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

Scot, who is in comfortable quarters in my grave, and the Frenchmen could not have found their way thither, so it was let alone till Mistress Martha’s researches.  So I came to myself in the boat in which they took me on board the lugger that was waiting for us; and instead of making for Alderney, as I had intended, so as to get the knot safely tied to your satisfaction, they sailed straight for Havre.  They had on board a Jesuit father, whom I had met once or twice among the Duke of Berwick’s people, but who had found Portsmouth too hot to hold him in the frenzy of Protestant zeal on the Bishops’ account.  He had been beset, and owed his life, he says, to the fists of the Breton and Norman sailors, who had taken him on board.  It was well for me, for I doubt if ever I was tough enough to have withstood my good friends’ treatment.  He had me carried to a convent in Havre, where the fathers nursed me well; and before I was on my legs again, I had made up my mind to cast in my lot with them, or rather with their Church.”

“Oh!”

“I had been baulked of winning the one being near whom my devil never durst come.  And blood-letting had pretty well disposed of him.  I was as meek and mild as milk under the good fathers.  Moreover, as my good friend at Turin had told me, and they repeated it, such a doubly heretical baptism as mine was probably invalid, and accounted for my being as much a vessel of wrath as even my father was pleased to call me.  There was the Queen’s rosary drawing me too.  Everything else was over with me, and it seemed to open a new life.  So, bless me, what a soft and pious frame I was in when they chastened me, water, oil, salt and all, on what my father raged at folks calling Lammas Day, but which it seems really belongs to St. Peter in the Fetters.  So I was named Pierre or Piers after him, thus keeping my own initial.”

“Piers! oh! not Piers Pigwiggin?”

“Pierre de Pilpignon, if you please.  I have a right to that too; but we shall come to it by and by.  I can laugh now, or perhaps weep, over the fervid state I was in then, as if I had trodden down my snake, and by giving up everything—you, estate, career, I could keep him down.  So it was settled that I would devote myself to the priesthood—don’t laugh!—and I was ordered off to their seminary in London, partly, I believe, for the sake of piloting a couple of fathers, who could not speak a word of English.  It was, as they rightly judged, the last place where my father would think of looking for me, but they did not as rightly judge that we should long keep possession there.  Matters grew serious, and it was not over safe in the streets.  There was a letter of importance from a friend in Holland, carrying the Prince of Orange’s hypocritical Declaration, which was to be got to Father Petre or the King on the night—Hallowmas Eve it was—and I was told off to put on a secular dress, which I could wear more naturally than most of them, and convey it.”

“Ah, that explains!”

“Apparition number one!  I guessed you were somewhere in those parts, and looked up at the windows, and though I did not see you, I believe it was your eyes that first sent a thrill through me that boded ill for Roman orders.  After that we lived in a continual state of rumours and alarms, secret messages and expeditions, until I, being strong in the arm and the wind and a feather-weight, was one of those honoured by rowing the Queen and Prince across the river.  M. de St. Victor accepted me.  He told me there would be two nurses, but never knew or cared who they were, nor did I guess, as we sat in the dark, how near I was to you.  And only for one second did I see your face, as you were entering the carriage, and I blessed you the more for what you were doing for Her Majesty.”

He proceeded to tell how he had accompanied the Jesuit fathers, on their leaving London, to the great English seminary at Douai, and being for the time convinced by them that his feelings towards Anne were a delusion of the enemy, he had studied with all his might, and as health and monotony of life began to have their accustomed effect in rousing the restlessness and mischievousness of his nature, with all the passions of manhood growing upon him, he strove to force them down by fasting and scourging.  He told, in a bitter, almost savage way, of his endeavours to flog his demon out of himself, and of his anger and disappointment at finding Piers Pilgrim in the seminary of Douai, quite as subject to his attacks as ever was Perry Oakshott under a sermon of Mr. Horncastle’s.

Then came the information among the students that the governor of the city, the Marquis de Nidemerle, had brought some English gentlemen and ladies to visit the gardens.  As most of the students were of British families there was curiosity as to who they were, and thus Peregrine heard that one was young Archfield of the Hampshire family, with his tutor, and the lady was Mistress Darpent, daughter to a French lawyer, who had settled in England after the Fronde.  Anne’s name had not transpired, for she was viewed merely as an attendant.  Peregrine had been out on some errand in the town, and had a distant view of his enemy as he held him, flaunting about with a fine lady on his arm, forgetting the poor little pretty wife whom no doubt he had frightened to death.”

“Oh! you little know how tenderly he speaks of her.”

“Tenderly!—that’s the way they speak of me at Oakwood, eh?  Human, not to say elf, nature, could not withstand giving the fellow a start.  I sped off, whipped into the Church, popped into a surplice I found ready to hand, caught up a candle, and!—Little did I think who it was that was hanging on his arm.  So little did I know it that my heart began to be drawn to St. Germain, where I still imagined you.  Altogether, after that prank, all broke out again.  I entertained the lads with a few more freaks, for which I did ample penance, but it grew on me that in my case all was a weariness and a sham, and that my demon might get a worse hold of me if I got into a course of hypocrisy.  They were very good to me, those fathers, but Jesuits as they were, I doubt whether they ever fathomed me.  Any way, perhaps they thought I should be a scandal, but they agreed with me that their order was not my vocation, and that we had better part before my fiend drove me to do so with dishonour.  They even gave me recommendations to the French officers that were besieging Tournay.  I knew the Duke of Berwick a little at Portsmouth, and it ended in my becoming under-secretary to the Duke of Chartres.  A man who knows languages has his value among Frenchmen, who despise all but their own.”

Peregrine did not enter into full details of this stage of his career, and Anne was not fully informed of the habits that the young Duke of Chartres, the future Regent Duke of Orleans, was already developing, but she gathered that, what the young man called his demon, had nearly undisputed sway over him, and she had not spent eight months at St. Germain without knowing by report of the dissolute manners of the substratum of fashionable society at Paris, even though outward decorum had been restored by Madame de Maintenon.  Yet he seemed to have been crossed by fits of vehement penitence, and almost the saddest part of the story was the mocking tone in which he alluded to these.

He had sought service at the Court in the hope of meeting Miss Woodford there, and had been grievously disappointed when he found that she had long since returned to England.  The sight of the gracious and lovely countenance of the exiled Queen seemed always to have moved and touched him, as in some inexplicable manner her eyes and expression recalled to him those of Mrs. Woodford and Anne; but the thought had apparently only stung him into the sense of being forsaken and abandoned to his own devices or those of his evil spirit.

One incident, occurring some three years previously, he told more fully, as it had a considerable effect on his life.  “I was attending the Duke in the gardens at Versailles,” he said, “when we were aware of a great commotion.  All the gentlemen were standing gazing up into the top of a great chestnut tree, the King and all, and in the midst stood the Abbé de Fénelon with his little pupils, the youngest, the Duke of Anjou, sobbing piteously, and the Duke of Burgundy in a furious passion, stamping and raging, and only withheld from rolling on the ground by the Abbé’s hand grasping his shoulder.  ‘I will not have him killed!  He is mine,’ he cried.  And up in the tree, the object of all their gaze, was a monkey with a paper fluttering in his hand.  Some one had made a present of the creature to the King’s grandsons; he was the reigning favourite, and having broken his chain, had effected an entrance by the window into the King’s cabinet, where after giving himself the airs of a minister of state, on being interrupted, he had made off through the window with an important document, which he was affecting to peruse at his leisure, only interrupting himself to hurl down leaves or unripe chestnuts at those who attempted to pelt him with stones, and this only made him mount higher and higher, entirely out of their reach, for no one durst climb after him.  I believe it was a letter from the King of Spain; at any rate the whole Cabinet was in agony lest the brute should proceed to tear it into fragments, and a musqueteer had been sent for to shoot him down.  I remembered my success with the monkey on poor little Madam Archfield’s back—nay, perhaps ’twas the same, my familiar taking shape.  I threw myself at the King’s feet, and desired permission to deal with the beast.  By good luck it had not been so easy as they supposed to find a musquet fit for immediate use, so I had full time.  To ascend the tree was no more than I had done many times before, and I went high in the branches, but cautiously, not to give Monsieur le Singe the idea of being pursued, lest he should leap to a bough incapable of supporting me.  When I had reached a fork tolerably high, and where he could see me, I settled myself, took out a letter, which fortunately was in my pocket, read it with the greatest deliberation, the monkey watching me all the time, and finally I proceeded to fold it neatly in all its creases.  The creature imitated me with its black fingers, little aware, poor thing, that the musqueteer had covered him with his weapon, and was waiting for the first sign of tearing the letter to pull the trigger, but withheld by a sign from the King, who did not wish to sacrifice his grandson’s pet before his eyes.  Finally, after finishing the folding, I doubled it a second time, and threw it at the animal.  To my great joy he returned the compliment by throwing the other at my head.  I was able to catch it, and moreover, as he was disposed to go in pursuit of his plaything, he swung his chain so near me that I got hold of it, twisted it round my arm, and made the best of my way down the tree, amid the ‘Bravos!’ started by the royal lips themselves, and repeated with ecstasy by all the crowd, who waved their hats, and made such a hallooing that I had much ado to get the monkey down safely; but finally, all dishevelled, with my best cuffs and cravat torn to ribbons, and my wig happily detached, unlike Absalom’s, for it remained in the tree, I had the honour of presenting on my knee the letter to the King, and the monkey to the Princes.  I kissed His Majesty’s hand, the little Duke of Anjou kissed the monkey, and the Duke of Burgundy kissed me with arms round my neck, then threw himself on his knees before his grandfather to ask pardon for his passion.  Every