A Reputed Changeling Part 48

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 sh.o.r.e 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.d!" she murmured, and shut her eyes again, dizzy and overcome, unable even to a.n.a.lyse 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 ap.r.o.n.

"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 gla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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 ta.s.sel, which had a.s.sumed 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 appet.i.te 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.

"n.o.body 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 rea.s.suring 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 pa.s.sed--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 x.x.xII: 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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.