His mother led him into the house. She gave him to the old nurse, who cried over him, and kissed him, and offered him cakes, and made him a whistle with a branch of plane tree, So in a short while Randal only felt puzzled. Then he forgot, and began to play. He was a very little boy.
Lady Ker shut herself up in her own room—her “bower,” the servants called it.
Soon Randal heard heavy steps on the stairs, and whispering. He wanted to run out, and his nurse caught hold of him, and would not have let him go, but he slipped out of her hand, and looked over the staircase.
They were bringing up the body of a man stretched on a shield.
It was Randal’s father.
He had been slain at Flodden, fighting for the king. An arrow had gone through his brain, and he had fallen beside James IV., with many another brave knight, all the best of Scotland, the Flowers of the Forest.
What was it Randal saw, when he thought he met his father in the twilight, three days before?
He never knew. His mother said he must have dreamed it all.
The old nurse used to gossip about it to the maids. “He’s an unco’ bairn, oor Randal; I wush he may na be fey.”
She meant that Randal was a strange child, and that strange things would happen to him.