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Lady Stair’s Daughter
by
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.