"That desire, if I may make you a great confidence, would satisfy itself in a woman of the qualities of Mistress Marget Forbes. I do no more than quote her because she is known to us both, and therefore she makes clear the exact shade of my meaning. But I imply no freedom with her name, except what the honouring of it carries, and if any man implied anything more she would know how to answer him. She has, I will say, the tang of the Forbes blood full in her, and I have always thought it warmer in its flow of both love and pride than the Gordon blood, although of that you should be a better judge than I am.
"One needs a wife of parts if one is, as I hope, to found a new clan in a new country, for, mind you, many of the Fraser Highlanders, when they end their period of enrolment, will prefer to settle in this lush, virgin country where the days go by like a dream. They will sit down on the untilled lands, and out of them find a competence of food and raiment, and they will marry French women who are buxom and healthy and will be good wives and mothers.
"Granted all this, and it follows that there will be materials for a new house of Inverey in some valley by the River Saint Lawrence, where the Red Man at present reigns in indolence. He who can sit on a knoll for an hour and let old Mother Earth spin her tune to the fathering sun, is ever a friend of mine. But the Red Man carries the pastime beyond me, unless when he is on the warpath, and then he is a devil. It would give me no compunction to reign with a hundred or more Fraser Highlanders, in a strath from which the Red Man has to be persuaded away, or driven by force. Perhaps I could even hold out a helping invitation to smaller 'broken men' still in the Aberdeenshire Highlands or elsewhere in dear Scotland, and that would please my self-importance.
"I renounce nothing, give up no legitimate claim that I have put forward for hand or land in our native country, but I see that I am come to leaving them unclaimed. Madame Angélique, to whom, mayhap, I have confided those consolations and aspirations, and who has a comely sense as well as comely looks, says very properly that changed circumstances carry other changes, and that even a Highland gentleman may recognize as much without loss of self-respect.
"Madame has, in the crash which sank Bigot's fortunes, come to plain faring, but I have made no difference in my friendship to her, and she, I feel, has increased hers towards me. She tells me she has no clamant ties left in Old France, any more than in New France, where the lustre of her powerful French friends has set, and my heart goes out to her in sympathy, and, I know not what more, except that she is a very fine woman and would adorn the home of. . . . Why give a name?
"You must make what you can of this scattered epistle and read it into my future because you may not hear from me again, or, if you do, only briefly in unlikelihoods. I am no practised writer, though I might have acquired the trade, and it is only out of a felt duty, combined with a personal regard of some durability, that I have set down, for you, those epistles of my doings far across the sea. Farewell, if it be farewell, and to Mistress Marget Forbes the like salutation, if she will accept it, as I am sure she will, when presented through you; and similarly to Madame Forbes, her mother, my humble duty.
"Always your well-wisher,
"JOCK FARQUHARSON, late of Inverey."
XVIII—My Garden of Content
"Said Edom o' Gordon to his men
We maun draw to a close."
That close, whether to a love story or a life, should come in the quiet, natural way which Providence orders, unexpectedly almost, not in tumult and trappings.