Gold of Fairnilee — XIII.—The Gold of Fairnilee.

CHAPTER XIII.

--_The Gold of Fairnilee_.

RANDAL and Jean went to the old woman and comforted her, though they could not understand what she meant.

She cried and sobbed, and threw her arms about; but, by degrees, they found out all the story.

When Randal had told her how all he saw in Fairyland was changed after he had touched his eyes with the water from the bottle, the old woman remembered many tales that she had heard about some charm known to the fairies, which helped them to find things hidden, and to see through walls and stones.

Then she had got the bottle from Randal, and had stolen out, meaning to touch her eyes with the water, and try whether _that_ was the charm and whether she could find the treasure spoken of in the old rhymes.

She went “Between the Camp o’ Rink And Tweed water clear,” and to the place which lay “Between the wet land and the dry,” that is, between the marsh and the Catrail.

Here she had noticed the three great Stones; which made a kind of chamber on the hill-side, and here she had anointed her eyes with the salt water of the bottle of tears.

Then she had seen through the grass, she declared, and through the upper soil, and she had beheld great quantities of gold.

And she was running with the bottle to tell Randal, and to touch his eyes with the water that he might see it also.

But, out of Fairyland, the strange water only had its magical power while it was still wet on the eyelashes.

This the old nurse soon found; for she went back to the three standing stones, and looked and saw nothing, only grass and daisies.

And the fairy bottle was broken, and all the water spilt.

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 oat-cake.

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 round 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 meantime, 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 round 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 till 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 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!

_ [Illustration: Page 308] Randal knew now 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 such in use in Briton before Julius Caesar came.

The box was of iron.

On the lid, in the moonshine, Jeanie could read the letters S. P.

Q.

R.

, 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.

[Illustration: Page 309] 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: “Between the Camp o’ Rink And Tweed water clear, Lie nine kings’ ransoms For nine hundred year.

” * 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 secret.

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.

[Illustration: Page 311] 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 till 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.

THE END.

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