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Michal had indeed been initiated into the mystery of such writings, and as at that time there were very few variations in cipher writing, a person who held the key of one of them might very easily decipher all the others; and in fact, Valentine succeeded, with the aid of the key supplied to him by Michal, in deciphering the whole letter. But now a second difficulty arose.
Then she returned to the study of the doctor's caligraphy, and copied a little more of it, but the proportion of the time she gave to the deciphering of the original manuscript to that occupied in writing the words in her own hand was about as ten is to one. An hour had elapsed since she had begun to write on the page, which she had not yet filled.
"That seems like a pretty pointless distinction," Selim von Ohlmhorst joined the conversation. "There no longer exists a means of deciphering it." "We'll find one." She was speaking, she realized, more in self-encouragement than in controversy. "How? From pictures and captions? We've found captioned pictures, and what have they given us?
"Read it," he bade her again, though there was no need for the injunction, for already she was deciphering the crabbed hand and the atrocious spelling for His Grace of Monmouth's education had been notoriously neglected. The letter, which was dated from The Hague, was addressed "To my good friend W., at Bridgwater."
The correspondent, a plain, uneducated man, had considerable difficulty in deciphering the fashionable scrawl common with merchants' clerks of late years, and the most important word, "cranberries," he failed to make out, but he did plainly and clearly read one hundred bushels persimmons.
"Clap your peep sight on that, Hap Smith. Poh at me, will you?" and close up to the driver's eyes he thrust the road house register with its newly pencilled inscription so close that Hap Smith dodged and was some time deciphering the brief legend. "Beats me," he grunted, when he had done. He tossed the book to a table as a matter of no moment and shrugged.
Since that period, whenever the world's circumstance has not imperiously called me away, or the temper of my mind impeded such study, I have been employed in deciphering these sacred remains. Their meaning, wondrous and eloquent, has often repaid my toil, soothing me in sorrow, and exciting my imagination to daring flights, through the immensity of nature and the mind of man.
Neither gold nor wine hath he; at this water shall he merry be. In the year of the Lord fifteen hundred and fifteen, hath the work completed been. God be praised!" As they were deciphering the rude characters of this pious inscription, a village priest came down a high flight of steps from the parsonage near the church, and courteously saluted the strangers.
"In the year 1588," says he, "there was a prophecy printed in Greek characters, exactly deciphering the long troubles of the English nation from 1641 to 1660;" and it ended thus: "And after him shall come a dreadful dead man, and with him a royal G, of the best blood in the world, and he shall have the crown, and shall set England on the right way, and put out all heresies."
The words were all short and simple and Dora had not much difficulty in deciphering their meaning. Anyhow, she now never sought my assistance for her reading. I can still see her seated at the table, a considerable distance from me, moving her head from word to word and from line to line, and silently working her lips, as though muttering an incantation.
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