The Chieftain Read Free

ceased. Few were as open about their intentions as Hector. Some came to inquire after the young widow’s health, a little embarrassed by the fact that they scarcely knew her. Others pretended to long acquaintance or a distant family relationship to try to gain access to her. But Isobel saw none of them. With her agreement, her father turned the most ineligible from the door, and her mother received the more presentable in the parlour and entertained them politely over tea and cakes. All went away disappointed.
    Only John Campbell was admitted freely to see Isobel, and more and more she came to value his quiet good manners, his air of strength and sound common sense. For two years of her life she had borne single-handed all the burdens of caring for a man she did not love and scarcely knew. Now the thought of being protected and cherished and cared for was very appealing. But she felt the need to give it a little more time, to make quite sure that she wanted to share her life with him. She understood so little of what marriage meant, and there was no reason to hurry. Meanwhile she walked in the garden with John at her side, and told him her feelings, and enjoyed his kindly, loving attentiveness.
    It was her father who had all the anxieties to face. It was he who had a bolt attached to the garden gate, and made sure she went nowhere unattended, and dealt with the troublesome suitors. And he knew very well that it was not simply her fortune and her beauty that attracted these men, but also the fact that Isobel the widow was a virgin still, untouched and unawakened. It was very well known that James Carnegie had suffered an apoplectic fit on the evening of their wedding day, and lain speechless and paralysed ever after. Most of the men who flocked to the door had been waiting eagerly for the past two years, expecting every hour to hear of James Carnegie’s death. That it had not come sooner was, Andrew knew, due largely to Isobel’s devoted care.
    ‘I think,’ he said proudly to John one day, ‘there’s not another girl in Scotland who’d have kept her marriage vows so faithfully with no hope of anything in return. And it’s not as if he had very much to offer before he was ill—A fortune, of course, and he was a kindly man—But old enough to be her father, and with no good looks to speak of—’ He sighed. ‘Many times I’ve wished we’d never urged the match on her, but there—We can’t know what’s to come.’
    ‘And perhaps she’s the better for it,’ John consoled him. ‘For was she not a little wilful in her younger days? The past years have calmed and matured her. I watched her grow up through the months of her married life. The man who wins her now will be fortunate indeed.’
    Andrew Reid looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Aye, very fortunate, my friend. And he’ll have to be something of a hero to be worthy of my girl.’ He saw John’s face fall, and smiled kindly. ‘We’ll see—We’ll see—’ he said.
    He’s a fair few years older than Isobel, he was thinking, and no more good looking than James Carnegie. But a good man, making a name for himself in his quiet way. And he cares for her, that’s plain. If she should want him, she could do worse. Time will tell.
    His greatest pleasure these days lay in watching the colour return to his daughter’s cheeks, and the pretty girlish roundness that months of sleeplessness and constant anxiety had worn away. He thought proudly that she was like the summer countryside itself, with that complexion of honey and rose, those eyes blue as the morning sky, that silken hair the colour of ripened corn: lovelier far than her mother in her younger days, though she too had been a beauty once.
    As the days passed Isobel began to feel as if she were slowly awakening from a bad dream. The past two years became gradually a merciful blur in her memory, and she began instead to remember her life before her marriage: the simple pleasures of family life, the walks and