urs when
she felt very lonely, although she would not have confessed this, being
a woman of invincible spirit and fortified by the courage of her love.
She never knew when her husband would be called away for one of his
hunts, and though there were many Loyalist families in Forfarshire, it
was not a time for easy social intercourse, and Jean was conscious that
the Carnegies and the rest of them of the old Cavalier stock looked
askance at her, and suspected the black Covenanting taint in her blood.
Claverhouse, like a faithful gentleman, had done his best to conceal
from her the injury which his marriage had done him, but she knew that his
cunning and bitter enemy, the Duke of Queensberry, had constantly
insinuated into the mind of the Duke of York and various high personages
in London that no one who had married Lady Cochrane's daughter could, in
the nature of things, be perfectly loyal. It was really for this love
that he had lost the post of commander-in-chief in Scotland, to which he
was distinctly entitled, and had experienced the insult of having his
name removed from the Scots Council. It might be her imagination, but
it seemed as if his fellow officers and other friends, whom she met
from time to time, were not at ease with her. She was angry when they
refrained from their customary frank expressions about her mother's
party, just as she would have been angry if they had said the things
they were accustomed to say in her presence. Claverhouse assured her on
those happy days when he was living at Dudhope, and when they could be
lovers among the woods there, as they had been in the pleasaunce at
Paisley Castle, that he never regretted his choice, and that she was
the inspiration of his life. It was pleasant to hear him repeat his
love vows, with a passion as hot and words as moving as in the days of
their courtship, and the very contrast between his unbending severity
as a soldier and his grace as a lover made him the more fascinating to
a woman who was herself of the lioness breed. All the same, she could not
forget that Claverhouse would have done better for himself if he had
married into one of the great Scots houses of his own party--and there
were few in which he would not have been welcome--and that indeed he
could not have done much worse for his future than in marrying her. It
was a day of keen rivalry among the Royalists, and a more unprincipled
and disreputable gang than the king's Scots ministers could not