“My little maid has not known before what boys can be!”
“No; but indeed Charles Archfield is quite different, almost as if he had been bred in London. He is a very gentleman. He never is rude to any girl, and he is courteous and gentle and kind. He gathered walnuts for us yesterday, and cracked all mine, and I am to make him a purse with two of the shells.”
Mrs. Woodford smiled, but there was a short thrill of anxiety in her motherly heart as her glance brought up a deeper colour into Anne’s cheeks. There was a reserve to bring that glow, for the child knew that if she durst say that Charles called her his little sweetheart and wife, and that the walnut-shell purse would be kept as a token, she should be laughed at as a silly child, perhaps forbidden to make it, or else her uncle might hear and make a joke of it. It was not exactly disingenuousness, but rather the first dawn of maidenly reserve and modesty that reddened her cheek in a manner her mother did not fail to observe.
Yet it was with more amusement than misgiving, for children played at courtship like other games in mimicry of being grown up, and a baronet’s only son was in point of fact almost as much out of the reach of a sea captain’s daughter and clergyman’s niece as a prince of the blood royal; and Master Archfield would probably be contracted long before he could choose for himself, for his family were not likely to take into account that if Captain Woodford had not been too severely wounded to come forward after the battle of Southwold Bay he would have been knighted. On the strength of which Anne, as her companions sometimes said, gave herself in consequence more airs than Mistress Lucy ever did.
Sedley, a poor cousin, a destitute cavalier’s orphan, who had been placed on the foundation at Winchester College in hopes that he might be provided for in the Church, would have been far more on her level, and indeed Lady Archfield, a notable matchmaker, had already hinted how suitable such a thing would be. However, the present school character of Master Sedley, as well as her own observations, by no means inclined Mrs. Woodford towards the boy, large limbed and comely faced, but with a bullying, scowling air that did not augur well for his wife or his parish.
Whether it were this lad’s threats, or more likely, the fact that all the Close was on the alert, Peregrine’s exploits were less frequent there, and began to extend to the outskirts of the city. There were some fine yew trees on the southern borders, towards the chalk down, with massive dark foliage upon stout ruddy branches, among which Peregrine, armed with a fishing-rod, line, and hook, sat perched, angling for what might be caught from unconscious passengers along a path which led beneath.
From a market-woman’s basket he abstracted thus a fowl! His “Ho! ho! ho!” startled her into looking up, and seeing it apparently resuscitated, and hovering aloft. Full of dismay, she hurried shrieking away to tell the story of the bewitched chick at the market-cross among her gossips.
His next capture was a chop from a butcher boy’s tray, but this involved more peril, for with a fierce oath that he would be revenged on the Whiggish imp, the lad darted at the tree, in vain, however, for Peregrine had dropped down on the other side, and crept unseen to another bush, where he lay perdu, under the thick green branches, rod and all, while the youth, swearing and growling, was shaking his former refuge.
As soon as the coast was clear he went back to his post, and presently was aware of three gentlemen advancing over the down, pointing, measuring, and surveying. One was small and slight, as simply dressed as a gentleman of the period could be; another was clad in a gay coat with a good deal of fluttering ribbon and rich lace; the third, a tall well-made man, had a plain walking suit, surmounted by a flowing periwig and plumed beaver. Coming close beneath Peregrine’s tree, and standing with their backs to it, they eagerly conversed. “Such a cascade will drown the honours of the Versailles fountains, if only the water can be raised to such a height. Are you sure of it, Wren?”
“As certain as hydraulics can make me, sir,” and the lesser man began drawing lines with his stick in the dust of the path in demonstration.
The opportunity was irresistible, and the hook from above deftly caught the band of the feathered hat of the taller man, slowly and steadily drawing it up, entirely unperceived by the owner, on whose wig it had rested, and who was bending over the dust-traced diagram in absorbed attention. Peregrine deferred his hobgoblin laughter, for success emboldened him farther. Detaching the hat from his hook, and depositing it safely in a fork of the tree, he next cautiously let down his line, and contrived to get a strong hold of one of the black locks on the top of the wig, just as the wearer was observing, “Oliver’s Battery, eh? A cupola with a light to be seen out at sea? Our sailors will make another St. Christopher of you! Ha! what’s this’”
For feeling as if a branch were touching the structure on his head, he had stepped forward, thus favouring Peregrine’s manœuvres so that the wig dangled in the air, suddenly disclosing the bare skull of a very dark man, with such marked features that it needed not the gentlemen’s outcry to show the boy who was the victim of his mischief.
“What imp is there?” cried the King, spying up into the tree, while his attendant drew his sword, “How now?” as Peregrine half climbed, half tumbled down, bringing hat and wig with him, and, whether by design or accident, fell at his feet. “Will nothing content you but royal game?” he continued laughing, as Sir Christopher Wren helped him to resume his wig. “Why, what a shrimp it is! a mere goblin sprite! What’s thy name, master wag?”
“Peregrine Oakshott, so please you,” the boy answered, raising himself with a face scared indeed, but retaining its queer impishness. “Sir, I never guessed—”
“Young rogue! have you our licence to waylay our loyal subjects?” demanded the King, with an affected fierceness. “Know you not ’tis rank treason to discrown our sacred Majesty, far more to dishevel or destroy our locks? Why! I might behead you on the spot.” To his great amazement the boy, with an eager face and clasped hands, exclaimed, “O sir! Oh, please your Majesty, do so.”
“Do so!” exclaimed the King astounded. “Didst hear what I said?”
“Yes, sir! You said it was a beheading matter, and I’m willing, sir.”
“Of all the petitions that ever were made to me, this is the strangest!” exclaimed Charles. “An urchin like this weary of life! What next? So,” with a wink to his companions, “Peregrine Oakshott, we condemn thee for high treason against our most sacred Majesty’s beaver and periwig, and sentence thee to die by having thine head severed from thy body. Kneel down, open thy collar, bare thy neck. Ay, so, lay thy neck across that bough. Killigrew, do thy duty.”
To the general surprise, the boy complied with all these directions, never flinching nor showing sign of fear, except that his lips were set and his cheek whitened. As he knelt, with closed eyes, the flat cold blade descended on his neck, the tension relaxed, and he sank!
“Hold!” cried the King. “It is gone too far! He has surely not carried out the jest by dying on our hands.”
“No, no, sir,” said Wren, after a moment’s alarm, “he has only swooned. Has any one here a flask of wine to revive him?”
Several gentlemen had come up, and as Peregrine stirred, some wine was held to his lips, and he presently asked in a faint voice, “Is this fairyland?”
“Not yet, my lad,” said Charles, “whatever it may be when Wren’s work is done.”
The boy opened his eyes, and as he beheld the same face, and the too familiar sky and trees, he sighed heavily, and said, “Then it is all the same! O sir, would you but have cut off my head in good earnest, I might be at home again!”
“Home! what means the elf?”
“An elf! That is what they say I am—changed in the cradle,” said Peregrine, incited to confidence by the good-natured eyes, “and I thought if I were close on death mine own people might take me home, and bring back the right one.”
“He really believes it!” exclaimed Charles much diverted. “Tell me, good Master Elf, who is thy father, I mean not my brother Oberon, but him of the right one, as thou sayst.”
“Mr. Robert Oakshott of Oakwood, sir,” said Peregrine.
“A sturdy squire of the country party,” said the King. “I am much minded to secure the lad for an elfin page,” he added aside to Killigrew. “There’s a fund of excellent humour and drollery in those queer eyes of his! So, Sir Hobgoblin, if you are proof against cold steel, I know not what is to be done with you. Get you back, and devise some other mode of finding your way home to fairyland.”
Peregrine said not a word of his adventure, so that the surprise of his family was the greater when overtures were made through Sir Christopher Wren for his appointment as a royal page.
“I would as soon send my son at once to be a page to Beelzebub,” returned Major Oakshott.
And though Sir Christopher did not return the answer exactly in those terms, he would not say that the Puritan Major did not judge rightly.
CHAPTER III
The Fairy King
“She’s turned her right and round about,
And thrice she blew on a grass-green horn,
And she sware by the moon and the stars above
That she’d gar me rue the day I was born.”
Old Ballad of Alison Cross.
Dr. Woodford’s parish was Portchester, where stood the fine old royal castle at present ungarrisoned, and partly dismantled in the recent troubles, on a chalk peninsula, a spur from Portsdown, projecting above the alluvial flats, and even into the harbour, whose waves at high tide laved the walls. The church and churchyard were within the ample circuit of the fortifications, about two furlongs distant from the main building, where rose the mighty Norman keep, above the inner court, with a gate tower at this date, only inhabited by an old soldier as porter with his family. A massive square tower at each angle of the huge wall likewise defied decay.
It was on Midsummer eve, that nearly about sundown, Dr. Woodford was summoned by the severe illness of the gatekeeper’s old father, and his sister-in-law went with him to attempt what her skill could accomplish for the old man’s relief.
They were detained there till the sun had long set, though the air, saturated with his redness, was full of soft twilight, while the moon, scarcely past the full, was just high enough to silver the quiet sea, and throw the shadow of the battlements and towers on the sward whitened with dew.
After the close atmosphere of the sickroom the freshness was welcome, and Mrs. Woodford, once a friend of Katherine Phillips, ‘the Matchless Orinda,’ had an eye and a soul to appreciate the beauty, and she even murmured the lines of Il Penseroso as she leant on the arm of her brother-in-law, who, in his turn, thought of Homer.
Suddenly, as they stood in the shadow, they were aware of a small, slight, fantastic figure in the midst of the grass-grown court, where there was a large green mushroom circle or fairy ring. On the borders of this ring it paused with an air of disappointment. Then entering it stood still, took off the hat, whose lopsided appearance had given so strange an outline, and bowed four times in opposite directions, when, as the face was turned towards the spectators, invisible in the dark shadow, the lady recognised Peregrine Oakshott. She pressed the Doctor’s arm, and they both stood still watching the boy bathing his hand in the dew, and washing his face with it, then kneeling on one knee, and clasping his hands, as he cried aloud in a piteous chant—
“Fairy mother, fairy mother! Oh, come, come and take me home! My very life is sore to me. They all hate me! My brothers and the servants, every one of them. And my father and tutor say I am possessed with an evil spirit, and I am beaten daily, and more than daily. I can never, never get a good word from living soul! This is the second seven years, and Midsummer night! Oh, bring the other back again! I’m weary, I’m weary! Good elves, good elves, take me home. Fairy mother! Come, come, come!” Shutting his eyes he seemed to be in a state of intense expectation. Tears filled Mrs. Woodford’s eyes. The Doctor moved forward, but no sooner did the boy become conscious of human presence than he started up, and fled wildly towards a postern door, but no sooner had he disappeared in the shadow than there was a cry and a fall.
“Poor child!” exclaimed Dr. Woodford, “he has fallen down the steps to the vault. It is a dangerous pitfall.”
They both hurried to the place, and found the boy lying on the steps leading down to the vault, but motionless, and when they succeeded in lifting him up, he was quite unconscious, having evidently struck his head against the mouth of the vault.
“We must carry him home between us,” said Mrs. Woodford. “That will be better than rousing Miles Gateward, and making a coil.”
Dr. Woodford, however, took the entire weight, which he declared to be very slight. “No one would think the poor child fourteen years old,” he observed, “yet did he not speak of a second seven?”
“True,” said Mrs. Woodford, “he was born after the Great Fire of London, which, as I have good cause to know, was in the year ’66.”
There was still little sign of revival about the boy when he had been carried into the Parsonage, undressed and laid in the Doctor’s own bed, only a few moans when he was handled, and on his thin, sharp features there was a piteous look of sadness entirely unlike his ordinary expression of malignant fun, and which went to the kind hearts of the Doctor and Mrs. Woodford. After exhausting their own remedies, as soon as the early daylight was available Dr. Woodford called up a couple of servants, and sent one into Portsmouth for a surgeon, and another to Oakwood to the parents.
The doctor was the first to arrive, though not till the morning was well advanced. He found that three ribs were broken against the edge of the stone step, and the head severely injured, and having had sufficient experience in the navy to be a reasonably safe practitioner, he did nothing worse than bleed the patient, and declared that absolute rest was the only hope of recovery.
He was being regaled with cold roast pig and ale when Major Oakshott rode up to the door. Four horses were dragging the great lumbering coach over Portsdown hill, but he had gone on before, to thank Dr. and Mrs. Woodford for their care of his unfortunate son, and to make preparations for his transport home under the care of his wife’s own woman, who was coming in the coach in the stead of the invalid lady.
“Nay, sir. Master Brent here has a word to say to that matter,” replied the Doctor.
“Truly, sir, I have,” said the surgeon; “in his present state it is as much as your son’s life is worth to move him.”
“Be that as it may seem to man, he is in the hand of Heaven, and he ought to be at home, whether for life or death.”
“For death it will assuredly be, sir, if he be jolted and shaken along the Portsdown roads—yea, I question whether you would get him to Oakwood alive,” said Brent, with naval roughness.
“Indeed, sir,” added Mrs. Woodford, “Mrs. Oakshott may be assured of my giving him as tender care as though he were mine own son.”
“I am beholden to you, madam,” said the Major; “I know your kindliness of heart; but in good sooth, the unhappy and rebellious lad merits chastisement rather than pity, since what should he be doing at this distance from home, where he was shut up for his misdemeanours, save fleeing like the Prodigal of the parable, or else planning another of his malicious pranks, as I greatly fear, on you or your daughter, madam. If so, he hath fallen into the pit that he made for others.”
The impulse was to tell what had occurred, but the surgeon’s presence, and the dread of making all worse for the poor boy checked both the hosts, and Mrs. Woodford only declared that since the day of the apology he had never molested her or her little girl.
“Still,” said the Major, “it is not possible to leave him in a stranger’s house, where at any moment the evil spirit that is in him may break forth.”
“Come and see him, and judge,” said Dr. Woodford.
When the father beheld the deathly face and motionless form, stern as he was, he was greatly shocked. His heavy tread caused a moan, and when he said “What, Perry, how now?” there was a painful shrinking and twitching, which the surgeon greeted as evidence of returning animation, but which made him almost drag the Major out of the room for fear of immediate consequences.
Major Oakshott, and still more the servant, who had arrived in the coach and come upstairs, could not but be convinced that removal was not to be thought of. The maid was, moreover, too necessary to her mistress to be left to undertake the nursing, much to her master’s regret, but to the joy of Mrs. Woodford, who felt certain that by far the best chance for the poor boy was in his entire separation from all associations with the home where he had evidently suffered so much.
There was, perhaps, nothing except the pageship at Court that could have gone more against Major Oakshott’s principles than to leave his son in the house of a prelatical minister, but alternative there was none, and he could only express how much he was beholden to the Dr. and Mrs. Woodford.
All their desire was that he would remain at a distance, for during the long and weary watch they had to keep over the half-conscious lad, the sound of a voice or even a horse’s tread from Oakwood occasioned moans and restlessness. The Major rode over, or sent his sons, or a servant daily to inquire during the first fortnight, except on the Sundays, and on each of these the patient made a step towards improvement.
At first he lay in a dull, death-like stupor, only groaning if disturbed, but by and by there was a babbling murmur of words, and soon the sound of his brother’s loud voice at the door, demanding from the saddle how it went to-day with Peregrine, caused a shriek of terror and such a fit of trembling that Mrs. Woodford had to go out and make a personal request that Oliver would never again speak under the window. To her great relief, when the balance between life and death had decidedly turned, the inquiries became less frequent, and could often be forestalled by sending messengers to Oakwood.
The boy usually lay still all day in the darkened room, only showing pain at light or noise, but at night he often talked and rambled a good deal. Sometimes it was Greek or Latin, sometimes whole chapters of Scripture, either denunciating portions or genealogies from the First Book of Chronicles, the polysyllabic names pouring from his mouth whenever he was particularly oppressed or suffering, so that when Mrs. Woodford had with some difficulty made out what they were, she concluded that they had been set as tasks of penance.
At other times Peregrine talked as if he absolutely believed himself in fairyland, accepting a strawberry or cherry as elfin food, promising a tester in Anne’s shoe when she helped to change his pillow, or conversing in the style of Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, on intended pranks. Often he fancied himself the lubber fiend resting at the fire his hairy strength, and watching for cock-crow as the signal for flinging out-of-doors. It was wonderful how in the grim and strict Puritanical household he could have imbibed so much fairy lore, but he must have eagerly assimilated and recollected whatever he heard, holding them as tidings from his true kith and kin; and, indeed, when he was running on thus, Mrs. Woodford sometimes felt a certain awe and chill, as of the preternatural, and could hardly believe that he belonged to ordinary human nature. Either she or the Doctor always took the night-watch after the talking mood set in, for they could not judge of the effect it might have on any of the servants. Indeed they sometimes doubted whether this were not the beginning of permanent insanity, as the delusion seemed to strengthen with symptoms of recovery.
“Then,” said Dr. Woodford, “Heaven help the poor lad!”
For sad indeed was the lot in those days of even the most harmless lunatic.
“Yet,” said the lady, “I scarcely think anything can be worse than what he undergoes at home. When I hear the terror and misery of his voice, I doubt whether we did him any true kindness by hindering his father from killing him outright by the shaking of his old coach.”
“Nay, sister, we strove to do our duty, though it may be we have taken on ourselves a further charge.”