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.
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