Page:Walter Scott - The Monastery (Henry Frowde, 1912).djvu/180

RV 112 (Rh) swelled with jealous anger, and the tear still in his eye, sped up the wild and upper extremity of the little valley of Glendearg with the speed of a roebuck, choosing, as if in desperate defiance of the difficulties of the way, the wildest and most dangerous paths, and voluntarily exposing himself a hundred times to dangers which he might have escaped by turning a little aside from them. It seemed as if he wished his course to be as straight as that of the arrow to its mark.

He arrived at length in a narrow and secluded cleuch or deep ravine, which ran down into the valley and contributed a scanty rivulet to the supply of the brook with which Glendearg is watered. Up this he sped with the same precipitate haste which had marked his departure from the tower, nor did he pause and look around until he had reached the fountain from which the rivulet had its rise.

Here Halbert stopped short, and cast a gloomy and almost a frightened glance around him. A huge rock rose in front, from a cleft of which grew a wild holly-tree whose dark-green branches rustled over the spring which arose beneath. The banks on either hand rose so high and approached each other so closely, that it was only when the sun was at its meridian height, and during the summer solstice, that its rays could reach the bottom of the chasm in which he stood. But it was now summer, and the hour was noon, so that the unwonted reflection of the sun was dancing in the pellucid fountain.

'It is the season and the hour,' said Halbert to himself; 'and now II might soon become wiser than Edward with all his pains! Mary should see whether he alone is fit to be consulted, and to sit by her side, and hang over her as she reads, and point out every word and every letter. And she loves me better than him—I am sure she does, for she comes of noble blood, and scorns sloth and cowardice. And do I myself not stand here slothful and cowardly as any priest of them all? Why should I fear to call upon this form—this shape? Already have I endured the vision, and why not again? What can it do to me, who am a man of lith and limb, and have by my side my father's sword? Does my heart beat, do my hairs