The Touchstone of Fortune Part 30

After leaving Westminster, we had no means of knowing our rate of progress, for there were no houses near the road, and, if there had been, we should not have known them. The drivers kept the horses in a strong trot, at times a vigorous gallop, and I judged that we were making nearly three leagues an hour. At that rate it would require perhaps two hours to reach the shrine mentioned by Lilly.

We had instructed the men on the box to watch for a sharp bend in the road just before crossing a bourne, and we, too, began to watch soon after leaving Westminster. After what seemed to be a long time, George asked me to make a flare in my tinder box, while he caught a glimpse of the face of his watch. This I did under the rug, and, much to our disgust, we found that we had been less than twenty minutes on the road, so provokingly had time lagged.

After our disappointment we lay back in the coach, determined to ignore time, and thereby perhaps hasten it. In truth, time's lagging was not unpleasant for me, in one respect, at least, for Bettina was by my side.

I found delight in keeping her well tucked about with rugs, so that not even a breath of the storm nor a flake of snow could reach her. She wore a great fur hood which b.u.t.toned under her chin, almost covering her face and falling in a soft warm curtain to her shoulders and bosom. She was warm, and aside from our great cause of anxiety, I believe, was happy.

I wished a hundred times that George were in another coach, though had he been, I well knew that I should have said a great deal to Betty which on the morrow would have been regretted, both for her sake and my own.

Just at a point when time seemed to have halted, the driver lifted the rug hanging behind him, and said:--

"Here is the bend, sir, and yonder is the bourne."

Presently we knew by the breaking of the ice and the splashing of the water that we were crossing the bourne, and when we were over, George called to the driver, directing him to allow the horses to walk until the order came to stop.

George dropped the front curtain, and turning to Betty and me, said:--

"Now, let us count as the clock ticks to the number 847, and when finished, we shall be at the shrine."

"We are more apt to find a bleak moor and a sharp blast of wind," I suggested.

While under the spell of Lilly's incantations, I had almost accepted his absurd vaporings, but cooler thought had brought contempt, and I had begun to look upon our journey as a very wild goose chase indeed.

"We have found the sharp turn in the road and the bourne," said George, "and I see no reason to doubt that we shall find the shrine."

"Lilly may have pa.s.sed over the road and may know that the shrine is here; but when we find it, what will it prove?" I asked.

"It will prove nothing, though I am willing to stake my life that we find Frances in Merlin House."

"Count!" exclaimed Betty, sharply. In our discussion, George and I had forgotten to count, but Betty had been counting under her breath as the clock ticks, and we took her number and started with it.

We all reached the number 847 almost at the same second, when we stopped the coach, and sure enough, there by the roadside, on a small rocky hillock surrounded by a bleak moor, was the shrine. Even from the road we could see the fragment of a cross projecting above the one piece of wall left standing. One would hardly have taken it to be a shrine unless the fact had been suggested, but with the thought in mind, the fragmentary cross was convincing evidence. Had its sacred quality been suspected during the time of Cromwell, not one stone would have been left upon another, but no one knew that it was the Virgin's shrine, therefore it was not disturbed, but stood there, black on a field of luminous white.

We all saw it at the same moment. I was content to view it from the coach, but George went to examine it, and returned, saying:--

"It is a shrine. Part of the cross still remains surmounting a fragment of a wall."

He climbed into the coach and was about to give the word to start again, when Betty spoke up, hesitatingly, pleadingly but emphatically:--

"Please wait a moment. I want to see it."

I followed Betty when she got out of the coach, and, as we approached the shrine, she exclaimed: "Doctor Lilly was right! There is no snow on the shrine. The Virgin protects it. There must be a relic beneath the stones!"

We climbed a little hillock and after standing before the shrine for a moment, Betty said, "Please return to the coach and leave me alone."

"Why, Betty?" I asked. "You may speak plainly to me. I think I know your motive."

"I want to offer a little prayer to the Virgin here at her broken shrine--a prayer for your cousin and for you--and for me."

I knelt with her, and after Betty had finished her simple invocation, we rose, and I, who at another time would have laughed at the prayer, felt the thrill of her whispered words lingering in my heart. I seemed to know that we should rescue Frances, and I also knew that my love for Bettina would bring me nothing but joy, softened and sanctified by sadness, and to her nothing of evil save the pain of a gentle longing.

Betty felt as I did, for when she rose she said, "Now we shall find Mistress Jennings, and, Baron Ned, I shall fear you no more."

"Have you feared me?" I asked, touched to the quick by her artless candor.

"Yes," she answered, sighing. "Though I have feared myself more. You are so far above me in every way that it is no wonder I am bewildered when you say--say--that you--. You know what I mean."

"Yes, Betty," I answered quickly, feeling that she had more to say.

"I was bewildered in my parlor at the Old Swan to-day," she said, hanging her head. "Your opinion of me must have fallen."

"No, no, I understood, Betty, I understood, and I dare not tell you how much my opinion has risen because I would say more than would be good for you or for me," I answered rea.s.suringly.

"But you must remember that a girl has impulses and yearnings at times, and she should not be too harshly blamed if she sometimes fails to beat them down. But now it will all be different. The Blessed Virgin will help us, and our conflict is over."

Betty and I started back to the coach, both feeling the uplift of our answered prayer. Probably we were the only devotees that had knelt before the shrine in hundreds of years, and the Virgin had heard our supplication. It was a proposition I should have laughed at and held to scorn prior to that time.

After leaving the shrine, it was only a few minutes till the coach turned to the left into a narrow road, and we were approaching the end of our rough journey. We continued to travel at a brisk trot and came to the forest, "dark and wild," of which Lilly had spoken. Thus far his "calculations" were correct, and I was beginning to take hope that they would continue so to the end. After half an hour on the winding road through the forest, the drivers halted at the gate of which Lilly had spoken, and in ten minutes more drew rein beside the high brick wall surrounding Merlin House.

Without the least trouble we found the gates or doors in the wall, and truly enough, they were of "thick oak" so strong that we could not feel them vibrate when we tried to shake them, and so firmly locked in the middle that we almost despaired of opening them. The wall was too high to scale, and for a moment it looked as though our journey had been in vain. But Betty's keen wits came to our rescue.

When George and I had examined the gates and had almost despaired of opening them, Betty undertook an inspection of her own, and presently called our attention to a hole, perhaps four inches in diameter, in each gate, which was hidden by round curtains of wood hung within, so completely closing up the holes as to make them invisible save on close examination. She suggested that we pa.s.s the trace chain through one hole, draw it out through the other, hitch the horses to the two ends, and pull down the wall if the gates refused to give way.

Her plan was so good that the horses soon opened the gate, though it required a strong pull from all four of them to do it. Betty and I were the first to enter, George following close at our heels. The two drivers, who had taken the horses back to the coach, hitched them to a tree and soon followed us, bringing the long leather reins to be used as climbing ropes if necessary.

Hardly had we entered the gate till we saw a starlike gleam of light in a window of a room in the third story of the tower, as Lilly had predicted.

While I was convinced that the light came through a hole in the curtain rather than from a star held by Raphael to guide us, still my scepticism was rapidly turning to awe.

We were speaking of the light when two great dogs came bounding out of the darkness and attacked us. I drew my sword, a sharp, heavy blade, and being much frightened, began to swing it heroically in every direction.

Fortunately one of the dogs happened to be in one of the directions, and I split its head. The other dog attacked Betty, but George ran to her rescue and finished the animal before it had time to bark.

Having vanquished the dogs, we hastened to the tower and stopped beneath the window of the star. We had hoped to attract Frances's attention by casting pebbles against the window-pane, but we had counted without our ammunition. We could find no pebbles, the snow being at least a foot deep.

A thick vine, probably an ivy, covered the front of the tower, and George attempted to make the escalade by climbing. He would have denuded the wall had he continued his efforts, for the vine broke, not being strong enough to bear his weight.

"Let me try it," whispered Betty, taking off her greatcoat, hood, gloves, and boots and tossing them to the ground.

I objected to her risking her pretty neck and limbs, but she insisted that she could make the ascent easily, and George agreeing with her, I reluctantly consented.

Brave little Betty at once began the ascent, I standing under her to break the fall if she should take one. When she had climbed five or six feet from the ground, the vine broke and she fell, landing gracefully on her feet. Instantly she was at it again, for Betty had a will of her own greatly disproportioned to her size. Again the vine broke, and when I picked her up I found that she had lost her breath by the fall, but she laughed as soon as her breath returned, and was in no way discouraged.

In a moment she tried again, despite my protest, saying she would go more slowly and use greater care in choosing the larger vines. This time she was determined to succeed, so she again tied the leather reins about her arm, grasped the vine, and within two minutes was standing on the upper coping of the second-story window, her waist on a level with the sill of the window of the star.

The wind howling through the trees and around the corner of the tower made so great a din that at first we did not hear what Betty said to attract Frances's attention, but presently, the storm lulling for a moment, we listened intently and heard her say:--

"It is Betty Pickering."

We supposed she spoke in response to an inquiry from within, and we were right, for almost instantly the curtains parted, the window opened, and we saw Frances standing in the light of Raphael's star--a candle.

Up to that time I had been incredulous of Lilly's wisdom, and while I had hoped to find my cousin, I had little faith in the result. But now conviction came with a shock and, notwithstanding my joy at seeing Frances, I found myself forgetting where I was in wondering whether Lilly were a G.o.d, a devil, or merely a shrewd charlatan who had obtained his wonderfully accurate knowledge from something that had happened in the past wherein the king was concerned, or from some one who knew where Frances had been taken.

I was awakened from my revery by hearing George call in a low voice to Frances, telling her to fasten the ends of the leathers to a bedpost or a heavy piece of furniture, and asking her if she could come down hand under hand. She answered that she could and took the end of the reins from Betty. After a minute or two spent by Frances back in the room, she reappeared, tossed her cloak down to us, climbed out the window, and stood for a moment beside Betty on the lower window cap. I heard Betty encouraging her, and presently Frances began her descent, reaching the ground safely. George would have been demonstrative, but I interrupted him, saying:--