A Reputed Changeling; Or, Three Seventh Years Two Centuries Ago by Yonge (best short novels of all time txt) 📖

often Anne had paced behind Mrs. Labadie as the Prince took his airing.  Startling lights from the windows fell on them, illuminating the drops of rain that plashed round them on that grim December night, and their steps sounded on the gravel, while still the babe, sheltered under the cloak, slept safely.  Another door was reached, more sentries challenged and passed; here was a street whose stones and silent houses shone for a little space as St. Victor raised his lantern and exchanged a word with a man on the box of a carriage.

One by one they were handed in, the Queen, the child, the nurse, Anne, and Lauzun, St. Victor taking his place outside.  As if in a dream they rattled on through the dark street, no one speaking except that Lauzun asked the Queen if she were wet.

It was not far before they stopped at the top of the steps called the Horseferry.  A few lights twinkled here and there, and were reflected trembling in the river, otherwise a black awful gulf, from which, on St. Victor’s cautious hail, a whistle ascended, and a cloaked figure with a lantern came up the steps glistening in the rain.

One by one again, in deep silence, they were assisted down, and into the little boat that rocked ominously as they entered it.  There the women crouched together over the child unable to see one another, Anne returning the clasp of a hand on hers, believing it Mrs. Labadie’s, till on Lauzun’s exclaiming, “Est ce que j’incommode sa Majesté?” the reply showed her that it was the Queen’s hand that she held, and she began a startled “Pardon, your Majesty,” but the sweet reply in Italian was, “Ah, we are as sisters in this stress.”

The eager French voice of Lauzun went on, in undertones certainly, but as if he had not the faculty of silence, and amid the plash of the oars, the rush of the river, and the roar of the rain, it was not easy to tell what he said, his voice was only another of the noises, though the Queen made little courteous murmurs in reply.  It was a hard pull against wind and tide towards a little speck of green light which was shown to guide the rowers; and when at last they reached it, St. Victor’s hail was answered by Dusions, one of the servants, and they drew to the steps where he held a lantern.

“To the coach at once, your Majesty.”

“It is at the inn—ready—but I feared to let it stand.”

Lauzun uttered a French imprecation under his breath, and danced on the step with impatience, only restrained so far as to hand out the Queen and her two attendants.  He was hotly ordering off Dusions and St. Victor to bring the coach, when the former suggested that they must find a place for the Queen to wait in where they could find her.

“What is that dark building above?”

“Lambeth Church,” Dusions answered.

“Ah, your Protestant churches are not open; there is no shelter for us there,” sighed the Queen.

“There is shelter in the angle of the buttress; I have been there, your Majesty,” said Dusions.

Thither then they turned.

“What can that be?” exclaimed the Queen, starting and shuddering as a fierce light flashed in the windows and played on the wall.

“It is not within, madame,” Lauzun encouraged; “it is reflected light from a fire somewhere on the other side of the river.”

“A bonfire for our expulsion.  Ah! why should they hate us so?” sighed the poor Queen.

“’Tis worse than that, only there’s no need to tell Her Majesty so,” whispered Mrs. Labadie, who, in the difficulties of the ascent, had been fain to hand the still-sleeping child to Anne.  “’Tis the Catholic chapel of St. Roque.  The heretic miscreants!”

“Pray Heaven no life be lost,” sighed Anne.

Sinister as the light was, it aided the poor fugitives at that dead hour of night to find an angle between the church wall and a buttress where the eaves afforded a little shelter from the rain, which slackened a little, when they were a little concealed from the road, so that the light need not betray them in case any passenger was abroad at such an hour, as two chimed from the clock overhead.

The women kept together close against the wall to avoid the drip of the eaves.  Lauzun walked up and down like a sentinel, his arms folded, and talking all the while, though, as before, his utterances were only an accompaniment to the falling rain and howling wind; Mary Beatrice was murmuring prayers over the sleeping child, which she now held in the innermost corner; Anne, with wide-stretched eyes, was gazing into the light cast beyond the buttress by the fire on the opposite side, when again there passed across it that form she had seen on All Saints’ Eve—the unmistakable phantom of Peregrine.

It was gone into the darkness in another second; but a violent start on her part had given a note of alarm, and brought back the Count, whose walk had been in the opposite direction.

“What was it?  Any spy?”

“Oh no—no—nothing!  It was the face of one who is dead,” gasped Anne.

“The poor child’s nerve is failing her,” said the Queen gently, as Lauzun drawing his sword burst out—

“If it be a spy it shall be the face of one who is dead;” and he darted into the road, but returned in a few moments, saying no one had passed except one of the rowers returning after running up to the inn to hasten the coach; how could he have been seen from the church wall?  The wheels were heard drawing up at that moment, so that the only thought was to enter it as quickly as might be in the same order as before, after which the start was made, along the road that led through the marshes of Lambeth; and then came the inquiry—an anxious one—whom or what mademoiselle, as Lauzun called her, had seen.

“O monsieur!” exclaimed the poor girl in her confusion, her best French failing, “it was nothing—no living man.”

“Can mademoiselle assure me of that?  The dead I fear not, the living I would defy.”

“He lives not,” said she in an undertone, with a shudder.

“But who is he that mademoiselle can be so certain?” asked the Frenchman.

“Oh!  I know him well enough,” said Anne, unable to control her voice.

“Mademoiselle must explain herself,” said M. de Lauzun.  “If he be spirit—or phantom—there is no more to say, but if he be in the flesh, and a spy—then—”  There was a little rattle of his sword.

“Speak, I command,” interposed the Queen; “you must satisfy M. le Comte.”

Thus adjured, Anne said in a low voice of horror: “It was a gentleman of our neighbourhood; he was killed in a duel last summer!”

“Ah!  You are certain?”

“I had the misfortune to see the fight,” sighed Anne.

“That accounts for it,” said the Queen kindly.  “If mademoiselle’s nerves were shaken by such a remembrance, it is not wonderful that it should recur to her at so strange a watch as we have been keeping.”

“It might account for her seeing this revenant cavalier in any passenger,” said Lauzun, not satisfied yet.

“No one ever was like him,” said Anne.  “I could not mistake him.”

“May I ask mademoiselle to describe him?” continued the count.

Feeling all the time as if this first mention were a sort of betrayal, Anne faltered the words: “Small, slight, almost misshapen—with a strange one-sided look—odd, unusual features.”

Lauzun’s laugh jarred on her.  “Eh! it is not a flattering portrait.  Mademoiselle is not haunted by a hero of romance, it appears, so much as by a demon.”

“And none of those monsieur has employed in our escape answer to that description?” asked the Queen.

“Assuredly not, your Majesty.  Crooked person and crooked mind go together, and St. Victor would only have trusted to your big honest rowers of the Tamise.  I think we may be satisfied that the demoiselle’s imagination was excited so as to evoke a phantom impressed on her mind by a previous scene of terror.  Such things have happened in my native Gascony.”

Anne was fain to accept the theory in silence, though it seemed to her strange that at a moment when she was for once not thinking of Peregrine, her imagination should conjure him up, and there was a strong feeling within her that it was something external that had flitted across the shadow, not a mere figment of her brain, though the notion was evidently accepted, and she could hear a muttering of Mrs. Labadie that this was the consequence of employing young wenches with their whims and megrims.

The Count de Lauzun did his best to entertain the Queen with stories of revenants in Gascony and elsewhere, and with reminiscences of his eleven years’ captivity at Pignerol, and his intercourse with Fouquet; but whenever in aftertimes Anne Woodford tried to recall her nocturnal drive with this strange personage, the chosen and very unkind husband of the poor old Grande Mademoiselle, she never could recollect anything but the fierce glare of his eyes in the light of the lamps as he put her to that terrible interrogation.

The talk was chiefly monologue.  Mrs. Labadie certainly slept, perhaps the Queen did so too, and Anne became conscious that she must have slumbered likewise, for she found every one gazing at her in the pale morning dawn and asking why she cried, “O Charles, hold!”

As she hastily entreated pardon, Lauzun was heard to murmur, “Je parie que le revenant se nomme Charles,” and she collected her senses just in time to check her contradiction, recollecting that happily such a name as Charles revealed nothing.  The little Prince, who had slumbered so opportunely all night, awoke and received infinite praise, and what he better appreciated, the food that had been provided for him.  They were near their journey’s end, and it was well, for people were awakening and going to their work as they passed one of the villages, and once the remark was heard, “There goes a coach full of Papists.”

However, no attempt was made to stop the party, and as it would be daylight when they reached Gravesend, the Queen arranged her disguise to resemble, as she hoped, a washerwoman—taking off her gloves, and hiding her hair, while the Prince, happily again asleep, was laid in a basket of linen.  Anne could not help thinking that she thus looked more remarkable than if she had simply embarked as a lady; but she meant to represent the attendant of her Italian friend Countess Almonde, whom she was to meet on board.

Leaving the coach outside a little block of houses, the party reached a projecting point of land, where three Irish officers received them, and conducted them to a boat.  Then, wrapped closely in cloaks from the chill morning air, they were rowed to the yacht, on the deck of which stood Lord and Lady Powys, Lady Strickland, Pauline Dunord, and a few more faithful followers, who had come more rapidly.  There was no open greeting nor recognition, for the captain and crew were unaware whom they were carrying, and, on the discovery, either for fear of danger or hope of reward, might have captured such a prize.

Therefore all the others, with whispered apologies, were hoisted up before her, and Countess Almonde had to devise a special entreaty that the chair might be lowered again for her poor laundress as well as for the other two women.

The yacht, which had been hired by St. Victor, at once spread her sails; Mrs. Labadie conversed with the captain while the countess took the Queen below into the stifling crowded little cabin.  It was altogether a wretched voyage; the wind was high, and the pitching and tossing more or less disabled everybody in the suite.  The Queen was exceedingly ill, so were the countess and Mrs. Labadie.  Nobody could be the least effective but Signora Turini, who waited on her Majesty, and Anne, who was so far seasoned by excursions at Portsmouth that she was capable of taking sole care of the little Prince, as the little vessel dashed along on her way with her cargo of alarm and suffering through the Dutch fleet of fifty vessels, none of which seemed to notice her—perhaps by express desire not to be too curious as to English fugitives.

Between the care of the little one, who needed in the tossing of the ship to be constantly in arms though he never cried and when awake was always merry, and the giving as much succour as possible to her suffering companions, Anne could not either rest or think, but seemed to live in one heavy dazed dream of weariness and endurance, hardly knowing whether it were day or night, till the welcome sound was heard that Calais was in sight.

Then, as well as they could, the poor travellers crawled from the corners, and put themselves in such array as they could