Page:Eugene Aram vol 3 - Lytton (1832).djvu/95

 the iron hands of Walter—"murderer of whom? I tell ye these are not Clarke's bones!"

"Where then do they lie?" cried his arrester.

Pale—confused—conscience-stricken—the bewilderment of intoxication mingling with that of fear, Houseman turned a ghastly look around him, and shrinking from the eyes of all, reading in the eyes of all his condemnation, he gasped out—"Search St. Robert's Cave, in the turn at the entrance!"

"Away!" rang the deep voice of Walter, on the instant—"away!—to the Cave—to the Cave!"

On the banks of the river Nid, whose waters keep an everlasting murmur to the crags and trees that overhang them, is a wild and dreary cavern, hollowed from a rock, which, according to tradition, was formerly the hermitage of one of those early enthusiasts who made their solitude in the sternest recesses of earth, and from the austerest thoughts, and the bitterest penance,