“Attend

“Attend, my son, yet attend, to one more advice, upon which all thy advantage and all thy success in this moment of crisis hang. Engage not in so arduous and important an enterprise immaturely. Thou hast yet no reason for despair. Thou art yet beheld with favour by propitious heaven. But thou mayest have reason for despair. One false step may ruin thee. One moment of heedless inconsideration may plunge thee in years of calamity. One moment of complying guilt may shut upon thee the door of enjoyment and happiness for ever.”
Such was the sorrow, and such were the consolations of Edwin. But far different was the situation, and far other scenes were prepared for his faithful shepherdess. For some time after she had been seized by Roderic, she had remained unconscious and supine. The terrors that had preceded the fatal capture, had overpowered her delicate frame, and sunk her into an alarming and obstinate fit of insensibility. They had now almost reached the palace of the magician, when she discovered the first symptoms of returning life. The colour gradually remounted into her bloodless cheeks; her hands were raised with a feeble and involuntary motion, and at length she lifted up her head, and opened her languid, unobserving eyes. “Edwin,” she cried, “my friend, my companion, where art thou? Where have we been? Oh, it is a long and tedious evening!” Saying this, she looked upon the objects around her. The sky was now become clear and smiling; the lowring clouds were dissipated, and the blue expanse was stretched without limits over their head. The sources of her former terror were indeed removed, but the objects that presented themselves were equally alarming. All was unexpected and all was unaccountable. Imogen had remained without consciousness from the very beginning of the storm, and it was during her insensibility that the goblin had been visible, and the magician descended to the plains. She found herself mounted upon a car, and hurried along by rapid steeds. She saw beside her a man whose face, whose garb, and whose whole appearance were perfectly unknown to her.
“Ah,” exclaimed the maiden, in a voice of amazement apprehension, “where am I? What is become of my Edwin? And what art thou? What means all this? These are not the well-known fields; this is not the brook of Towey, nor these hills of Clwyd. Oh, whither, whither do we fly? This track leads not to the cottage of my parents, and the groves of Rhyddlan.” “Be not uneasy, my fair one,” answered Roderic. “We go, though not by the usual path, to where your friends reside. I am not your enemy, but a swain who esteems it his happiness to have come between you and your distress, and to have rescued you from the pelting of the storm. Suspend, my love, for a few moments your suspicions and your anxiety, and we shall arrive where all your doubts will be removed, and all I hope will be pleasure and felicitation.” While he thus spoke the chariot hastened to the conclusion of their journey, and entered the area in the front of the mansion of Roderic.
The suspicions of Imogen were indeed removed, but in a manner too cruel for her tender frame. The terror and fatigue she had previously undergone had wasted her spirits, and the surprise she now experienced, was more than she could sustain. As the chariot entered the court, she cried out with a voice of horror and anguish, and sunk breathless into the arms of her ravisher. Though the passion he had already conceived for her, made this a circumstance of affliction, he yet in another view rejoiced, that he was able, by its intervention, to conduct his prize in a manner by stealth into his palace, and thus to prevent that struggle and those painful sensations, which she must otherwise have known. For could she have borne, without emotion, to see herself conveyed into a wretched imprisonment? Could she have submitted, without opposition, to be shut up, as it were, from the hope of revisiting those scenes, where once her careless childhood played, and those friends whom she valued more than life?