“And when shall we set forth, father?” said the youth, as eagerly as if the journey which he was now undertaking led to the pleasures of a summer holiday.
“Even now, if thou wilt,” said the Sub-Prior, yielding to his impetuosity—“go, then, and command them to prepare for our departure.—Yet stay,” he said, as Edward, with all the awakened enthusiasm of his character, hastened from his presence, “come hither, my son, and kneel down.”
Edward obeyed, and kneeled down before him. Notwithstanding his slight figure and thin features, the Sub-Prior could, from the energy of his tone, and the earnestness of his devotional manner, impress his pupils and his penitents with no ordinary feelings of personal reverence. His heart always was, as well as seemed to be, in the duty which he was immediately performing; and the spiritual guide who thus shows a deep conviction of the importance of his office, seldom fails to impress a similar feeling upon his hearers. Upon such occasions as the present, his puny body seemed to assume more majestic stature—his spare and emaciated countenance bore a bolder, loftier, and more commanding port—his voice, always beautiful, trembled as labouring under the immediate impulse of the Divinity—and his whole demeanour seemed to bespeak, not the mere ordinary man, but the organ of the Church in which she had vested her high power for delivering sinners from their load of iniquity.
“Hast thou, my fair son,” said he, “faithfully recounted the circumstances which have thus suddenly determined thee to a religious life?”
“The sins I have confessed, my father,” answered Edward, “but I have not yet told of a strange appearance, which, acting in my mind, hath, I think, aided to determine my resolution.”
“Tell it, then, now,” returned the Sub-Prior; “it is thy duty to leave me uninstructed in nought, so that thereby I may understand the temptation that besets thee.”
“I tell it with unwillingness,” said Edward; “for although, God wot, I speak but the mere truth, yet even while my tongue speaks it as truth, my own ears receive it as fable.”
“Yet say the whole,” said Father Eustace; “neither fear rebuke from me, seeing I may know reasons for receiving as true that which others might regard as fabulous.”
“Know, then, father,” replied Edward, “that betwixt hope and despair—and, heavens! what a hope!—the hope to find the corpse mangled and crushed hastily in amongst the bloody clay which the foot of the scornful victor had trod down upon my good, my gentle, my courageous brother,—I sped to the glen called Corri-nan-shian; but, as your reverence has been already informed, neither the grave, which my unhallowed wishes had in spite of my better self longed to see, nor any appearance of the earth having been opened, was visible in the solitary spot where Martin had, at morning yesterday, seen the fatal hillock. You know your dalesmen, father. The place hath an evil name, and this deception of the sight inclined them to leave it. My companions became affrighted, and hastened down the glen as men caught in trespass. My hopes were too much blighted, my mind too much agitated, to fear either the living or the dead. I descended the glen more slowly than they, often looking back, and not ill pleased with the poltroonery of my companions, which left me to my own perplexed and moody humour, and induced them to hasten into the broader dale. They were already out of sight, and lost amongst the windings of the glen, when, looking back, I saw a female form standing beside the fountain——”
“How, my fair son?” said the Sub-Prior, “beware you jest not with your present situation!”