Page:Walter Scott - The Monastery (Henry Frowde, 1912).djvu/191

RV 123 (Rh) The youth stood silent and astonished for a few minutes. It seemed to him that the extraordinary being he had seen, half his terror, half his protectress, was still hovering on the gale which swept past him, and that she might again make herself sensible to his organs of sight. 'Speak!' he said, wildly tossing his arms, 'speak yet again—be once more present, lovely vision! thrice have I now seen thee, yet the idea of thy invisible presence around or beside me makes my heart beat faster than if the earth yawned and gave up a demon.' But neither sound nor appearance indicated the presence of the White Lady, and nothing preternatural beyond what he had already witnessed was again audible or visible. Halbert, in the meanwhile, by the very exertion of again inviting the presence of this mysterious being, had recovered his natural audacity. He looked around once more, and resumed his solitary path down the valley into whose recesses he had penetrated.

Nothing could be more strongly contrasted than the storm of passion with which he had bounded over stock and crag in order to plunge himself into the Corri-nan-shian, and the sobered mood in which he now returned homeward, industriously seeking out the most practicable path, not from a wish to avoid danger, but that he might not by personal toil distract his attention, deeply fixed on the extraordinary scene which he had witnessed. In the former case, he had sought by hazard and bodily exertion to indulge at once the fiery excitation of passion, and to banish the cause of the excitement from his recollection; while now he studiously avoided all interruption to his contemplative walk, lest the difficulty of the way should interfere with, or disturb, his own deep reflections. Thus slowly pacing forth his course, with the air of a pilgrim rather than of a deer-hunter, Halbert about the close of the evening regained his paternal tower.