A Reputed Changeling

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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 superstition, 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 passing 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.

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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 passively 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 assistance 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.