COUNTESS AND GROOM

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2298, 17 November 1925, Page 3

COUNTESS AND GROOM

AN ILL-ASSORTED PAIR STRANGE TRUE LOVE STORY. Life has seldom dawned for any daughter of a npble house more fair or full of promise than for the infant Lady Susanna Cochrane, second daughter of John, fourth Earl of Dundonald. All that rank and wealth and beauty could give were hers by birth. Her mother, was an earl's daughter, and had for grandfather the Duke of Atholl. Her paternal grandmother was Lady Susanna Hamilton, daughter of the Duke of Hamilton; and on both sides she came from a line of fair women, many of whom, like her mother, - had ranked among the most beautiful in all Scotland. Such was the splendid heritage of Lady Susanna when she opened her eyes on the world; and, during the earlier years of her life, it seemed that Fortune, who had already dowered her so. richly, could not smile too sweetnly upon her. “The Three Graces.” She grew to girlhood, and young womanhood more beautiful even than her mother or her two sisters. Anno and Catherine, of whom the former became a duchesS at 16; while Catherine was not long out of the schoolroom before her hand was won by the Earl of Galloway. - As for Susanna, the loveliest of the “Three Graces” —Scotland’s fairest daughter,” to quote a chronicler of the time—she counted her high-placed lovers by the score almost before she had graduated into long frocks; and Charles, sixth Earl of Strathmore, was accounted the luckiest man north of the Tweed when he won her for his bride. It was an ideal union, this of the beautiful Lady Susanna with the stalwart and handsome young earl —“the fairest lass and bonniest lad” in all Scotland; and none who saw their radiant happiness on their wedding day could have dreamt how soon tragedy was to close so bright a chapter of romance.

For a few short years the young earl and his countess were ideally happy. “I never thought,” Lady Strathmore wrote to a friend, “that life could be so sweet. The days are all too short to crowd my happiness into.” Then, when the sky was fairest, the blow fell. A Terrible Tragedy One May day in 1728 the young earl, after attending the funeral of a friend, had a quarrel with a fellow mourner, James Carnegie, of Finhaven, 1 Hot words led to blows, swords i were drawn; and, after a fierce encounter, Carnegie’s sword passed clean through Strathmore's body, and he fell to the ground a dead man. The widowed countess mourned her lord deeply and sincerely. She was more beautiful than ever —she was barely 20 when this tragedy came to cloud her life—and richly dowered| and many a wooer sought to console her with a new prospect of wedded happiness. She had naught to say to any of them. She preFerred to live alone with her memories, and to find solace in good works. And thus for 17 years she lived, a model of all that is beautiful in womanhbod, captivating all hearts by her sweetness and graciousness, and by a beauty which sorrow only served to refine and make more lovely still. Thus we find her in 1745, a gracious and lovely lady, still young, dispensing her charities and hospitalities,, and esteemed everywhere as a model of all the proprieties. But she was still a woman. Romance and passion were by no means dead in her; and to this "eternal feminine” we must look for an explanation of the strange event which now follows in her story. An Amazing Confession,

Among the countess’ many, servants was one George Forbes, a young and strikingly handsome groom, who had been taken on as a stable-boy by her late husband. Forbes was a simple, manly follow, a peasant’s son, and with no ambition beyond the state of life to which he had been born. He was proud of the fact that he had served his mistress well, and that she liked him. That Lady Strathmore valued her groom was proved by the fact that she chose him as her escort whenever she went riding, and that she promoted him to the charge of her stables —a proof of confidence which no doubt he had earned. But that his high-placed mistress should regard him otherwise than as a servant was an absurd idea which never entered his head. One day, however, the countess summoned the groom to her presence, and, to his amazement and embarrassment, told him that she had long grown to love him, and that she asked nothing better of life than to become his wife. Overcome with surprise and confusion, Forbes protested: “But, my lady, think of the difference between us. You are one of the greatest ladies in the land, and I am no better than the earth you tread on.” “You must not, say that,” the countess replied. “You are more to me than rank or riches These I count as nothing compared with the happiness you have it in your power to bestow.”

In the face of such pleading, from one so beautiful and so reverenced, what could the poor groom do but consent, fearful though he was of the consequences of such an ill-assorted union? And thus strangely and romantically it was that, one April .day in 1745, the Countess of Strathmore, the descendant of dukes and kings, gave her hand at the altar to the exstable lad and peasant’s son. What followed this singular union was precisely what was to be expected. The countess was disowned by her noble relatives: her friends, with one consent, gave her the cold shoulder; and, unable to bear any longer the constant slights and her complete Isolation, she was thankful to escape

■with her low-born husband to the Continent. Disillusioned. Here familiarity with the groom quickly, and naturally, perhaps, bred contempt and disillusion. His coarseness offended every susceptibility; he was frankly Impossible in such an intimate relation; and, after she had given birth to a daughter in Holland, she arranged a separation, for which the groom -was at least as grateful as herself. The child —the very sight of whom, reminding her as it did of the father, she could not bear—was placed in a convent at Rouen, where she -was tenderly cared for by the abbess and nuns. As for the mother, weary and disillusioned, she rambled aimlessly and miserably about the Continent until, after nine years of unhappiness, death came to her at Paris as a merciful friend. Such was the sordid close of a life that had opened as fairly as any that has fallen to the lot of woman. And what of the child who drew from her mother royal and ducal strains, and from her father the blood of stablemen and peasants? A Brutal Step-Mother At the Rouen convent she grew up to girlhood perfectly happy, among the nuns she grew to love. The sad and beautiful lady who had come once or twice to see her, and who. she was told, was her mother, had become a dim memory of early girlhood.

Who the great lady was. and who was her father, she did not know. This knowledge the nuns, in their wisdom, kept from her—if, indeed, they knew themselves. But at length, in 1761, her father, who had married again, sent for- her to Leith, where he was established as a livery stable keeper. Here the girl spent a miserable life, treated by her step-mother with great coarseness and brutality.

She found her life impossible, and at length ran away. For several days she tramped aimlessly through the country, and at length, when penniless, begging her bread from to door, at last she found shelter with a farmer named Lauder and his wife. She was treated with great kindness, and ultimately married the son of her benefactor.

She became the mother of many children, who in their humble life knew nothing of their high-placed cousins, the dukes and earls of another world than theirs. When her husband died —many of her children had died young and tlu rest were far from prosperous—Mrs Lauder retired to spend her last days in a small cottage at St. Ninian’s, near Stirling, where for a time she lived in the utmost poverty.

Then, when her life was almost flickering out in destitution, a few of her great relatives condescended to acknowledge her existence. The Earls of Galloway and Dunmore, the Duke of Hamilton and Mrs Stewart Mackenzie combined to provide her with an annuity of £IOO, and, thus secure against want, the old lady contrived to spin out the thread of her days a few years longer. Thus died, at the advanced age of 85, eating the bread of charity, the woman who had in her veins the blood of, Scotland's greatest men and her fairest women.