“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 shore 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 glass 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 glass in his hand.
“Oh!” she gasped. “Are you alive?”