"GEORGE REX."
"You understand?" said the Black Colonel, as I lifted my eyes from the document and handed it back to him.
I nodded, mechanically, for I was thinking—thinking chiefly of Marget and myself.
VIII.—The Conquering Hero
It is unbelievable how the sweet face of a lass, or her soft figure, with its air of passion song, will come between two men and make any great affairs of state dividing them, seem as nothing by comparison. The Black Colonel and I would hardly, as individuals, have quarrelled about Stuart and Guelph, knowing well the value which Stuart and Guelph would have put on us. But with Marget Forbes as prize it was another affair altogether, for, in her, a whole bouquet of calling qualities united.
Her heart, so far, was all in the open joy of living, though in the troublous times which surrounded her and her family, she found burden enough of sorrow. She was a flower of the heather, opening late, like it, but perhaps with the same red, rich bloom, for it was not hard to divine that elements of high possibility were enclosed in her young womanhood. It gave you, for all its simplicity, a sense of latent treasure, when it should fully open, even, it might be of surprise to herself.
Seventeen! they say, when girlhood is trembling, quivering on the portal of womanhood, a world of mysteries. But it is not half so dramatic as twenty-five, when a woman, if she be rightly healthy in mind and body, comes into woman's estate, feeling, desiring, some earlier, some later, but roughly then. Peril is there, as well as beauty, for then all the Margets in the wide world are pulling at the silky bonds of sex, thinking these will stretch and stretch, only to find, perhaps, that there is a strain at which they must break or surrender.
If the insurgency of newly-found womanhood can be fitly employed all is well, but remember that most women are, in thought, rebels for romance. Nature, too, runs fullest in the veins of those who live with her naturally, aloof from the veneer of society. Nature is lusty in Nature's lap, and she mothered our Corgarff without let or hindrance, in sun and in snow, Marget Forbes included.
You are to suppose a region far removed even from such a niggard commerce of life as there was then in the Scottish Highlands. It is sixty miles from the warming salt-wash of the sea, and has winds nearly as cold as those that blow from the Arctic. This is because it stands high, and is so bare of trees that they blow unbroken over its area. They catch you with their ice tang in them, untouched by long, sheltering woods, or soft, rolling dales, and they make your face tingle into red and white, the blushes of Mother Nature.
That is the winter, when the land is often covered with snow, and the little burns of the hills are frozen into snake-like icicles. If the picture is hard, it is nevertheless beautiful, looked out upon from the comfort of good clothes and a full stomach. It invites you to explore it, to follow that far track ending on the snow-line of Morven, or yon other, which dips and is lost in the riven sides of Lochnagar. The air sings through your lungs with the force of strong drink and makes you hearty. You feel monarch of all you survey, even if it be not worth having, which is the most stirring feeling a landscape can yield.