English literature -- England -- Lancashire; Legends -- England -- Lancashire
On this day, teeming with events, Dr Dee had been too closely engaged in
parish duties to give heed to these love fancies, and even had he been
ever so free to exercise his judgment in the matter, it is more than
likely Rodolf would not have opened to him the proceedings then afoot.
He well knew that the Doctor yet bore no good-will to Kelly, and might
possibly thwart his designs, to the undoing of any good purposed by the
strange transactions that had already occurred; he resolved, therefore,
to let this day pass, ere he opened his lips on the subject. But how to
while away the hours until evening was a most embarrassing problem.
Sleep he had tried, but he found no wish to repeat the experiment;
reading was just then foreign to his humour; mathematics must, that day,
go unstudied. After beating time to at least a dozen strange metres, he
hit upon the happy contrivance of writing a love-song, as a kind of
expedient to restore the equilibrium. He was rather unskilled at the
work; but the pen becomes eloquent when the soul moves it. We will,
however, leave him at this thrifty employment, having no design, gentle
reader, to make the occasion as wearisome to thee as to himself. Having
the power to annihilate both time and space, let us watch the round sun,
as he threw his last look, that evening, on the scene of this marvellous
history. The old walls of the college, and the church tower, were
invested with a gorgeous apparel of light, as though illumined for some
gay festival, some season of rejoicing, when gladness shines out visibly
in the shape of bonfires and torches. But few moments elapsed, ere the
love-sick youth was again admitted into the dark interior of the seer's
dwelling.
A voice whispered in his ear--
"Not a word, hardly a breath, as thou wouldest thrive in thy pursuit.
There be spirits abroad, not of earth, nor air. Be silent and discreet."
A ray suddenly darted across the room. Again the voice was at his ear:--
"Hold thine eye to the crevice when the light enters, and mark well what
thou beholdest."
Again he saw his mistress, apparently in a vaulted chamber, lighted by a
single lamp: she sat as if anxious and disturbed, her cheek pale and
flushed by turns, whilst her eye wandered hurriedly around the room.
Some one approached; it was the seer. Rodolf heard him speak.
"Maiden, hast thou a lover?"
The sound seemed scarcely akin to that of human speech. It rose heavily
and deep, as from the charnel-house, as if the grim and cold jaws of the
grave could utter a voice,--the dreary echoes of the tomb! The seer's
lips were motionless, whilst he thus continued in the same sepulchral
tone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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