A Reputed Changeling Part 53

In the evening the father and brother arrived. The Major was now an old man, hale indeed, and with the beauty that a pure, self- restrained life often sheds on an aged man. He was much shaken, and when he came in, with his own white hair on his shoulders, and actually tears in his eyes, the look that pa.s.sed between them was like nothing but the spirit of the parable so often, but never too often, repeated.

Peregrine, who never perhaps had spent a happy or fearless hour with him, and had dreaded his coming, felt probably for the first time the mysterious sense of home and peace given by the presence of those between whom there is the tie of blood. Not many words pa.s.sed; he was hardly in a state for them, but from that time, he was never so happy as when his father and brother were beside him; and they seldom left him, the Major sitting day and night by his pillow attending to his wants, or saying words of prayer.

The old man had become much softened, by nothing more perhaps than watching the way in which his daughter-in-law dealt with the manifestations of the Oakshott imp nature in her eldest child.

"If I had understood," he said to Dr. Woodford. "If I had so treated that poor boy, never would he have been as he is now."

"You acted according to your conscience."

"Ah, sir! a man does not grow old without learning that the conscience may be blinded, above all by the spirit of opposition and party."

"I will not say there were no mistakes," said the Doctor; "and yet, sir, the high standard, sound principle, and strong faith he learnt from you and your example have prevailed to bear him through."

The Major answered with a groan, but added, "And yet, even now, stained as he tells me he is, and cut off in the flower of his age, I thank my G.o.d and his Saviour, and after Him, you and yours, that I am happier about him than I have been these eight and twenty years."

With no scruple, Major Oakshott threw his heart into the ministrations of Dr. Woodford, which Peregrine declared kept at bay the Evil Angel who more than once seemed to his consciousness to be striving to make him despair, while friend and father brought him back to the one hope.

From time to time Anne visited him for a short interval, always to his joy and grat.i.tude. There was one visit at last which all knew would be the final one, when she shared in his first and last English Communion. As she was about to leave him, he held her hand, and signed to her to bend down to hear him better. "If you can, let good Father Seyton at Douai know that peace is come--the Evil One beaten, thanks to Him who giveth us the victory--and I thank them all there--and ask their prayers."

"I will, I will."

Some one at the door said, "May I come in?"

There was a sunburnt face, a head with long brown hair, a white coat.

"Archfield?" asked Peregrine. "Come, send me away with pardon."

"'Tis yours I need;" and as Charles knelt by the bed the two faces, one all health, the other gray and deathly, were close together.

"You have given your life for mine, and given _her_. How shall I thank you?"

"Make her happy. She deserves it."

Charles clasped her hand with a look that was enough. Then with a strange smile, half sweetness, half the contortion of a mortal pang, the dying man said, "May she kiss me once?"

And when her lips had touched the cold damp brow--

"There--My fourth seven. At last! The change is come. Old-- impish--evil--self left behind. At last! Thanks to Him who treads down Satan under our feet. Thanks! Take her away now."

Charles took her away, scarce knowing where they went,--out into the spring sunshine, on the slopes above the turf bowling-green, where the captive King had beguiled his weary hours. Only then would awe and emotion let them speak, though his arm was round her, her hand in his, and his first words were, as he looked at the scarf that still bore up her arm, "And this is what you have borne for me?"

"It is all but healed. Don't think of it."

"I shall all my life! Poor fellow, he might well bid me deserve you. I never can. 'Tis to you I owe all. I believe, indeed, the amba.s.sador might have claimed me, but he is so tardy that probably I should have been hanged long before the proper form was ready; and it would have been to exile, and with a tainted name. You have won for me the clearing of name and honour--home, parents and child and all, besides your sweet self."

"And it was not me, but he whom we so despised and dreaded. Had I not been seized, I could only have implored for you."

"I know this, that if you had not been what you are, my boy would have borne a dishonoured name, and we should never have been together as now."

It was in truth their first meeting in freedom and security as lovers; but it could only be in a grave, quiet fashion, under the knowledge that he, to whom their re-union was chiefly owing, was breathing out the life he had sacrificed for them. Thus they only gently and in a low voice went over their past doings and feelings as they walked up and down together, till Dr. Woodford came in the sunset to tell them that the change so longed for had come in peace, and with a smile that told of release from the Evil Angel.

Peregrine's wish was fulfilled, and he was buried in Portchester Churchyard at Mrs. Woodford's feet. This time it was Mr.

Horncastle, old as he was, who preached the funeral sermon, the In Memoriam of our forefathers; and by special desire of Major Oakshott took for his text, 'At evening time there shall be light.' He spoke, sometimes in a voice broken, as much by feeling as by age, of the childhood blighted by a cruel superst.i.tion, and perverted, as he freely made confession, by discipline without comprehension, because no confidence had been sought. Then ensued a tribute of earnest, generous justice to her who had done her best to undo the warp in the boy's nature, and whose blessed influence the young man had owned to the last, through all the temptations, errors, and frenzies of his life. Nor did the good man fail to make this a means of testifying to the entire neighbourhood, who had flocked to hear him, all that might be desirable to be known respecting the conflict at Portchester, actually reading Peregrine's affidavit, as indeed was due to Colonel Archfield, so as to prove that this was no mere pardon, though technically it had so to stand, but actual acquittal.

Nor was the struggle with evil at the end forgotten, nor the surrender alike of love and of hatred, as well as of his own life, which had been the final conquest, the decisive pa.s.sing from darkness to light.

It was a strange sermon according to present ideas, but not to those who had grown up to the semi-political preaching of the century then in its last decade; and it filled many eyes with tears, many hearts with a deeper spirit of that charity which hopeth all things.

A month later Charles Archfield and Anne Jacobina Woodford were married at the little parish church of Fareham. Sir Philip insisted on making it a gay and brilliant wedding, in order to demonstrate to the neighbourhood that though the maiden had been his grandson's governess, she was a welcomed and honoured acquisition to the family. Perhaps too he perceived the error of his middle age, when he contrasted that former wedding, the work of worldly conventionality, with the present. In the first, an unformed, undeveloped lad, unable to understand his own true feelings and affections had been pa.s.sively linked to a shallow, frivolous, ill- trained creature, utterly incapable of growing into a helpmeet for him; whereas the love and trust of the stately-looking pair, in the fresh bloom of manhood and womanhood, had been proved in the furnace of trial, so that the troth they plighted had deep foundation for the past, and bright hope for the future.

Nor was anybody more joyous than little Philip, winning his Nana for a better mother to him than his own could ever have been

It was in a blue velvet coat that Colonel Archfield was married. He had resigned his Austrian commission; and though the 'Salamander,'

was empowered to offer him an excellent staff appointment in the English army, he decided to refuse. Sir Philip showed signs of having been aged and shaken by the troubles of the winter, and required his son's a.s.sistance in the care of his property, and little Philip was growing up to need a father's hand, so that Charles came to the conclusion that there was no need to cross the old Cavalier's dislike to the new regime, nor to make his mother and wife again suffer the anxieties of knowing him on active service, while his duties lay at home.

Sedley Archfield, after a long illness, owed recovery both in body and mind to Mrs. Oakshott, and by her arrangement finally obtained a fresh commission in a regiment raised for the defence of the possessions of the East India Company. And that the poor changeling was still tenderly remembered might be proved by the fact that when the bells rung for Queen Anne's coronation there was one baby Peregrine at Fareham and another at Oakwood.