A Reputed Changeling

Hurriedly she spoke, her object, as it seemed to be that of every one, to keep up such hope and encouragement as to drown the terrible sense of the actual upshot of the trial.  The room at the George was full in a moment of friends declaring that all would go well in the end, and consulting what to do.  Neither Sir Philip nor Dr. Woodford could be available, as their refusal to take the oaths to King William made them marked men.  The former could only write to the Imperial Ambassador, beseeching him to claim the prisoner as an officer of the Empire, though it was doubtful whether this would be allowed in the case of an Englishman born.  Mr. Fellowes undertook to be the bearer of the letter, and to do his best through Archbishop Tenison to let the King know the true bearings of the case.  Almost in pity, to spare Anne the misery of helpless waiting, Dr. Woodford consented to let her go under his escort, starting very early the next morning, since the King might immediately set off for the army in Holland, and the space was brief between condemnation and execution.

Sir Edmund proposed to hurry to Carisbrooke Castle, being happily on good terms with that fiery personage, Lord Cutts, the governor of the Isle of Wight as well as a favoured general of the King, whose intercession might do more than Princess Anne’s.  Moreover, a message came from old Mr. Cromwell, begging to see Sir Edmund.  It was on behalf of Major Oakshott, who entreated that Sir Philip might be assured of his own great regret at the prosecution and the result, and his entire belief that the provocation came from his unhappy son.  Both he and Richard Cromwell were having a petition for pardon drawn up, which Sir Henry Mildmay and almost all the leading gentlemen of Hampshire of both parties were sure to sign, while the sheriff would defer the execution as long as possible.  Pardons, especially in cases of duelling, had been marketable articles in the last reigns, and there could not but be a sigh for such conveniences.  Sir Philip wanted to go at once to the jail, which was very near the inn, but consented on strong persuasion to let his son-in-law precede him.

Anne longed for a few moments to herself, but durst not leave the poor old man, who sat holding her hand, and at each interval of silence saying how this would kill the boy’s mother, or something equally desponding, so that she had to talk almost at random of the various gleams of hope, and even to describe how the little Duke of Gloucester might be told of Philip and sent to the King, who was known to be very fond of him.  It was a great comfort when Dr. Woodford came and offered to pray with them.

By and by Sir Edmund returned, having been making arrangements for Charles’s comfort.  Ordinary prisoners were heaped together and miserably treated, but money could do something, and by application to the High Sheriff, permission had been secured for Charles to occupy a private room, on a heavy fee to the jailor, and for his friends to have access to him, besides other necessaries, purchased at more than their weight in gold.  Sir Edmund brought word that Charles was in good heart; sent love and duty to his father, whom he would welcome with all his soul, but that as Miss Woodford was—in her love and bravery—going so soon to London, he prayed that she might be his first visitor that evening.

There was little more to do than to cross the street, and Sir Edmund hurried her through the flagged and dirty yard, and the dim, foul hall, filled with fumes of smoke and beer, where melancholy debtors held out their hands, idle scapegraces laughed, heavy degraded faces scowled, and evil sounds were heard, up the stairs to a nail-studded door, where Anne shuddered to hear the heavy key turned by the coarse, rude-looking warder, only withheld from insolence by the presence of a magistrate.  Her escort tarried outside, and she saw Charles, his rush-light candle gleaming on his gold lace as he wrote a letter to the ambassador to be forwarded by his father.

He sprang up with outstretched arms and an eager smile.  “My brave sweetheart! how nobly you have done.  Truth and trust.  It did my heart good to hear you.”

Her head was on his shoulder.  She wanted to speak, but could not without loosing the flood of tears.

“Faith entire,” he went on; “and you are still striving for me.”

“Princess Anne is—” she began, then the choking came.

“True!” he said.  “Come, do not expect the worst.  I have not made up my mind to that!  If the ambassador will stir, the King will not be disobliging, though it will probably not be a free pardon, but Hungary for some years to come—and you are coming with me.”

“If you will have one who might be—may have been—your death.  Oh, every word I said seemed to me stabbing you;” and the tears would come now.

“No such thing!  They only showed how true my love is to God and me, and made my heart swell with pride to hear her so cheering me through all.”

His strength seemed to allow her to break down.  She had all along had to bear up the spirits of Sir Philip and Lady Archfield, and though she had struggled for composure, the finding that she had in him a comforter and support set the pent-up tears flowing fast, as he held her close.

“Oh, I did not mean to vex you thus!” she said.

“Vex! no indeed!  ’Tis something to be wept for.  But cheer up, Anne mine.  I have often been in far worse plights than this, when I have ridden up in the face of eight big Turkish guns.  The balls went over my head then, by God’s good mercy.  Why not the same now?  Ay! and I was ready to give all I had to any one who would have put a pistol to my head and got me out of my misery, jolting along on the way to the Iron Gates.  Yet here I am!  Maybe the Almighty brought me back to save poor Sedley, and clear my own conscience, knowing well that though it does not look so, it is better for me to die thus than the other way.  No, no; ’tis ten to one that you and the rest of you will get me off.  I only meant to show you that supposing it fails, I shall only feel it my due, and much better for me than if I had died out there with it unconfessed.  I shall try to get them all to feel it so, and, after all, now the whole is out, my heart feels lighter than it has done these seven years.  And if I could only believe that poor fellow alive, I could almost die content, though that sounds strange.  It will quiet his poor restless spirit any way.”

“You are too brave.  Oh!  I hoped to come here to comfort you, and I have only made you comfort me.”

“The best way, sweetest.  Now, I will seal and address this letter, and you shall take it to Mr. Fellowes to carry to the ambassador.”

This gave Anne a little time to compose herself, and when he had finished, he took the candle, and saying, “Look here,” he held it to the wall, and they read, scratched on the rough bricks, “Alice Lisle, 1685.  This is thankworthy.”

“Lady Lisle’s cell!  Oh, this is no good omen!”

“I call it a goodly legacy even to one who cannot claim to suffer wrongfully,” said Charles.  “There, they knock—one kiss more—we shall meet again soon.  Don’t linger in town, but give me all the days you can.  Yes, take her back, Sir Edmund, for she must rest before her journey.  Cheer up, love, and do not lie weeping all night, but believe that your prayers to God and man must prevail one way or another.”

CHAPTER XXXI

Elf-Land

“Three ruffians seized me yestermorn,  Alas! a maiden most forlorn;They choked my cries with wicked might,  And bound me on a palfrey white.”S. T. COLERIDGE.

Yet after the night it was with more hope than despondency, Anne, in the February morning, mounted en croupe behind Mr. Fellowes’s servant, that being decided on as the quickest mode of travelling.  She saw the sunrise behind St. Catherine’s Hill, and the gray mists filling the valley of the Itchen, and the towers of the Cathedral and College barely peeping beyond them.  Would her life rise out of the mist?

Through hoar-frosted hedges, deeply crested with white, they rode, emerging by and by on downs, becoming dully green above, as the sun touched them, but white below.  Suddenly, in passing a hollow, overhung by two or three yew-trees, they found themselves surrounded by masked horsemen.  The servant on her horse was felled, she herself snatched off and a kerchief covered her face, while she was crying, “Oh sir, let me go!  I am on business of life and death.”

The covering was stuffed into her mouth, and she was borne along some little way; then there was a pause, and she freed herself enough to say, “You shall have everything; only let me go;” and she felt for the money with which Sir Philip had supplied her, and for the watch given her by King James.

“We want you; nothing of yours,” said a voice.  “Don’t be afraid.  No one will hurt you; but we must have you along with us.”

Therewith she was pinioned by two large hands, and a bandage was made fast over her eyes, and when she shrieked out, “Mr. Fellowes!  Oh! where are you?” she was answered—

“No harm has been done to the parson.  He will be free as soon as any one comes by.  ’Tis you we want.  Now, I give you fair notice, for we don’t want to choke you; there’s no one to hear a squall.  If there were, we should gag you, so you had best be quiet, and you shall suffer no hurt.  Now then, by your leave, madam.”

She was lifted on horseback again, and a belt passed round her and the rider in front of her.  Again she strove, in her natural voice, to plead that to stop her would imperil a man’s life, and to implore for release.  “We know all that,” she was told.  It was not rudely said.  The voice was not that of a clown; it was a gentleman’s pronunciation, and this was in some ways more inexplicable and alarming.  The horses were put in rapid motion; she heard the trampling of many hoofs, and felt that they were on soft turf, and she knew that for many miles round Winchester it was possible to keep on the downs so as to avoid any inhabited place.  She tried to guess, from the sense of sunshine that came through her bandage, in what direction she was being carried, and fancied it must be southerly.  On—on—on—still the turf.  It seemed absolutely endless.  Time was not measurable under such circumstances, but she fancied noon must have more than passed, when the voice that had before spoken said, “We halt in a moment, and shift you to another horse, madam; but again I forewarn you that our comrades here have no ears for you, and that cries and struggles will only make it the worse for you.”  Then came the sound as of harder ground and a stop—undertones, gruff and manly, could be heard, the peculiar noise of horses’ drinking; and her captor came up this time on foot, saying, “Plaguy little to be had in this accursed hole; ’tis but the choice between stale beer and milk.  Which will you prefer?”

She could not help accepting the milk, and she was taken down to drink it, and a hunch of coarse barley bread was given to her, with it the words, “I would offer you bacon, but it tastes as if Old Nick had smoked it in his private furnace.”

Such expressions were no proof that gentle blood was lacking, but whose object could her abduction be—her, a penniless dependent?  Could she have been seized by mistake for some heiress?  In that moment’s hope she asked, “Sir, do you know who I am—Anne Woodford, a poor, portionless maid, not—”

“I know perfectly well, madam,” was the reply.  “May I trouble you to permit me to mount you again?”

She was again placed behind one of the riders, and again fastened to him, and off they went, on a rougher horse, on harder ground, and, as she thought, occasionally through brushwood.  Again a space, to her illimitable, went by, and then came turf once more, and by and by what seemed to her the sound of the sea.

Another halt, another lifting down, but at once to be gathered up again, and then a splashing through water.  “Be careful,” said the voice.  A hand, a gentleman’s hand, took hers; her feet were on boards—on a boat; she was drawn down to sit on a low thwart.  Putting her hand over, she felt the lapping of the water and tasted that it was salt.

“Oh, sir, where are you taking me?” she asked, as the boat was pushed off.

“That you will know in due time,” he answered.

Some more refreshment was offered her in a decided but not discourteous manner, and she partook of it, remembering that exhaustion might add to her perils.  She perceived that after pushing off from shore sounds of eating and low gruff voices mingled with the plash of oars.  Commands seemed to be given in French, and there were mutterings of some strange language.  Darkness was coming on.  What were they doing with her?  And did Charles’s fate hang upon hers?

Yet in spite of terrors and anxieties, she was so much worn out as to doze long enough to lose count of time, till she was awakened by the rocking and tossing of the boat and loud peremptory commands.  She became for the first time in her life miserable with sea-sickness, for how long it was impossible to tell, and the pitching of the boat became so violent that when she found herself bound to one of the seats she was conscious of little but a longing to be allowed to go to the bottom in peace, except that some great cause—she could hardly in her bewildered wretchedness recollect what—forbade her to die till her mission was over.

There were loud peremptory orders, oaths, sea phrases, in French and English, sometimes in that unknown tongue.  Something expressed that a light was directing to a landing-place, but reaching it was doubtful.

“Unbind her eyes,” said a voice; “let her shift for herself.”

“Better not.”

There followed a fresh upheaval, as if the boat were perpendicular; a sudden sinking, some one fell over and bruised her; another frightful rising and falling, then smoothness; the rope that held her fast undone; the keel grating; hands apparently dragging up the boat.  She was lifted out like a doll, carried apparently through water over shingle.  Light again made itself visible; she was in a house, set down on a chair, in the warmth of fire, amid a buzz of voices, which lulled as the bandage was untied and removed.  Her eyes were so dazzled, her head so giddy, her senses so faint, that everything swam round her, and there that strange vision recurred.  Peregrine Oakshott was before her.  She closed her eyes again, as she lay back in the chair.

“Take this; you will be better.”  A glass was at her lips, and she swallowed some hot drink, which revived her so that she opened her eyes again, and by the lights in an apparently richly curtained room, she again beheld that figure standing by her, the glass in his hand.

“Oh!” she gasped.  “Are you alive?”

The answer was to raise her still gloved hand with substantial fingers to a pair of lips.

“Then—then—he is safe!  Thank God!” she murmured, and shut her eyes again, dizzy and overcome, unable even to analyse her conviction that all would be well, and that in some manner he had come to her rescue.

“Where am I?” she murmured dreamily.  “In Elf-land?”

“Yes; come to be Queen of it.”

The words blended with her confused fancies.  Indeed she was hardly fully conscious of anything, except that a woman’s hands were about her, and that she was taken into another room, where her drenched clothes were removed, and she was placed in a warm, narrow bed, where some more warm nourishment was put into her mouth with a spoon, after which she sank into a sleep of utter exhaustion.  That sleep lasted long.  There was a sensation of the rocking of the boat, and of aching limbs, through great part of the time; also there seemed to be a continual roaring and thundering around her, and such strange misty visions, that when she finally awoke, after a long interval of deeper and sounder slumber, she was incapable of separating the fact from the dream, more especially as head and limbs were still heavy, weary, and battered.  The strange roaring still sounded, and sometimes seemed to shake the bed.  Twilight was coming in at a curtained window, and showed a tiny chamber, with rafters overhead and thatch, a chest, a chair, and table.  There was a pallet on the floor, and Anne suspected that she had been wakened by the rising of its occupant.  Her watch was on the chair by her side, but it had not been wound, and the dim light did not increase, so that there was no guessing the time; and as the remembrance of her dreadful adventures made themselves clear, she realised with exceeding terror that she must be a prisoner, while the evening’s apparition relegated itself to the world of dreams.

Being kidnapped to be sent to the plantations was the dread of those days.  But if such were the case, what would become of Charles?  In the alarm of that thought she sat up in bed and prepared to rise, but could nowhere see her clothes, only the little cloth bag of toilet necessaries that she had taken with her.

At that moment, however, the woman came in with a steaming cup of chocolate in her hand and some of the garments over her arm.  She was a stout, weather-beaten, kindly-looking woman with a high white cap, gold earrings, black short petticoat, and many-coloured apron.  “Monsieur veut savoir si mademoiselle va bien?” said she in slow careful French, and when questions in that language were eagerly poured out, she shook her head, and said, “Ne comprends pas.”  She, however, brought in the rest of the clothes, warm water, and a light, so that Anne rose and dressed, exceedingly perplexed, and wondering whether she could be in a ship, for the sounds seemed to say so, and there was no corresponding motion.  Could she be in France?  Certainly the voyage had seemed interminable, but she did not think it could have been long enough for that, nor that any person in his senses would try to cross in an open boat in such weather.  She looked at the window, a tiny slip of glass, too thick to show anything but what seemed to be a dark wall rising near at hand.  Alas! she was certainly a prisoner!  In whose hands?  With what intent?  How would it affect that other prisoner at Winchester?  Was that vision of last night substantial or the work of her exhausted brain?  What could she do?  It was well for her that she could believe in the might of prayer.

She durst not go beyond her door, for she heard men’s tones, suppressed and gruff, but presently there was a knock, and wonder of wonders, she beheld Hans, black Hans, showing all his white teeth in a broad grin, and telling her that Missee Anne’s breakfast was ready.  The curtain that overhung the door was drawn back, and she passed into another small room, with a fire on the open hearth, and a lamp hung from a beam, the walls all round covered with carpets or stuffs of thick glowing colours, so that it was like the inside of a tent.  And in the midst, without doubt, stood Peregrine Oakshott, in such a dress as was usually worn by gentlemen in the morning—a loose wrapping coat, though with fine lace cuffs and cravat, all, like the shoes and silk stockings, worn with his peculiar daintiness, and, as was usual when full-bottomed wigs were the rule in grande tenue, its place supplied by a silken cap.  This was olive green with a crimson tassel, which had assumed exactly the characteristic one-sided Riquet-with-a-tuft aspect.  For the rest, these years seemed to have made the slight form slighter and more wiry, and the face keener, more sallow, and more marked.

He bowed low with the foreign courtesy which used to be so offensive to his contemporaries, and offered a delicate, beringed hand to lead the young lady to the little table, where grilled fowl and rolls, both showing the cookery of Hans, were prepared for her.

“I hope you rested well, and have an appetite this morning.”

“Sir, what does it all mean?  Where am I?” asked Anne, drawing herself up with the native dignity that she felt to be her defence.

“In Elf-land,” he said, with a smile, as he heaped her plate.

“Speak in earnest,” she entreated.  “I cannot eat till I understand.  It is no time for trifling!  Life and death hang on my reaching London!  If you saved me from those men, let me go free.”

“No one can move at present,” he said.  “See here.”

He drew back a curtain, opened first one door and then another, and she saw sheets of driving rain, and rising, roaring waves, with surf which came beating in on the force of such a fearful gust of wind that Peregrine hastily shut the door, not without difficulty.  “Nobody can stir at present,” he said, as they came into the warm bright room again.  “It is a frightful tempest, the worst known here for years, they say.  The dead-lights, as they call them, have been put in, or the windows would be driven in.  Come and taste Hans’s work; you know it of old.  Will you drink tea?  Do you remember how your mother came to teach mine to brew it, and how she forgave me for being graceless enough to squirt at her?”

There was something so gentle and reassuring in the demeanour of this strange being that Anne, convinced of the utter hopelessness of confronting the storm, as well as of the need of gathering strength, allowed herself to be placed in a chair, and to partake of the food set before her, and the tea, which was served without milk, in an exquisite dragon china cup, but with a saucer that did not match it.

“We don’t get our sets perfect,” said Peregrine, with a smile, who was waiting on her as if she were a princess.

“I entreat you to tell me where we are!” said Anne.  “Not in France?”

“No, not in France!  I wish we were.”

“Then—can this be the Island?”

“Yes, the Island it is,” said Peregrine, both speaking as South Hants folk; “this is the strange cave or chasm called Black Gang Chine.”

“Black Gang!  Oh! the highwaymen, the pirates!  You have saved me from them.  Were they going to send me to the plantations?”

“You need have no fears.  No one shall touch you, or hurt you.  You shall see no one save by your own consent, my queen.”

“And when this storm is passed—Oh!” as a more fearful roar and dash sounded as if the waves were about to sweep away their frail shelter—“you will come with me and save Mr. Archfield’s life?  You cannot know—”

“I know,” he interrupted; “but why should I be solicitous for his life?  That I am here now is no thanks to him, and why should I give up mine for the sake of him who meant to make an end of me?”

“You little know how he repented.  And your own life?  What do you mean?”

“People don’t haunt the Black Gang Chine when their lives are secure from Dutch Bill,” he answered.  “Don’t be terrified, my queen; though I cannot lay claim, like Prospero, to having raised this storm by my art magic, yet it perforce gives me time to make you understand who and what I am, and how I have recovered my better angel to give her no mean nor desperate career.  It will be better thus than with the suddenness with which I might have had to act.”

A new alarm seized upon Anne as to his possible intentions, but she would not forestall what she so much apprehended, and, sensible that self-control alone could guard her, since escape at present was clearly impossible, she resigned herself to sit opposite to him by the ample hearth of what she perceived to be a fisherman’s hut, thus fitted up luxuriously with, it might be feared, the spoils of the sea.

The story was a long one, and not by any means told consecutively or without interruption, and all the time those eyes were upon her, one yellow the other green, with the effect she knew so well of old in childish days, of repulsion yet compulsion, of terror yet attraction, as if irresistibly binding a reluctant will.  Several times Peregrine was called off to speak to some one outside the door, and at noon he begged permission for his friends to dine with them, saying that there was no other place where the dinner could be taken to them comfortably in this storm.

CHAPTER XXXII

Seven Years

“It was between the night and day,  When the Fairy King has power,That I sunk down in a sinful fray,And ’twixt life and death was snatched away  To the joyless Elfin bower.”SCOTT.

This motto was almost the account that the twisted figure, with queer contortions of face, yet delicate feet and hands, and dainty utterance, might have been expected to give, when Anne asked him, “Was it you, really?”

“I—or my double?” he asked.  “When?”

She told him, and he seemed amazed.

“So you were there?  Well, you shall hear.  You know how things stood with me—your mother, my good spirit, dead, my uncle away, my father bent on driving me to utter desperation, and Martha Browning laying her great red hands on me—”