The Black Colonel

by James Milne

I am of a family which has been accustomed to storm through the world, sometimes with all the world could give, at other times with mighty little. This element has got into our blood, become, you might say, a habit, and often, myself, I have felt its prickings. After all, it must be a finely insurgent thing to drive to the devil in a golden carriage built for two, or more; and the Gordons have never been accustomed to count their guests, so long as they made good company.

Then I had grown up at a time in our Highlands when the kettle of history was about to boil over, scalding a great many people in the process. The fiery cross of war carried its message from one valley to another and left its embers on new graves wherever it went.

You are asking what this excursion in deep waters has to do with Marget and myself and the Black Colonel, Jock Farquharson. It has everything to do with us, because it is the lamp of the road along which we journeyed. Anybody can count turnings in a path, but it is harder to catch the other-world glow which sees us past them to our desired haven.

We were in sight of it, and, although we said little, I knew that we both rejoiced exceedingly over the news which the Black Colonel sent in his last letter. When we met I looked at Marget as much as to ask, "Shall I say it?" And she looked at me answering, "No, you need not, because I understand."

It is a curious state this which, at some time or other, exists between two loving people cast for each other's welfaring. A delicate mystery lies in it, and that is an essential strand in every true affection, but it can readily be destroyed. Break it rudely, even shock it a little, and a chasm may yawn where, before, there was a silken thread of union, tender in its fibre, but beautifully elastic.

You may exclaim, when you read these confidences and remember others to which I have confessed, that I was not so awkward a lover as I sometimes appeared to be. No, I was not awkward in thought, but I could be, I know full well, very awkward in its expression as deeds. Often I would go wrong in form, rarely in feeling, if you can assume a man built on those colliding lines.

Marget has told me, in raillery, that she was more than once tempted to give me "a good shaking," as the woman's saying goes. It was not, perhaps, that she expected to shake much out of me, or to shake me out of myself, but that she would herself have been relieved by the exercise, for women, you see, are like that.

My reflection has to do with a day when we spoke of it as settled that the Black Colonel would never come back, that the whole episode which he represented was over, and that an open road, undisturbed surely by any more surprises and alarms, lay before us. How could I forget the scene, for it was to open out our true life, our deep, full love.

She looked at me as much as to ask had I been planning a stratagem, I the unsophisticated, which I had not. She looked again, and I saw she knew, that at long length, we were face to face with the soft realities which, hitherto, had remained dumb, or only whispered. I waited to take her in my arms, and she told me later her instinct expected me to do it, and I didn't. What poor fools men may be, to miss so much, and to place a good woman in the position of having her consent rebuffed, for that is to outrage her sex-respect.

I seem to remember that Marget turned her head away in despair with me, only she pretended to be watching the sun and the clouds as they dipped the hills in light and shadow. This threw her face into profile, and I thought I had never seen it quite so beautiful. There was an expectant vibrancy in it, from the fair forehead to the dimpled chin, but its flower of expression was in the flowing eye, the ripe mouth, and the tremulous lips.