“EVERYBODY knows there’s fairies,” said the old nurse one night when she
was bolder than usual. What she said we will put in English, not Scotch
as she spoke it. “But they do not like to be called fairies. So the old
rhyme runs:
‘If ye call me imp or elf, .
I warn you look well to yourself;
If ye call me fairy,
Ye ‘ll find me quite contrary;
If good neighbour you call me,
Then good neighbour I will be;
But if you call me kindly sprite,
I ‘ll be your friend both day and night.’
So you must always call them ‘good neighbours’ or ‘good folk,’ when you
speak of them.”
“Did _you_ ever see a fairy, nurse?” asked Randal.
“Not myself, but my mother knew a woman--they called her Tibby Dickson,
and her husband was a shepherd, and she had a bairn, as bonny a bairn as
ever you saw. And one day she went to the well to draw water, and as
she was coming back she heard a loud scream in her house. Then her heart
leaped, and fast she ran and flew to the cradle; and there she saw an
awful sight--not her own bairn, but a withered imp, with hands like a
mole’s, and a face like a frog’s, and a mouth from ear to ear, and two
great staring eyes.”
“What was it?” asked Jeanie, in a trembling voice.
“A fairy’s bairn that had not thriven,” said nurse; “and when their
bairns do not thrive, they just steal honest folks’ children and carry
them away to their own country.”
“And where’s that?” said Randal.
“It’s under the ground,” said nurse, “and there they have gold and
silver and diamonds; and there’s the Queen of them all, that’s as
beautiful as the day. She has yellow hair-down to her feet, and she
has blue eyes, like the sky on a fine day, and her voice like all the
mavises singing in the spring. And she is aye dressed in green, and all
her court in green; and she rides a white horse with golden bells on the
bridle.”
“I would like to go there and see her,” said Randal.
“Oh, never say that, my bairn; you never know who may hear you! And if
you go there, how will you come back again? and what will your mother
do? and Jean here, and me that’s carried you many a time in weary arms
when you were a babe?”
“Can’t people come back again?” asked Randal.
“Some say ‘Yes,’ and some say ‘No.’ There was Tarn Hislop, that vanished
away the day before all the lads and your own father went forth to that
weary war at Flodden, and the English, for once, by guile, won the day.
Well, Tam Hislop, when the news came that all must arm and mount and
ride, he could nowhere be found. It was as if the wind had carried him
away. High and low they sought him, but there was his clothes and his
jack,* and his sword and his spear, but no Tam Hislop. Well, no man
heard more of him for seven whole years, not till last year, and then
he came back: sore tired he looked, ay, and older than when he was lost.
And I met him by the well, and I was frightened; and ‘Tam,’ I said,
‘where have ye been this weary time?’ ‘I have been with them that I will
not speak the name-of,’ says he. ‘Ye mean the good folk,’ said I. ‘Ye
have said it,’ says he. Then I went up to the house, with my heart in my
mouth, and I met Simon Grieve. ‘Simon,’ I says, ‘here’s Tam Hislop come
home from the good folk.’ ‘I ‘ll soon send him back to them,’ says he.
And he takes a great rung** and lays it about Tarn’s shoulders, calling
him coward loon, that ran away from the fighting. And since then Tam
has never been seen about the place. But the Laird’s man, of Gala, knows
them that say he was in Perth the last seven years, and not in Fairyland
at all. But it was Fairyland he told me, and he would not lie to his own
mother’s half-brother’s cousin.”
* Jack, a kind of breastplate.
** Rung, a staff.
Randal did not care much for the story of Tam Hislop. A fellow who would
let old Simon Grieve beat him could not be worthy of the Fairy Queen.
Randal was about thirteen now, a tall boy, with dark eyes, black hair,
a brown face with the red on his cheeks. He had grown up in a country
where everything was magical and haunted; where fairy knights rode on
the leas after dark, and challenged men to battle. Every castle had its
tale of Redcap, the sly spirit, or of the woman of the hairy hand. Every
old mound was thought to cover hidden gold. And all was so lonely;
the green hills rolling between river and river, with no men on them,
nothing but sheep, and grouse, and plover. No wonder that Randal lived
in a kind of dream. He would lie and watch the long grass till it locked
like a forest, and he thought he could see elves dancing between the
green grass stems, that were like fairy trees. He kept wishing that
he, too, might meet the Fairy Queen, and be taken into that other world
where everything was beautiful.
[Illustration: Chapter Six]