Stories of the Border Marches Part 20

Great were the festivities that Lord and Lady Stair had prepared for the wedding of their daughter with so eligible a suitor as the young laird of Baldoon, and when the ceremony in the church was over, there were great doings at Ca.r.s.ecreugh. Baldoon must either have been a very stupid man or a wilfully blind one, for his bride of snow seemed to look on everything that took place with vacant, unseeing, unsmiling eyes, and spoke and acted as one in a dream.

In the evening there was a dance. One can see the bright lights, the gaily-coloured wedding garments of the festive company, hear the sound of clarionet and of fiddle gaily jigging out country dances, and the loud hum of talk and laughter of the many guests. Baldoon, a proud husband, tricked out in all the finery of a bridegroom of that day, leads out his bride, the beautiful Janet, in her white bridal robe. Can he not feel the clammy chill of the little hand he takes in his? Why does he not understand the piteous look in the eyes of the girl whose feet are treading so gay a measure? No trapped bird with broken wing was ever more pitiful.

While the guests still were making merry, the bride and her bridesmaids went up to the bridal chamber. The virgins who prepared Iphigenia for her sacrifice had a task no less terrible. Then, amidst the animal jocularities that were looked on as wit in that day, the bridegroom followed, and the best man locked the door on the married pair and put the key in his pocket.

The dance went gaily on, but not for long. High above the sound of the violins, the laughter that grew more unlicensed as the night wore on, the sound of voices, the thud of feet, the tap of heels and rustle of brocades on a polished floor, came terrible shrieks and groans that made the heart of each wedding guest stand still. There could be no doubt from which room they came, and the panic-struck company dashed upstairs like a breakaway mob of cattle. The best man, livid-faced and with a shaking hand, unlocked the door, and on the threshold stumbled over the body of the bridegroom, terribly wounded and streaming with blood. At first they could see no bride, and then, in the corner of the wide chimney, they found her crouching, with no covering but her shift, and that dabbled with gore.

"She sat there grinning at them, mopping and mowing," so says Sir Walter Scott--"in a word, absolutely insane."

"Tak' up your bonny bridegroom!" she screamed, with hysterical laughter, and pointed mockingly at what seemed to be the corpse of young Baldoon.

Sick in body she was, as well as sick in mind, and on September 12th, 1669, a little over a fortnight from the day she was married, the Bride of Baldoon died.

David Dunbar of Baldoon recovered from his wounds, but during the thirteen years that remained for him to live, he declined to help the curious to elucidate the mystery of his attempted murder. In the words of Sir Walter Scott: "If a lady, he said, asked him any question upon the subject, he would neither answer her nor speak to her again while he lived; if a gentleman, he would consider it as a mortal affront, and demand satisfaction as having received such."

Many, of course, were the explanations given by the general public as to the real happenings on that tragic wedding-night. The majority inclined to think that the bride herself, crazed by grief at the loss of her lover, tried to kill her husband rather than be his wife in anything save legal formality. Others swore that the a.s.sailant was none other than the discarded lover, and that Lord Rutherfurd, having left Baldoon for dead, had escaped by the chimney where the unfortunate bride was crouching. But in those days there was bound to be yet another factor brought into the tale. Witches were held responsible for many a crime in Scotland in the seventeenth century, and of course Lord Stair's "auld witch wife" was adjudged guilty of the whole tragedy. In a sense, doubtless, so she was, but the description given by the credulous of how, on her marriage night, Janet Dalrymple was "harled" through the house by evil spirits in such a way as to cause her death shortly afterwards, is slightly at variance with the actual facts. Yet others there were who said that she who had sworn solemnly by all that was holy to keep her plighted troth with Andrew Rutherfurd, had obviously handed herself over, body and soul, to Satan when the troth was broken, and that he who would have slain David Dunbar was the Evil One himself.

"He threw the bridegroom from the nuptial bed, Into the chimney did so his rival maul, His bruised bones ne'er were cured but by the fall."

The "fall" referred to by this scurrilous lampoon, written by Sir William Hamilton, a bitter enemy of Lord Stair, was the accident by which Dunbar of Baldoon met his death. While riding from Leith to Holyrood on March 27, 1682, his horse fell with him. His injuries proved fatal, and he died next day, and was buried in Holyrood Chapel.

Of the other actors in the tragedy there is little to tell. That great and able lawyer, Viscount Stair, has left behind him permanent record of the ability that brought him his t.i.tle. For fifty years his wife and he lived together, and history tells us that "they were tenderly attached to the last." A witty, brilliant, worldly woman, she had the power of keeping the love of her husband fresh and living to the very end. She it was who is reported by a local historian, whose standard possibly may not have been of the very highest, to have made "one of the best puns extant." "Bluidy Clavers" was Sheriff of Wigtown in her day, and in her presence he dared to inveigh against one who was still the idol of Presbyterian Whigs, John Knox.

"Why are you so severe on the character of John Knox?" asked the Lady Stair. "You are both reformers: he gained his point by clavers; you attempt to gain yours by knocks."

When the lady died, in the year 1692, she left an order regarding the disposal of her body which entirely confirmed the popular belief that, early in life, she had bargained with the Evil One for the worldly success of herself and her descendants, and had paid her soul as price.

She asked that her body might not be buried underground, but that the coffin containing her should be stood upright in the family vault of Kirkliston. While she remained so placed, she said, the Dalrymples should flourish. But woe betide the line when that coffin should be moved and laid on common earth as those of common people. Her orders were carried out. Does she, a dismal sentry, keep guard there still? And what sort of a Purgatory has her poor soul had to pa.s.s through to atone for the cruel murder of the child she bore?