"He will never find me again," she mused. Tears came to her eyes, and the drops which were not to be kept back fell on the palm of the stouter Quakeress, who was dozing.
The woman opened her sleepy eyes and gazed at her almost compassionately, then closed them again and fell into a deep slumber. The coach was striking level land. Now the other Quakeress was nodding. For a moment the girl was tempted to seize the blunderbuss from its leather bed and jump out into the road. Then fear overcame her, and she, too, sank back and closed her eyes.
It was the ringing of an evening bell tolled in a nearby hamlet which welcomed them into the beautiful roadway leading to Penn Rhyn. That roadway is little changed to-day, but the house itself gazes upon its visitors in new attire. Probably there is no mansion in Pennsylvania that has had a more interesting history than this pile erected early in the eighteenth century by a pompous Bickley from Buckinghamshire. On the estate is the family tomb guarding the dust of many generations of Bickleys—young Bickleys who faded before their perfect bloom, old Bickleys who were glad enough to lay down the thread of life and rest their tired bones on that moss-grown bank. A long procession of men and women bearing a name that they all were proud of, with but one exception. He, Robert Bickley, cursed his name and his father one Christmas night and then threw himself into the Delaware because the stern gentleman had told him never to darken his door in life, owing to an unfortunate marriage. Now, every Christmas eve it is said that he rises from the river, gaunt and slimy, and steals up the path to the house. Sometimes a belated wanderer sees him standing in the moonlight before the great hall door of Penn Rhyn, moaning over his unhappy fate. Again he is heard in the corridors tapping with ghostly fingers at each chamber door for admittance. Promptly on the stroke of twelve weird, unearthly cries fill the house. Then every wakeful sleeper cuddles down low under the bedclothes. Perhaps it is only the wind playing about the chimneys, but the superstitious would have us believe that it is the shade of poor Robert Bickley calling to his young wife and cursing his fate and name.
Twilight, with her many fairy couriers,—the glowworms, fireflies, and velvety night-moths,—was settling over the paths of Penn Rhyn's garden when the two Quakeresses and the girl, stiff from their long journey, alighted before the Bickley door. The Bickleys were overjoyed to see their sister before brother Shewell's letter was delivered by the stoutest of the guards, who still carried the blunderbuss. After Abram Bickley perused the epistle with knitted brow an air of depression fell on the group. "She is to stay in the country, guarded close, for the summer, and the next summer until this painter fellow is filched from her head," he read to his wife.
The figures on the porch, with their background of dim vines and murky bricks, made a night-piece worthy of the brush of Mr. Hogarth. To the girl, tired and distraught, the front of the house seemed to be covered with mocking faces like the masks about the playboard of the Philadelphia theatre. She hated them all with their looks of compassion, scorn, and surprise. The dull-witted Quakeresses were speaking again with her brother-in-law. Their slow-mouthed sentences came to her ears. "I am here like some poor thief awaiting jail," the girl thought, as she looked at them. Then the faces began to fade. She had wandered into a world of fragrant dusk filled with the good-night prayers of closing flowers. She would willingly go to jail for love. There was nothing more beautiful in the world. Each prison bar she would twine with it. Each day and night should be carpeted with it. Her face was raised heavenward to the field of little stars.
In the course of events the world in which the Shewells moved learned that Benjamin West had departed for England, and that Betsey Shewell was secreted in a safe country retreat where it would be impossible for him to find her. Sarah Franklin brought to her father's mind his half promise to aid the lovers.
"We must bide our time," he said. "Haste trips up its own heels." That night he penned a letter to West in London. In a few months an answer came. When "Pappy" showed it to his family one morning, they almost devoured him with kisses.
"Take me with you, father, when you set out for Bickleys," Sarah implored. "I want to be in the plot."
"That you shall," he promised her. "There is much to be done first, though, for we must get at old West."