"I am," I declared hotly, "neither a matchmaker, especially for adventurers, nor a scheming politician, and on both grounds I decline to have anything to do with you. Your insistence compels me to speak with a plainness which I would rather have avoided, but you must blame yourself. It's a far cry to Loch Awe, and a farther cry to the pardon of the Black Colonel, but he thinks it might be contrived if he had Marget Forbes and her property for a trump card. A pretty scheme, but not one which my commission for King George instructs me to countenance."
Now I, in turn, had gone aflame, despite all my resolve to the contrary, but if I had spoken the name of Marget Forbes it was, I tried to reflect, as if it had no intimate meaning for me. That would have been to blunder doubly, because it would show me personally, nay, intimately, interested.
The Black Colonel had been silent, and, when I ceased talking, I noticed a strained, even a queer, look in his eye. Was he counting up some element of the game which, thus far, was unknown to me? For when the minds of men rub fiercely against each other, as ours had been doing, they speak quicker than words. A kind of communication springs up, vague of detail, but unfailing in its general import.
I was not surprised, therefore, when the Black Colonel put his hand within his coat and drew a paper from a pocket there. But I was surprised when he said, "I have something here which I owe to the favour of my friends in the south, and you will find that it bears upon our conversation." He unfolded the paper slowly, I seeing, as he did so, that it was an official paper, and then he handed it to me.
It was not easy to read, in the dim light of the Colonel's Bed, thanks to its crabbed orthography and its long formal phrasing, but gradually I made out its wording to be this:
"Greetings:
"Whereas, trusty and well-beloved councillors advise it in the interest of our cause in the Scottish Highlands, that influential gentlemen who have been Jacobite in sympathy, and even act, be won over to Our Settled Sovereignship;
"Therefore it is ordered that they shall, wherever possible, be installed in the headship of houses and estates kindred to them, which have been forfeit and estreated, all on strict condition of loyalty to Ourselves and our Crown for ever;
"And this wisely considered and, in our graciousness of heart, clement policy, shall, we instruct, apply to John Farquharson of Inverery, commonly called the Black Colonel, if, and when, he is able to implement its essence in reference to the Forbes estate of Corgarff in the far uplands of Aberdeenshire, where we wish to be loyally regarded by our subjects.
"In token of all which foregoing greetings and intimations on our part, herewith witness our royal signature.