Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan (Penguin Classics) (24 page)

This was her story, and Randal did not know what to believe. But so many strange things had happened to him, that one more did not seem impossible. So he and Jean took the old nurse home, and made her comfortable in her room, and Jean put her to bed, and got her a little wine and an oatcake.

Then Randal very quietly locked the door outside, and put the key in his pocket. It would have been of no use to tell the old nurse to be quiet about what she thought she had seen.

By this time it was late and growing dark. But that night there would be a moon.

After supper, of which there was very little, Lady Ker went to bed. But Randal and Jean slipped out into the moonlight. They took a sack with them, and Randal carried a pickaxe and a spade. They walked quickly to the three great stones, and waited for a while to hear if all was quiet. Then Jean threw a white cloak around her, and stole about the edges of the camp and the wood. She knew that if any wandering man came by, he would not stay long where such a figure was walking. The night was cool, the dew lay on the deep fern; there was a sweet smell from the grass and from the pine-wood.

In the mean time, Randal was digging a long trench with his pickaxe, above the place where the old woman had knelt, as far as he could remember it.

He worked very hard, and when he was in the trench up to his knees, his pickaxe struck against a stone. He dug around it with the spade, and came to a layer of black burnt ashes of bones. Beneath these, which he scraped away, was the large flat stone on which his pick had struck. It was a wide slab of red sandstone, and Randal soon saw that it was the lid of a great stone coffin, such as the ploughshare sometimes strikes against when men are ploughing the fields in the Border country.

Randal had seen these before, when he was a boy, and he knew that there was never much in them, except ashes and one or two rough pots of burnt clay.

He was much disappointed.

It had seemed as if he was really coming to something, and, behold, it was only an old stone coffin!

However, he worked on until he had cleared the whole of the stone coffin-lid. It was a very large stone chest, and must have been made, Randal thought, for the body of a very big man.

With the point of his pickaxe he raised the lid.

In the moonlight he saw something of a strange shape.

He put down his hand, and pulled it out.

It was an image, in metal, about a foot high, and represented a beautiful woman, with wings on her shoulders, sitting on a wheel.

Randal had never seen an image like this; but in an old book, which belonged to the monks of Melrose, he had seen, when he was a boy, a picture of such a woman.

The monks had told him that she was Dame Fortune, with her swift wings that carry her from one person to another, as luck changes, and with her wheel that she turns with the turning of chance in the world.

The image was very heavy. Randal rubbed some of the dirt and red clay off, and found that the metal was yellow. He cut it with his knife; it was soft. He cleaned a piece, which shone bright and unrusted in the moonlight, and touched it with his tongue. Then he had no doubt any more. The image was
gold
!

Randal now knew that the old nurse had not been mistaken. With the help of the fairy water she had seen
the gold of Fairnilee
. He called very softly to Jeanie, who came glimmering in her white robes through the wood, looking herself like a fairy. He put the image in her hand, and set his finger on his lips to show that she must not speak.

Then he went back to the great stone coffin, and began to grope in it with his hands. There was much earth in it that had slowly sifted through during the many years that it had been buried. But there was also a great round bowl of metal and a square box.

Randal got out the bowl first. It was covered with a green rust, and had a lid; in short, it was a large ancient kettle, such as soldiers use in camp. Randal got the lid off, and, behold, it was
all full of very ancient gold coins, not Greek, nor Roman, but like those used in Britain before Julius Caesar came.

The square box was of iron, and was rusted red. On the lid, in the moonlight, Jeanie could read the letters SPQR, but she did not know what they meant. The box had been locked, and chained, and clamped with iron bars. But all was so rusty that the bars were easily broken, and the lid torn off.

Then the moon shone on bars of gold, and on great plates and dishes of gold and silver, marked with letters, and with what Randal thought were crests. Many of the cups were studded with red and green and blue stones. And there were beautiful plates and dishes, purple, gold, and green; and one of these fell, and broke into a thousand pieces, for it was of some strange kind of glass. There were three gold sword-hilts, carved wonderfully into the figures of strange beasts with wings, and heads like lions.

Randal and Jean looked at it and marvelled, and Jean sang in a low, sweet voice:

Nobody ever saw so much treasure in all broad Scotland.

Jean and Randal passed the rest of the night in hiding what they had found. Part they hid in the secret chamber of Fairnilee, of which only Jean and Lady Ker and Randal knew. The rest they stowed away in various places. Then Randal filled the earth into the trench, and cast wood on the place, and set fire to the wood, so that next day there was nothing there but ashes and charred earth.

You will not need to be told what Randal did, now that he had treasure in plenty. Some he sold in France, to the king, Henry II, and some in Rome, to the Pope; and with the money which they gave him he bought corn and cattle in England, enough to feed all his neighbours, and stock the farms, and sow the fields for next year. And Fairnilee became a very rich and fortunate house,
for Randal married Jean, and soon their children were playing on the banks of the Tweed, and rolling down the grassy slope to the river, to bathe on hot days. And the old nurse lived long and happy among her new bairns, and often she told them how it was
she
who really found the gold of Fairnilee.

You may wonder what the gold was, and how it came there? Probably Father Francis, the good Melrose monk, was right. He said that the iron box and the gold image of Fortune, and the kettle full of coins, had belonged to some regiment of the Roman army: the kettle and the coins they must have taken from the Britons; the box and all the plate were their own, and brought from Italy. Then they, in their turn, must have been defeated by some of the fierce tribes beyond the Roman wall, and must have lost all their treasure. That must have been buried by the victorious enemy; and
they
, again, must have been driven from their strong camp at Rink, either by some foes from the north, or by a new Roman army from the south. So all the gold lay at Fairnilee for many hundred years, never quite forgotten, as the old rhyme showed, but never found until it was discovered, in their sore need, by the old nurse and Randal and Jean.

As for Randal and Jean, they lived to be old, and died on one day, and they are buried at Dryburgh in one tomb, and a green tree grows over them; and the Tweed goes murmuring past their grave, and past the grave of Sir Walter Scott.

My mother’s girlhood home was a croft above Clachanree proper, over its skyline, in the middle of the moor. A solitary place; I doubt if there were any other houses within view. Only the smoke from the houses of Tallurach and perhaps the school-house behind the Planting gave hint of neighbours at all. We looked on to a sheer hill face called the Leitir, which overshadowed Loch Laide, famous for its trout and for the waterfowl that lived secretly among its reeds.

A solitary place. When once I spent a whole summer there I found it too solitary. When I grew tired of watching women’s ploys about the house I had to go about with my grandfather, tending his fields or rounding up his sheep. It must have been on an expedition with him that I discovered behind the Leitir a habitation I had never known about before.

It was a tiny croft, an islet of cultivation in the middle of the heather. There were only three fields, one of hay, one of turnips, one of potatoes, with a little grassland heavily encroached upon by tufts of bulrushes, even starred here and there by bog-cotton flowers. But in my eyes the smallness was its charm. On the greensward around the little house some half-dozen hens daintily strutted. A cow and her calf munched nearby, and a pony lay taking his ease in shelter of the single tutelary rowan tree. An old woman could be seen busy on one of the fields, singling turnips.

I do not think it was the custom in Clachanree for women to

work much in the fields. True, they would help out at harvest or lambing time. Here was a woman who every time I passed that way with my grandfather was at man’s work. I admired her greatly. She was only of average height, but stalwart and strong. How nonchalantly would she swing a hammer down upon a post in her fence; how confidently catch and harness her pony; with what careless ease cut rushes for his bed. Her clothes were the dark long-sleeved blouse and the full skirt that all elderly women wore, but she had man’s boots, stout hobnailed affairs, and I thought her worthy of them.

I persuaded my grandfather one day to pass near enough the house to hail her. ‘Well, well then, Oonagh, and how are you the day?’ She dropped her hoe and came silent, though smiling, to meet us. She wore her hair, of a silvery gold colour, in a pile on the top of her head, as the fashion then was or had been. Her face was brown with the sun, the corners of her eyes wrinkled from squinting against it.

I got into the habit of giving my grandfather the slip and spending with Oonagh the time I was supposed to be under his care. I made advances to her, and she accepted my presence in her silent way. I had the privilege of assisting her out of doors: gathering her cut hay, or making a mixture of milk and meal for her calf. Soon I was permitted entry into her house. Its thatch was adorned by a plume of heather sprouting
all joco
from it. Inside it consisted of only one room – well, one and a half, for the box-bed was virtually a room in itself. Everything was as spick-and-span as if Oonagh expected company. The coverlet of patchwork, though frayed, was immaculately clean; the table was covered in a shiny, bright-coloured stuff called, I think, baize; the bowls and jugs upon the dresser made as brave a display, proportionately to the size of the dwelling, as did ours in the croft house of Druim. Even the rag rug before the hearth was clean – clean, I began to realize, because few feet trod on it. There was no plant on the window sill; instead there was a brown jam-jar of pink-spotted flowers with a heavy clinging scent which vied with the usual smells of damp and peat-reek.