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 entitled "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 sex 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 passing 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 hoarded as if they contained treasure, and only dipped into for very special reasons.