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

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—”

“Oh, sir, she really loved you, and is far wiser and more tolerant than you thought her.”

“I know,” he smiled grimly.  “She buried the huge Scot that was killed in the great smuggling fray under the Protector, with all honours, in our family vault, and had a long-winded sermon preached on my untimely end.  Ha! ha!” with his mocking laugh.

“Don’t, sir!  If you had seen your father then!  Why did no one come forward and explain?”

“Mayhap there were none at hand who knew, or wished to meddle with the law,” he said.  “Well, things were beyond all bearing at home, and you were going away, and would not so much as look at me.  Now, one of the few sports my father did not look askance at was fishing, and he would endure my being out at night with, as he thought, poor man, old Pete Perring, who was as stern a Puritan as himself; but I had livelier friends, and more adventurous.  They had connections with French free-traders for brandy and silks, and when they found I was one with them, my French tongue was a boon to them, till I came to have a good many friends among the Norman fishermen, and to know the snug hiding-places about the coast.  So at last I made up my mind to be off with them, and make my way to my uncle in Muscovy.  I had raised money enough at play and on the jewels one picks up in an envoy’s service, and there was one good angel whom I meant to take with me if I could secure her and bind her wings.  Now you know with what hopes I saw you gathering flowers alone that morning.”

Anne clasped her hands; Charles had truly interfered with good cause.

“I had all arranged,” he continued; “my uncle would have given you a hearty welcome, and made our peace with my father, or if not, he would have left us all his goods, and secured my career.  What call had that great lout, with a wife of his own too, to come thrusting between us?  I thought I should make short work of him, and give him a lesson against meddling—great unlicked cub as he was, while I had had the best training at Berlin and Paris in fencing; but somehow those big strong fellows, from their very clumsiness, throw one out.  And he meant mischief—yes, that he did.  I saw it in his eyes.  I suppose his sulky rustic jealousy was a-fire at a few little civilities to that poor little wife of his.  Any way, when he bore me down like the swing of a windmill, he drove his sword home.  Talk of his being innocent!  Why should he never look whether I were dead or alive, but fling me headlong into that pit?”

Anne could not but utter her eager defence, but it was met with a sinister smile, half of scorn, half of pity, and as she would have gone on, “Hush! your pleading only fills up the measure of my loathing.”

Her heart sank, but she let him go on, listening perhaps less attentively as she considered how to take him.

“In fact,” he continued, “little as the lubber knew it, ’twas the best he could have done for me.  For though I never looked for such luck as your being out in the court at that hour, I did think the chance not to be lost of visiting the garden or the churchyard, and there were waiting in the vault a couple of stout Normans, who were to come at my whistle.  It seems that when I came tumbling down in their midst, senseless and bleeding like a calf, they did not take it quite so easily as your champion above, but began doing what they could for me, and were trying to staunch the wound, when they heard a trampling and a rumbling overhead, and being aware that our undertaking might look ugly in the sight of the law, and thinking this might be pursuers, they carried me off with all speed, not so much as stopping to pick up the things that have made such a commotion.  Was there any pursuit?”

“Oh no; it must have been the haymakers.”

“No doubt.  The place was in no great favour with our own people; they were in awe of the big