The Gold of Fairnilee | Page 4

little beautiful child, in its white nightdress, with its yellow curls all tangled over its blue eyes.
Then Lady Ker and the old nurse could not make too much of the pretty English child that had come here in such a wonderful way.
How did it get mixed up with all the spoil? and how had it been carried so far on horseback without being hurt? Nobody ever knew. It came as if the fairies had sent it. English it was, but the best Scot could not hate such a pretty child. Old Nancy Dryden ran up to the old nursery with it, and laid it in a great wooden tub full of hot water, and was giving it warm milk to drink, and dandling it, almost before the men knew what had happened.
"Yon bairn will be a bonny mate for you, Maister Randal," said old Simon Grieve. "'Deed, I dinna think her kin will come speering* after her at Fairnilee. The Red Cock's crawing ower Hardriding Ha' this day, and when the womenfolk come back frae the wood, they'll hae other thing to do for-bye looking for bairns."
* Asking.
When Simon Grieve said that the Red Cock was crowing over his enemies' home, he meant that he had set it on fire after the people who lived in it had run away.
Lady Ker grew pale when she heard what he said. She hated the English, to be sure, but she was a woman with a kind heart. She thought of the dreadful danger that the little English girl had escaped, and she went upstairs and helped the nurse to make the child happy.
[Illustration: Chapter Four]
CHAPTER IV.
--Randal and Jean.
THE little girl soon made everyone at Fairnilee happy. She was far too young to remember her own home, and presently she was crawling up and down the long hall and making friends with Randal. They found out that her name was Jane Musgrave, though she could hardly say Musgrave; and they called her Jean, with their Scotch tongues, or "Jean o' the Kye," because she came when the cows were driven home again.
Soon the old nurse came to like her near as well as Randal, "her ain bairn" (her own child), as she called him. In the summer days, Jean, as she grew older, would follow Randal about like a little doggie. They went fishing together, and Randal would pull the trout out of Caddon Burn, or the Burn of Peel; and Jeanie would be very proud of him, and very much alarmed at the big, wide jaws of the yellow trout. And Randal would plait helmets with green rushes for her and him, and make spears of bulrushes, and play at tilts and tournaments. There was peace in the country; or if there was war, it did not come near the quiet valley of the Tweed and the hills that lie round Fairnilee. In summer they were always on the hills and by the burnsides.
You cannot think, if you have not tried, what pleasant company a burn is. It comes out of the deep; black wells in the moss, far away on the tops of the hills, where the sheep feed, and the fox peers from his hole, and the ravens build in the crags. The burn flows down from the lonely places, cutting a way between steep, green banks, tumbling in white waterfalls over rocks, and lying in black, deep pools below the waterfalls. At every turn it does something new, and plays a fresh game with its brown waters. The white pebbles in the water look like gold: often Randal would pick one out and think he had found a gold-mine, till he got it into the sunshine, and then it was only a white stone, what he called a "chucky--stane;" but he kept hoping for better luck next time. In the height of summer, when the streams were very low, he and the shepherd's boys would build dams of stones and turf across a narrow part of the burn, while Jean sat and watched them on a little round knoll. Then, when plenty of water had collected in the pool, they would break the dam and let it all run downhill in a little flood; they called it a "hurly gush." And in winter they would slide on the black, smooth ice of the boat-pool, beneath the branches of the alders.
Or they would go out with Yarrow, the shepherd's dog, and follow the track of wild creatures in the snow. The rabbit makes marks like **, and the hare makes marks like **; but the fox's track is just as if you had pushed a piece of wood through the snow--a number of cuts in the surface, going straight along.
[Illustration: Tracks of Hare and Fox]
When it was very cold, the