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against the rocks, and perhaps causing them to fall over him.
Franz went on, however, keeping as near as possible to the zigzags of the counterscarp, feeling his way hand and foot, to make sure he was not going astray. Sustained by superhuman strength, he also felt himself guided by an extraordinary instinct that could not deceive him.
Beyond the bastion stretched the south wall, that with which the drawbridge established communication when it was not raised against the gate.
When the bastion was passed, obstacles appeared to multiply. Among the huge rocks which covered the plateau, to follow the counterscarp was impossible, and he had to leave it. Figure a man endeavouring to traverse a field of Carnac in which the dolmens and menhirs were on no plan whatever; and not a mark to guide him, not a ray of light in the dark night.
Franz kept on, here climbing over a rock which barred his way, there creeping among the rocks, his hands torn with the thistles and brushwood, his head skimmed by the pairs of ospreys disturbed in their resting-places and flying off, uttering their horrible scream.
Ah! why did not the chapel bell clang as it had clanged for Nic Deck and the doctor? Why did not the intense light which had enveloped them stream up from between the battlements of the donjon? He would have headed towards the sound, he would have made towards the light, as the sailor towards the siren’s whistle or the light house rays.
No! nothing but deep night bordered his view a few yards away.
This lasted for nearly an hour. When the ground began to slope to the left, Franz felt he was going wrong. Perhaps he had gone lower than the gate? Perhaps he was beyond the drawbridge?
He stopped, stamping his foot and wringing his hand. Which way should he go? Ah! how angry he was when he thought he would have to wait for the daylight! But then he would be seen by the people in the castle, he could not take them by surprise. Rodolphe de Gortz would be on his guard.
It was in the night-time that he must get into the enclosure, and Franz could not find his way in this darkness!
A cry escaped him—a cry of despair:
“Stilla!” he cried, “my Stilla!”
Did he think that the prisoner could hear him, that she could reply to him?
And yet a score of times he shouted the name, and the echoes of Plesa repeated it.
Suddenly Franz’s eyes were on the alert. A ray of light pierced the darkness—a dazzling ray, and its source was at a considerable elevation.
“There is the castle—there!” he said, and from its position the light could only come from the central donjon.
In his mental excitement Franz did not hesitate to believe that it was La Stilla who showed him this light. There could be no doubt she had recognized him at the moment he had perceived her through the battlements of the bastion. And now she it was who had given the signal and showed him the road to follow to reach the gate.
Franz went towards the light, which increased with every step he took. As he had gone too far to the left on the plateau, he had to go back about twenty yards to the right, and after a few trials he regained the edge of the counterscarp.
The light shone in his face, and its height showed that it came from one of the windows of the donjon.
Franz was about to find himself faced by the last obstacles—insurmountable, perhaps.
In fact, if the gate were shut, the drawbridge raised, he would have to go down to the foot of the wall, and what would he do then, where it was fifty feet high in front of him?
Franz went on towards the place where the drawbridge would rest if the gate were open.
The drawbridge was down.
Without even stopping to think, Franz rushed on to the bridge and laid his hand on the gate.
The gate opened.
Franz rushed under the dark arch. But before he had taken a dozen steps the drawbridge was raised with a clatter against the gate.
Count Franz de Télek was a prisoner in the Castle of the Carpathians.
CHAPTER XIII.
The country people and travellers who passed backwards or forwards over the Vulkan hill knew only the Castle of the Carpathians from its exterior aspect. At the respectful distance at which fear kept the bravest of Werst and its environs, it presented to the eye but an enormous mass of rocks which they might take to be ruins.
But within the enclosure was the castle as dilapidated as they supposed? No; and within the shelter of its solid walls and buildings, the old feudal fortress could have accommodated quite a garrison.
Vast vaulted halls, deep excavations, innumerable corridors, courts of which the stonework was hidden beneath the lofty fence of herbage, subterranean redoubts to which the light of day never penetrated, narrow staircases contrived in the thickness of the walls, casemates lighted by narrow loopholes in the external wall, a central donjon with three floors of apartments sufficiently habitable, crowned by a crenellated platform; and among the other buildings of the enclosure, interminable corridors capriciously entangled, mounting to the platform of the bastions, diving to the depths of the lower structure, with a few cisterns in which the rain-water was caught, the overflow feeding the torrent of the Nyad, and then long tunnels, not stopped up as was believed, but giving access to the Vulkan road—such was the state of the Castle of the Carpathians, the geometrical plan of which was as complicated as that of the labyrinths of Porsena, of Lemnos, or of Crete.
As Theseus was led on by his love for the daughter of Minos, so was it the power of love, more intense and more irresistible, which had led the count within the intricacies of the castle. Would he find an Ariadne’s thread to guide him, as the Greek hero had done?
Franz had had but one thought—to get within the enclosure, and he had got there. But one thing might have struck him, and that was that the drawbridge, which had always been raised, seemed to have been expressly lowered to admit him. Perhaps he might have been uneasy when the gate shut suddenly behind him? But he gave no thought to these things. He was at last in the castle where Rodolphe de Gortz was keeping La Stilla, and he would sacrifice his life to reach her.
The gallery into which Franz had advanced was wide, lofty, and with a vaulted roof, and it was quite dark, and its pavement was broken up, so that it had to be trodden carefully.
Franz took to the left wall, and kept to it, feeling his way along the facing, the efflorescent surface of which rubbed off on his hands. He heard no sound except that of his steps, which echoed in the distance. A draught of warm air with an ancient, frowsy smell swept gently past him, as if there were an opening at the other end of the gallery.
After passing a stone pillar which served as a buttress in the last angle to the left, Franz found himself in a much narrower corridor. He had only to open his arms to touch the walls.
He went on in this way, his body bent forward, feeling with hands and feet, and endeavouring to discover if the passage were a straight one.
Two hundred yards after passing the buttress Franz felt the wall curving off to the left, to take the exactly opposite direction fifty paces farther on. Did it return to the outer wall, or did it lead to the foot of the donjon?
Franz endeavoured to quicken his advance, but every moment he was hindered by a rise in the ground, against which he stumbled, or by some sharp angle which changed his direction. From time to time he would reach some opening in the wall leading off to lateral ramifications. But all was dark, unfathomable, and it was in vain he sought to make out where he was in this maze in a molehill.
He had to retrace his steps several times on ascertaining that