Scottish crown was his two-year-old grandchild in "Norroway ower the
faem."
In the eyes of all his people the King's duty was plain. He was only
forty-four, a brilliant _parti_ for the daughter of any royal or noble
house, and the Scots wished a man, not a maid, to rule over them. He
must, obviously, marry again. Joleta, also called Yolande, daughter of
the Count de Dreux, and a descendant of the Kings of France, was his
chosen bride. She was of surpassing fairness, and even most of those who
had harboured scruples with regard to the match, because the maid had
been destined for a nunnery, forgot such scruples when they looked upon
her beauty.
On All Saints' Day, 1285, the wedding--a more brilliant function than
anything that had ever before been held in Scotland--was celebrated in
Jedburgh Abbey. The little grey town on the Jed was packed with Scottish
and French nobles and their retinues. Few were the noble houses that
were not there represented, and the monks of Beauvais--the black-cloaked
Augustinian friars from St. Quentin's Abbey--who held rule at the Abbey
of Jedburgh in those days, must have had their ears gladdened by the
constant sound of the French tongue coming from seigneur, squire, and
page-boy who passed them on the causeway.
There was nothing awanting in pomp or in splendour at the royal wedding.
The trees were shedding their leaves, the bracken and the heather on the
moors were brown, and winds that swept across the Carter Bar and down
from the Cheviots had a winter nip in them; but indoors there was warmth
enough, and all the gorgeousness and feasting and merrymaking that the
most exacting of guests could desire for the marriage of a great king.
The banquet after the wedding was followed by a masque. Musicians
ushered into the banqueting hall of the castle a gorgeously attired
procession of dancers, many of them armed men. It was a radiant scene
for the bright eyes of Queen Yolande. Lights flashed on swords and on
armour, and on the sumptuous trappings and brilliant-coloured attire of
lords and of ladies, for courts in those days looked like hedges of
sweet-peas in the summer sun. The musicians played their best, the
guests mingled gaily with the dancing mummers, and then, suddenly, above
all the sounds of music and of revel, there arose a cry, a woman's cry,
shrill and full of fear. What was that grisly figure that appeared
amongst the dancers?--a grinning skeleton--a dancing Death. No masquer
this, but a grim messenger from the Shades, bringing dire warning to
one, at least, of that gay company. As it had come, so it vanished, but
all the gaiety had gone from the merry throng. The ill-omened dancer had
laid a chilly hand on the heart of many a wedding guest.
There were some who said it was a monkish trick, contrived for his own
ends by one of the brethren from Beauvais, but, less than six months
later, all Scotland believed that the skeleton masquer at Jedburgh had,
indeed, come to warn an unfortunate land of its approaching doom.
On a dark March night of 1286, King Alexander rode along the rough cliff
path between Burntisland and Kinghorn on a horse that stumbled in the
darkness, and in the morning, on the rocks far down below, the grey
waves lapped against the ashen dead face of a mighty king.
Not only was the fair Queen Yolande a widow. Scotland was widowed
indeed. For long years thereafter she was to be a battlefield for
fiercely contending nations, and if the ghost that danced at Jethart was
truly a portent of the death of the King of Peace, it also was a portent
of the death of many a gallant warrior and of much grievous spilling of
innocent blood in the woeful years to come.
A MAN HUNT IN 1813
It was a clear, crisp, sunny day, early in March 1813, that the laird of
Wauchope was riding into Hawick. A little snow still lay on the crest of
Cheviot and on some of the foot-hills, and a smirr of hoar-frost
silvered the turf by the roadside; but the sun was bright--strong to
overcome frost and snow--and in it the leaves that still clung to the
beech hedges shone like burnished copper.
Walter Scott of Wauchope was one of the most popular men in Liddesdale.
He it was who had, by his own exertions, raised the Light Company of
Roxburghshire Volunteers, a band of nearly a hundred men of fine
physique and first-rate horsemanship, whose bearing was the admiration
of everyone when the laird marched them into Hawick on that momentous
night in 1804 when "Boney" was supposed to have landed on Scottish
shores. Mr. Scott's services had not been forgotten. A captain's
commission in the 1st Regiment of Roxburgh Local Militia now belonged to
him, and he squared his shoulders with an air and gave the military
salute to those on the road with whom he exchanged greetings.
It was a morning for only peace and goodwill to be abroad, and the
laird rode on in cheerful frame, and put his horse to a canter along the
turf. But as he cantered, the good steed's ears suddenly went back, he
plunged, swerved, and answered his master's voice and heels by standing
stock-still, staring affrightedly at what at first, to his rider, seemed
a mere limp, inanimate bundle of old clothing lying half in, half out of
the ditch. In a moment the laird was standing beside the mysterious
heap, and found an old, white-haired man, grievously mishandled, with
blood on his face, blood dabbling the dead leaves in the ditch, blood on
the turf where the pure hoar-frost had lain. There was but little life
left in him, and it was not easy for him to explain his sorry plight
when the words came only with hard-fought breathing, hoarse and low.
"She will pe a pedlar," he said, "an' she will haf peen robbed and
murdered.... Och, so little she will pe hafing, and now all gone....
Ochone, ochone!" Gently the laird put his questions to the dying man.
The robbery had been committed only a short time before. The assailant
was a big man--"a fery big man"--an Irishman, and he could not have gone
far. Up again on his wondering steed sprang the laird, and at
steeplechase pace rode on. Near Birney-knowe he came in sight of his
quarry, a powerful six-footer, but carrying too much flesh to do more
than a good sprint without failing. In a neighbouring field a ploughman
with his pair of horses was turning up the rich brown loam. "_Hup_,
Jess! Woa-_hi_, Chairlie!" sounded his cheerful voice from over the
dyke, above the jingle of his horses' harness as they turned at the
head-rig with their greedy following of screaming, white-winged gulls.
"_Hi!_ Will Little!" shouted the laird. "Leave the plough, lad! There's
murder afoot the day! Come and help catch the murderer!"
William Little, a handsome fellow of six feet, clean built and athletic,
required but little explanation. In two minutes his pair was unyoked and
tied to the beam of the plough, his coat off and cast at the back of the
dyke, and as sturdy a pair of legs as any in Liddesdale had joined in
the chase. The robber had not failed to hear the laird's shouts, and as
Little unyoked his horses, he ran on, adding still more to the distance
that already separated him from his pursuers. Clearly his best chance
was to leave the high-road and get on to ground where it was impossible,
or, at least, most unlikely, that a mounted man could follow him.
Through hedges he clambered, vaulted dry stone dykes, leapt ditches,
made somewhat heavy weather over the plough, but got away on rough turf
up the hillside. The morning wore on, and both hunters and hunted wished
that the sun had shone less warmly on that March day. On a steep part of
High Tofts Hill, however, the chase at last came to an end. The steep
face of the hill was more than the laird's good steed could manage,
though nobly, in response to his call, did it do its best. He had to
turn back and come round by a part where the ascent was less steep,
while Little, hot but undaunted, went on with the chase alone. The
robber's extra weight was telling on him, and he was not in the hard
training of the young Border farmer. The hill pumped him, he stumbled as
he ran, and, as Little gained on him yard by yard, he saw that he could
run no longer, but must come to bay. He turned round and faced his
pursuer, breathing hard, and with all his might tugging at a big
butcher's knife in his pocket. Ordinarily the knife came easily to his
hand, but he had forgotten that the pocket was stuffed with articles
stolen from the old pedlar. The knife was hopelessly jammed, and Little
was almost upon him. A large, sharp-pointed stone stuck out of the
ground at his feet. "_Keep off!_" he yelled to the ploughman. "Hands
off! or I'll scatter your brains!" And as he threatened, he stooped to
seize the stone and make good his threat. But the Fates that day had
signed the Irish villain's death-warrant. The good Border earth clung to
the stone, refusing to let it go. With all his force he tugged and
tugged, but ere the earth could give way, Little had thrown himself upon
him, and when Mr. Scott appeared over the brow of the hill, the sturdy
farmer was still holding his own with a kicking, biting, struggling,
cursing ruffian who would have had no compunction in adding another to
his list of victims that day. Between them, Little and the laird tied
their captive's hands behind his back with part of the bridle reins, and
walked him back to Kirkton. There help was sent to the old Highlander,
but no doctor could undo the ill that had been wrought him, and he died
a few days later. In one of the Kirkton farm-carts the old man's
murderer was conveyed to Hawick, and from thence to Jedburgh jail. It
was too much a case of "hot trod" for him to do anything but plead
guilty, and he hung on a gallows at Jedburgh, as many a worthier man had
done in earlier days. The laird lived for more than twenty years after
his man hunt on that March day in 1813, and his worthy fellow-huntsman
had no cause to forget his morning's work, for he was presented with a
baton and relieved from paying taxes for the rest of his natural life.
LADY STAIR'S DAUGHTER
The story of the Bride of Lammermoor is one that all the world knows,
but how many are there who realise that the tragedy which Sir Walter
Scott's genius has given to the world is in truth one of the annals of a
noble Scottish family? Possibly among all the "old, unhappy, far-off
things" there is none more pitiful than the tale of the Earl of Stair's
daughter and her luckless lover, Lord Rutherfurd.
They were never laggards either in love or in war, those Border
Rutherfurds. "A stout champion," according to contemporary history, was
Colonel Andrew Rutherfurd, Governor of Dunkirk, and afterwards of
Tangier, ennobled for his doughty deeds in foreign lands under the title
of Earl of Teviot, and when, in 1664, he was slain by the Moors, his
distant relative, Lord Rutherfurd, inherited most of his fortune.
Presumably the fortune was not great, and even in the old reiving days
no Rutherfurd ever rolled in wealth. Moreover, Lord Stair was a staunch
Whig, and Rutherfurd an ardent Jacobite, and so it was that when the
young lord became a suitor for the hand of Janet Dalrymple, daughter of
that famous lawyer, James Dalrymple, first Lord Stair, neither her
father nor her mother smiled on his suit.
Sir James Dalrymple was made a baronet in the same year that Andrew
Rutherfurd got his title, and both he and his wife, Dame Margaret, a
daughter of Ross of Balniel, were ambitious folk. The worldly success in
life of her husband and of all her family was what Lady Stair constantly
schemed and planned and worked for. A clever, hard, worldly woman, with
a witty and unsparing tongue, was Lady Stair, but obviously she was not
a popular member of the society in which she lived, and when her plans
succeeded in spite of all obstacles, there were many who were ready to
say that she belonged to the blackest sisterhood of her day, and that to
be "worried at the stake" and burned would only be the fate that she
deserved.
Lady Stair's daughter was singularly unlike the mother who bore her, for
the beautiful Janet Dalrymple was a gentle, shrinking, highly strung
girl, who was like wax in the hands of one who ruled her household with
a rod of iron. As a child her will had always had to bend to her
mother's. Scarcely had she dared to hold an opinion on anything save
under her mother's direction, and so when it came about that the tricksy
god of love made her give her heart passionately and utterly to a man of
whom her parents disapproved, poor Janet Dalrymple must have felt as
though she were the victim of a sort of moral earthquake. Naturally she
could see no reason why the man who in her eyes was peerless was not
approved by her parents. Surely his politics did not matter. He had
money enough for all their needs, and he would make her the Lady
Rutherfurd; and, besides, what more could they want than just this--that
he loved her and she loved him, and they would love each other until
death--and after it.
These reasons given to a woman of Lady Stair's type were scarcely likely
to be listened to with much patience, and Janet Dalrymple and Lord
Rutherfurd soon saw that all their love-making must be done under the
rose, and that they must wait as best they could for the obdurate
parents to change their minds. Together they broke a gold coin, of which
each wore a half, and solemnly called upon God to witness them plighting
their troth, and together imprecated dreadful evils upon the one who
should prove faithless. Doubtless Lady Stair was too clever a woman not
to have a shrewd suspicion that her daughter's attachment to Lord
Rutherfurd was something more than a mere piece of girlish sentiment;
but if she did know, the knowledge did not overburden her. Obviously
another suitor must be provided without loss of time. The expulsive
power of a new affection must promptly be tried on the love-sick girl,
whose pale face was in itself enough to betray the condition of her
heart.
To Lord Stair belonged the credit of finding one who was approved of by
Lady Stair as an entirely suitable match. David Dunbar, younger, of
Baldoon in Wigtonshire, a solid young man with a good, solid fortune,
was the son-in-law of their choice; and Lady Stair found no difficulty
in getting him to see that her beautiful daughter was undoubtedly the
right wife for him.
Contemporary history furnishes us with no description of Andrew, Lord
Rutherfurd, but we learn from the Edinburgh printer who furnished the
Dunbar family with an enthusiastic elegy on the death of David Dunbar of
Baldoon that apparently he was a little red-faced man, ardently keen
about agricultural pursuits, and deeply interested in the breeding of
cattle and horses. Moreover, he was a student, well versed in modern
history and in architecture, and with a good head for arithmetic (did he
add up the figures of the fortune of Janet Dalrymple entirely to his own
satisfaction?), and he had the additional amazing distinction chronicled
by his eulogising biographer--
"He learned the French, be't spoken to his praise,
In very little more than forty days."
It is impossible to tell how much of the love story of the girl whom he
proposed to make his wife was known to young Baldoon. Possibly he had
had it lightly sketched to him by Lady Stair's skilled hand, as a mere
girlish fancy, likely to be very soon past and already entirely on the
wane. In any case, Baldoon evidently saw no more difficulties in the way
of his nuptials than did Lord and Lady Stair. The fact that the bride
"canna thole the man" must ever be a purely secondary consideration in
such matrimonial arrangements. Meantime the unhappy bride-elect had the
scheme laid before her, and in spite of her sobbing protests, was
commanded to conform to the wishes of her parents.
The news of Lady Stair's triumph was not long in coming to Lord
Rutherfurd's ears, and he at once wrote to Janet Dalrymple to remind her
that she was pledged to him by everything that they both considered
holy. No reply came from the unhappy girl, but a letter from Lady Stair
informed the distracted lover that her daughter was fully sensible of
the grave fault of which she had been guilty in entering into an
engagement without the sanction of her parents, and that she now
retracted her vows, and was about to give her hand to Mr. David Dunbar
of Baldoon. Such an answer, written by the mother of his betrothed, and
not by the girl herself, was scarcely likely to be received with
meekness by one of the Rutherfurds of that ilk. Lord Rutherfurd demanded
an interview with Janet Dalrymple, and absolutely declined to accept any
reply that did not come to him from her own lips. It was a struggle
between a high-spirited, determined man, deeply in love with her that he
strove for, and a woman whose heart was as hard as her brain was keen,
and who did not scruple to use any means, fair or foul, by which to gain
her own ends. The lion and the snake are unequal combatants, and in this
case the lion was worsted indeed. Lady Stair granted the interview, but
took care that not for one moment was her daughter permitted to be alone
with her lover. Lord Rutherfurd had many arguments that he had deemed
unanswerable, but the lady's nimble wits and ready tongue found an
answer for each one.
It must have been a strange scene that took place that day in the old
mansion of Carsecreugh. The girl herself was present, but, had the tales
of Lady Stair's dealings with the Evil One been true, she could not have
substituted for her beautiful, happy daughter any witch-made thing that
looked more lifeless than the poor, white-faced creature that sat with
silent lips and down-cast eyes, terror-ridden, broken-hearted.
With every impassioned word he spoke Rutherfurd hoped to bring some sign
of life to her, to glean a look from her eyes that showed that her love
was still his, but he pled in vain. As for his arguments, Lady Stair
could quote Scripture with any minister in the land, and the texts she
hurled at him were fearful missiles for one who had not the book of
Numbers at his fingers' ends.
"If a woman vow unto the Lord, and bind herself by a bond, being in her
father's house in her youth; and her father hear her vow, and her bond
wherewith she hath bound her soul, and her father shall hold his peace
at her: then all her vows shall stand, and every bond wherewith she hath
bound her soul shall stand. But if her father disallow her in the day
that he heareth; not any of her vows, or of her bonds wherewith she hath
bound her soul, shall stand: and the Lord shall forgive her, because her
father disallowed her."
So quoted the pitiless voice. Even the devil, they say, can quote
Scripture for his own ends. Finally, the mother, again telling
Rutherfurd that her daughter acknowledged the wrongness of her conduct
and desired to hold no further intercourse with him, turned to the
white, marble creature, who seemed to hear nothing, to understand
nothing, and commanded her to restore the broken half of the golden coin
to him who had bestowed it. For the fraction of a second her icy fingers
touched Lord Rutherfurd's, and yet she spoke no word.
To the fiery Borderer it was an insupportable situation. His temper
went. The broken coin was cast to the ground, and with furious words he
poured out on Lady Stair all his long pent-up anger. Then, turning to
her who, so short a time before, had been all the world to him, he cast
on her the curse, "For you, madam, you will be a world's wonder," and
strode from the room, his face ablaze with wrath, black murder in his
heart. Scotland was no longer a friendly home for Andrew, Lord
Rutherfurd. He went abroad, and died there sixteen years later.
Meantime the preparations for the marriage of young Baldoon with Lord
Stair's daughter went on apace. The bride showed no active dislike to
the bridegroom her parents had provided, but behaved as a mere lay
figure on which wedding garments were fitted, and which received with
cold unresponsiveness all the attentions of the man who was to be her
husband. When the wedding day--August 24th, 1669--arrived, a large
assemblage of relations and friends of both bride and bridegroom
mustered at Carsecreugh. And still the white-faced lay figure
mechanically went through all that was required of her, received the
compliments and jests of the company with chill politeness, but with
never a smile--a bride of marble, with a heart that had turned to stone.
She rode pillion to church behind a young brother who afterwards said
that the hand which lay on his as she held her arm round his waist was
"cold and damp as marble." "Full of his new dress and the part he acted
in the procession, the circumstance, which he long afterwards remembered
with bitter sorrow and compunction, made no impression on him at the
time."
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 Carsecreugh. 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."