her, if ever I do, will be endless wedded bliss. It is an over-sentimental story, for the French young girl, but, then, one must try to keep up what French one has, because it is a delightful language."

Marget had learned it as a girl in France, for she had lived there a while, seen something of the Stuart Court over the water, of the Court of King Louis also, and even heard the pa.s.sing rustle of the skirts of "the Pompadour" and Madame du Barry. Already the breath of a freer day to come was blowing across that fair land, and her stay in it definitely influenced Marget's character, ripened it quickly on broadly beautiful lines, without hurting its pure scent of Scottish heather.

Hospitality was a duty as well as a pleasure in every Highland home, and, after our trifles of a few minutes, she rose and went to give some order. When she returned she said she had a small treat in store for me, and it came into the room almost with herself. What do you think it was? Why, tea!

It was a beverage then almost unknown in the Scottish Highlands, but Marget's family, as she said, had at intervals received packets of it from their friends in the south. Those gifts were h.o.a.rded as if they contained treasure, and only dipped into for very special reasons.

"It flatters me," I remarked airily, "to think I am a special reason, because that must come near being a special friend."

"Oh," quoth Marget, "but you are an official enemy, so how could you be a special friend? And still such things are possible, you know, but I shall not tell you how they are possible. You would not understand a bit"; and, as she spoke, her eyes and hands were arranging the tea-table.

"I should, I a.s.sure you, try very hard," said I, "and it would be odd if I did not succeed, with a dish of tea for stimulant. I don't remember when I tasted tea last," I added laconically, as Marget poured it out of a quaint old pot into dwarfy cups of French mould. Most of the dainty things, the bric-a-brac of households in the Jacobite Highlands were from France, just as we had come to say "ashets" and "gigots" of mutton, and generally to graft French cookery into our Scottish meals, for the "Auld Alliance" had various harvests.

As we talked over the tea-cups, Marget and I, I thought how quickly in that Nature's cradle of Corgarff she had ripened to woman's estate.

She had, at times, been in touch with the artificialities of social life, but they had not dulled her free, strong character. She had drawn her instincts, as she had drawn her blood, from the long hills, and she had no self-consciousness to dim her lights. But when I rose to leave she said merrily, "We have spoken much foolish nonsense, have we not, Captain Gordon?"

"Wise nonsense, Mistress Forbes," I answered.

"Thank you, but wise nonsense is most becoming when it is expressed as a parable."

"Then let us have the parable."

"Oh! parables are not in fashion with so many hard realities about, and there should not be three people in one. Three's never company, they say, good company, even in a parable."

"Then, dear lady, why put in three?"

"This parable, dear Captain, would need three; first, a high-minded young man who wears arms and dreams dreams, who is beloved by everybody for his good nature and qualities, who is on the other side of where he would be most welcome, and who will probably never summon courage to get there; secondly, an older man of more picturesque, more risky qualities, an adventurer in love and war, never afraid to strike, even if the stroke might wound, a personality able, on occasion, to commandeer what could not be secured by affection, thanks to an understanding of woman's nature and the imperfections of man's government; and, thirdly, between those personal forces a woman who might, to her undoing, be captured by the force of family and state circ.u.mstances, instead of by the man of her tell-tale heart's desire."

"A very subtle parable!" I remarked, for no reason whatever, but the tone of it held more than this ba.n.a.lity, although she showed no heed of that, but remarked:

"No; a very common parable; it's what every woman knows by instinct or experience, if few would care to reveal it, even in a parable."

We said good-bye without more ado, and I set off for the castle, troubled for my unreadiness in woman nature, the most puzzling, calling, captivating skein in all the universe, because it holds, behind the silken veil of its treasure-house, the eternal mystery of creation, that something divine which is nearest to G.o.d Himself.

When in trouble, my trouble, anyhow, one sighs for a song, and my heart-quaking carried me to a ballad, very familiar in our countryside, which tells of an unbridled lover laying siege to a woman he covets.

Her men were absent, and she and her domestics were the only garrison of the castle when he knocked roysterously at its gates:

"The lady ran up to her towe-head, As fast as she could drie, To see if by her fair speeches She could with him agree.

"As soon he saw the lady fair, And her yates all locked fast, He fell into a rage of wrath, And his heart was aghast.

"c.u.m doon to me, ye lady fair; c.u.m doon to me; let's see; This nigh ye's ly by my ain side The morn my bride sall be!"

It was pagan wooing, but it has often won the day, only why should I let it disturb me, whose cause stood by itself? What I must realize was that powers above me were at work, for "state reasons," on affairs in which I was concerned, privately. I must try to meet this influence without letting as much be known outwardly, because I was an officer bound by my commission to serve his Majesty's desires and commands.

Now I am no good schemer, and I merely drifted to those conclusions as a swimmer goes with a tide in which he happens to find himself. He feels that he is in its custody, but, on the instinct for life, he makes a stroke now and then and their c.u.mulative effect probably bears him somewhere safe to land. Might it be so with me!

Unfortunately I was a swimmer in the dark, for I did not know, however I might guess, what Marget and her mother were thinking. Perhaps my heart really a.s.sured my mind as to Marget, or so I was fain to conclude. Her mother, however, might take a mother's view, the far-carrying view which thinks of daughters settled in such a manner as will continue the old line.

Every man has, deep down in him, the desire to own a little bit of land, even though most of us only get six feet for a grave. It is man's form of ancestor-worship, and in woman it finds expression in the home, and continuous olive branches to fill that home. The man likes to have his foot securely on a rood of Mother Earth, a patch to call his very own. The woman supplements that by peopling a house; and is not this service of the maternal instinct the greater, the finer of the two?

One placed in circ.u.mstances which need strong action, should not think too much, because by doing that he raises a wall of difficulties around him. Mental ghosts are no use to anybody, although, to be sure, they weren't unknown to me. So I welcomed a letter that reached me next morning from Marget's mother, but I opened it with a dread. It addressed me as "Dear Captain Gordon," and it read:

"I am troubling you for advice, because there is n.o.body else whom I can ask, and because the matter may interest you, both as a relative, far removed I admit, and as a soldier of the reigning king. You will guess what it is, and that makes it easier for me to explain.

"It has been made known to us in a round-about, but authoritative way, that it would give King George and his ministers satisfaction to see our house and people established again, and that Jock Farquharson, the laird of Inverey, would be confirmed in the chiefship, if as much were agreeable to my daughter and myself.

"They don't ask me will I give my daughter in ransom for the house and possessions of our ancestors, but that is what is meant, and you can judge how the idea has concerned me. You may also, however, concern and interest a mother at the same time, and I have hesitated to return a 'No,' especially as Marget said, about the letter, when I showed it to her, 'Well, the sons of the house have sacrificed enough for it. It may now be the turn of the daughter to sacrifice something . . .!"

"That was dutifully said, but what she expects, I'm certain, is that I shall say the 'No' of my own accord, and I want your advice as to the manner in which it can best be done. I want it at once, because news comes to me, through the early channel of our domestics, that the Black Colonel means to ride over upon us one of these evenings, a friendly call, I suppose. Marget does not know of this intention on his part, and I am not going to tell her, for a mother's instinct naturally wishes to shield a daughter from disturbance.

"If you would advise me how to say 'No' without bringing further displeasure from high places upon our ruined house, you would be doing us a service. If, besides that, you were to find a means of keeping the Black Colonel away, why, you would be doing a further service."

As I read that last sentence an idea struck me, and I at once sent a note to the dear lady, saying I would solve her difficulty. Then I dispatched a pair of trusty scouts in quest of certain information I needed, and in eight hours they were back with it. After that, I felt more myself than I had done for some time, just because I was now committed to definite, perhaps even dangerous, action.

_XI--The Crack of Thunder_

It is fine how the spur of danger, especially danger to somebody else, dear if not near, helps a man's spirits upward. The blood flows more quickly in him, his hand is surer, his brain works better. He feels that the die has been cast, that nothing more matters, except the reckoning, and, so feeling, he sheds all timorous self-consciousness and is himself.

That, at all events, was how I felt as I took the road southward, across the hills towards Deeside, with a cracking wind to walk against.

I would intercept the Black Colonel's raid on Marget and her mother, and break the whole scheme behind it--if I could!

So we scheme, we glorious little fellows of this world, bent on love or hatred, and the Great Beneficence smiles at us, at our cleverness, or it may be the Great Furies, however you will have it. Anyway, Nature has merely to move and our grandest plans may crinkle up like a feather held to a "cruisie," the rude lamp, fed with dried splinters of fir-wood, or mutton tallow and a wick, which our Highlanders used for lighting.

But that was not in my thoughts when I came to the top of the last hill dividing our strath from the Black Colonel's. My estimate was that if I got there by break of day and waited I should, being in a high eyrie with a wide view, see him come from the opposite direction. My information from my scouts was that he would travel alone, a fit thing, having regard to his mission at the Dower House, Corgarff.