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 assailant 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.