Part 2 (2/2)
”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 pet.i.tions 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 st.u.r.dy 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 gra.s.s-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 ma.s.sive 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.
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