The Black Colonel Part 9

Well, on a night which I recall for its dense blackness, there came a tap, tap, tap, three of them, slowly and distinctly, at the small window of my room in the Castle. I knew by the method of the disturbance that it was not an accident, but I was on my feet and peering hard into the outer darkness before I realized that here was the prearranged signal of danger at the Dower House.

A hand moved close to the window, signalling me, and I motioned back, though, on either side, all this was divined, as divination takes place in the dark, rather than seen at all. I picked up my sword, which always stood in a certain corner of my room, pulled the door gently towards me and stepped softly out on to the gra.s.s, which grew close up to the Castle walls.

"Come ye, fast, Captain Gordon," quietly said a figure gliding beside me, and without another word we made for the Dower House. When I felt myself beyond ear-shot of the sentry, I asked:

"What's happened--what's wrong?"

"I'm no' exac'ly sure," was the old retainer's answer, "but men hae been surroundin' the place, as if to attack it. They wakened me, bein'

a light sleeper, because they made sounds different fae' the ordinary.

It was like men crawlin' amon' the gra.s.s on a plan, and I slippit doon for you."

"What had we better do?" I asked formally, and not because I expected any answer, for I had decided to get into the Dower House without alarming anybody, if that could be done.

We managed to open a window and step through it, but then the dogs sleeping inside set up an alarm. This quickly awoke everybody, and the confusion set affairs moving outside, where I heard a voice that seemed familiarly like Red Murdo's cry hoa.r.s.ely:

"Lie close, lie close!"

Presently Marget and her mother, who had both dressed hastily, came to the stair-head, holding a glimmering light over the darkness beneath.

Behind them crowded their few scared domestics, and odd the whole scene looked, although, indeed, between keeping off the barking dogs and wondering what was to happen outside, I had no desire or time to study it.

"Who's there?" called Marget, in a not uncomposed but expectant voice, and I answered, telling in a few words what I knew. Quick in thought and action she thanked me for coming, and said she would just get her cloak. She took her mother with her, but in a moment was back again asking, "How can I be of service?"

She carried a stout walking-stick, and I looked at it as she came down the stairs to where I stood in the lobby, her mother following. "Yes,"

she said, "my hand lighted on it somewhere, perhaps because it has been through troubles and wars and is in the presence of more. Shall we say that the fighting instinct, even in a stick, leaps to the call?" She laughed quietly, but with a concerned note in the laugh, and I knew she was thinking of her mother's safety and health, both threatened by this strange incursion of ill-disposed men.

Wishful as one would be at such a moment to magnify a trifle, in order, if possible, to occupy an anxious woman's mind, I remarked, "Oh, a stick can be a very sound weapon in a good hand."

"It's about all that the orders of search and suppression have left us Jacobites," remarked Marget; "openly confessed, anyhow, for I suppose there may be a small, concealed a.r.s.enal or two, even among our Corgarff hills."

Nothing, apparently, had happened outside in those tense minutes, and it was the strain of waiting which made us resolutely talk of nothing--but a stick. There had been no further cry since the "Lie close" already mentioned, and it, no doubt, had been a mischance on the part of Red Murdo. All was silence and black without, and within all quiet alarm, such as you get when a household suppresses itself in obedience to some demand.

It was an oppressive silence, this waiting, and I was glad to hear Marget tap the floor with her sinewy hazel and say merrily, thinking to lighten her mother's concern, "My grandfather insisted that a stick with a n.o.b was no stick for a Highland gentleman. It escaped, he would say, when it was most needed, and that might, at times, leave the best of Highland gentlemen by the wayside." Joking, under difficulties!

She paused, for there arose a crack-cracking as of men coming closer among the scrub of heather and fern which surrounded the Dower House, only it was quite momentary. The stick which she had half-lifted, an unconscious act of readiness for defence, tapped back on to the floor, and my sword-point made a sharper rattle, though I was unaware that my hand had even moved it. The tyranny of doing nothing began to be intolerable and to insist on an issue, be it what it might.

Think of the situation for me, and although I am, I hope, neither more selfish nor more cowardly than other men, I could not help doing that.

Here was I, the chief and head of his Majesty's garrison at Corgarff Castle, standing defence on the door-step of a Jacobite household. Why was I there at all? What was I there to accomplish? How was I to do this unknown something and return with composure to my quarters, secure in my loyalty to King George and his ministers?

Moreover, what had I come out for to see? A mere expedition of burglary by a band of hungry caterans who took the chattels of friend or foe indifferently? Possibly that was all. Then I could have fetched half-a-dozen soldiers and apprehended those same footpads, or, at all events, driven them to the hills again. But at the head of what defensive force did I find myself? Why, a few domestics without resource enough even to escape from the danger, a dear old lady who anxiously wanted to mother the trouble about her, and a young woman of nerve and resolve, my only stand-by.

There, for it was a new discovery in our relationship, I realized that to have Marget by me was a very welcome comradeship, and, somehow, so natural, that it made the other things of no burden. I was curiously happy, and could have left matters at that, but what to do, what to do?

There must, in all of us, be an instinct for our keeping, when we are in danger. Give it headway and you will probably win through, as a thirsty horse knows how to reach a springwell among the hills. Argue with it and it says, "Take your reasoned method, your road of the better judgment, but don't blame me, your natural guardian, if you come to harm."

With this I got the strong intuition, possibly communicated to my mind or heart by Marget's nearness, that here was no ordinary raid for spoilage. Something else of a personal and intimate sort was behind, I was sure of it, something to which acute danger attached for my dearest wishes.

When you are, in small authority, set over the people of a locality, you are apt to develop a small official mind which obscures the power of seeing, understanding, divining. Such an att.i.tude, as I had painfully seen in various parts of the Highlands, fretted the great sore of defeat that lay upon the Jacobites, whereas the effort should have been to heal it. My own mind I had tried to keep fresh and free in all my relationships at Corgarff, impelled, may be, by a nature which liked, possibly out of vanity, to give sympathy. From this and a mute speaking with one near and dear, I now had my personal reward, for I understood. Marget was the trophy sought in this dark raid, and she was to be the Black Colonel's trophy.

"Action, front!" I said to myself, in one of the drill-book commands.

Offence is always a soldier's best defence, although it is a sailor's phrase, so I would go out and make a reconnaissance from the back of the Dower House. This should cause the invaders to show themselves, and might, if they thought the move stood for any force, even alarm them into a quiet retreat, which, for several reasons, was what I most desired.

Quickly I told Marget of my intention, and the need for it, and asked her to remain on guard where she was. She answered briskly, a woman determined to be brave and not a burden, that n.o.body should enter the place without feeling the weight of her grandfather's stick. She added, and here came in the other woman, that I was not to be long absent. This touched me sweetly, for it showed that Marget was thinking less of her own safety, or, at the moment, even of her mother's, than of mine in the night outside. Honestly, I went dancing from her side with a wine of joy in me that I had never tasted, for she had shown that I was something to her, perhaps more than something. I might have been drunk, and if I had I could not have been more lost than I was in the darkness behind the Dover House, because it instantly swallowed me up.

There is a darkness to which, after a little, the eye so accustoms itself that it can see trees and rocks and even faces in contour.

There is another darkness which seals the eyes and numbs the mind and even weights the feet as with lead. This was that night's darkness, so pall-like that I was simply lost in it.

Nevertheless, calling up all my sense of locality, and feeling the way lightly with my bare, ready sword, I started to make a circle of the Dower House. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty cautious steps, with my sword-point probing the way, and it touched something soft and yielding. That something a-sort of whimpered, as a dog caught poaching would, or as a man might who felt a quick pain. A sword-p.r.i.c.k stings, and the something leapt erect and with a curse turned at me, when I instinctively fell on guard. Another sword struck at mine, my blade slid up this other, caught in the handle and wrenched it from the unseen hand. The weapon fell among the bracken, but my man thought more of getting away than of looking for it, so he doubled round a tree and was gone.

Evidently I had struck the investing circle, and I went on cautiously, but never another figure did I perceive, though, before me, ran many soft noises of as many retreats. Finally there was a suppressed rush away, and with that I arrived at the front door of the Dower House to hear a mother's cry of distress, "Marget, Marget! oh, Marget, Marget!"

"Where is she?" said I anxiously.

"She grew alarmed for you," answered her mother more anxiously, "and went out, although I tried to keep her. Hardly had she gone when I heard a smothered sob, and then there was a hustle of feet as if she were being carried oft by force."

There was a boding of ill in her cry, like a coronach, and the domestics took it up in sympathy, as Highland women will. "Marget!

Marget! Mistress Marget!" rose the cry, and we became aware that all the inmates of the castle were stirring to it. But never a response came from Marget, never a token from the raiders, and it was forced on me that she and they were both gone from us.

We called on her, and searched for them until the dawn came, but only found the sword which I had encountered, and I knew it as one the Black Colonel had long worn, and then, when he himself got a better, that with the "S" for "Stuart" on its handle, had given to Red Murdo. The larger knowledge, brought by the dawn, was that the raiders had vanished as secretly as they had come, and that they had, beyond doubt, taken Marget with them. For though--

"We sought her baith by bower and ha', The lady was not seen."

_XIII--The Wound of Absence_

You will probably know what it is to lose somebody who by physical fragrance, the mystery of a common spirituality, or both, has become essential to you. The wound is twice as bitter if, until the parting, you were unaware how much that presence really meant. It is as if you had come into a new world of your own and then found it vanish, before you could take possession.

I had no doubt, thanks to the hearing of his voice and the leaving behind of his sword, that the raiders were headed by Red Murdo, the Black Colonel's henchman. Actual light came during the morning, in the form of a message by word of mouth: "I am a prisoner in the topmost room of Lonach Tower, and Red Murdo and his men are camped below."

When the Highland woman who brought it had said that, she melted away again without taking bite or sup. She lived in the ruin of Lonach Tower, and that was how Marget had been able to send her with the message. She could not be too long absent, however, or she might be missed by Red Murdo, whom, she said, she had left snoring out his lost night's sleep.

I found a Highlander who had engaged in relations with Red Murdo, though their nature need not be mentioned, and who was anxious to score them off for a settled life. Working on that, I told him to go to Lonach Tower, where he would find Red Murdo, and say the Black Colonel was waiting at a fold of the hills, which I named--waiting to hear how the night's work had fared! That, as you will mark, was the nice significance of the message, which I hoped would move Red Murdo and his merry men--his master waited "to hear how the night's work had fared!"

If the Black Colonel was behind the business it would seem a natural message, nay, a command, and my messenger went off with it. When he had gone, I picked out a dozen of our best soldiers, and, hinting the mission, without explaining it, we followed at a distance. We halted behind the last peak of the hill which looks down on Lonach Tower and awaited events.

We saw the receding Highland figure wend slowly towards the bare, lean turret, and, when he reached it, my eyes lifted to its queer little windows, seeking to look through them. They gave no sign of anybody inside, and, indeed, the mullioning of time had so dimmed them that, perhaps, the outside world could hardly be seen from within.

My Highlander hammered at the one entrance door, and he had to hammer a while before it opened to him. Then it only opened partly, as if the guardian kept a shoulder to it, while he spoke the visitor. Next it shut again, leaving my man outside, but evidently the colloquy had not finished, for he waited.

Ten minutes more and the door drew wide, as we could see, and Red Murdo came out, his comrades with him, and there was more questioning of the bringer of news. Evidently he played his part well, perhaps because, knowing nothing of what lay behind, he simply stuck to the terms of his delivery, for presently Red Murdo's party set off towards the meeting-place I had named for them.

Here was my time to act, and I only waited until the coast, or rather the valley, was clear. When the tartans of Red Murdo's party had fluttered out of sight, in obedience, as they fancied, to the commands of their chief, I got my fellows quickly a-foot for Lonach Tower and she who was a captive there.

The heavy oaken, iron-clasped door had been locked by the departed raiders, and no sign of any tenant within fluttered out to us.

Half-measures are no more useful in opening bolted doors, of which you have not the key, than they are in accomplishing other difficult things. So, finally, we put our collective weights against it, pushed hard and steadily, and when the weather-worn bars and hinges gave way, tumbled headlong into the old keep.

n.o.body was in the ground-room floor, nothing, except the untidiness left by half-a-dozen rough men, and I mounted the narrow stair and tried the room above. Again we had to use force, and when the door flew inward I almost landed in the lap of Marget Forbes. There she was, bound to a rough seat, in the middle of the room, with a cravat tied round the lower part of her face, to keep her silent. Gently but swiftly I undid the gag, and after that cut the rough tow which bound her to the seat. Being thus freed, she told me, with an agitation which I tried to still, what had happened just before we came and on the previous night.