Chapter 9

Kneel with me--swear it--'tis not in words I trust,
Save when they're fenced with an appeal to Heaven.
OLD PLAY

After passing the night in that sound sleep for which agitation and
fatigue had prepared him, Roland was awakened by the fresh morning
air, and by the beams of the rising sun. His first feeling was that of
surprise; for, instead of looking forth from a turret window on the
Lake of Avenel, which was the prospect his former apartment afforded,
an unlatticed aperture gave him the view of the demolished garden of
the banished anchorite. He sat up on his couch of leaves, and arranged
in his memory, not without wonder, the singular events of the
preceding day, which appeared the more surprising the more he
considered them. He had lost the protectress of his youth, and, in the
same day, he had recovered the guide and guardian of his childhood.
The former deprivation he felt ought to be matter of unceasing regret,
and it seemed as if the latter could hardly be the subject of unmixed
self-congratulation. He remembered this person, who had stood to him
in the relation of a mother, as equally affectionate in her attention,
and absolute in her authority. A singular mixture of love and fear
attended upon his early remembrances as they were connected with her;
and the fear that she might desire to resume the same absolute control
over his motions--a fear which her conduct of yesterday did not tend
much to dissipate--weighed heavily against the joy of this second
meeting.

"She cannot mean," said his rising pride, "to lead and direct me as a
pupil, when I am at the age of judging of my own actions?--this she
cannot mean, or meaning it, will feel herself strangely deceived."

A sense of gratitude towards the person against whom his heart thus
rebelled, checked his course of feeling. He resisted the thoughts
which involuntarily arose in his mind, as he would have resisted an
actual instigation of the foul fiend; and, to aid him in his struggle,
he felt for his beads. But, in his hasty departure from the Castle of
Avenel, he had forgotten and left them behind him.

"This is yet worse," he said; "but two things I learned of her under
the most deadly charge of secrecy--to tell my beads, and to conceal
that I did so; and I have kept my word till now; and when she shall
ask me for the rosary, I must say I have forgotten it! Do I deserve
she should believe me when. I say I have kept the secret of my faith,
when I set so light by its symbol?"

He paced the floor in anxious agitation. In fact, his attachment to
his faith was of a nature very different from that which animated the
enthusiastic matron, but which, notwithstanding, it would have been