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BY THE AUTHOR OF “BERTRAM,” &c.
IN FOUR VOLUMES.
VOL. III.
EDINBURGH:
PRINTED FOR ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY,
AND HURST, ROBINSON, AND CO. CHEAPSIDE,
LONDON.
1820.
MELMOTH.
CHAPTER XII.
Juravi lingua, mentem injuratam gero.——
Who brought you first acquainted with the devil?
Shirley’s St Patrick for Ireland.
“I ran on till I had no longer breath or
strength, (without perceiving that I was
in a dark passage), till I was stopt by a
door. In falling against it, I burst it open,
and found myself in a low dark room.
When I raised myself, for I had fallen on
my hands and knees, I looked round, and
saw something so singular, as to suspend
even my personal anxiety and terror for a
moment.
“The room was very small; and I could
perceive by the rents, that I had not only
broken open a door, but a large curtain
which hung before it, whose ample folds
still afforded me concealment if I required
it. There was no one in the room, and I
had time to study its singular furniture at
leisure.
“There was a table covered with cloth;
on it were placed a vessel of a singular construction,
a book, into whose pages I looked,
but could not make out a single letter.
I therefore wisely took it for a book of magic,
and closed it with a feeling of exculpatory
horror. (It happened to be a
copy of the Hebrew Bible, marked with
the Samaritan points). There was a knife
too; and a cock was fastened to the leg of
the table, whose loud crows announced his
impatience of further constraint(1).
“I felt that this apparatus was somewhat
singular—it looked like a preparation
for a sacrifice. I shuddered, and
wrapt myself in the volumes of the drapery
which hung before the door my fall
had broken open. A dim lamp, suspended
from the ceiling, discovered to me all these
objects, and enabled me to observe what
followed almost immediately. A man of
middle age, but whose physiognomy had
something peculiar in it, even to the eye
of a Spaniard, from the clustering darkness
of his eye-brows, his prominent nose, and
a certain lustre in the balls of his eyes, entered
the room, knelt before the table, kissed
the book that lay on it, and read from
it some sentences that were to precede, as I
imagined, some horrible sacrifice;—felt the
edge of the knife, knelt again, uttered
some words which I did not understand,
(as they were in the language of that book),
and then called aloud on some one by the
name of Manasseh-ben-Solomon. No one
answered. He sighed, passed his hand
over his eyes with the air of a man who is
asking pardon of himself for a short forgetfulness,
and then pronounced the name of
“Antonio.” A young man immediately
entered, and answered, “Did you call me,
Father?”—But while he spoke, he threw
a hollow and wandering glance on the singular
furniture of the room.
“I called you, my son, and why did you
not answer me?”—“I did not hear you, father—I
mean, I did not think it was on
me you called. I heard only a name I
was never called by before. When you
said ‘Antonio,’ I obeyed you—I came.”—“But
that is the name by which you
must in future be called and be known,
to me at least, unless you prefer another.—You
shall have your choice.”—“My father,
I shall adopt whatever name you choose.”—“No;
the choice of your new name
must be your own—you must, for the future,
either adopt the name you have heard,
or another.”—“What other, Sir?”—“That
of parricide.” The youth shuddered with
horror, less at the words than at the expression
that accompanied them; and, after
looking at his father for some time in
a posture of tremulous and supplicating
inquiry, he burst into tears. The father
seized the moment. He grasped the arms
of his son, “My child, I gave you life, and
you may repay the gift—my life is in your
power. You think me a Catholic—I have
brought you up as one for the preservation
of our mutual lives, in a country where
the confession of the true faith would infallibly
cost both. I am one of that unhappy
race every where stigmatized and
spoken against, yet on whose industry and
talent the ungrateful country that anathematizes
us, depends for half the sources of
its national prosperity. I am a Jew, “an
Israelite,” one of those to whom, even by
the confession of a Christian apostle, “pertain
the adoption, and the glory, and the
covenants, and the giving of the law, and
the service of God, and the promises; whose
are the fathers, and of whom as concerning
the flesh—” Here he paused, not willing
to go on with a quotation that would have
contradicted his sentiments. He added,
“The Messias will come, whether suffering
or triumphant(2). I am a Jew. I called
you at the hour of your birth by the
name of Manasseh-ben-Solomon. I called
on you by that name, which I felt had
clung to the bottom of my heart from that
hour, and which, echoing from its abyss,
I almost hoped you would have recognized.
It was a dream, but will you not, my
beloved child, realize that dream? Will
you not?—will you not? The God of
your fathers is waiting to embrace you—and
your father is at your feet, imploring
you to follow the faith of your father Abraham,
the prophet Moses, and all the
holy prophets who are with God, and
who look down on this moment of your
soul’s vacillation between the abominable
idolatries of those who not only adore
the Son of the carpenter, but even impiously
compel you to fall down before
the image of the woman his mother,
and adore her by the blasphemous name
of Mother of God,—and the pure voice of
those who call on you to worship the God
of your fathers, the God of ages, the eternal
God of heaven and earth, without son
or mother, without child or descendant, (as
impiously presumed in their blasphemous
creed), without even worshipper, save those
who, like me, sacrifice their hearts to him
in solitude, at the risk of those hearts being
PIERCED BY THEIR OWN CHILDREN.”
“At these words, the young man, overcome
by all he saw and heard, and quite
unprepared for this sudden transition from
Catholicism to Judaism, burst into tears.
The father seized the moment, “My child,
you are now to profess yourself the slave
of these idolaters, who are cursed in the
law of Moses, and by the commandment
of God,—or to enrol yourself among the
faithful, whose rest shall be in the bosom
of Abraham, and who, reposing there, shall
see the unbelieving crawling over the burning
ashes of hell, and supplicate you in
vain for a drop of water, according to the
legends of their own prophet. And does
not such a picture excite your pride to deny
them a drop?”—“I would not deny
them a drop,” sobbed the youth, “I would
give them these tears.”—“Reserve them
for your father’s grave,” added the Jew,
“for to the grave you have doomed me.—I
have lived, sparing, watching, temporizing,
with these accursed idolaters, for you.
And now—and now you reject a God who
is alone able to save, and a father kneeling
to implore you to accept that salvation.”—“No,
I do not,” said the bewildered youth.—“What,
then, do you determine?—I am
at your feet to know your resolution. Behold,
the mysterious instruments of your
initiation are ready. There is the uncorrupted
book of Moses, the prophet of God,
as these idolaters themselves confess.
There are all the preparations for the year
of expiation—determine whether those
rites shall now dedicate you to the true
God, or seize your father, (who has put his
life into your hands), and drag him by the
throat into the prisons of the Inquisition.
You may—you can—will you?”
“In prostrate and tremulous agony, the
father held up his locked hands to his
child. I seized the moment—despair had
made me reckless. I understood not a
word of what was said, except the reference
to the Inquisition. I seized on that
last word—I grasped, in my despair, at the
heart of father and child. I rushed from
behind the curtain, and exclaiming, “If
he does not betray you to the Inquisition,
I will.” I fell at his feet. This mixture
of defiance and prostration, my squalid
figure, my inquisitorial habit, and my
bursting on this secret and solemn interview,
struck the Jew with a horror he
vainly gasped to express, till, rising from
my knees, on which I had fallen from my
weakness, I added, “Yes, I will betray
you to the Inquisition, unless you instantly
promise to shelter me from it.” The
Jew glanced at my dress, perceived his
danger and mine, and, with a physical presence
of mind unparalleled, except in a
man under strong impressions of mental
excitation and personal danger, bustled about
to remove every trace of the expiatory
sacrifice, and of my inquisitorial costume,
in a moment. In the same breath
he called aloud for Rebekah, to remove the
vessels from the table; bid Antonio quit
the apartment, and hastened to clothe me
in some dress that he had snatched from a
wardrobe collected from centuries; while
he tore off my inquisitorial dress with a
violence that left me actually naked, and
the habit in rags.
“There was something at once fearful
and ludicrous in the scene that followed.
Rebekah, an old Jewish woman, came
at his call; but, seeing a third person, retreated
in terror, while her master, in his
confusion, called her in vain by her Christian
name of Maria. Obliged to remove
the table alone, he overthrew it, and broke
the leg of the unfortunate animal fastened
to it, who, not to be without his share
in the tumult, uttered the most shrill and
intolerable screams, while the Jew, snatching
up the sacrificial knife, repeated eagerly,
“Statim mactat gallum,” and put the
wretched bird out of its pain; then, trembling
at this open avowal of his Judaism,
he sat down amid the ruins of the overthrown
table, the fragments of the broken
vessels, and the remains of the martyred
cock. He gazed at me with a look of stupified
and ludicrous inanity, and demanded
in delirious tones, what “my lords the
Inquisitors had pleased to visit his humble
but highly-honoured mansion for?” I
was scarce less deranged than he was;
and, though we both spoke the same language,
and were forced by circumstances
into the same strange and desperate confidence
with each other, we really needed,
for the first half-hour, a rational interpreter
of our exclamations, starts of fear, and
bursts of disclosure. At last our mutual
terror acted honestly between us, and we
understood each other. The end of the
matter was, that, in less than an hour, I
felt myself clad in a comfortable garment,
seated at a table amply spread, watched
over by my involuntary host, and watching
him in turn with red wolfish eyes,
which glanced from his board to his person,
as if I could, at a moment’s hint of
danger from his treachery, have changed
my meal, and feasted on his life-blood.
No such danger occurred,—my host was
more afraid of me than I had reason to be
of him, and for many causes. He was a
Jew innate, an impostor,—a wretch, who,
drawing sustenance from the bosom of our
holy mother the church, had turned her
nutriment to poison, and attempted to infuse
that poison into the lips of his son.
I was but a fugitive from the Inquisition,—a
prisoner, who had a kind of instinctive
and very venial dislike to giving the
Inquisitors the trouble of lighting the faggots
for me, which would be much better
employed in consuming the adherent to
the law of Moses. In fact, impartiality
considered, there was every thing in my
favour, and the Jew just acted as if he felt
so,—but all this I ascribed to his terrors of
the Inquisition.
“That night I slept,—I know not how
or where. I had wild dreams before I
slept, if I did sleep; and after,—such visions,—such
things, passed in dread and
stern reality before me. I have often in
my memory searched for the traces of the
first night I passed under the roof of the
Jew, but can find nothing,—nothing except
a conviction of my utter insanity. It might
not have been so,—I know not how it was.
I remember his lighting me up a narrow
stair, and my asking him, was he lighting
me down the steps of the dungeons of the
Inquisition?—his throwing open a door,
and my asking him, was it the door of the
torture-room?—his attempting to undress
me, and my exclaiming, “Do not bind
me too tight,—I know I must suffer, but
be merciful;”—his throwing me on the
bed, while I shrieked, “Well, you have
bound me on the rack, then?—strain it
hard, that I may forget myself the sooner;
but let your surgeon not be near to watch
my pulse,—let it cease to throb, and let
me cease to suffer.” I remember no more
for many days, though I have struggled
to do so, and caught from time to time
glimpses of thoughts better lost. Oh, Sir,
there are some criminals of the imagination,
whom if we could plunge into the
oubliettes of its magnificent but lightly-based
fabric, its lord would reign more
happy. * * *
* * * *
“Many days elapsed, indeed, before the
Jew began to feel his immunity somewhat
dearly purchased, by the additional maintenance
of a troublesome, and, I fear, a
deranged inmate. He took the first opportunity
that the recovery of my intellect
offered, of hinting this to me, and inquired
mildly what I purposed to do, and
where I meant to go. This question for
the first time opened to my view that
range of hopeless and interminable desolation
that lay before me,—the Inquisition
had laid waste the whole track of life, as
with fire and sword. I had not a spot to
stand on, a meal to earn, a hand to grasp,
a voice to greet, a roof to crouch under,
in the whole realm of Spain.
“You are not to learn, Sir, that the power
of the Inquisition, like that of death, separates
you, by its single touch, from all mortal
relations. From the moment its grasp
has seized you, all human hands unlock their
hold of yours,—you have no longer father,
mother, sister, or child. The most devoted
and affectionate of all those relatives,
who, in the natural intercourse of human
life, would have laid their hands under
your feet to procure you a smoother passage
over its roughnesses, would be the
first to grasp the faggot that was to reduce
you to ashes, if the Inquisition were to
demand the sacrifice. I knew all this;
and I felt, besides, that, had I never been
a prisoner in the Inquisition, I was an isolated
being, rejected by father and mother,—the
involuntary murderer of my brother,
the only being on earth who loved me, or
whom I could love or profit by,—that being
who seemed to flash across my brief
human existence, to illuminate and to
blast. The bolt had perished with the victim.
In Spain it was impossible for me
to live without detection, unless I plunged
myself into an imprisonment as profound
and hopeless as that of the Inquisition.
And, if a miracle were wrought to
convey me out of Spain, ignorant as I was
of the language, the habits, and the modes
of obtaining subsistence, in that or any
other country, how could I support myself
even for a day. Absolute famine
stared me in the face, and a sense of degradation
accompanying my consciousness
of my own utter and desolate helplessness,
was the keenest shaft in the quiver,
whose contents were lodged in my heart.
My consequence was actually lessened in
my own eyes, by ceasing to become the
victim of persecution, by which I had
suffered so long. While people think it
worth their while to torment us, we are
never without some dignity, though painful
and imaginary. Even in the Inquisition
I belonged to somebody,—I was
watched and guarded;—now, I was the
outcast of the whole earth, and I wept
with equal bitterness and depression at
the hopeless vastness of the desert I had
to traverse.
“The Jew, not at all disturbed by these
feelings, went daily out for intelligence,
and returned one evening in such raptures,
that I could easily discover he had ascertained
his own safety at least, if not mine.
He informed me that the current report in
Madrid was, that I had perished in the
fall of the burning ruins on the night of
the fire. He added, that this report had
received additional currency and strength
from the fact, that the bodies of those who
had perished by the fall of the arch, were,
when discovered, so defaced by fire, and
so crushed by the massive fragments, as
to be utterly undistinguishable;—their remains
had been collected, however, and
mine were supposed to be among the number.
A mass had been performed for
them, and their cinders, occupying but a
single coffin(3), were interred in the vaults
of the Dominican church, while some of
the first families of Spain, in the deepest
mourning, and their faces veiled, testified
their grief in silence for those whom they
would have shuddered to acknowledge
their mortal relationship to, had they been
still living. Certainly a lump of cinders
was no longer an object even of religious
hostility. My mother, he added, was
among the number of mourners, but with
a veil so long and thick, and attendance so
few, that it would have been impossible
to have known the Duchess di Monçada,
but for the whisper that her appearance
there had been enjoined for penance. He
added, what gave me more perfect satisfaction,
that the holy office was very glad
to accredit the story of my death; they
wished me to be believed dead, and what
the Inquisition wishes to be believed, is
rarely denied belief in Madrid. This signing
my certificate of death, was to me the
best security for life. In the communicativeness
of his joy, which had expanded
his heart, if not his hospitality, the Jew,
as I swallowed my bread and water, (for
my stomach still loathed all animal food),
informed me that there was a procession to
take place that evening, the most solemn
and superb ever witnessed in Madrid.
The holy office was to appear in all the
pomp and plenitude of its glory, accompanied
by the standards of St Dominic and
the cross, while all the ecclesiastical orders
in Madrid were to attend with their appropriate
insignia, invested by a strong
military guard, (which, for some reason or
other, was judged necessary or proper),
and, attended by the whole populace of
Madrid, was to proceed to the principal
church to humiliate themselves for the recent
calamity they had undergone, and
implore the saints to be more personally
active in the event of a future conflagration.
“The evening came on—the Jew left
me; and, under an impression at once unaccountable
and irresistible, I ascended
to the highest apartment in his house,
and, with a beating heart, listened for the
toll of the bells that was to announce the
commencement of the ceremony. I had
not long to wait. At the close of twilight,
every steeple in the city was vibrating
with the tolls of their well-plied bells. I
was in an upper room of the house.
There was but one window; but, hiding
myself behind the blind, which I withdrew
from time to time, I had a full view of the
spectacle. The house of the Jew looked
out on an open space, through which the
procession was to pass, and which was already
so filled, that I wondered how the
procession could ever make its way through
such a wedged and impenetrable mass. At
last, I could distinguish a motion like that
of a distant power, giving a kind of indefinite
impulse to the vast body that rolled
and blackened beneath me, like the ocean
under the first and far-felt agitations of the
storm.
“The crowd rocked and reeled, but did
not seem to give way an inch. The procession
commenced. I could see it approach,
marked as it was by the crucifix,
banner, and taper—(for they had reserved
the procession till a late hour, to give it the
imposing effect of torch-light.) And I saw
the multitude at a vast distance give way
at once. Then came on the stream of the
procession, rushing, like a magnificent
river, between two banks of human bodies,
who kept as regular and strict distance,
as if they had been ramparts of
stone,—the banners, and crucifixes, and
tapers, appearing like the crests of foam
on advancing billows, sometimes rising,
sometimes sinking. At last they came on,
and the whole grandeur of the procession
burst on my view, and nothing was ever
more imposing, or more magnificent. The
habits of the ecclesiastics, the glare of the
torches struggling with the dying twilight,
and seeming to say to heaven, We have a
sun though yours is set;—the solemn and
resolute look of the whole party, who trod
as if their march were on the bodies of
kings, and looked as if they would have
said, What is the sceptre to the cross?—the
black crucifix itself, trembling in the
rear, attended by the banner of St Dominick,
with its awful inscription.—It was a
sight to convert all hearts, and I exulted I
was a Catholic. Suddenly a tumult seemed
to arise among the crowd—I knew not
from what it could arise—all seemed so
pleased and so elated.
“I drew away the blind, and saw, by
torch-light, among a crowd of officials who
clustered round the standard of St Dominick,
the figure of my companion. His
story was well known. At first a faint
hiss was heard, then a wild and smothered
howl. Then I heard voices among the
crowd repeat, in audible sounds, “What
is this for? Why do they ask why the
Inquisition has been half-burned?—why
the virgin has withdrawn her protection?—why
the saints turn away their faces
from us?—when a parricide marches among
the officials of the Inquisition. Are
the hands that have cut a father’s throat
fit to support the banner of the cross?”
These were the words but of a few at first,
but the whisper spread rapidly among the
crowd; and fierce looks were darted, and
hands were clenched and raised, and some
stooped to the earth for stones. The procession
went on, however, and every one
knelt to the crucifixes as they advanced,
held aloft by the priests. But the murmurs
increased too, and the words, “parricide,
profanation, and victim,” resounded
on every side, even from those who knelt
in the mire as the cross passed by. The
murmur increased—it could no longer be
mistaken for that of adoration. The foremost
priests paused in terror ill concealed—and
this seemed the signal for the terrible
scene that was about to follow. An
officer belonging to the guard at this time
ventured to intimate to the chief Inquisitor
the danger that might be apprehended,
but was dismissed with the short and sullen
answer, “Move on—the servants of
Christ have nothing to fear.” The procession
attempted to proceed, but their progress
was obstructed by the multitude,
who now seemed bent on some deadly
purpose. A few stones were thrown; but
the moment the priests raised their crucifixes,
the multitude were on their knees
again, still, however, holding the stones
in their hands. The military officers again
addressed the chief Inquisitor, and
intreated his permission to disperse the
crowd. They received the same dull
and stern answer, “The cross is sufficient
for the protection of its servants—whatever
fears you may feel, I feel none.”
Incensed at the reply, a young officer
sprung on his horse, which he had quitted
from respect while addressing the Suprema,
and was in a moment levelled by the
blow of a stone that fractured his skull.
He turned his blood-swimming eyes on
the Inquisitor, and died. The multitude
raised a wild shout, and pressed closer.
Their intentions were now too plain.
They pressed close on that part of the procession
among which their victim was
placed. Again, and in the most urgent
terms, the officers implored leave to disperse
the crowd, or at least cover the retreat
of the obnoxious object to some
neighbouring church, or even to the walls
of the Inquisition. And the wretched
man himself, with loud outcries, (as he
saw the danger thickening around him),
joined in their petition. The Suprema,
though looking pale, bated not a jot
of his pride. “These are my arms!” he
exclaimed, pointing to the crucifixes, “and
their inscription is εν-τουτω-νικα. I forbid a
sword to be drawn, or a musket to be
levelled. On, in the name of God.” And
on they attempted to move, but the pressure
now rendered it impossible. The multitude,
unrepressed by the military, became
ungovernable; the crosses reeled and rocked
like standards in a battle; the ecclesiastics,
in confusion and terror, pressed on
each other. Amid that vast mass, every
particle of which seemed in motion, there
was but one emphatic and discriminate
movement—that which bore a certain part
of the crowd strait on to the spot where
their victim, though inclosed and inwrapt
by all that is formidable in earthly, and all
that is awful in spiritual power—sheltered
by the crucifix and the sword—stood trembling
to the bottom of his soul. The Suprema
saw his error too late, and now called
loudly on the military to advance, and
disperse the crowd by any means. They
attempted to obey him; but by this time
they were mingled among the crowd themselves.
All order had ceased; and besides,
there appeared a kind of indisposition to
this service, from the very first, among the
military. They attempted to charge, however;
but, entangled as they were among
the crowd, who clung round their horses
hoofs, it was impossible for them even to
form, and the first shower of stones threw
them into total confusion. The danger
increased every moment, for one spirit now
seemed to animate the whole multitude.
What had been the stifled growl of a few,
was now the audible yell of all—“Give
him to us—we must have him;” and they
tossed and roared like a thousand waves
assailing a wreck. As the military retreated,
a hundred priests instantly closed
round the unhappy man, and with generous
despair exposed themselves to the fury
of the multitude. While the Suprema,
hastening to the dreadful spot, stood in
the front of the priests, with the cross
uplifted,—his face was like that of the
dead, but his eye had not lost a single
flash of its fire, nor his voice a tone of
its pride. It was in vain; the multitude
proceeded calmly, and even respectfully,
(when not resisted), to remove all
that obstructed their progress; in doing
so, they took every care of the persons of
priests whom they were compelled to remove,
repeatedly asking their pardon for
the violence they were guilty of. And
this tranquillity of resolved vengeance was
the most direful indication of its never
desisting till its purpose was accomplished.
The last ring was broken—the last resister
overcome. Amid yells like those of a
thousand tigers, the victim was seized and
dragged forth, grasping in both hands fragments
of the robes of those he had clung
to in vain, and holding them up in the
impotence of despair.
“The cry was hushed for a moment, as
they felt him in their talons, and gazed on
him with thirsty eyes. Then it was renewed,
and the work of blood began.
They dashed him to the earth—tore him
up again—flung him into the air—tossed
him from hand to hand, as a bull gores the
howling mastiff with horns right and left.
Bloody, defaced, blackened with earth,
and battered with stones, he struggled and
roared among them, till a loud cry announced
the hope of a termination to a
scene alike horrible to humanity, and disgraceful
to civilization. The military,
strongly reinforced, came galloping on,
and all the ecclesiastics, with torn habits,
and broken crucifixes, following fast in
the rear,—all eager in the cause of human
nature—all on fire to prevent this
base and barbarous disgrace to the name
of Christianity and of human nature.
“Alas! this interference only hastened
the horrible catastrophe. There was but
a shorter space for the multitude to work
their furious will. I saw, I felt, but I cannot
describe, the last moments of this horrible
scene. Dragged from the mud and
stones, they dashed a mangled lump of
flesh right against the door of the house
where I was. With his tongue hanging
from his lacerated mouth, like that of a
baited bull; with one eye torn from the
socket, and dangling on his bloody cheek;
with a fracture in every limb, and a wound
for every pore, he still howled for “life—life—life—mercy!”
till a stone, aimed by
some pitying hand, struck him down.
He fell, trodden in one moment into sanguine
and discoloured mud by a thousand
feet. The cavalry came on, charging
with fury. The crowd, saturated
with cruelty and blood, gave way in grim
silence. But they had not left a joint of
his little finger—a hair of his head—a slip
of his skin. Had Spain mortgaged all her
reliques from Madrid to Monserrat, from
the Pyrennees to Gibraltar, she could not
have recovered the paring of a nail to canonize.
The officer who headed the troop
dashed his horse’s hoofs into a bloody formless
mass, and demanded, “Where was
the victim?” He was answered, “Beneath
your horse’s feet(4);” and they departed. * * * *
* * * * *
“It is a fact, Sir, that while witnessing
this horrible execution, I felt all the effects
vulgarly ascribed to fascination. I shuddered
at the first movement—the dull and
deep whisper among the crowd. I shrieked
involuntarily when the first decisive
movements began among them; but when
at last the human shapeless carrion was
dashed against the door, I echoed the wild
shouts of the multitude with a kind of savage
instinct. I bounded—I clasped my
hands for a moment—then I echoed the
screams of the thing that seemed no longer
to live, but still could scream; and I
screamed aloud and wildly for life—life—and
mercy! One face was turned towards
me as I shrieked in unconscious tones.
The glance, fixed on me for a moment,
was in a moment withdrawn. The
flash of the well-known eyes made no
impression on me then. My existence
was so purely mechanical, that, without
the least consciousness of my own danger,
(scarce less than that of the victim, had I
been detected), I remained uttering shout
for shout, and scream for scream—offering
worlds in imagination to be able to remove
from the window, yet feeling as if every
shriek I uttered was as a nail that fastened
me to it—dropping my eye-lids, and feeling
as if a hand held them open, or cut
them away—forcing me to gaze on all that
passed below, like Regulus, with his lids
cut off, compelled to gaze on the sun that
withered up his eye-balls—till sense, and
sight, and soul, failed me, and I fell grasping
by the bars of the window, and mimicking,
in my horrid trance, the shouts
of the multitude, and the yell of the devoted(5).
I actually for a moment believed
myself the object of their cruelty. The
drama of terror has the irresistible power
of converting its audience into its victims.
“The Jew had kept apart from the tumult
of the night. He had, I suppose,
been saying within himself, in the language
of your admirable poet,
“Oh, Father Abraham, what these Christians are!”
But when he returned at a late hour, he
was struck with horror at the state in
which he found me. I was delirious,—raving,
and all he could say or do to soothe
me, was in vain. My imagination had
been fearfully impressed, and the consternation
of the poor Jew was, I have been
told, equally ludicrous and dismal. In his
terror, he forgot all the technical formality
of the Christian names by which he had
uniformly signalized his household, since
his residence in Madrid at least. He called
aloud on Manasseh-ben-Solomon his
son, and Rebekah his maid, to assist in
holding me. “Oh, Father Abraham, my
ruin is certain, this maniac will discover
all, and Manasseh-ben-Solomon, my son,
will die uncircumcised.”
“These words operating on my delirium,
I started up, and, grasping the Jew
by the throat, arraigned him as a prisoner
of the Inquisition. The terrified wretch,
falling on his knees, vociferated, “My
cock,—my cock,—my cock! oh! I am undone!”
Then, grasping my knees, “I am
no Jew,—my son, Manasseh-ben-Solomon,
is a Christian; you will not betray him,
you will not betray me,—me who have
saved your life. Manasseh,—I mean Antonio,—Rebekah,—no,
Maria, help me to
hold him. Oh God of Abraham, my
cock, and my sacrifice of expiation, and
this maniac to burst on the recesses of our
privacy, to tear open the veil of the tabernacle!”—“Shut
the tabernacle,” said Rebekah,
the old domestic whom I have before
mentioned; “yea, shut the tabernacle,
and close up the veils thereof, for behold
there be men knocking at the door,—men
who are children of Belial, and they knock
with staff and stone; and, verily, they are
about to break in the door, and demolish
the carved work thereof with axes and
hammers.”—“Thou liest,” said the Jew,
in much perturbation: “there is no carved
work thereabout, nor dare they break it
down with axes and hammers; peradventure
it is but an assault of the children of
Belial, in their rioting and drunkenness.
I pray thee, Rebekah, to watch the door,
and keep off the sons of Belial, even the
sons of the mighty of the sinful city—the
city of Madrid, while I remove this blaspheming
carrion, who struggleth with me,—yea,
struggleth mightily,” (and struggle
I did mightily). But, as I struggled, the
knocks at the door became louder and
stronger; and, as I was carried off, the
Jew continued to repeat, “Set thy face against
them, Rebekah; yea, set thy face
like a flint.” As he retired, Rebekah exclaimed,
“Behold I have set my back against
them, for my face now availeth not.
My back is that which I will oppose, and
verily I shall prevail.”—“I pray thee, Rebekah,”
cried the Jew, “oppose thy FACE
unto them, and verily that shall prevail.
Try not the adversary with thy back, but
oppose thy face unto them; and behold, if
they are men, they shall flee, even though
they were a thousand, at the rebuke of
one. I pray thee try thy face once more,
Rebekah, while I send this scape-goat
into the wilderness. Surely thy face is
enough to drive away those who knocked
by night at the door of that house in Gibeah,
in the matter of the wife of the Benjamite.”
The knocking all this time increased.
“Behold my back is broken,”
cried Rebekah, giving up her watch
and ward, “for, of a verity, the weapons
of the mighty do smite the lintels
and door-posts; and mine arms are not
steel, neither are my ribs iron, and behold
I fail,—yea, I fail, and fall backwards into
the hands of the uncircumcised.” And so
saying, she fell backwards as the door gave
way, and fell not, as she feared, into the
hands of the uncircumcised, but into those
of two of her countrymen, who, it appeared,
had some extraordinary reason for this
late visit and forcible entrance.
“The Jew, apprized who they were,
quitted me, after securing the door, and
sat up the greater part of the night, in
earnest conversation with his visitors.
Whatever was their subject, it left traces
of the most intense anxiety on the countenance
of the Jew the next morning.
He went out early, did not return till a
late hour, and then hastened to the room
I occupied, and expressed the utmost delight
at finding me sane and composed.
Candles were placed on the table, Rebekah
dismissed, the door secured, and the
Jew, after taking many uneasy turns about
the narrow apartment, and often clearing
his throat, at length sat down, and ventured
to entrust me with the cause of his
perturbation, in which, with the fatal consciousness
of the unhappy, I already began
to feel I must have a share. He told
me, that though the report of my death,
so universally credited through Madrid,
had at first set his mind at ease, there was
now a wild story, which, with all its falsehood
and impossibility, might, in its circulation,
menace us with the most fearful
consequences. He asked me, was it possible
I could have been so imprudent as to
expose myself to view on the day of that
horrible execution? and when I confessed
that I had stood at a window, and had involuntarily
uttered cries that I feared
might have reached some ears, he wrung
his hands, and a sweat of consternation
burst out on his pallid features. When he
recovered himself, he told me it was universally
believed that my spectre had appeared
on that terrible occasion,—that I
had been seen hovering in the air, to witness
the sufferings of the dying wretch,—and
that my voice had been heard summoning
him to his eternal doom. He
added, that this story, possessing all the
credibility of superstition, was now repeated
by a thousand mouths; and whatever
contempt might be attached to its absurdity,
it would infallibly operate as a hint
to the restless vigilance, and unrelaxing
industry of the holy office, and might ultimately
lead to my discovery. He therefore
was about to disclose to me a secret,
the knowledge of which would enable me
to remain in perfect security even in the
centre of Madrid, until some means might
be devised of effecting my escape, and
procuring me the means of subsistence in
some Protestant country, beyond the reach
of the Inquisition.
“As he was about to disclose this secret
on which the safety of both depended, and
which I bent in speechless agony to hear, a
knock was heard at the door, very unlike
the knocks of the preceding night. It was
single, solemn, peremptory,—and followed
by a demand to open the doors of the house
in the name of the most holy Inquisition.
At these terrible words, the wretched Jew
flung himself on his knees, blew out the
candles, called on the names of the twelve
patriarchs, and slipped a large rosary on
his arm, in less time than it is possible to
conceive any human frame could go
through such a variety of movements.
The knock was repeated,—I stood paralyzed;
but the Jew, springing on his feet,
raised one of the boards of the floor in a
moment, and, with a motion between convulsion
and instinct, pointed to me to descend.
I did so, and found myself in a
moment in darkness and in safety.
“I had descended but a few steps, on
the last of which I stood trembling, when
the officers of the Inquisition entered the
room, and stalked over the very board
that concealed me. I could hear every
word that passed. “Don Fernan,” said
an officer to the Jew, who re-entered with
them, after respectfully opening the door,
“why were we not admitted sooner?”—“Holy
Father,” said the trembling Jew,
“my only domestic, Maria, is old and
deaf, the youth my son is in his bed, and
I was myself engaged in my devotions.”—“It
seems you can perform them in the
dark,” said another, pointing to the candles,
which the Jew was re-lighting.—“When
the eye of God is on me, most
reverend fathers, I am never in darkness.”—“The
eye of God is on you,” said the
officer, sternly seating himself; “and so is
another eye, to which he has deputed the
sleepless vigilance and resistless penetration
of his own,—the eye of the holy office.
Don Fernan di Nunez,” the name
by which the Jew went, “you are not ignorant
of the indulgence extended by the
church, to those who have renounced the
errors of that accursed and misbelieving
race from which you are descended, but
you must be also aware of its incessant vigilance
being directed towards such individuals,
from the suspicion necessarily attached
to their doubtful conversion, and
possible relapse. We know that the black
blood of Grenada flowed in the tainted
veins of your ancestry, and that not more
than four centuries have elapsed, since your
forefathers trampled on that cross before
which you are now prostrate. You are an
old man, Don Fernan, but not an old
Christian; and, under these circumstances,
it behoves the holy office to have a
watchful scrutiny over your conduct.”
“The unfortunate Jew, invoking all the
saints, protested he would feel the strictest
scrutiny with which the holy office might
honour him, as a ground of obligation and
a matter of thanksgiving,—renouncing at
the same time the creed of his race in
terms of such exaggeration and vehemence,
as made me tremble for his probable sincerity
in any creed, and his fidelity to me.
The officers of the Inquisition, taking
little notice of his protestations, went on
to inform him of the object of their visit.
They stated that a wild and incredible tale
of the spectre of a deceased prisoner of
the Inquisition having been seen hovering
in the air near his house, had suggested to
the wisdom of the holy office, that the
living individual might be concealed within
its walls.
“I could not see the trepidation of the
Jew, but I could feel the vibration of the
boards on which he stood communicated
to the steps that supported me. In a
choaked and tremulous voice, he implored
the officers to search every apartment of
his house, and to raze it to the ground,
and inter him under its dust, if aught
were found in it which a faithful and orthodox
son of the church might not harbour.
“That shall doubtless be done,”
said the officer, taking him at his word
with the utmost sang froid; “but, in the
mean time, suffer me to apprize you, Don
Fernan, of the peril you incur, if at any
future time, however remote, it shall be
discovered that you harboured or aided in
concealing a prisoner of the Inquisition,
and an enemy of the holy church,—the
very first and lightest part of that penalty
will be your dwelling being razed to the
ground.” The Inquisitor raised his voice,
and paused with emphatic deliberation between
every clause of the following sentences,
measuring as it were the effect of
his blows on the increasing terror of his
auditor. “You will be conveyed to our
prison, under the suspected character of a
relapsed Jew. Your son will be committed
to a convent, to remove him from the
pestilential influence of your presence;—and
your whole property shall be confiscated,
to the last stone in your walls, the
last garment on your person, and the last
denier in your purse.”
“The poor Jew, who had marked the
gradations of his fear by groans more audible
and prolonged at the end of every tremendous
denunciatory clause, at the mention
of confiscation so total and desolating,
lost all self-possession, and, ejaculating—“Oh
Father Abraham, and all the holy
prophets!”—fell, as I conjectured from the
sound, prostrate on the floor. I gave myself
up for lost. Exclusive of his pusillanimity,
the words he had uttered were enough
to betray him to the officers of the
Inquisition; and, without a moment’s hesitation
between the danger of falling into
their hands, and plunging into the darkness
of the recess into which I had descended,
I staggered down a few remaining
steps, and attempted to feel my way
along a passage, in which they seemed to
terminate.
CHAPTER XIII.
There sat a spirit in the vault,
In shape, in hue, in lineaments, like life.
Southey’s Thalaba.
“I am convinced, that, had the passage
been as long and intricate as any that ever
an antiquarian pursued to discover the
tomb of Cheops in the Pyramids, I would
have rushed on in the blindness of my desperation,
till famine or exhaustion had
compelled me to pause. But I had no
such peril to encounter,—the floor of the
passage was smooth, and the walls were
matted, and though I proceeded in darkness,
I proceeded in safety; and provided
my progress removed me far enough from
the pursuit or discovery of the Inquisition,
I scarcely cared how it might terminate.
“Amid this temporary magnanimity of
despair, this state of mind which unites
the extremes of courage and pusillanimity,
I saw a faint light. Faint it was,
but it was distinct,—I saw clearly it was
light. Great God! what a revulsion in
my blood and heart, in all my physical and
mental feelings, did this sun of my world
of darkness create! I venture to say,
that my speed in approaching it was in
the proportion of one hundred steps to
one, compared to my crawling progress in
the preceding darkness. As I approached,
I could discover that the light gleamed
through the broad crevices of a door,
which, disjointed by subterranean damps,
gave me as full a view of the apartment
within, as if it were opened to
me by the inmate. Through one of
these crevices, before which I knelt in a
mixture of exhaustion and curiosity, I
could reconnoitre the whole of the interior.
“It was a large apartment, hung with
dark-coloured baize within four feet of the
floor, and this intermediate part was thickly
matted, probably to intercept the subterranean
damps. In the centre of the
room stood a table covered with black
cloth; it supported an iron lamp of an antique
and singular form, by whose light I
had been directed, and was now enabled
to descry furniture that appeared sufficiently
extraordinary. There were, amid maps
and globes, several instruments, of which
my ignorance did not permit me then to
know the use,—some, I have since learned,
were anatomical; there was an electrifying
machine, and a curious model of a
rack in ivory; there were few books, but
several scrolls of parchment, inscribed with
large characters in red and ochre-coloured
ink; and around the room were placed
four skeletons, not in cases, but in a kind
of upright coffin, that gave their bony
emptiness a kind of ghastly and imperative
prominence, as if they were the real
and rightful tenants of that singular apartment.
Interspersed between them were
the stuffed figures of animals I knew not
then the names of,—an alligator,—some
gigantic bones, which I took for those of
Sampson, but which turned out to be
fragments of those of the Mammoth,—and
antlers, which in my terror I believed
to be those of the devil, but afterwards
learned to be those of an Elk. Then I
saw figures smaller, but not less horrible,—human
and brute abortions, in all their
states of anomalous and deformed construction,
not preserved in spirits, but
standing in the ghastly nakedness of their
white diminutive bones; these I conceived
to be the attendant imps of some infernal
ceremony, which the grand wizard,
who now burst on my sight, was to preside
over.
“At the end of the table sat an old
man, wrapped in a long robe; his head was
covered with a black velvet cap, with a
broad border of furs, his spectacles were of
such a size as almost to hide his face, and
he turned over some scrolls of parchment
with an anxious and trembling hand;
then seizing a scull that lay on the table,
and grasping it in fingers hardly less bony,
and not less yellow, seemed to apostrophize
it in the most earnest manner. All my
personal fears were lost in the thought of
my being the involuntary witness of some
infernal orgie. I was still kneeling at the
door, when my long suspended respiration
burst forth in a groan, which reached the
figure seated at the table in a moment.
Habitual vigilance supplied all the defects
of age on the part of the listener. It was
but the sensation of a moment to feel the
door thrown open, my arm seized by an
arm powerful though withered by age, and
myself, as I thought, in the talons of a
demon.
“The door was closed and bolted. An
awful figure stood over me, (for I had
fallen on the floor), and thundered out,
“Who art thou, and why art thou here?”
I knew not what to answer, and gazed
with a fixed and speechless look on the
skeletons and the other furniture of this
terrible vault. “Hold,” said the voice,
“if thou art indeed exhausted, and needest
refreshment, drink of this cup, and thou
shalt be refreshed as with wine; verily, it
shall come into thy bowels as water, and
as oil into thy bones,”—and as he spoke he
offered to me a cup with some liquid in it.
I repelled him and his drink, which I
had not a doubt was some magical drug,
with horror unutterable; and losing all
other fears in the overwhelming one of becoming
a slave of Satan, and a victim of
one of his agents, as I believed this extraordinary
figure, I called on the name of
the Saviour and the saints, and, crossing
myself at every sentence, exclaimed,
“No, tempter, keep your infernal potions
for the leprous lips of your imps, or swallow
them yourself. I have but this
moment escaped from the hands of the
Inquisition, and a million times rather
would I return and yield myself their victim,
than consent to become yours,—your
tender-mercies are the only cruelties I
dread. Even in the prison of the holy
office, where the faggots appeared to be
lit before my eyes, and the chain already
fastened round my body to bind it to the
stake, I was sustained by a power that enabled
me to embrace objects so terrible to
nature, sooner than escape them at the
price of my salvation. The choice was
offered me, and I made my election,—and
so would I do were it to be offered a thousand
times, though the last were at the
stake, and the fire already kindling.”
Here the Spaniard paused in some agitation.
In the enthusiasm of his narration,
he had in some degree disclosed that
secret which he had declared was incommunicable,
except in confessing to a priest.
Melmoth, who, from the narrative of
Stanton, had been prepared to suspect
something of this, did not think prudent
to press him for a farther disclosure, and
waited in silence till his emotion had subsided,
without remark or question. Monçada
at length resumed his narrative.
“While I was speaking, the old man
viewed me with a look of calm surprise,
that made me ashamed of my fears, even
before I had ceased to utter them.
“What!” said he at length, fixing apparently
on some expressions that struck
him, “art thou escaped from the arm
that dealeth its blow in darkness, even the
arm of the Inquisition? Art thou that
Nazarene youth who sought refuge in the
house of our brother Solomon, the son of
Hilkiah, who is called Fernan Nunez by
the idolaters in this land of his captivity?
Verily I trusted thou shouldst this night
have eat of my bread, and drank of my
cup, and been unto me as a scribe, for our
brother Solomon testified concerning thee,
saying, His pen is even as the pen of a
ready writer.”
“I gazed at him in astonishment. Some
vague recollections of Solomon’s being about
to disclose some safe and secret retreat
wandered over my mind; and, while
trembling at the singular apartment in
which we were seated, and the employment
in which he seemed engaged, I yet
felt a hope hover about my heart, which
his knowledge of my situation appeared to
justify. “Sit down,” said he, observing
with compassion that I was sinking alike
under the exhaustion of fatigue and the
distraction of terror; “sit down, and eat
a morsel of bread, and drink a cup of
wine, and comfort thine heart, for thou
seemest to be as one who hath escaped
from the snare of the fowler, and from the
dart of the hunter.” I obeyed him involuntarily.
I needed the refreshment he
offered, and was about to partake of
it, when an irresistible feeling of repugnance
and horror overcame me; and,
as I thrust away the food he offered me, I
pointed to the objects around me as the
cause of my reluctance. He looked round
for a moment, as doubting whether objects
so familiar to him, could be repulsive
to a stranger, and then shaking his
head, “Thou art a fool,” said he, “but
thou art a Nazarene, and I pity thee;
verily, those who had the teaching of thy
youth, not only have shut the book of
knowledge to thee, but have forgot to open
it for themselves. Were not thy masters,
the Jesuits, masters also of the healing
art, and art thou not acquainted with the
sight of its ordinary implements? Eat, I
pray thee, and be satisfied that none of
these will hurt thee. Yonder dead bones
cannot weigh out or withhold thy food;
nor can they bind thy joints, or strain
them with iron, or rend them with steel,
as would the living arms that were stretched
forth to seize thee as their prey. And,
as the Lord of hosts liveth, their prey
wouldst thou have been, and a prey unto
their iron and steel, were it not for the
shelter of the roof of Adonijah to-night.”
“I took some of the food he offered me,
crossing myself at every mouthful, and
drank the wine, which the feverish thirst
of terror and anxiety made me swallow
like water, but not without an internal
prayer that it might not be converted into
some deleterious and diabolical poison.
The Jew Adonijah observed me with
increasing compassion and contempt.—“What,”
said he, “appals thee? Were I
possessed of the powers the superstition of
thy sect ascribes to me, might I not make
thee a banquet for fiends, instead of offering
thee food? Might I not bring from
the caverns of the earth the voices of those
that “peep and mutter,” instead of speaking
unto thee with the voice of man?
Thou art in my power, yet have I no
power or will to hurt thee. And dost
thou, who art escaped from the dungeons
of the Inquisition, look as one that
feareth on the things that thou seest around
thee, the furniture of the cell
of a secluded leach? Within this apartment
I have passed the term of sixty
years, and dost thou shudder to visit it
for a moment? These be the skeletons of
bodies, but in the den thou hast escaped
from were the skeletons of perished souls.
Here are relics of the wrecks or the caprices
of nature, but thou art come from
where the cruelty of man, permanent and
persevering, unrelenting and unmitigated,
hath never failed to leave the proofs of its
power in abortive intellects, crippled frames,
distorted creeds, and ossified hearts. Moreover,
there are around thee parchments
and charts scrawled as it were with the
blood of man, but, were it even so, could
a thousand such volumes cause such terror
to the human eye, as a page of the history
of thy prison, written as it is in blood,
drawn, not from the frozen veins of the
dead, but from the bursting hearts of the
living. Eat, Nazarene, there is no poison
in thy food,—drink, there is no drug
in thy cup. Darest thou promise thyself
that in the prison of the Inquisition, or
even in the cells of the Jesuits? Eat and
drink without fear in the vault, even in
the vault of Adonijah the Jew. If thou
daredst to have done so in the dwellings
of the Nazarenes, I had never beheld thee
here. Hast thou fed?” he added, and I
bowed. “Hast thou drank of the cup I
gave thee?” my torturing thirst returned,
and I gave him back the cup. He smiled,
but the smile of age,—the smile of lips
over which more than an hundred years
have passed, has an expression more repulsive
and hideous than can be deemed; it
is never the smile of pleasure,—it is a
frown of the mouth, and I shrunk before
its grim wrinkles, as the Jew Adonijah
added, “If thou hast eat and drank, it is
time for thee to rest. Come to thy bed,
it may be harder than they have given
thee in thy prison, but behold it shall be
safer. Come and rest thee there, it may
be that the adversary and the enemy shall
not there find thee out.”
“I followed him through passages so devious
and intricate, that, bewildered as I
was with the events of the night, they
forced on my memory the well-known
fact, that in Madrid the Jews have subterranean
passages to each other’s habitations,
which have hitherto baffled all the
industry of the Inquisition. I slept that
night, or rather day, (for the sun had
risen), on a pallet laid on the floor of a
room, small, lofty, and matted half-way
up the walls. One narrow and grated
window admitted the light of the sun,
that arose after that eventful night; and
amid the sweet sound of bells, and the
still sweeter of human life, awake and in
motion around me, I sunk into a slumber
that was unbroken even by a dream, till
the day was closing; or, in the language
of Adonijah, “till the shadows of the
evening were upon the face of all the
earth.”
CHAPTER XIV. — Tale of the Indians.
Unde iratos deos timent, qui sic propitios merentur?
Seneca.
“When I awoke, he was standing by
my pallet. “Arise,” said he, “eat and
drink, that thy strength may return unto
thee.” He pointed to a small table as he
spoke, which was covered with food of the
plainest kind, and dressed with the utmost
simplicity. Yet he seemed to think an
apology was necessary for the indulgence
of this temperate fare. “I myself,” said
he, “eat not the flesh of any animal, save
on the new moons and the feasts, yet the
days of the years of my life have been one
hundred and seven; sixty of which have
been passed in the chamber where thou
sawest me. Rarely do I ascend to the
upper chamber of this house, save on occasions
like this, or peradventure to pray,
with my window open towards the east,
for the turning away wrath from Jacob,
and the turning again the captivity of
Zion. Well saith the ethnic leach,
“Aer exclusus confert ad longevitatem.”
“Such hath been my life, as I tell thee.
The light of heaven hath been hidden from
mine eyes, and the voice of man is as the
voice of a stranger in mine ears, save those
of some of mine own nation, who weep for
the affliction of Israel; yet the silver cord
is not loosed, nor the golden bowl broken;
and though mine eye be waxing dim, my
natural force is not abated.” (As he spoke,
my eyes hung in reverence on the hoary
majesty of his patriarchal figure, and I felt
as if I beheld an embodied representation
of the old law in all its stern simplicity—the
unbending grandeur, and primeval antiquity.)
“Hast thou eaten, and art full?
Arise, then, and follow me.”
“We descended to the vault, where I
found the lamp was always burning. And
Adonijah, pointing to the parchments that
lay on the table, said, “This is the matter
wherein I need thy help; the collection
and transcription whereof hath been the
labour of more than half a life, prolonged
beyond the bounds allotted to mortality;
but,” pointing to his sunk and blood-shot
eyes, “those that look out of the windows
begin to be darkened, and I feel that I
need help from the quick hand and clear
eye of youth. Wherefore, it being certified
unto me by our brother, that thou
wert a youth who couldst handle the pen
of a scribe, and, moreover, wast in need of
a city of refuge, and a strong wall of defence,
against the laying-in-wait of thy
brethren round about thee, I was willing
that thou shouldst come under my
roof, and eat of such things as I set before
thee, and such as thy soul desireth, excepting
only the abominable things forbidden
in the law of the prophet; and shouldst,
moreover, receive wages as an hired servant.”
“You will perhaps smile, Sir; but even
in my wretched situation, I felt a slight
but painful flush tinge my cheek, at the
thought of a Christian, and a peer of Spain,
becoming the amanuensis of a Jew for hire.
Adonijah continued, “Then, when my
task is completed, then will I be gathered
to my fathers, trusting surely in the Hope
of Israel, that mine eyes shall “behold the
King in his beauty,—they shall see the
land that is very far off.” And peradventure,”
he added, in a voice that grief rendered
solemn, mellow, and tremulous,
“peradventure there shall I meet in bliss,
those with whom I parted in woe—even
thou, Zachariah, the son of my loins, and
thou, Leah, the wife of my bosom;” apostrophizing
two of the silent skeletons that
stood near. “And in the presence of the
God of our fathers, the redeemed of Zion
shall meet—and meet as those who are to
part no more for ever and ever.” At these
words, he closed his eyes, lifted up his
hands, and appeared to be absorbed in
mental prayer. Grief had perhaps subdued
my prejudices—it had certainly softened
my heart—and at this moment I
half-believed that a Jew might find entrance
and adoption amid the family and
fold of the blessed. This sentiment operated
on my human sympathies, and I inquired,
with unfeigned anxiety, after the
fate of Solomon the Jew, whose misfortune
in harbouring me had exposed him to the
visit of the Inquisitors. “Be at peace,”
said Adonijah, waving his bony and wrinkled
hand, as if dismissing a subject below
his present feelings, “our brother Solomon
is in no peril of death; neither shall
his goods be taken for a spoil. If our adversaries
are mighty in power, so are we
mighty also to deal with them by our
wealth or our wisdom. Thy flight they
never can trace, thy existence on the face
of the earth shall also be unknown to them,
so thou wilt hearken to me, and heed my
words.”
“I could not speak, but my expression
of mute and imploring anxiety spoke for
me. “Thou didst use words,” said Adonijah,
“last night, whereof, though I remember
not all the purport, the sound yet
maketh mine ears to tingle; even mine,
which have not vibrated to such sounds
for four times the space of thy youthful
years. Thou saidst thou wert beset by a
power that tempted thee to renounce the
Most High, whom Jew and Christian alike
profess to worship; and that thou didst
declare, that were the fires kindled around
thee, thou wouldst spit at the tempter, and
trample on the offer, though thy foot pressed
the coal which the sons of Dominick
were lighting beneath its naked sole.”—“I
did,” I cried, “I did—and I would—So
help me God in mine extremity.”
“Adonijah paused for a moment, as if
considering whether this were a burst of
passion, or a proof of mental energy. He
seemed at last inclined to believe it the
latter, though all men of far-advanced age
are apt to distrust any marks of emotion
as a demonstration rather of weakness than
of sincerity. “Then,” said he, after a long
and solemn pause, “then thou shalt know
the secret that hath been a burthen to the
soul of Adonijah, even as his hopeless solitude
is a burthen to the soul of him who
traverseth the desert, none accompanying
him with step, or cheering him with voice.
From my youth upward, even until now,
have I laboured, and behold the time of
my deliverance is at hand; yea, and shall
be accomplished speedily.
“In the days of my childhood, a rumour
reached mine ears, even mine, of a
being sent abroad on the earth to tempt
Jew and Nazarene, and even the disciples
of Mohammed, whose name is accursed in
the mouth of our nation, with offers of deliverance
at their utmost need and extremity,
so they would do that which my lips
dare not utter, even though there be no
ear to receive it but thine. Thou shudderest—well,
then, thou art sincere, at
least, in thy faith of errors. I listened to
the tale, and mine ears received it, even as
the soul of the thirsty drinketh in rivers
of water, for my mind was full of the vain
fantasies of the Gentile fables, and I longed,
in the perverseness of my spirit, to see,
yea, and to consort with, yea, and to deal
with, the evil one in his strength. Like
our fathers in the wilderness, I despised
angel’s food, and lusted after forbidden
meats, even the meats of the Egyptian
sorcerers. And my presumption was rebuked
as thou seest:—childless, wifeless,
friendless, at the last period of an existence
prolonged beyond the bounds of nature,
am I now left, and, save thee alone, without
one to record its events. I will not
trouble thee now with the tale of my
eventful life, farther than to tell thee, that
the skeletons thou tremblest to behold,
were once clothed in flesh far fairer than
thine. They are those of my wife and
child, whose history thou must not now
hear—but those of the two others thou
must both hear and relate.” And he
pointed to the two other skeletons opposite,
in their upright cases. “On my return
to my country, even Spain, if a Jew
can be said to have a country, I set myself
down on this seat, and, lighted by this
lamp, I took in my hand the pen of a
scribe, and vowed by a vow, that this lamp
should not expire, nor this seat be forsaken,
nor this vault untenanted, until that the
record is written in a book, and sealed as
with the king’s signet. But, behold, I
was traced by those who are keen of scent,
and quick of pursuit, even the sons of Dominick.
And they seized me, and laid
my feet fast in the bonds; but my writings
they could not read, because they
were traced in a character unknown to
this idolatrous people. And behold, after
a space they set me free, finding no cause
of offence in me; and they bade me depart,
and trouble them no more. Then
vowed I a vow unto the God of Israel,
who had delivered me from their thraldom,
that none but he who could read
these characters should ever transcribe
them. Moreover, I prayed, and said, O
Lord God of Israel! who knowest that we
are the sheep of thy fold, and our enemies
as wolves round about us, and as lions who
roar for their evening prey, grant, that a
Nazarene escaped from their hands, and
fleeing unto us, even as a bird chased from
her nest, may put to shame the weapons
of the mighty, and laugh them to scorn.
Grant also, Lord God of Jacob, that he
may be exposed to the snare of the enemy,
even as those of whom I have written, and
that he may spit at it with his mouth, and
spurn at it with his feet, and trample on
the ensnarer, even as they have trampled;
and then shall my soul, even mine, have
peace at the last. Thus I prayed—and
my prayer was heard, for behold, thou art
here.”
“As I heard these words, a horrid foreboding,
like a night-mare of the heart,
hung heavily on me. I looked alternately
at the withering speaker, and the hopeless
task. To bear about that horrible secret
inurned in my heart, was not that enough?
but to be compelled to scatter its ashes abroad,
and to rake into the dust of others
for the same purpose of unhallowed exposure,
revolted me beyond feeling and utterance.
As my eye fell listlessly on the
manuscripts, I saw they contained only the
Spanish language written in the Greek
characters—a mode of writing that, I
easily conceived, must have been as unintelligible
to the officers of the Inquisition,
as the Hieroglyphics of the Egyptian
priests. Their ignorance, sheltered by
their pride, and that still more strongly
fortified by the impenetrable secresy attached
to their most minute proceedings,
made them hesitate to entrust to any one
the circumstance of their being in possession
of manuscript which they could
not decypher. So they returned the papers
to Adonijah, and, in his own language,
“Behold, he abode in safety.” But to me
this was a task of horror unspeakable. I
felt myself as an added link to the chain,
the end of which, held by an invisible
hand, was drawing me to perdition; and
I was now to become the recorder of my
own condemnation.
“As I turned over the leaves with a
trembling hand, the towering form of Adonijah
seemed dilated with preternatural
emotion. “And what dost thou tremble at,
child of the dust?” he exclaimed, “if thou
hast been tempted, so have they—if thou
hast resisted, so have they—if they are at
rest, so shalt thou be. There is not a pang
of soul or body thou hast undergone, or
canst undergo, that they have not suffered
before thy birth was dreamt of. Boy,
thy hand trembles over pages it is unworthy
to touch, yet still I must employ
thee, for I need thee. Miserable link of
necessity, that binds together minds so uncongenial!
I would that the ocean were my
ink, and the rock my page, and mine arm,
even mine, the pen that should write thereon
letters that should last like those on
the written mountains for ever and ever—even
the mount of Sinai, and those that
still bear the record, “Israel hath passed
the flood(6).” As he spoke, I again turned
over the manuscripts. “Does thy hand
tremble still?” said Adonijah; “and dost
thou still hesitate to record the story of
those whose destiny a link, wondrous, invisible,
and indissoluble, has bound to
thine. Behold, there are those near thee,
who, though they have no longer a tongue,
speak to thee with that eloquence which is
stronger than all the eloquence of living
tongues. Behold, there are those around
thee, whose mute and motionless arms of
bone plead to thee as no arms of flesh ever
pleaded. Behold, there are those who, being
speechless, yet speak—who, being dead,
are yet alive—who, though in the abyss of
eternity, are yet around thee, and call on
thee, as with a mortal voice. Hear them!—take
the pen in thine hand, and write.”
I took the pen in my hand, but could not
write a line. Adonijah, in a transport of
ecstasy, snatching a skeleton from its receptacle,
placed it before me. “Tell him
thy story thyself, peradventure he will believe
thee, and record it.” And supporting
the skeleton with one hand, he pointed
with the other, as bleached and bony
as that of the dead, to the manuscript that
lay before me.
“It was a night of storms in the world
above us; and, far below the surface of
the earth as we were, the murmur of the
winds, sighing through the passages, came
on my ear like the voices of the departed,—like
the pleadings of the dead. Involuntarily
I fixed my eye on the manuscript
I was to copy, and never withdrew
till I had finished its extraordinary contents.
“There is an island in the Indian sea,
not many leagues from the mouth of
the Hoogly, which, from the peculiarity
of its situation and internal circumstances,
long remained unknown to Europeans,
and unvisited by the natives of the contiguous
islands, except on remarkable occasions.
It is surrounded by shallows that
render the approach of any vessel of
weight impracticable, and fortified by
rocks that threatened danger to the slight
canoes of the natives, but it was rendered
still more formidable by the terrors with
which superstition had invested it. There
was a tradition that the first temple to the
black goddess Seeva(7), had been erected
there; and her hideous idol, with its collar
of human sculls, forked tongues darting
from its twenty serpent mouths, and seated
on a matted coil of adders, had there
first received the bloody homage of the
mutilated limbs and immolated infants of
her worshippers.
“The temple had been overthrown, and
the island half depopulated, by an earthquake,
that agitated all the shores of India.
It was rebuilt, however, by the zeal
of the worshippers, who again began to
re-visit the island, when a tufaun of fury
unparalleled even in those fierce latitudes,
burst over the devoted spot. The pagoda
was burnt to ashes by the lightning; the
inhabitants, their dwellings, and their
plantations, swept away as with the besom
of destruction, and not a trace of humanity,
cultivation, or life, remained in the
desolate isle. The devotees consulted
their imagination for the cause of these
calamities; and, while seated under the
shade of their cocoa-trees they told their
long strings of coloured beads, they ascribed
it to the wrath of the goddess
Seeva at the increasing popularity of the
worship of Juggernaut. They asserted
that her image had been seen ascending amid
the blaze of lightning that consumed
her shrine and blasted her worshippers as
they clung to it for protection, and firmly
believed she had withdrawn to some happier
isle, where she might enjoy her feast
of flesh, and draught of blood, unmolested
by the worship of a rival deity. So
the island remained desolate, and without
inhabitant for years.
“The crews of European vessels, assured
by the natives that there was neither animal,
or vegetable, or water, to be found on
its surface, forbore to visit; and the Indian
of other isles, as he passed it in his
canoe, threw a glance of melancholy fear
at its desolation, and flung something overboard
to propitiate the wrath of Seeva.
“The island, thus left to itself, became
vigorously luxuriant, as some neglected
children improve in health and strength,
while pampered darlings die under excessive
nurture. Flowers bloomed, and foliage
thickened, without a hand to pluck,
a step to trace, or a lip to taste them,
when some fishermen, (who had been
driven by a strong current toward the isle,
and worked with oar and sail in vain to
avoid its dreaded shore), after making a
thousand prayers to propitiate Seeva, were
compelled to approach within an oar’s length
of it; and, on their return in unexpected
safety, reported they had heard
sounds so exquisite, that some other goddess,
milder than Seeva, must have fixed
on that spot for her residence. The
younger fishermen added to this account,
that they had beheld a female figure of
supernatural loveliness, glide and disappear
amid the foliage which now luxuriantly
overshadowed the rocks; and, in
the spirit of Indian devotees, they hesitated
not to call this delicious vision an incarnated
emanation of Vishnu, in a lovelier
form than ever he had appeared before,—at
least far beyond that which he
assumed, when he made one of his avatars
in the figure of a tiger.
“The inhabitants of the islands, as superstitious
as they were imaginative, deified the
vision of the isles after their manner. The
old devotees, while invoking her, stuck
close to the bloody rites of Seeva and Haree,
and muttered many a horrid vow over
their beads, which they took care to render
effectual by striking sharp reeds into
their arms, and tinging every bead with
blood as they spoke. The young women
rowed their light canoes as near as they
dared to the haunted isle, making vows to
Camdeo(8), and sending their paper vessels,
lit with wax, and filled with flowers, towards
its coast, where they hoped their
darling deity was about to fix his residence.
The young men also, at least those
who were in love and fond of music, rowed
close to the island to solicit the god
Krishnoo(9) to sanctify it by his presence;
and not knowing what to offer to the
deity, they sung their wild airs standing
high on the prow of the canoe, and at last
threw a figure of wax, with a kind of lyre
in its hand, towards the shore of the desolate
isle.
“For many a night these canoes might be
seen glancing past each other over the
darkened sea, like shooting stars of the
deep, with their lighted paper lanthorns,
and their offerings of flowers and fruits,
left by some trembling hand on the sands,
or hung by a bolder one in baskets of cane
on the rocks; and still the simple islanders
felt joy and devotion united in this “voluntary
humility.” It was observed, however,
that the worshippers departed with
very different impressions of the object of
their adoration. The women all clung to
their oars in breathless admiration of the
sweet sounds that issued from the isle; and
when that ceased they departed, murmuring
over in their huts those “notes angelical,” to
which their own language furnished no appropriate
sounds. The men rested long on
their oars, to catch a glimpse of the form
which, by the report of the fishermen,
wandered there; and, when disappointed,
they rowed home sadly.
“Gradually the isle lost its bad character
for terror; and in spite of some old
devotees, who told their blood-discoloured
beads, and talked of Seeva and Haree, and
even held burning splinters of wood to
their scorched hands, and stuck sharp
pieces of iron, which they had purchased
or stolen from the crews of European vessels,
in the most fleshy and sensitive parts
of their bodies,—and, moreover, talked of
suspending themselves from trees with the
head downwards, till they were consumed
by insects, or calcined by the sun, or rendered
delirious by their position,—in spite
of all this, which must have been very affecting,
the young people went on their
own way,—the girls offering their wreaths
to Camdeo, and the youths invoking
Krishnoo, till the devotees, in despair,
vowed to visit this accursed island, which
had set every body mad, and find out
how the unknown deity was to be recognised
and propitiated; and whether
flowers, and fruits, and love-vows, and
the beatings of young hearts, were to
be substituted for the orthodox and legitimate
offering of nails grown into the
hands till they appeared through their
backs, and setons of ropes inserted into the
sides, on which the religionist danced his
dance of agony, till the ropes or his patience
failed. In a word, they were determined
to find out what this deity was,
who demanded no suffering from her worshippers,—and
they fulfilled their resolution
in a manner worthy of their purpose.
“One hundred and forty beings, crippled
by the austerities of their religion, unable
to manage sail or oar, embarked in a
canoe to reach what they called the accursed
isle. The natives, intoxicated with the
belief of their sanctity, stripped themselves
naked, to push their boat through
the surf, and then, making their salams,
implored them to use oars at least. The
devotees, all too intent on their beads,
and too well satisfied of their importance
in the eyes of their favourite deities, to admit
a doubt of their safety, set off in triumph,—and
the consequence may be easily
conjectured. The boat soon filled and
sunk, and the crew perished without a
single sigh of lamentation, except that they
had not feasted the alligators in the sacred
waters of the Ganges, or perished at least
under the shadow of the domes of the
holy city of Benares, in either of which
cases their salvation must have been unquestionable.
“This circumstance, apparently so untoward,
operated favourably on the popularity
of the new worship. The old
system lost ground every day. Hands,
instead of being scorched over the fire,
were employed only in gathering flowers.
Nails (with which it was the custom of the
devotees to lard their persons) actually fell
in price; and a man might sit at his ease
on his hams with as safe a conscience,
and as fair a character, as if fourscore of
them occupied the interval between. On
the other hand, fruits were every day
scattered on the shores of the favourite
isle; flowers, too, blushed on its rocks, in
all the dazzling luxuriance of colouring
with which the Flora of the East delights
to array herself. There was that brilliant
and superb lily, which, to this day, illustrates
the comparison between it and Solomon,
who, in all his glory, was not arrayed
like one of them. There was the rose unfolding
its “paradise of leaves,” and the
scarlet blossom of the bombex, which an
English traveller has voluptuously described
as banqueting the eye with “its mass
of vegetable splendour” unparalleled. And
the female votarists at last began to imitate
some of “those sounds and sweet
airs” that every breeze seemed to waft to
their ears, with increasing strength of melody,
as they floated in their canoes round
this isle of enchantment.
“At length one circumstance occurred
that put its sanctity of character, and that
of its inmate, out of all doubt. A young
Indian who had in vain offered to his beloved
the mystical bouquet, in which the
arrangement of the flowers is made to express
love, rowed his canoe to the island,
to learn his fate from its supposed inhabitant;
and as he rowed, composed a song,
which expressed that his mistress despised
him, as if he were a Paria, but that he
would love her though he were descended
from the head of Brahma;—that her skin
was more polished than the marble steps
by which you descend to the tank of a
Rajah, and her eyes brighter than any
whose glances were watched by presumptuous
strangers through the rents of the
embroidered purdah(10) of a Nawaub;—that
she was loftier in his eyes than the black
pagoda of Juggernaut, and more brilliant
than the trident of the temple of Maha-deva,
when it sparkled in the beams of the
moon. And as both these objects were
visible to his eyes from the shore, as he
rowed on in the soft and glorious serenity
of an Indian night, no wonder they found
a place in his verse. Finally, he promised,
that if she was propitious to his suit, he
would build her a hut, raised four feet above
the ground to avoid the serpents;—that
her dwelling should be overshadowed
by the boughs of the tamarind; and that
while she slept, he would drive the musquitoes
from her with a fan, composed of
the leaves of the first flowers which she accepted
as a testimony of his passion.
“It so happened, that the same night,
the young female, whose reserve had been
the result of any thing but indifference,
attended by two of her companions, rowed
her canoe to the same spot, with the view
of discovering whether the vows of her
lover were sincere. They arrived about
the same time; and though it was now
twilight, and the superstition of these
timid beings gave a darker tinge to the
shadows that surrounded them, they ventured
to land; and, bearing their baskets
of flowers in trembling hands, advanced to
hang them on the ruins of the pagoda,
amid which it was presumed the new goddess
had fixed her abode. They proceeded,
not without difficulty, through thickets
of flowers that had sprung spontaneously
in the uncultivated soil—not without fear
that a tiger might spring on them at every
step, till they recollected that those animals
chose generally the large jungles for
their retreat, and seldom harboured amid
flowers. Still less was the alligator to be
dreaded, amid the narrow streams that
they could cross without tinging their ancles
with its pure water. The tamarind,
the cocoa, and the palm-tree, shed their
blossoms, and exhaled their odours, and
waved their leaves, over the head of the
trembling votarist as she approached
the ruin of the pagoda. It had been a
massive square building, erected amid
rocks, that, by a caprice of nature not uncommon
in the Indian isles, occupied its
centre, and appeared the consequence of
some volcanic explosion. The earthquake
that had overthrown it, had mingled the
rocks and ruins together in a shapeless and
deformed mass, which seemed to bear alike
the traces of the impotence of art and nature,
when prostrated by the power that
has formed and can annihilate both. There
were pillars, wrought with singular characters,
heaped amid stones that bore no
impress but that of some fearful and violent
action of nature, that seemed to say,
Mortals, write your lines with the chisel,
I write my hieroglyphics in fire. There
were the disjointed piles of stones carved
into the form of snakes, on which the hideous
idol of Seeva had once been seated;
and close to them the rose was bursting
through the earth which occupied the fissures
of the rock, as if nature preached a
milder theology, and deputed her darling
flower as her missionary to her children.
The idol itself had fallen, and lay in fragments.
The horrid mouth was still visible,
into which human hearts had been formerly
inserted. But now, the beautiful
peacocks, with their rain-bow trains and
arched necks, were feeding their young amid
the branches of the tamarind that
overhung the blackened fragments. The
young Indians advanced with diminished
fear, for there was neither sight or sound
to inspire the fear that attends the approach
to the presence of a spiritual being—all
was calm, still, and dark. Yet their
feet trod with involuntary lightness as they
advanced to these ruins, which combined
the devastations of nature with those of
the human passions, perhaps more bloody
and wild than the former. Near the ruins
there had formerly been a tank, as is usual,
near the pagodas, both for the purposes
of refreshment and purification; but the
steps were now broken, and the water was
stagnated. The young Indians, however,
took up a few drops, invoked the “goddess
of the isle,” and approached the only
remaining arch. The exterior front of this
building had been constructed of stone,
but its interior had been hollowed out of
the rock; and its recesses resembled, in
some degree, those in the island of Elephanta.
There were monstrous figures
carved in stone, some adhering to the
rock, others detached from it, all frowning
in their shapeless and gigantic hideousness,
and giving to the eye of superstition
the terrible representation of “gods of
stone.”
“Two of the young votarists, who
were distinguished for their courage, advanced
and performed a kind of wild
dance before the ruins of the ancient
gods, as they called them, and invoked
(as they might) the new resident of
the isle to be propitious to the vows of
their companion, who advanced to hang
her wreath of flowers round the broken
remains of an idol half-defaced and half-hidden
among the fragments of stone, but
clustered over with that rich vegetation
which seems, in oriental countries, to announce
the eternal triumph of nature amid
the ruins of art. Every year renews the
rose, but what year shall see a pyramid rebuilt?
As the young Indian hung her
wreath on the shapeless stone, a voice
murmured, “There is a withered flower
there.”—“Yes—yes—there is,” answered
the votarist, “and that withered flower is
an emblem of my heart. I have cherished
many roses, but suffered one to wither that
was the sweetest to me of all the wreath.
Wilt thou revive him for me, unknown
goddess, and my wreath shall no longer be
a dishonour to thy shrine?”—“Wilt thou
revive the rose by placing it in the warmth
of thy bosom,” said the young lover, appearing
from behind the fragments of rock
and ruin that had sheltered him, and from
which he had uttered his oracular reply,
and listened with delight to the emblematical
but intelligible language of his
beloved. “Wilt thou revive the rose?”
he asked, in the triumph of love, as he
clasped her to his bosom. The young Indian,
yielding at once to love and superstition,
seemed half-melting in his embrace,
when, in a moment, she uttered a wild
shriek, repelled him with all her strength,
and crouched in an uncouth posture of
fear, while she pointed with one quivering
hand to a figure that appeared, at that moment,
in the perspective of that tumultuous
and indefinite heap of stone. The
lover, unalarmed by the shriek of his mistress,
was advancing to catch her in his
arms, when his eye fell on the object that
had struck hers, and he sunk on his face
to the earth, in mute adoration.
“The form was that of a female, but
such as they had never before beheld, for
her skin was perfectly white, (at least in
their eyes, who had never seen any but
the dark-red tint of the natives of the Bengalese
islands). Her drapery (as well as
they could see) consisted only of flowers,
whose rich colours and fantastic grouping
harmonized well with the peacock’s feathers
twined among them, and altogether composed
a feathery fan of wild drapery, which, in
truth, beseemed an “island goddess.” Her
long hair, of a colour they had never beheld
before, pale auburn, flowed to her
feet, and was fantastically entwined with
the flowers and the feathers that formed
her dress. On her head was a coronal
of shells, of hue and lustre unknown
except in the Indian seas—the purple
and the green vied with the amethyst,
and the emerald. On her white bare
shoulder a loxia was perched, and round
her neck was hung a string of their
pearl—like eggs, so pure and pellucid, that
the first sovereign in Europe might have
exchanged her richest necklace of pearls
for them. Her arms and feet were perfectly
bare, and her step had a goddess-like
rapidity and lightness, that affected the
imagination of the Indians as much as
the extraordinary colour of her skin and
hair. The young lovers sunk in awe
before this vision as it passed before
their eyes. While they prostrated themselves,
a delicious sound trembled on their
ears. The beautiful vision spoke to them,
but it was in a language they did not understand;
and this confirming their belief
that it was the language of the gods, they
prostrated themselves to her again. At
that moment, the loxia, springing from
her shoulder, came fluttering towards them.
“He is going to seek for fire-flies to light
his cell(11),” said the Indians to each other.
But the bird, who, with an intelligence
peculiar to his species, understood and
adopted the predilection of the fair being
he belonged to, for the fresh flowers in
which he saw her arrayed every day, darted
at the withered rose-bud in the wreath
of the young Indian; and, striking his
slender beak through it, laid it at her
feet. The omen was interpreted auspiciously
by the lovers, and, bending once
more to the earth, they rowed back to
their island, but no longer in separate
canoes. The lover steered that of his mistress,
while she sat beside him in silence;
and the young people who accompanied
them chaunted verses in praise of the white
goddess, and the island sacred to her and
to lovers.
CHAPTER XV.
But tell me to what saint, I pray,
What martyr, or what angel bright,
Is dedicate this holy day,
Which brings you here so gaily dight?
Dost thou not, simple Palmer, know,
What every child can tell thee here?—
Nor saint nor angel claims this show,
But the bright season of the year.
Queen-Hoo Hall, by Strutt.
“The sole and beautiful inmate of the
isle, though disturbed at the appearance of
her worshippers, soon recovered her tranquillity.
She could not be conscious of
fear, for nothing of that world in which
she lived had ever borne a hostile appearance
to her. The sun and the shade—the
flowers and foliage—the tamarinds and
figs that prolonged her delightful existence—the
water that she drank, wondering
at the beautiful being who seemed to
drink whenever she did—the peacocks,
who spread out their rich and radiant plumage
the moment they beheld her—and
the loxia, who perched on her shoulder
and hand as she walked, and answered her
sweet voice with imitative chirpings—all
these were her friends, and she knew none
but these.
“The human forms that sometimes approached
the island, caused her a slight
emotion; but it was rather that of curiosity
than alarm; and their gestures were
so expressive of reverence and mildness,
their offerings of flowers, in which she delighted,
so acceptable, and their visits so
silent and peaceful, that she saw them
without reluctance, and only wondered,
as they rowed away, how they could move
on the water in safety; and how creatures
so dark, and with features so unattractive,
happened to grow amid the beautiful
flowers they presented to her as the productions
of their abode. The elements
might be supposed to have impressed her
imagination with some terrible ideas; but
the periodical regularity of these phænomena,
in the climate she inhabited, divested
them of their terrors to one who had
been accustomed to them, as to the alternation
of night and day—who could not
remember the fearful impression of the
first, and, above all, who had never heard
any terror of them expressed by another,—perhaps
the primitive cause of fear in
most minds. Pain she had never felt—of
death she had no idea—how, then, could
she become acquainted with fear?
“When a north-wester, as it is termed,
visited the island, with all its terrific accompaniments
of midnight darkness, clouds
of suffocating dust, and thunders like the
trumpet of doom, she stood amid the leafy
colonnades of the banyan-tree, ignorant of
her danger, watching the cowering wings
and drooping heads of the birds, and the
ludicrous terror of the monkies, as they
skipt from branch to branch with their
young. When the lightning struck a tree,
she gazed as a child would on a fire-work
played off for its amusement; but the next
day she wept, when she saw the leaves
would no longer grow on the blasted trunk.
When the rains descended in torrents, the
ruins of the pagoda afforded her a shelter;
and she sat listening to the rushing of the
mighty waters, and the murmurs of the
troubled deep, till her soul took its colour
from the sombrous and magnificent imagery
around her, and she believed herself
precipitated to earth with the deluge—borne
downward, like a leaf, by a cataract—engulphed
in the depths of the ocean—rising
again to light on the swell of the
enormous billows, as if she were heaved on
the back of a whale—deafened with the
roar—giddy with the rush—till terror and
delight embraced in that fearful exercise
of imagination. So she lived like a flower
amid sun and storm, blooming in the light,
and bending to the shower, and drawing
the elements of her sweet and wild existence
from both. And both seemed to
mingle their influences kindly for her, as
if she was a thing that nature loved, even
in her angry mood, and gave a commission
to the storm to nurture her, and to the
deluge to spare the ark of her innocence,
as it floated over the waters. This existence
of felicity, half physical, half imaginative,
but neither intellectual or impassioned,
had continued till the seventeenth
year of this beautiful and mild being, when
a circumstance occurred that changed its
hue for ever.
“On the evening of the day after the Indians
had departed, Immalee, for that was
the name her votarists had given her, was
standing on the shore, when a being approached
her unlike any she had ever beheld.
The colour of his face and hands resembled
her own more than those she was accustomed
to see, but his garments, (which were
European), from their square uncouthness,
their shapelessness, and their disfiguring
projection about the hips, (it was the fashion
of the year 1680), gave her a mixed
sensation of ridicule, disgust, and wonder,
which her beautiful features could express
only by a smile—that smile, a native of
the face from which not even surprise
could banish it.
“The stranger approached, and the
beautiful vision approached also, but not
like an European female with low and
graceful bendings, still less like an Indian
girl with her low salams, but like a young
fawn, all animation, timidity, confidence,
and cowardice, expressed in almost a single
action. She sprung from the sands—ran
to her favourite tree;—returned again
with her guard of peacocks, who expanded
their superb trains with a kind of instinctive
motion, as if they felt the danger that
menaced their protectress, and, clapping her
hands with exultation, seemed to invite
them to share in the delight she felt in
gazing at the new flower that had grown
in the sand.
“The stranger advanced, and, to Immalee’s
utter astonishment, addressed her
in the language which she herself had retained
some words of since her infancy,
and had endeavoured in vain to make her
peacocks, parrots, and loxias, answer her
in corresponding sounds. But her language,
from want of practice, had become
so limited, that she was delighted to hear
its most unmeaning sounds uttered by human
lips; and when he said, according to
the form of the times, “How do you, fair
maid?” she answered, “God made me,”
from the words of the Christian Catechism
that had been breathed into her infant lip.
“God never made a fairer creature,” replied
the stranger, grasping her hand, and
fixing on her eyes that still burn in the
sockets of that arch-deceiver. “Oh yes!”
answered Immalee, “he made many things
more beautiful. The rose is redder than
I am—the palm-tree is taller than I am—and
the wave is bluer than I am;—but they
all change, and I never change. I have
grown taller and stronger, though the
rose fades every six moons; and the rock
splits to let in the bats, when the earth
shakes; and the waves fight in their anger
till they turn grey, and far different from
the beautiful colour they have when the
moon comes dancing on them, and sending
all the young, broken branches of her
light to kiss my feet, as I stand on the soft
sand. I have tried to gather them every
night, but they all broke in my hand the
moment I dipt it into water.”—“And
have you fared better with the stars?” said
the stranger smiling.—“No,” answered the
innocent being, “the stars are the flowers
of heaven, and the rays of the moon the
boughs and branches; but though they are
so bright, they only blossom in the night,—and
I love better the flowers that I can
gather, and twine in my hair. When I
have been all night wooing a star, and it
has listened and descended, springing
downwards like a peacock from its nest,
it has hid itself often afterwards playfully
amid the mangoes and tamarinds where it
fell; and though I have searched for it till
the moon looked wan and weary of lighting
me, I never could find it. But where
do you come from?—you are not scaly
and voiceless like those who grow in the
waters, and show their strange shapes as I
sit on the shore at sun-set;—nor are you
red and diminutive like those who come
over the waters to me from other worlds,
in houses that can live on the deep, and
walk so swiftly, with their legs plunged
in the water. Where do you come from?—you
are not so bright as the stars that
live in the blue sea above me, nor so deformed
as those that toss in the darker sea
at my feet. Where did you grow, and
how came you here?—there is not a canoe
on the sand; and though the shells bear
the fish that live in them so lightly over
the waters, they never would bear me.
When I placed my foot on their scolloped
edge of crimson and purple, they sunk into
the sand.”—“Beautiful creature,” said
the stranger, “I come from a world where
there are thousands like me.”—“That is
impossible,” said Immalee, “for I live
here alone, and other worlds must be like
this.”—“What I tell you is true, however,”
said the stranger. Immalee paused
for a moment, as if making the first effort
of reflection—an exertion painful enough
to a being whose existence was composed
of felicitous tacts and unreflecting instincts—and
then exclaimed, “We both must
have grown in the world of voices, for I
know what you say better than the chirp of
the loxia, or the cry of the peacock. That
must be a delightful world where they all
speak—what would I give that my roses
grew in the world of answers!”
“At this moment the stranger made certain
signals of hunger, which Immalee understood
in a moment, and told him to follow
her to where the tamarind and the fig
were shedding their fruit—where the stream
was so clear, you could count the purple
shells in its bed—and where she would
scoop for him in the cocoa-shell the cool
waters that flowed beneath the shade of
the mango. As they went, she gave him
all the information about herself that she
could. She told him that she was the
daughter of a palm-tree, under whose shade
she had been first conscious of existence,
but that her poor father had been long
withered and dead—that she was very old,
having seen many roses decay on their
stalks; and though they were succeeded
by others, she did not love them so well
as the first, which were a great deal larger
and brighter—that, in fact, every thing
had grown smaller latterly, for she was
now able to reach to the fruit which formerly
she was compelled to wait for till it
dropt on the ground;—but that the water
was grown taller, for once she was forced
to drink it on her hands and knees, and
now she could scoop it in a cocoa-shell.
Finally, she added, she was much older
than the moon, for she had seen it waste
away till it was dimmer than the light of
a fire-fly; and the moon that was lighting
them now would decline too, and its successor
be so small, that she would never
again give it the name she had given to
the first—Sun of the Night. “But,” said
her companion, “how are you able to
speak a language you never learned from
your loxias and peacocks?”—“I will tell
you,” said Immalee, with an air of solemnity,
which her beauty and innocence made
at once ludicrous and imposing, and in
which she betrayed a slight tendency to
that wish to mystify that distinguishes her
delightful sex,—“there came a spirit to
me from the world of voices, and it whispered
to me sounds that I never have forgotten,
long, long before I was born.”—“Really?”
said the stranger. “Oh yes!—long
before I could gather a fig, or gather
the water in my hand, and that must
be before I was born. When I was born,
I was not so high as the rose-bud, at which
I tried to catch, now I am as near the
moon as the palm-tree—sometimes I catch
her beams sooner than he does, therefore I
must be very old, and very high.” At
these words, the stranger, with an expression
indescribable, leaned against a tree.
He viewed that lovely and helpless being,
while he refused the fruits and water she
offered him, with a look, that, for the first
time, intimated compassion. The stranger
feeling did not dwell long in a mansion
it was unused to. The expression was
soon exchanged for that half-ironical, half-diabolical
glance Immalee could not understand.
“And you live here alone,” he
said, “and you have lived in this beautiful
place without a companion?”—“Oh
no!” said Immalee, “I have a companion
more beautiful than all the flowers in the
isle. There is not a rose-leaf that drops in
the river so bright as its cheek. My
friend lives under the water, but its colours
are so bright. It kisses me too, but its
lips are very cold; and when I kiss it, it
seems to dance, and its beauty is all broken
into a thousand faces, that come smiling
at me like little stars. But, though
my friend has a thousand faces, and I
have but one, still there is one thing that
troubles me. There is but one stream
where it meets me, and that is where
are no shadows from the trees—and I never
can catch it but when the sun is bright.
Then when I catch it in the stream, I kiss
it on my knees; but my friend has grown
so tall, that sometimes I wish it were
smaller. Its lips spread so much wider,
that I give it a thousand kisses for one
that I get.” “Is your friend male or female,”
said the stranger.—“What is that?”
answered Immalee.—“I mean, of what
sex is your friend?”
“But to this question he could obtain no
satisfactory answer; and it was not till his
return the next day, when he revisited the
isle, that he discovered Immalee’s friend
was what he suspected. He found this
innocent and lovely being bending over a
stream that reflected her image, and wooing
it with a thousand wild and graceful
attitudes of joyful fondness. The stranger
gazed at her for some time, and thoughts
it would be difficult for man to penetrate
into, threw their varying expression over
his features for a moment. It was the
first of his intended victims he had ever
beheld with compunction. The joy, too,
with which Immalee received him, almost
brought back human feelings to a heart
that had long renounced them; and, for a
moment, he experienced a sensation like
that of his master when he visited paradise,—pity
for the flowers he resolved to
wither for ever. He looked at her as she
fluttered round him with outspread arms
and dancing eyes; and sighed, while she
welcomed him in tones of such wild sweetness,
as suited a being who had hitherto
conversed with nothing but the melody of
birds and the murmur of waters. With
all her ignorance, however, she could not
help testifying her amazement at his arriving
at the isle without any visible
means of conveyance. He evaded answering
her on this point, but said, “Immalee,
I come from a world wholly unlike that
you inhabit, amid inanimate flowers, and
unthinking birds. I come from a world
where all, as I do, think and speak.” Immalee
was speechless with wonder and
delight for some time; at length she exclaimed,
“Oh, how they must love each
other! even I love my poor birds and
flowers, and the trees that shade, and the
waters that sing to me!” The stranger
smiled. “In all that world, perhaps there
is not another being beautiful and innocent
as you. It is a world of suffering,
guilt, and care.” It was with much difficulty
she was made to comprehend the
meaning of these words, but when she did,
she exclaimed, “Oh, that I could live in
that world, for I would make every one
happy!”—“But you could not, Immalee,”
said the stranger; “this world is of such
extent that it would take your whole life
to traverse it, and, during your progress,
you never could be conversant with more
than a small number of sufferers at a time,
and the evils they undergo are in many
instances such as you or no human power
could relieve.” At these words, Immalee
burst into an agony of tears. “Weak,
but lovely being,” said the stranger, “could
your tears heal the corrosions of disease?—cool
the burning throb of a cancered heart?—wash
the pale slime from the clinging
lips of famine?—or, more than all, quench
the fire of forbidden passion?” Immalee
paused aghast at this enumeration, and
could only faulter out, that wherever she
went, she would bring her flowers and sunshine
among the healthy, and they should
all sit under the shade of her own tamarind.
That for disease and death, she had long
been accustomed to see flowers wither and
die their beautiful death of nature. “And
perhaps,” she added, after a reflective pause,
“as I have often known them to retain
their delicious odour even after they were
faded, perhaps what thinks may live too
after the form has faded, and that is a
thought of joy.” Of passion, she said
she knew nothing, and could propose
no remedy for an evil she was unconscious
of. She had seen flowers fade with
the season, but could not imagine why the
flower should destroy itself. “But did
you never trace a worm in the flower?”
said the stranger, with the sophistry of
corruption. “Yes,” answered Immalee,
“but the worm was not the native of the
flower; its own leaves never could have
hurt it.” This led to a discussion, which
Immalee’s impregnable innocence, though
combined with ardent curiosity and quick
apprehension, rendered perfectly harmless
to her. Her playful and desultory answers,—her
restless eccentricity of imagination,—her
keen and piercing, though
ill-poised intellectual weapons,—and, above
all, her instinctive and unfailing tact in
matters of right and wrong, formed altogether
an array that discomfited and baffled
the tempter more than if he had been compelled
to encounter half the wranglers of
the European academies of that day. In
the logic of the schools he was well-versed,
but in this logic of the heart and of nature,
he was “ignorance itself.” It is said, that
the “awless lion” crouches before “a maid
in the pride of her purity.” The tempter
was departing gloomily, when he saw tears
start from the bright eyes of Immalee, and
caught a wild and dark omen from her innocent
grief. “And you weep, Immalee?”
“Yes,” said the beautiful being, “I always
weep when I see the sun set in clouds; and
will you, the sun of my heart, set in darkness
too? and will you not rise again? will you
not?” and, with the graceful confidence of
pure innocence, she pressed her red delicious
lip to his hand as she spoke.
“Will you not? I shall never love my
roses and peacocks if you do not return,
for they cannot speak to me as you do,
nor can I give them one thought, but you
can give me many. Oh, I would like to
have many thoughts about the world that
suffers, from which you came; and I believe
you came from it, for, till I saw you,
I never felt a pain that was not pleasure;
but now, it is all pain when I think you
will not return.”—“I will return,” said
the stranger, “beautiful Immalee, and will
shew you, at my return, a glimpse of that
world from which I come, and in which
you will soon be an inmate.”—“But shall
I see you there,” said Immalee, “otherwise
how shall I talk thoughts?”—“Oh
yes,—oh certainly.”—“But why do you
repeat the same words twice; your once
would have been enough.”—“Well then,
yes.”—“Then take this rose from me, and
let us inhale its odour together, as I say to
my friend in the fountain, when I bend to
kiss it; but my friend withdraws its rose
before I have tasted it, and I leave mine
on the water. Will you not take my
rose,” said the beautiful suppliant, bending
towards him. “I will,” said the stranger;
and he took a flower from the cluster Immalee
held out to him. It was a withered
one. He snatched it, and hid it in his
breast. “And will you go without a canoe
across that dark sea?” said Immalee.—“We
shall meet again, and meet in the
world of suffering,” said the stranger.—“Thank
you,—oh, thank you,” repeated
Immalee, as she saw him plunge fearless
amid the surf. The stranger answered only,
“We shall meet again.” Twice, as he
parted, he threw a glance at the beautiful
and isolated being; a lingering of humanity
trembled round his heart,—but he tore
the withered rose from his bosom, and to
the waved arm and angel-smile of Immalee,
he answered, “We shall meet again.”
CHAPTER XVI.
Più non ho la dolce speranza.
Didone.
“Seven mornings and evenings Immalee
paced the sands of her lonely isle, without
seeing the stranger. She had still his promise
to console her, that they should meet
in the world of suffering; and this she repeated
to herself as if it was full of hope
and consolation. In this interval she tried
to educate herself for her introduction into
this world, and it was beautiful to see her
attempting, from vegetable and animal
analogies, to form some image of the incomprehensible
destiny of man. In the
shade she watched the withering flower.—“The
blood that ran red through its veins
yesterday is purple to-day, and will be
black and dry to-morrow,” she said; “but
it feels no pain—it dies patiently,—and
the ranunculus and tulip near it are untouched
by grief for their companion, or
their colours would not be so resplendent.
But can it be thus in the world that
thinks? Could I see him wither and die,
without withering and dying along with
him. Oh no! when that flower fades, I
will be the dew that falls over him!”
“She attempted to enlarge her comprehension,
by observing the animal world.
A young loxia had fallen dead from its
pendent nest; and Immalee, looking into
the aperture which that intelligent bird
forms at the lower extremity of the nest
to secure it from birds of prey, perceived
the old ones with fire-flies in their small
beaks, their young one lying dead before
them. At this sight Immalee burst into
tears.—“Ah! you cannot weep,” she said,
“what an advantage I have over you!
You eat, though your young one, your
own one, is dead; but could I ever drink
of the milk of the cocoa, if he could no
longer taste it? I begin to comprehend
what he said—to think, then, is to suffer—and
a world of thought must be a world
of pain! But how delicious are these
tears! Formerly I wept for pleasure—but
there is a pain sweeter than pleasure, that
I never felt till I beheld him. Oh! who
would not think, to have the joy of tears?”
“But Immalee did not occupy this interval
solely in reflection; a new anxiety began
to agitate her; and in the intervals of
her meditation and her tears, she searched
with avidity for the most glowing and fantastically
wreathed shells to deck her arms
and hair with. She changed her drapery of
flowers every day, and never thought them
fresh after the first hour; then she filled her
largest shells with the most limpid water,
and her hollow cocoa nuts with the most
delicious figs, interspersed with roses, and
arranged them picturesquely on the stone
bench of the ruined pagoda. The time,
however, passed over without the arrival
of the stranger, and Immalee, on visiting
her fairy banquet the next day, wept over
the withered fruit, but dried her eyes, and
hastened to replace them.
“She was thus employed on the eighth
morning, when she saw the stranger approach;
and the wild and innocent delight
with which she bounded towards him, excited
in him for a moment a feeling of
gloomy and reluctant compunction, which
Immalee’s quick susceptibility traced in
his pausing step and averted eye. She
stood trembling in lovely and pleading
diffidence, as if intreating pardon for an
unconscious offence, and asking permission
to approach by the very attitude in
which she forbore it, while tears stood in
her eyes ready to fall at another repelling
motion. This sight “whetted his almost
blunted purpose.” She must learn to
suffer, to qualify her to become my pupil,
he thought. “Immalee, you weep,” he
added, approaching her. “Oh yes!” said
Immalee, smiling like a spring morning
through her tears; “you are to teach me
to suffer, and I shall soon be very fit for
your world—but I had rather weep for
you, than smile on a thousand roses.”—“Immalee,”
said the stranger, repelling
the tenderness that melted him in spite of
himself, “Immalee, I come to shew you
something of the world of thought you
are so anxious to inhabit, and of which
you must soon become an inmate. Ascend
this hill where the palm-trees are clustering,
and you shall see a glimpse of part of
it.”—“But I would like to see the whole,
and all at once!” said Immalee, with the
natural avidity of thirsty and unfed intellect,
that believes it can swallow all things,
and digest all things. “The whole, and
all at once!” said her conductor, turning to
smile at her as she bounded after him,
breathless and glowing with newly excited
feeling. “I doubt the part you will
see to-night will be more than enough to
satiate even your curiosity.” As he spoke
he drew a tube from his vest, and bid her
apply it to her sight. The Indian obeyed
him; but, after gazing a moment, uttered
the emphatic exclamation, “I am there!—or
are they here?” and sunk on the
earth in a frenzy of delight. She rose
again in a moment, and eagerly seizing
the telescope, applied it in a wrong direction,
which disclosed merely the sea to her
view, and exclaimed sadly, “Gone!—gone—all
that beautiful world lived and
died in a moment—all that I love die so—my
dearest roses live not half so long
as those I neglect—you were absent for
seven moons since I first saw you, and the
beautiful world lived only a moment.”
“The stranger again directed the telescope
towards the shore of India, from
which they were not far distant, and Immalee
again exclaimed in rapture, “Alive
and more beautiful than ever!—all living,
thinking things!—their very walk thinks.
No mute fishes, and senseless trees, but
wonderful rocks(12), on which they look
with pride, as if they were the works of
their own hands. Beautiful rocks! how
I love the perfect straitness of your sides,
and the crisped and flower-like knots of
your decorated tops! Oh that flowers
grew, and birds fluttered round you, and
then I would prefer you even to the rocks
under which I watch the setting sun! Oh
what a world must that be where nothing
is natural, and every thing beautiful!—thought
must have done all that. But,
how little every thing is!—thought should
have made every thing larger—thought
should be a god. But,” she added with
quick intelligence and self-accusing diffidence,
“perhaps I am wrong. Sometimes
I have thought I could lay my hand on
the top of a palm-tree, but when, after a
long, long time, I came close to it, I could
not have reached its lowest leaf were I ten
times higher than I am. Perhaps your
beautiful world may grow higher as I approach
it.”—“Hold, Immalee,” said the
stranger, taking the telescope from her
hands, “to enjoy this sight you should
understand it.”—“Oh yes!” said Immalee,
with submissive anxiety, as the world of
sense rapidly lost ground in her imagination
against the new-found world of mind,—“yes—let
me think.”—“Immalee, have
you any religion?” said the visitor, as an
indescribable feeling of pain made his
pale brow still paler. Immalee, quick
in understanding and sympathising with
physical feeling, darted away at these
words, returned in a moment with a banyan
leaf, with which she wiped the drops
from his livid forehead; and then seating
herself at his feet, in an attitude of profound
but eager attention, repeated, “Religion!
what is that? is it a new thought?”—“It
is the consciousness of a Being superior
to all worlds and their inhabitants,
because he is the Maker of all, and will be
their judge—of a Being whom we cannot
see, but in whose power and presence we
must believe, though invisible—of one who
is every where unseen; always acting,
though never in motion; hearing all things,
but never heard.” Immalee interrupted
with an air of distraction—“Hold! too
many thoughts will kill me—let me pause.
I have seen the shower that came to refresh
the rose-tree beat it to the earth.”
After an effort of solemn recollection, she
added, “The voice of dreams told me
something like that before I was born, but
it is so long ago,—sometimes I have had
thoughts within me like that voice. I
have thought I loved the things around
me too much, and that I should love things
beyond me—flowers that could not fade,
and a sun that never sets. I could have
sprung, like a bird into the air, after such
a thought—but there was no one to shew
me that path upward.” And the young
enthusiast lifted towards heaven eyes in
which trembled the tears of ecstatic imaginings,
and then turned their mute pleadings
on the stranger.
“It is right,” he continued, “not only
to have thoughts of this Being, but to express
them by some outward acts. The
inhabitants of the world you are about to
see, call this, worship,—and they have
adopted (a Satanic smile curled his lip as
he spoke) very different modes; so different,
that, in fact, there is but one point in
which they all agree—that of making their
religion a torment;—the religion of some
prompting them to torture themselves, and
the religion of some prompting them to
torture others. Though, as I observed,
they all agree in this important point, yet
unhappily they differ so much about the
mode, that there has been much disturbance
about it in the world that thinks.”—“In
the world that thinks!” repeated Immalee,
“Impossible! Surely they must
know that a difference cannot be acceptable
to Him who is One.”—“And have
you then adopted no mode of expressing
your thoughts of this Being, that is, of
worshipping him?” said the stranger.—“I
smile when the sun rises in its
beauty, and I weep when I see the evening
star rise,” said Immalee.—“And do
you recoil at the inconsistencies of varied
modes of worship, and yet you
yourself employ smiles and tears in your
address to the Deity?”—“I do,—for
they are both the expressions of joy with
me,” said the poor Indian; “the sun
is as happy when he smiles through the
rain-clouds, as when he burns in the mid-height
of heaven, in the fierceness of his
beauty; and I am happy whether I smile
or I weep.”—“Those whom you are about
to see,” said the stranger, offering her the
telescope, “are as remote in their forms
of worship as smiles from tears; but they
are not, like you, equally happy in both.”
Immalee applied her eye to the telescope,
and exclaimed in rapture at what she saw.
“What do you see?” said the stranger.
Immalee described what she saw with
many imperfect expressions, which, perhaps,
may be rendered more intelligible by
the explanatory words of the stranger.
“You see,” said he, “the coast of India,
the shores of the world near you.—There
is the black pagoda of Juggernaut,
that enormous building on which your eye
is first fixed. Beside it stands a Turkish
mosque—you may distinguish it by a figure
like that of the half-moon. It is the
will of him who rules that world, that its
inhabitants should worship him by that
sign(13). At a small distance you may see
a low building with a trident on its summit—that
is the temple of Maha-deva, one
of the ancient goddesses of the country.”—“But
the houses are nothing to me,” said
Immalee, “shew me the living things
that go there. The houses are not half
so beautiful as the rocks on the shore,
draperied all over with sea-weeds and
mosses, and shaded by the distant palm-tree
and cocoa.”—“But those buildings,”
said the tempter, “are indicative of the
various modes of thinking of those who
frequent them. If it is into their thoughts
you wish to look, you must see them expressed
by their actions. In their dealings
with each other, men are generally deceitful,
but in their dealings with their gods,
they are tolerably sincere in the expression
of the character they assign them in their
imaginations. If that character be formidable,
they express fear; if it be one of
cruelty, they indicate it by the sufferings
they inflict on themselves; if it be gloomy,
the image of the god is faithfully reflected
in the visage of the worshipper. Look
and judge.”
“Immalee looked and saw a vast sandy
plain, with the dark pagoda of Juggernaut
in the perspective. On this plain lay the
bones of a thousand skeletons, bleaching
in the burning and unmoistened air. A
thousand human bodies, hardly more alive,
and scarce less emaciated, were trailing
their charred and blackened bodies over
the sands, to perish under the shadow of
the temple, hopeless of ever reaching that
of its walls.
“Multitudes of them dropt dead as they
crawled. Multitudes still living, faintly
waved their hands, to scare the vultures
that hovered nearer and nearer at every
swoop, and scooped the poor remnants of
flesh from the living bones of the screaming
victim, and retreated, with an answering
scream of disappointment at the scanty
and tasteless morsel they had torn away.
“Many tried, in their false and fanatic
zeal, to double their torments, by crawling
through the sands on their hands and
knees; but hands through the backs of
which the nails had grown, and knees
worn literally to the bone, struggled but
feebly amid the sands and the skeletons,
and the bodies that were soon to be skeletons,
and the vultures that were to make
them so.
“Immalee withheld her breath, as if
she inhaled the abominable effluvia of this
mass of putrefaction, which is said to desolate
the shores near the temple of Juggernaut,
like a pestilence.
“Close to this fearful scene, came on a
pageant, whose splendour made a brilliant
and terrible contrast to the loathsome and
withering desolation of animal and intellectual
life, amid which its pomp came
towering, and sparkling, and trembling on.
An enormous fabric, more resembling a
moving palace than a triumphal car, supported
the inshrined image of Juggernaut,
and was dragged forward by the united
strength of a thousand human bodies,
priests, victims, brahmins, faqueers and all.
In spite of this huge force, the impulse
was so unequal, that the whole edifice rocked
and tottered from time to time, and
this singular union of instability and splendour,
of trembling decadence and terrific
glory, gave a faithful image of the meretricious
exterior, and internal hollowness,
of idolatrous religion. As the procession
moved on, sparkling amid desolation, and
triumphant amid death, multitudes rushed
forward from time to time, to prostrate
themselves under the wheels of the enormous
machine, which crushed them to atoms
in a moment, and passed on;—others
“cut themselves with knives and lancets
after their manner,” and not believing
themselves worthy to perish beneath the
wheels of the idol’s chariot, sought to propitiate
him by dying the tracks of those
wheels with their blood;—their relatives
and friends shouted with delight as they saw
the streams of blood dye the car and its line
of progress, and hoped for an interest in
these voluntary sacrifices, with as much energy,
and perhaps as much reason, as the
Catholic votarist does in the penance of St
Bruno, or the ex-oculation of St Lucia, or
the martyrdom of St Ursula and her eleven
thousand virgins, which, being interpreted,
means the martyrdom of a single female
named Undecimilla, which the Catholic
legends read Undecim Mille.
“The procession went on, amid that
mixture of rites that characterizes idolatry
in all countries,—half resplendent, half horrible—appealing
to nature while they rebel
against her—mingling flowers with blood,
and casting alternately a screaming infant,
or a garland of roses, beneath the car of the
idol.
“Such was the picture that presented to
the strained, incredulous eyes of Immalee,
those mingled features of magnificence
and horror,—of joy and suffering,—of
crushed flowers and mangled bodies,—of
magnificence calling on torture for its
triumph,—and the steam of blood and the
incense of the rose, inhaled at once by the
triumphant nostrils of an incarnate demon,
who rode amid the wrecks of nature and
the spoils of the heart! Immalee gazed on
in horrid curiosity. She saw, by the aid
of the telescope, a boy seated on the front
of the moving temple, who “perfected the
praise” of the loathsome idol, with all the
outrageous lubricities of the Phallic worship.
From the slightest consciousness of
the meaning of this phenomenon, her unimaginable
purity protected her as with a
shield. It was in vain that the tempter
plied her with questions, and hints of explanation,
and offers of illustration. He
found her chill, indifferent, and even incurious.
He gnashed his teeth and gnawed
his lip en parenthese. But when she
saw mothers cast their infants under the
wheels of the car, and then turn to watch
the wild and wanton dance of the Almahs,
and appear, by their open lips and clapped
hands, to keep time to the sound of the
silver bells that tinkled round their slight
ankles, while their infants were writhing
in their dying agony,—she dropt the telescope
in horror, and exclaimed, “The
world that thinks does not feel. I never
saw the rose kill the bud!”
“But look again,” said the tempter,
“to that square building of stone, round
which a few stragglers are collected, and
whose summit is surmounted by a trident,—that
is the temple of Maha-deva, a goddess
who possesses neither the power or
the popularity of the great idol Juggernaut.
Mark how her worshippers approach
her.” Immalee looked, and saw
women offering flowers, fruits, and perfumes;
and some young girls brought
birds in cages, whom they set free; others,
after making vows for the safety of some
absent, sent a small and gaudy boat of paper,
illuminated with wax, down the
stream of an adjacent river, with injunctions
never to sink till it reached him.
“Immalee smiled with pleasure at the
rites of this harmless and elegant superstition.
“This is not the religion of torment,”
said she.—“Look again,” said the
stranger. She did, and beheld those very
women whose hands had been employed
in liberating birds from their cages, suspending,
on the branches of the trees
which shadowed the temple of Maha-deva,
baskets containing their new-born infants,
who were left there to perish with hunger,
or be devoured by the birds, while
their mothers danced and sung in honour
of the goddess.
“Others were occupied in conveying,
apparently with the most zealous and tender
watchfulness, their aged parents to the
banks of the river, where, after assisting
them to perform their ablations, with all
the intensity of filial and divine piety, they
left them half immersed in the water, to be
devoured by alligators, who did not suffer
their wretched prey to linger in long
expectation of their horrible death; while
others were deposited in the jungles near
the banks of the river, where they met
with a fate as certain and as horrible, from
the tigers who infested it, and whose yell
soon hushed the feeble wail of their unresisting
victims.
“Immalee sunk on the earth at this
spectacle, and clasping both hands over
her eyes, remained speechless with grief
and horror.
“Look yet again,” said the stranger,
“the rites of all religions are not so bloody.”
Once more she looked, and saw a Turkish
mosque, towering in all the splendour that
accompanied the first introduction of the
religion of Mahomet among the Hindoos.
It reared its gilded domes, and carved minarets,
and crescented pinnacles, rich with
all the profusion which the decorative imagination
of Oriental architecture, at once
light and luxuriant, gorgeous and aerial,
delights to lavish on its favourite works.
“A group of stately Turks were approaching
the mosque, at the call of the
muezzin. Around the building arose
neither tree nor shrub; it borrowed neither
shade nor ornament from nature; it had
none of those soft and graduating shades
and hues, which seem to unite the works
of God and the creature for the glory of the
former, and calls on the inventive magnificence
of art, and the spontaneous loveliness
of nature, to magnify the Author of both;
it stood the independent work and emblem
of vigorous hands and proud minds,
such as appeared to belong to those who
now approached it as worshippers. Their
finely featured and thoughtful countenances,
their majestic habits, and lofty figures,
formed an imposing contrast to the
unintellectual expression, the crouching
posture, and the half naked squalidness of
some poor Hindoos, who, seated on their
hams, were eating their mess of rice, as
the stately Turks passed on to their devotions.
Immalee viewed them with a feeling
of awe and pleasure, and began to
think there might be some good in the religion
professed by these noble-looking
beings. But, before they entered the
mosque, they spurned and spit at the unoffending
and terrified Hindoos; they
struck them with the flats of their sabres,
and, terming them dogs of idolaters, they
cursed them in the name of God and the
prophet. Immalee, revolted and indignant
at the sight, though she could not hear the
words that accompanied it, demanded the
reason of it. “Their religion,” said the stranger,
“binds them to hate all who do not worship
as they do.”—“Alas!” said Immalee,
weeping, “is not that hatred which their
religion teaches, a proof that theirs is the
worst? But why,” she added, her features
illuminated with all the wild and sparkling
intelligence of wonder, while flushed with
recent fears, “why do I not see among
them some of those lovelier beings, whose
habits differ from theirs, and whom you
call women? Why do they not worship
also; or have they a milder religion of
their own?”—“That religion,” replied the
stranger, “is not very favourable to those
beings, of whom you are the loveliest; it
teaches that men shall have different companions
in the world of souls; nor does it
clearly intimate that women shall ever arrive
there. Hence you may see some of
these excluded beings wandering amid
those stones that designate the place of
their dead, repeating prayers for the dead
whom they dare not hope to join; and
others, who are old and indigent, seated
at the doors of the mosque, reading aloud
passages from a book lying on their knees,
(which they call the Koran), with the hope
of soliciting alms, not of exciting devotion.”
At these desolating words, Immalee, who
had in vain looked to any of these systems
for that hope or solace which her pure
spirit and vivid imagination alike thirsted
for, felt a recoiling of the soul unutterable
at religion thus painted to her, and exhibiting
only a frightful picture of blood
and cruelty, of the inversion of every principle
of nature, and the disruption of every
tie of the heart.
“She flung herself on the ground, and
exclaiming, “There is no God, if there be
none but theirs!” then, starting up as if to
take a last view, in the desperate hope that
all was an illusion, she discovered a small
obscure building overshaded by palm-trees,
and surmounted by a cross; and struck by
the unobtrusive simplicity of its appearance,
and the scanty number and peaceable
demeanour of the few who were approaching
it, she exclaimed, that this must be a
new religion, and eagerly demanded its
name and rites. The stranger evinced
some uneasiness at the discovery she had
made, and testified still more reluctance to
answer the questions which it suggested;
but they were pressed with such restless
and coaxing importunity, and the beautiful
being who urged them made such an
artless transition from profound and
meditative grief to childish, yet intelligent
curiosity, that it was not in man, or more
or less than man, to resist her.
“Her glowing features, as she turned them
toward him, with an expression half impatient,
half pleading, were indeed those
“(14)of a stilled infant smiling through its
tears.” Perhaps, too, another cause might
have operated on this prophet of curses,
and made him utter a blessing where he
meant malediction; but into this we dare
not inquire, nor will it ever be fully known
till the day when all secrets must be disclosed.
However it was, he felt himself
compelled to tell her it was a new religion,
the religion of Christ, whose rites and worshippers
she beheld. “But what are the
rites?” asked Immalee. “Do they murder
their children, or their parents, to prove
their love to God? Do they hang them
on baskets to perish, or leave them on the
banks of rivers to be devoured by fierce and
hideous animals?”—“The religion they
profess forbids that,” said the stranger, with
reluctant truth; “it requires them to honour
their parents, and to cherish their
children.”—“But why do they not spurn
from the entrance to their church those
who do not think as they do?”—“Because
their religion enjoins them to be mild, benevolent,
and tolerant; and neither to reject
or disdain those who have not attained
its purer light.”—“But why is there no
splendour or magnificence in their worship;
nothing grand or attractive?”—“Because
they know that God cannot be acceptably
worshipped but by pure hearts
and crimeless hands; and though their religion
gives every hope to the penitent
guilty, it flatters none with false promises
of external devotion supplying the homage
of the heart; or artificial and picturesque
religion standing in the place of that single
devotion to God, before whose throne,
though the proudest temples erected to his
honour crumble into dust, the heart burns
on the altar still, an inextinguishable and
acceptable victim.”
“As he spoke, (perhaps constrained by
a higher power), Immalee bowed her glowing
face to the earth, and then raising it
with the look of a new-born angel, exclaimed,
“Christ shall be my God, and I
will be a Christian!” Again she bowed in
the deep prostration which indicates the
united submission of soul and body, and
remained in this attitude of absorption so
long, that, when she rose, she did not
perceive the absence of her companion.—“He
fled murmuring, and with him fled
the shades of night.”
CHAPTER XVII .
“Why, I did say something about getting a licence
from the Cadi.”
Blue Beard.
“The visits of the stranger were interrupted
for some time, and when he returned,
it seemed as if their purpose was
no longer the same. He no longer attempted
to corrupt her principles, or sophisticate
her understanding, or mystify
her views of religion. On the latter subject
he was quite silent, seemed to regret
he had ever touched on it, and not
all her restless avidity of knowledge, or
caressing importunity of manner, could
extract from him another syllable on the
subject. He repayed her amply, however,
by the rich, varied, and copious
stores of a mind, furnished with matter
apparently beyond the power of human
experience to have collected, confined, as
it is, within the limits of threescore years
and ten. But this never struck Immalee;
she took “no note of time;” and the
tale of yesterday, or the record of past centuries,
were synchronized in a mind to
which facts and dates were alike unknown;
and which was alike unacquainted with
the graduating shades of manner, and the
linked progress of events.
“They often sat on the shore of the
isle in the evening, where Immalee always
prepared a seat of moss for her visitor, and
gazed together on the blue deep in silence;
for Immalee’s newly-awaked intellect and
heart felt that bankruptcy of language,
which profound feeling will impress on the
most cultivated intellect, and which, in
her case, was increased alike by her innocence
and her ignorance; and her visitor
had perhaps reasons still stronger for his
silence. This silence, however, was often
broken. There was not a vessel that sailed
in the distance which did not suggest
an eager question from Immalee, and did
not draw a slow and extorted reply from the
stranger. His knowledge was immense,
various, and profound, (but this was rather
a subject of delight than of curiosity to his
beautiful pupil); and from the Indian canoe,
rowed by naked natives, to the splendid,
and clumsy, and ill-managed vessels of the
Rajahs, that floated like huge and gilded fish
tumbling in uncouth and shapeless mirth
on the wave, to the gallant and well-manned
vessels of Europe, that came on like the gods
of ocean bringing fertility and knowledge,
the discoveries of art, and the blessings of
civilization, wherever their sails were unfurled
and their anchors dropt,—he could
tell her all,—describe the destination of
every vessel,—the feelings, characters, and
national habits of the many-minded inmates,—and
enlarge her knowledge to a
degree which books never could have done;
for colloquial communication is always the
most vivid and impressive medium, and
lips have a prescriptive right to be the
first intelligencers in instruction and in
love.
“Perhaps this extraordinary being, with
regard to whom the laws of mortality and
the feelings of nature seemed to be alike
suspended, felt a kind of sad and wild repose
from the destiny that immitigably
pursued him, in the society of Immalee.
We know not, and can never tell, what
sensations her innocent and helpless beauty
inspired him with, but the result was, that
he ceased to regard her as his victim; and,
when seated beside her listening to her
questions, or answering them, seemed to
enjoy the few lucid intervals of his insane
and morbid existence. Absent from her,
he returned to the world to torture and
to tempt in the mad-house where the
Englishman Stanton was tossing on his
straw——”
“Hold!” said Melmoth; “what name
have you mentioned?”—“Have patience
with me, Senhor,” said Monçada, who did
not like interruption; “have patience, and
you will find we are all beads strung on
the same string. Why should we jar
against each other? our union is indissoluble.”
He proceeded with the story of
the unhappy Indian, as recorded in the
parchments of Adonijah, which he had
been compelled to copy, and of which he
was anxious to impress every line and letter
on his listener, to substantiate his own
extraordinary story.
“When absent from her, his purpose
was what I have described; but while present,
that purpose seemed suspended; he
gazed often on her with eyes whose wild
and fierce lustre was quenched in a dew
that he hastily wiped away, and gazed on
her again. While he sat near her on the
flowers she had collected for him,—while
he looked on those timid and rosy lips that
waited his signal to speak, like buds that
did not dare to blow till the sun shone on
them,—while he heard accents issue from
those lips which he felt it would be as impossible
to pervert as it would be to teach
the nightingale blasphemy,—he sunk down
beside her, passed his hand over his livid
brow, and, wiping off some cold drops,
thought for a moment he was not the Cain
of the moral world, and that the brand was
effaced,—at least for a moment. The habitual
and impervious gloom of his soul soon
returned. He felt again the gnawings of
the worm that never dies, and the scorchings
of the fire that is never to be quenched.
He turned the fatal light of his dark eyes
on the only being who never shrunk from
their expression, for her innocence made
her fearless. He looked intensely at her,
while rage, despair, and pity, convulsed his
heart; and as he beheld the confiding and
conciliating smile with which this gentle
being met a look that might have withered
the heart of the boldest within him,—a
Semele gazing in supplicating love on the
lightnings that were to blast her,—one human
drop dimmed their portentous lustre,
as its softened rays fell on her. Turning
fiercely away, he flung his view on the ocean,
as if to find, in the sight of human life,
some fuel for the fire that was consuming
his vitals. The ocean, that lay calm and
bright before them as a sea of jasper, never
reflected two more different countenances,
or sent more opposite feelings to two hearts.
Over Immalee’s, it breathed that deep and
delicious reverie, which those forms of nature
that unite tranquillity and profundity
diffuse over souls whose innocence gives
them a right to an unmingled and exclusive
enjoyment of nature. None but crimeless
and unimpassioned minds ever truly
enjoyed earth, ocean, and heaven. At
our first transgression, nature expels us,
as it did our first parents, from her paradise
for ever.
“To the stranger the view was fraught
with far different visions. He viewed it
as a tiger views a forest abounding with
prey; there might be the storm and the
wreck; or, if the elements were obstinately
calm, there might be the gaudy and
gilded pleasure barge, in which a Rajah
and the beautiful women of his haram were
inhaling the sea breeze under canopies of
silk and gold, overturned by the unskilfulness
of their rowers, and their plunge,
and struggle, and dying agony, amid the
smile and beauty of the calm ocean, produce
one of those contrasts in which his
fierce spirit delighted. Or, were even this
denied, he could watch the vessels as they
floated by, and, from the skiff to the huge
trader, be sure that every one bore its
freight of woe and crime. There came on
the European vessels full of the passions and
crimes of another world,—of its sateless cupidity,
remorseless cruelty, its intelligence,
all awake and ministrant in the cause of
its evil passions, and its very refinement
operating as a stimulant to more inventive
indulgence, and more systematized vice.
He saw them approach to traffic for “gold,
and silver, and the souls of men;”—to
grasp, with breathless rapacity, the gems
and precious produce of those luxuriant
climates, and deny the inhabitants the rice
that supported their inoffensive existence;—to
discharge the load of their crimes, their
lust and their avarice, and after ravaging
the land, and plundering the natives, depart,
leaving behind them famine, despair,
and execration; and bearing with
them back to Europe, blasted constitutions,
inflamed passions, ulcerated hearts,
and consciences that could not endure
the extinction of a light in their sleeping
apartment.
“Such were the objects for which he
watched; and one evening, when solicited
by Immalee’s incessant questions about
the worlds to which the vessels were hastening,
or to which they were returning,
he gave her a description of the world,
after his manner, in a spirit of mingled
derision, malignity, and impatient bitterness
at the innocence of her curiosity.
There was a mixture of fiendish acrimony,
biting irony, and fearful truth, in his wild
sketch, which was often interrupted by
the cries of astonishment, grief, and terror,
from his hearer. “They come,” said he,
pointing to the European vessels, “from a
world where the only study of the inhabitants
is how to increase their own sufferings,
and those of others, to the utmost
possible degree; and, considering they
have only had 4000 years practice at the
task, it must be allowed they are tolerable
proficients.”—“But is it possible?”—“You
shall judge. In aid, doubtless, of this desirable
object, they have been all originally
gifted with imperfect constitutions and
evil passions; and, not to be ungrateful,
they pass their lives in contriving how to
augment the infirmities of the one, and
aggravate the acerbities of the other.
They are not like you, Immalee, a being
who breathes amid roses, and subsists only
on the juices of fruits, and the lymph of
the pure element. In order to render
their thinking powers more gross, and
their spirits more fiery, they devour animals,
and torture from abused vegetables
a drink, that, without quenching thirst,
has the power of extinguishing reason, inflaming
passion, and shortening life—the
best result of all—for life under such circumstances
owes its only felicity to the
shortness of its duration.”
“Immalee shuddered at the mention of
animal food, as the most delicate European
would at the mention of a cannibal
feast; and while tears trembled in her
beautiful eyes, she turned them wistfully
on her peacocks with an expression that
made the stranger smile. “Some,” said
he, by way of consolation, “have a taste
by no means so sophisticated,—they content
themselves at their need with the flesh
of their fellow-creatures; and as human
life is always miserable, and animal life
never so, (except from elementary causes),
one would imagine this the most humane
and salutary way of at once gratifying the
appetite, and diminishing the mass of human
suffering. But as these people pique
themselves on their ingenuity in aggravating
the sufferings of their situation, they
leave thousands of human beings yearly to
perish by hunger and grief, and amuse
themselves in feeding on animals, whom,
by depriving of existence, they deprive of
the only pleasure their condition has allotted
them. When they have thus, by unnatural
diet and outrageous stimulation,
happily succeeded in corrupting infirmity
into disease, and exasperating passion into
madness, they proceed to exhibit the proofs
of their success, with an expertness and
consistency truly admirable. They do not,
like you, Immalee, live in the lovely independence
of nature—lying on the earth,
and sleeping with all the eyes of heaven
unveiled to watch you—treading the same
grass till your light step feels a friend in
every blade it presses—and conversing
with flowers, till you feel yourself and
them children of the united family of nature,
whose mutual language of love you
have almost learned to speak to each other—no,
to effect their purpose, their food,
which is of itself poison, must be rendered
more fatal by the air they inhale; and
therefore the more civilized crowd all together
into a space which their own respiration,
and the exhalation of their bodies,
renders pestilential, and which gives
a celerity inconceivable to the circulation
of disease and mortality. Four thousand
of them will live together in a space smaller
than the last and lightest colonnade of
your young banyan-tree, in order, doubtless,
to increase the effects of fœtid air, artificial
heat, unnatural habits, and impracticable
exercise. The result of these judicious
precautions is just what may be
guessed. The most trifling complaint becomes
immediately infectious, and, during
the ravages of the pestilence, which this
habit generates, ten thousand lives a-day
are the customary sacrifice to the habit of
living in cities.”—“But they die in the
arms of those they love,” said Immalee,
whose tears flowed fast at this recital;
“and is not that better than even life
in solitude,—as mine was before I beheld
you?”
“The stranger was too intent on his
description to heed her. “To these cities
they resort nominally for security and protection,
but really for the sole purpose to
which their existence is devoted,—that of
aggravating its miseries by every ingenuity
of refinement. For example, those who
live in uncontrasted and untantalized misery,
can hardly feel it—suffering becomes
their habit, and they feel no more jealousy
of their situation than the bat, who clings
in blind and famishing stupefaction to the
cleft of a rock, feels of the situation of the
butterfly, who drinks of the dew, and
bathes in the bloom of every flower. But
the people of the other worlds have invented,
by means of living in cities, a new
and singular mode of aggravating human
wretchedness—that of contrasting it with
the wild and wanton excess of superfluous
and extravagant splendour.”
“Here the stranger had incredible difficulty
to make Immalee comprehend how
there could be an unequal division of the
means of existence; and when he had done
his utmost to explain it to her, she continued
to repeat, (her white finger on her
scarlet lip, and her small foot beating the
moss), in a kind of pouting inquietude,
“Why should some have more than they
can eat, and others nothing to eat?”—“This,”
continued the stranger, “is the
most exquisite refinement on that art of
torture which those beings are so expert
in—to place misery by the side of opulence—to
bid the wretch who dies for
want feed on the sound of the splendid
equipages which shake his hovel as they
pass, but leave no relief behind—to bid
the industrious, the ingenious, and the
imaginative, starve, while bloated mediocrity
pants from excess—to bid the dying
sufferer feel that life might be prolonged
by one drop of that exciting liquor, which,
wasted, produces only sickness or madness
in those whose lives it undermines;—to
do this is their principal object, and it is
fully attained. The sufferer through whose
rags the wind of winter blows, like arrows
lodging in every pore—whose tears freeze
before they fall—whose soul is as dreary
as the night under whose cope his resting-place
must be—whose glued and clammy
lips are unable to receive the food which
famine, lying like a burning coal at his vitals,
craves—and who, amid the horrors of
a houseless winter, might prefer its desolation
to that of the den that abuses the
name of home—without food—without
light—where the howlings of the storm
are answered by the fiercer cries of hunger—and
he must stumble to his murky
and strawless nook over the bodies of his
children, who have sunk on the floor, not
for rest, but despair. Such a being, is he
not sufficiently miserable?”
“Immalee’s shudderings were her only
answer, (though of many parts of his description
she had a very imperfect idea).
“No, he is not enough so yet,” pursued
the stranger, pressing the picture on her;
“let his steps, that know not where they
wander, conduct him to the gates of the
affluent and the luxurious—let him feel
that plenty and mirth are removed from
him but by the interval of a wall, and yet
more distant than if severed by worlds—let
him feel that while his world is darkness
and cold, the eyes of those within are
aching with the blaze of light, and hands
relaxed by artificial heat, are soliciting with
fans the refreshment of a breeze—let him
feel that every groan he utters is answered
by a song or a laugh—and let him die on
the steps of the mansion, while his last
conscious pang is aggravated by the
thought, that the price of the hundredth
part of the luxuries that lie untasted before
heedless beauty and sated epicurism,
would have protracted his existence, while
it poisons theirs—let him die of want on
the threshold of a banquet-hall, and then
admire with me the ingenuity that displays
itself in this new combination of misery.
The inventive activity of the people
of the world, in the multiplication of
calamity, is inexhaustibly fertile in resources.
Not satisfied with diseases and famine,
with sterility of the earth, and tempests
of the air, they must have laws and
marriages, and kings and tax-gatherers,
and wars and fetes, and every variety of
artificial misery inconceivable to you.”
“Immalee, overpowered by this torrent of
words, to her unintelligible words, in vain
asked a connected explanation of them.
The demon of his superhuman misanthropy
had now fully possessed him, and not
even the tones of a voice as sweet as the
strings of David’s harp, had power to expel
the evil one. So he went on flinging
about his fire-brands and arrows, and then
saying, “Am I not in sport? These people(15),”
said he, “have made unto themselves kings,
that is, beings whom they voluntarily invest
with the privilege of draining, by taxation,
whatever wealth their vices have left to
the rich, and whatever means of subsistence
their want has left to the poor, till
their extortion is cursed from the castle to
the cottage—and this to support a few
pampered favourites, who are harnessed by
silken reins to the car, which they drag
over the prostrate bodies of the multitude.
Sometimes exhausted by the monotony of
perpetual fruition, which has no parallel
even in the monotony of suffering, (for the
latter has at least the excitement of hope,
which is for ever denied to the former),
they amuse themselves by making war,
that is, collecting the greatest number of
human beings that can be bribed to the
task, to cut the throats of a less, equal,
or greater number of beings, bribed
in the same manner for the same purpose.
These creatures have not the least
cause of enmity to each other—they do
not know, they never beheld each other.
Perhaps they might, under other circumstances,
wish each other well, as far as human
malignity would suffer them; but
from the moment they are hired for legalized
massacre, hatred is their duty, and
murder their delight. The man who
would feel reluctance to destroy the reptile
that crawls in his path, will equip himself
with metals fabricated for the purpose
of destruction, and smile to see it stained
with the blood of a being, whose existence
and happiness he would have sacrificed his
own to promote, under other circumstances.
So strong is this habit of aggravating
misery under artificial circumstances, that
it has been known, when in a sea-fight a
vessel has blown up, (here a long explanation
was owed to Immalee, which may be
spared the reader), the people of that world
have plunged into the water to save, at
the risk of their own lives, the lives of
those with whom they were grappling
amid fire and blood a moment before, and
whom, though they would sacrifice to their
passions, their pride refused to sacrifice to
the elements.”—“Oh that is beautiful!—that
is glorious!” said Immalee, clasping
her white hands; “I could bear all you
describe to see that sight!”
“Her smile of innocent delight, her
spontaneous burst of high-toned feeling,
had the usual effect of adding a darker
shade to the frown of the stranger, and a
sterner curve to the repulsive contraction
of his upper lip, which was never raised
but to express hostility or contempt.
“But what do the kings do?” said Immalee,
“while they are making men kill
each other for nothing?”—“You are ignorant,
Immalee,” said the stranger, “very
ignorant, or you would not have said it
was for nothing. Some of them fight for
ten inches of barren sand—some for the
dominion of the salt wave—some for any
thing—and some for nothing—but all for
pay and poverty, and occasional excitement,
and the love of action, and the love of
change, and the dread of home, and the
consciousness of evil passions, and the
hope of death, and the admiration of the
showy dress in which they are to perish.
The best of the jest is, they contrive not
only to reconcile themselves to these cruel
and wicked absurdities, but to dignify
them with the most imposing names their
perverted language supplies—the names of
fame, of glory, of recording memory, and
admiring posterity.
“Thus a wretch whom want, idleness,
or intemperance, drives to this reckless and
heart-withering business,—who leaves his
wife and children to the mercy of strangers,
or to famish, (terms nearly synonimous),
the moment he has assumed the
blushing badge that privileges massacre,
becomes, in the imagination of this intoxicated
people, the defender of his country,
entitled to her gratitude and to her praise.
The idle stripling, who hates the cultivation
of intellect, and despises the meanness
of occupation, feels, perhaps, a taste for arraying
his person in colours as gaudy as
the parrot’s or the peacock’s; and this effeminate
propensity is baptised by the
prostituted name of the love of glory—and
this complication of motives borrowed from
vanity and from vice, from the fear of distress,
the wantonness of idleness, and the
appetite for mischief, finds one convenient
and sheltering appellation in the single
sound—patriotism. And those beings who
never knew one generous impulse, one independent
feeling, ignorant of either the
principles or the justice of the cause for
which they contend, and wholly uninterested
in the result, except so far as it involves
the concerns of their own vanity,
cupidity, and avarice, are, while living,
hailed by the infatuated world as its benefactors,
and when dead, canonized as its
martyrs. He died in his country’s cause,
is the epitaph inscribed by the rash hand
of indiscriminating eulogy on the grave of
ten thousand, who had ten thousand different
motives for their choice and their
fate,—who might have lived to be their
country’s enemies if they had not happened
to fall in her defence,—and whose love of
their country, if fairly analysed, was, under
its various forms of vanity, restlessness, the
love of tumult, or the love of show—purely
love of themselves. There let them
rest—nothing but the wish to disabuse
their idolaters, who prompt the sacrifice,
and then applaud the victim they have
made, could have tempted me to dwell
thus long on beings as mischievous in
their lives, as they are insignificant in their
death.
“Another amusement of these people,
so ingenious in multiplying the sufferings
of their destiny, is what they call law.
They pretend to find in this a security for
their persons and their properties—with
how much justice, their own felicitous experience
must inform them! Of the security
it gives to the latter, judge, Immalee,
when I tell you, that you might spend
your life in their courts, without being
able to prove that those roses you have
gathered and twined in your hair were
your own—that you might starve for this
day’s meal, while proving your right to a
property which must incontestibly be
yours, on the condition of your being
able to fast on a few years, and survive to
enjoy it—and that, finally, with the sentiments
of all upright men, the opinions of
the judges of the land, and the fullest conviction
of your own conscience in your favour,
you cannot obtain the possession of
what you and all feel to be your own,
while your antagonist can start an objection,
purchase a fraud, or invent a lie. So
pleadings go on, and years are wasted, and
property consumed, and hearts broken,—and
law triumphs. One of its most admirable
triumphs is in that ingenuity by
which it contrives to convert a difficulty
into an impossibility, and punish a man
for not doing what it has rendered impracticable
for him to do.
“When he is unable to pay his debts,
it deprives him of liberty and credit, to insure
that inability still further; and while
destitute alike of the means of subsistence,
or the power of satisfying his creditors, he
is enabled, by this righteous arrangement,
to console himself, at least, with the reflection,
that he can injure his creditor as
much as he has suffered from him—that
certain loss is the reward of immitigable
cruelty—and that, while he famishes in
prison, the page in which his debt is recorded
rots away faster than his body; and
the angel of death, with one obliterating
sweep of his wing, cancels misery and
debt, and presents, grinning in horrid triumph,
the release of debtor and debt, signed
by a hand that makes the judges tremble
on their seats.”—“But they have religion,”
said the poor Indian, trembling at
this horrible description; “they have that
religion which you shewed me—its mild
and peaceful spirit—its quietness and resignation—no
blood—no cruelty.”—“Yes,—true,”
said the stranger, with some reluctance,
“they have religion; for in their
zeal for suffering, they feel the torments
of one world not enough, unless aggravated
by the terrors of another. They have
such a religion, but what use have they
made of it? Intent on their settled purpose
of discovering misery wherever it
could be traced, and inventing it where it
could not, they have found, even in the
pure pages of that book, which, they presume
to say, contains their title to peace
on earth, and happiness hereafter, a right
to hate, plunder, and murder each other.
Here they have been compelled to exercise
an extraordinary share of perverted ingenuity.
The book contains nothing but
what is good, and evil must be the minds,
and hard the labour of those evil minds, to
extort a tinge from it to colour their pretensions
withal. But mark, in pursuance
of their great object, (the aggravation of
general misery), mark how subtilly they
have wrought. They call themselves by
various names, to excite passions suitable
to the names they bear. Thus some forbid
the perusal of that book to their disciples,
and others assert, that from the exclusive
study of its pages alone, can the
hope of salvation be learned or substantiated.
It is singular, however, that with all
their ingenuity, they have never been able
to extract a subject of difference from the
essential contents of that book, to which
they all appeal—so they proceed after their
manner.
“They never dare to dispute that it
contains irresistible injunctions,——that
those who believe in it should live in habits
of peace, benevolence, and harmony,—that
they should love each other in prosperity,
and assist each other in adversity.
They dare not deny that the spirit that
book inculcates and inspires, is a spirit
whose fruits are love, joy, peace, long-suffering,
mildness, and truth. On these
points they never presumed to differ.—They
are too plain to be denied, so they
contrive to make matter of difference out
of the various habits they wear; and they
cut each other’s throats for the love of God,
on the important subject(16), whether their
jackets should be red or white—or whether
their priests should be arrayed in silk ribbons(17),
or white linen(18), or black household
garments(19)—or whether they should immerse
their children in water, or sprinkle
them with a few drops of it—or whether
they should partake of the memorials of
the death of him they all profess to love,
standing or on their knees—or—— But
I weary you with this display of human
wickedness and absurdity. One point is
plain, they all agree that the language of
the book is, “Love one another,” while
they all translate that language, “Hate one
another.” But as they can find neither
materials or excuse from that book, they
search for them in their own minds,—and
there they are never at a loss, for human
minds are inexhaustible in malignity and
hostility; and when they borrow the name
of that book to sanction them, the deification
of their passions becomes a duty, and
their worst impulses are hallowed and
practised as virtues.”—“Are there no parents
or children in these horrible worlds?”
said Immalee, turning her tearful eyes on
this traducer of humanity; “none that
love each other as I loved the tree under
which I was first conscious of existence, or
the flowers that grew with me?”—“Parents?—children?”
said the stranger; “Oh
yes! There are fathers who instruct their
sons——” And his voice was lost—he
struggled to recover it.
“After a long pause, he said, “There
are some kind parents among those sophisticated
people.”—“And who are they?”
said Immalee, whose heart throbbed spontaneously
at the mention of kindliness.—“Those,”
said the stranger, with a withering
smile, “who murder their children at
the hour of their birth, or, by medical art,
dismiss them before they have seen the
light; and, in so doing, they give the only
credible evidence of parental affection.”
“He ceased, and Immalee remained
silent in melancholy meditation on what
she had heard. The acrid and searing
irony of his language had made no impression
on one with whom “speech was
truth,” and who could have no idea why a
circuitous mode of conveying meaning
could be adopted, when even a direct one
was often attended with difficulty to herself.
But she could understand, that he
had spoken much of evil and of suffering,
names unknown to her before she beheld
him, and she turned on him a glance that
seemed at once to thank and reproach him
for her painful initiation into the mysteries
of a new existence. She had, indeed,
tasted of the tree of knowledge, and
her eyes were opened, but its fruit was
bitter to her taste, and her looks conveyed
a kind of mild and melancholy gratitude,
that would have wrung the heart for giving
its first lesson of pain to the heart of a
being so beautiful, so gentle, and so innocent.
The stranger marked this blended
expression, and exulted.
“He had distorted life thus to her imagination,
perhaps with the purpose of terrifying
her from a nearer view of it; perhaps
in the wild hope of keeping her for
ever in this solitude, where he might
sometimes see her, and catch, from the
atmosphere of purity that surrounded
her, the only breeze that floated over
the burning desert of his own existence.
This hope was strengthened by the obvious
impression his discourse had made
on her. The sparkling intelligence,—the
breathless curiosity,—the vivid gratitude
of her former expression,—were all extinguished,
and her down cast and thoughtful
eyes were full of tears.
“Has my conversation wearied you,
Immalee?” said he.—“It has grieved me,
yet I wish to listen still,” answered the
Indian. “I love to hear the murmur of
the stream, though the crocodile may be
beneath the waves.”—“Perhaps you wish
to encounter the people of this world, so
full of crime and misfortune.”—“I do, for
it is the world you came from, and when
you return to it all will be happy but me.”—“And
is it, then, in my power to confer
happiness?” said her companion; “is
it for this purpose I wander among mankind?”
A mingled and indefinable expression
of derision, malevolence, and despair,
overspread his features, as he added,
“You do me too much honour, in devising
for me an occupation so mild and so
congenial to my spirit.”
“Immalee, whose eyes were averted, did
not see this expression, and she replied,
“I know not, but you have taught me the
joy of grief; before I saw you I only smiled,
but since I saw you, I weep, and my
tears are delicious. Oh! they are far different
from those I shed for the setting
sun, or the faded rose! And yet I know
not—” And the poor Indian, oppressed by
emotions she could neither understand or
express, clasped her hands on her bosom,
as if to hide the secret of its new palpitations,
and, with the instinctive diffidence
of her purity, signified the change of her
feelings, by retiring a few steps from her
companion, and casting on the earth eyes
which could contain their tears no longer.
The stranger appeared troubled,—an emotion
new to himself agitated him for a moment,—then
a smile of self-disdain curled
his lip, as if he reproached himself for the
indulgence of human feeling even for a moment.
Again his features relaxed, as he
turned to the bending and averted form of
Immalee, and he seemed like one conscious
of agony of soul himself, yet inclined to
sport with the agony of another’s. This
union of inward despair and outward levity
is not unnatural. Smiles are the legitimate
offspring of happiness, but laughter
is often the misbegotten child of madness,
that mocks its parent to her face.
With such an expression he turned towards
her, and asked, “But what is your
meaning, Immalee?”—A long pause followed
this question, and at length the Indian
answered, “I know not,” with that
natural and delicious art which teaches the
sex to disclose their meaning in words that
seem to contradict it. “I know not,”
means, “I know too well.” Her companion
understood this, and enjoyed his
anticipated triumph. “And why do your
tears flow, Immalee?”—“I know not,”
said the poor Indian, and her tears flowed
faster at the question.
“At these words, or rather at these
tears, the stranger forgot himself for a moment.
He felt that melancholy triumph
which the conqueror is unable to enjoy;
that triumph which announces a victory
over the weakness of others, obtained at
the expence of a greater weakness in ourselves.
A human feeling, in spite of him,
pervaded his whole soul, as he said, in accents
of involuntary softness, “What
would you have me do, Immalee?” The
difficulty of speaking a language that
might be at once intelligible and reserved,—that
might convey her wishes without
betraying her heart,—and the unknown
nature of her new emotions, made Immalee
faulter long before she could answer,
“Stay with me,—return not to that
world of evil and sorrow.—Here the flowers
will always bloom, and the sun be as bright
as on the first day I beheld you.—Why
will you go back to the world to think
and to be unhappy?” The wild and discordant
laugh of her companion, startled
and silenced her. “Poor girl,” he exclaimed,
with that mixture of bitterness
and commiseration, that at once terrifies
and humiliates; “and is this the destiny
I am to fulfil?—to listen to the chirping
of birds, and watch the opening of buds?
Is this to be my lot?” and with another
wild burst of unnatural laughter, he flung
away the hand which Immalee had extended
to him as she had finished her simple
appeal.—“Yes, doubtless, I am well
fitted for such a fate, and such a partner.
Tell me,” he added, with still wilder fierceness,
“tell me from what line of my
features,—from what accent of my voice,—from
what sentiment of my discourse,
have you extracted the foundation of a
hope that insults me with the view of felicity?”
Immalee, who might have replied,
“I understand a fury in your words,
but not your words,” had yet sufficient aid
from her maiden pride, and female penetration,
to discover that she was rejected
by the stranger; and a brief emotion of indignant
grief struggled with the tenderness
of her exposed and devoted heart.
She paused a moment, and then checking
her tears, said, in her firmest tones, “Go,
then, to your world,—since you wish to be
unhappy—go!—Alas! it is not necessary
to go there to be unhappy, for I must be
so here. Go,—but take with you these
roses, for they will all wither when you are
gone!—take with you these shells, for I
shall no longer love to wear them when you
no longer see them!” And as she spoke,
with simple, but emphatic action, she untwined
from her bosom and hair the shells
and flowers with which they were adorned,
and threw them at his feet; then turning
to throw one glance of proud and melancholy
grief at him, she was retiring.
“Stay, Immalee,—stay, and hear me for
a moment,” said the stranger; and he
would, at that moment, have perhaps discovered
the ineffable and forbidden secret
of his destiny, but Immalee, in silence,
which her look of profound grief made
eloquent, shook sadly her averted head,
and departed.
CHAPTER XVIII .
Miseram me omnia terrent, et maris sonitus, et
scopuli, et solitudo, et sanctitudo Apollinis.
Latin Play.
“Many days elapsed before the stranger
revisited the isle. How he was occupied,
or what feelings agitated him in the interval,
it would be beyond human conjecture
to discover. Perhaps he sometimes exulted
in the misery he had inflicted,—perhaps
he sometimes pitied it. His
stormy mind was like an ocean that had
swallowed a thousand wrecks of gallant
ships, and now seemed to dally with the
loss of a little slender skiff, that could
hardly make way on its surface in the profoundest
calm. Impelled, however, by
malignity, or tenderness, or curiosity, or
weariness of artificial life, so vividly contrasted
by the unadulterated existence of
Immalee, into whose pure elements nothing
but flowers and fragrance, the sparkling
of the heavens, and the odours of earth,
had transfused their essence—or, possibly,
by a motive more powerful than all,—his
own will; which, never analysed, and
hardly ever confessed to be the ruling
principle of our actions, governs nine-tenths
of them.—He returned to the shore
of the haunted isle, the name by which it
was distinguished by those who knew not
how to classify the new goddess who was
supposed to inhabit it, and who were as
much puzzled by this new specimen in
their theology, as Linnæus himself could
have been by a non-descript in botany.
Alas! the varieties in moral botany far
exceed the wildest anomalies of those in
the natural. However it was, the stranger
returned to the isle. But he had to traverse
many paths, where human foot but his
had never been, and to rend away branches
that seemed to tremble at a human touch,
and to cross streams into which no foot
but his had ever been dipped, before he
could discover where Immalee had concealed
herself.
“Concealment, however, was not in her
thoughts. When he found her, she was
leaning against a rock; the ocean was
pouring its eternal murmur of waters at
her feet; she had chosen the most desolate
spot she could find;—there was neither
flower or shrub near her;—the calcined
rocks, the offspring of volcano—the restless
roar of the sea, whose waves almost
touched her small foot, that seemed by its
heedless protrusion at once to court and
neglect danger—these objects were all
that surrounded her. The first time he
had beheld her, she was embowered amid
flowers and odours, amid all the glorious
luxuries of vegetable and animal nature;
the roses and the peacocks seemed emulous
which should expand their leaves or their
plumes, as a shade to that loveliness which
seemed to hover between them, alternately
borrowing the fragrance of the one, and
the hues of the other. Now she stood as
if deserted even by nature, whose child she
was; the rock was her resting-place, and
the ocean seemed the bed where she purposed
to rest; she had no shells on her
bosom, no roses in her hair—her character
seemed to have changed with her feelings;
she no longer loved all that is beautiful in
nature; she seemed, by an anticipation of
her destiny, to make alliance with all that
is awful and ominous. She had begun to
love the rocks and the ocean, the thunder
of the wave, and the sterility of the sand,—awful
objects, the incessant recurrence
of whose very sound seems intended to remind
us of grief and of eternity. Their
restless monotony of repetition, corresponds
with the beatings of a heart which
asks its destiny from the phenomena of nature,
and feels the answer is—“Misery.”
“Those who love may seek the luxuries
of the garden, and inhale added intoxication
from its perfumes, which seem the
offerings of nature on that altar which is
already erected and burning in the heart of
the worshipper;—but let those who have
loved seek the shores of the ocean, and
they shall have their answer too.
“There was a sad and troubled air
about her, as she stood so lonely, that
seemed at once to express the conflict of
her internal emotions, and to reflect the
gloom and agitation of the physical objects
around her; for nature was preparing for
one of those awful convulsions—one of
those abortive throes of desolation, that
seems to announce a more perfect wrath
to come; and while it blasts the vegetation,
and burns up the soil of some visited
portion, seems to proclaim in the
murmur of its receding thunders, that
it will return in that day, when the
universe shall pass away as a scroll, and
the elements melt with fervent heat,
and return to fulfil the dreadful promise,
which its partial and initiatory
devastation has left incomplete. Is there
a peal of thunder that does not mutter a
menace, “For me, the dissolution of the
world is reserved, I depart, but I shall
return?” Is there a flash of lightning
that does not say, visibly, if not audibly,
“Sinner, I cannot now penetrate the recesses
of your soul; but how will you encounter
my glare, when the hand of the
judge is armed with me, and my penetrating
glance displays you to the view of assembled
worlds?”
“The evening was very dark; heavy
clouds, rolling on like the forces of an hostile
army, obscured the horizon from east
to west. There was a bright but ghastly
blue in the heaven above, like that in the
eye of the dying, where the last forces of
life are collected, while its powers are rapidly
forsaking the frame, and feeling
their extinguishment must shortly be.
There was not a breath of air to heave the
ocean,—the trees drooped without a whisper
to woo their branches or their buds,—the
birds had retired, with that instinct
which teaches them to avoid the fearful
encounter of the elements, and nestled
with cowering wings and drooping heads
among their favourite trees. There was
not a human sound in the isle; the very
rivulet seemed to tremble at its own tinklings,
and its small waves flowed as if a
subterranean hand arrested and impeded
their motion. Nature, in these grand and
terrific operations, seems in some degree to
assimilate herself to a parent, whose most
fearful denunciations are preceded by an
awful silence, or rather to a judge, whose
final sentence is felt with less horror than
the pause that intervenes before it is pronounced.
“Immalee gazed on the awful scene by
which she was surrounded, without any
emotion derived from physical causes. To
her, light and darkness had hitherto been
the same; she loved the sun for its lustre,
and the lightning for its transitory brilliancy,
and the ocean for its sonorous music,
and the tempest for the agitation which it
gave to the trees, under whose bending
and welcoming shadow she danced, in time
kept by the murmur of their leaves, that
hung low, as if to crown their votarist.
And she loved the night, when all was
still, but what she was accustomed to call
the music of a thousand streams, that
made the stars rise from their beds, to
sparkle and nod to that wild melody.
“Such she had been. Now, her eye
was intently fixed on the declining light,
and the approaching darkness,—that preternatural
gloom, that seems to say to the
brightest and most beautiful of the works
of God, “Give place to me, thou shalt
shine no more.”
“The darkness increased, and the clouds
collected like an army that had mustered
its utmost force, and stood in obdured and
collected strength against the struggling
light of heaven. A broad, red, and dusky
line of gloomy light, gathered round
the horizon, like an usurper watching
the throne of an abdicated sovereign,
and expanding its portentous circle, sent
forth alternately flashes of lightning, pale
and red;—the murmur of the sea increased,
and the arcades of the banyan-tree, that
had struck its patriarchal root not five
hundred paces from where Immalee stood,
resounded the deep and almost unearthly
murmur of the approaching storm through
all its colonnades; the primeval trunk
rocked and groaned, and the everlasting
fibres seemed to withdraw their grasp from
the earth, and quiver in air at the sound.
Nature, with every voice she could inspire
from earth, or air, or water, announced
danger to her children.
“That was the moment the stranger
chose to approach Immalee; of danger he
was insensible, of fear he was unconscious;
his miserable destiny had exempted him
from both, but what had it left him? No
hope—but that of plunging others into his
own condemnation. No fear—but that
his victim might escape him. Yet with
all his diabolical heartlessness, he did feel
some relentings of his human nature, as
he beheld the young Indian; her cheek
was pale, but her eye was fixed, and her
figure, turned from him, (as if she preferred
to encounter the tremendous rage of the
storm), seemed to him to say, “Let me
fall into the hands of God, and not into
those of man.”
“This attitude, so unintentionally assumed
by Immalee, and so little expressive
of her real feelings, restored all the malignant
energies of the stranger’s feelings;
the former evil purposes of his heart, and
the habitual character of his dark and
fiendish pursuit, rushed back on him.
Amid this contrasted scene of the convulsive
rage of nature, and the passive helplessness
of her unsheltered loveliness, he
felt a glow of excitement, like that which
pervaded him, when the fearful powers of
his “charmed life” enabled him to penetrate
the cells of a madhouse, or the dungeons
of an Inquisition.
“He saw this pure being surrounded
by the terrors of nature, and felt a wild and
terrible conviction, that though the lightning
might blast her in a moment, yet
there was a bolt more burning and more
fatal, which was wielded by his own hand,
and which, if he could aim it aright, must
transfix her very soul.
“Armed with all his malignity and all
his power, he approached Immalee, armed
only with her purity, and standing like the
reflected beam of the last ray of light
on whose extinction she was gazing.
There was a contrast in her form and her
situation, that might have touched any
feelings but those of the wanderer.
“The light of her figure shining out amid
the darkness that enveloped her,—its
undulating softness rendered still softer
to the eye by the rock against which it
reclined,—its softness, brightness, and flexibility,
presenting a kind of playful hostility
to the tremendous aspect of nature
overcharged with wrath and ruin.
“The stranger approached her unobserved;
his steps were unheard amid the
rush of the ocean, and the deep, portentous
murmur of the elements; but, as he advanced,
he heard sounds that perhaps operated
on his feelings as the whispers of Eve
to her flowers on the organs of the serpent.
Both knew their power, and felt their time.
Amid the fast approaching terrors of a
storm, more terrible than any she had ever
witnessed, the poor Indian, unconscious,
or perhaps insensible of its dangers, was
singing her wild song of desperation and
love to the echoes of the advancing storm.
Some words of this strain of despair and
passion reached the ear of the stranger.
They were thus:
“The night is growing dark—but what
is that to the darkness that his absence has
cast on my soul? The lightnings are
glancing round me—but what are they to
the gleam of his eye when he parted from
me in anger?
“I lived but in the light of his presence—why
should I not die when that light is
withdrawn? Anger of the clouds, what
have I to fear from you? You may scorch
me to dust, as I have seen you scorch the
branches of the eternal trees—but the trunk
still remained, and my heart will be his
for ever.
“Roar on, terrible ocean! thy waves,
which I cannot count, can never wash his
image from my soul,—thou dashest a thousand
waves against a rock, but the rock is
unmoved—and so would be my heart amid
the calamities of the world with which
he threatens me,—whose dangers I never
would have known but for him, and whose
dangers for him I will encounter.”
“She paused in her wild song, and then
renewed it, regardless alike of the terrors
of the elements, and the possible presence
of one whose subtle and poisonous potency
was more fatal than all the elements
in their united wrath.
“When we first met, my bosom was
covered with roses—now it is shaded with
the dark leaves of the ocynum. When he
saw me first, the living things all loved
me—now I care not whether they love
me or not—I have forgot to love them.
When he came to the isle every night, I
hoped the moon would be bright—now I
care not whether she rises or sets, whether
she is clouded or bright. Before he came,
every thing loved me, and I had more
things to love than I could reckon by the
hairs of my head—now I feel I can love
but one, and that one has deserted me.
Since I have seen him all things have
changed. The flowers have not the colours
they once had—there is no music
in the flow of the waters—the stars do not
smile on me from heaven as they did,—and
I myself begin to love the storm better
than the calm.”
“As she ended her melancholy strain,
she turned from the spot where the increasing
fury of the storm made it no
longer possible for her to stand, and turning,
met the gaze of the stranger fixed on
her. A suffusion, the most rich and vivid,
mantled over her from brow to bosom;
she did not utter her usual exclamation of
joy at his sight, but, with averted eyes
and faultering step, followed him as he
pointed her to seek shelter amid the ruins
of the pagoda. They approached it in silence;
and, amid the convulsions and fury
of nature, it was singular to see two beings
walk on together without exchanging a
word of apprehension, or feeling a thought
of danger,—the one armed by despair, the
other by innocence. Immalee would rather
have sought the shelter of her favourite
banyan-tree, but the stranger tried
to make her comprehend, that her danger
would be much greater there than in the
spot he pointed out to her. “Danger!”
said the Indian, while a bright and wild
smile irradiated her features; “can there
be danger when you are near me?”—“Is
there, then, no danger in my presence?—few
have met me without dreading, and
without feeling it too!” and his countenance,
as he spoke, grew darker than the
heaven at which he scowled. “Immalee,”
he added, in a voice still deeper and more
thrilling, from the unwonted operation of
human emotion in its tones; “Immalee,
you cannot be weak enough to believe
that I have power of controuling the elements?
If I had,” he continued, “by the
heaven that is frowning at me, the first
exertion of my power should be to collect
the most swift and deadly of the lightnings
that are hissing around us, and transfix
you where you stand!”—“Me?” repeated
the trembling Indian, her cheek growing
paler at his words, and the voice in which
they were uttered, than at the redoubling
fury of the storm, amid whose pauses she
scarce heard them.—“Yes—you—you—lovely
as you are, and innocent, and pure,
before a fire more deadly consumes your
existence, and drinks your heart-blood—before
you are longer exposed to a danger
a thousand times more fatal than those
with which the elements menace you—the
danger of my accursed and miserable presence!”
“Immalee, unconscious of his meaning,
but trembling with impassioned grief at
the agitation with which he spoke, approached
him to soothe the emotion of
which she knew neither the name or the
cause. Through the fractures of the ruin
the red and ragged lightnings disclosed,
from time to time, a glimpse of her figure,—her
dishevelled hair,—her pallid and appealing
look,—her locked hands, and the
imploring bend of her slight form, as if
she was asking pardon for a crime of which
she was unconscious,—and soliciting an interest
in griefs not her own. All around
her wild, unearthly, and terrible,—the floor
strewed with fragments of stone, and
mounds of sand,—the vast masses of ruined
architecture, whose formation seemed the
work of no human hand, and whose destruction
appeared the sport of demons,—the
yawning fissures of the arched and ponderous
roof, through which heaven darkened
and blazed alternately with a gloom that
wrapt every thing, or a light more fearful
than that gloom.—All around her
gave to her form, when it was momently
visible, a relief so strong and so touching,
that it might have immortalized the hand
who had sketched her as the embodied presence
of an angel who had descended to
the regions of woe and wrath,—of darkness
and of fire, on a message of reconciliation,—and
descended in vain.
“The stranger threw on her, as she
bent before him, one of those looks that,
but her own, no mortal eye had yet
encountered unappalled. Its expression
seemed only to inspire a higher feeling of
devotedness in the victim. Perhaps an
involuntary sentiment of terror mingled
itself with that expression, as this beautiful
being sunk on her knees before her
writhing and distracted enemy; and, by
the silent supplication of her attitude,
seemed to implore him to have mercy on
himself. As the lightnings flashed around
her,—as the earth trembled beneath her
white and slender feet,—as the elements
seemed all sworn to the destruction of
every living thing, and marched on from
heaven to the accomplishment of their purpose,
with Væ victis written and legible to
every eye, in the broad unfolded banners of
that resplendent and sulphurous light that
seemed to display the day of hell—the feelings
of the devoted Indian seemed concentrated
on the ill-chosen object of their idolatry
alone. Her graduating attitudes
beautifully, but painfully, expressed the
submission of a female heart devoted to its
object, to his frailties, his passions, and his
very crimes. When subdued by the image
of power, which the mind of man exercises
over that of woman, that impulse becomes
irresistibly humiliating. Immalee had at
first bowed to conciliate her beloved, and
her spirit had taught her frame that first
inclination. In her next stage of suffering,
she had sunk on her knees, and,
remaining at a distance from him, she
had trusted to this state of prostration
to produce that effect on his heart which
those who love always hope compassion
may produce,—that illegitimate child of
love, often more cherished than its parent.
In her last efforts she clung to
his hand—she pressed her pale lips to it,
and was about to utter a few words—her
voice failed her, but her fast dropping
tears spoke to the hand which she held,—and
its grasp, which for a moment convulsively
returned hers, and then flung it
away, answered her.
“The Indian remained prostrate and aghast.
“Immalee,” said the stranger, in
a struggling voice, “Do you wish me to
tell you the feelings with which my presence
should inspire you?”—“No—no—no!”
said the Indian, applying her white
and delicate hands to her ears, and then
clasping them on her bosom; “I feel them
too much.”—“Hate me—curse me!” said
the stranger, not heeding her, and stamping
till the reverberation of his steps on
the hollow and loosened stones almost contended
with the thunder; “hate me, for
I hate you—I hate all things that live—all
things that are dead—I am myself
hated and hateful!”—“Not by me,” said
the poor Indian, feeling, through the
blindness of her tears, for his averted
hand. “Yes, by you, if you knew whose
I am, and whom I serve.” Immalee aroused
her newly-excited energies of heart
and intellect to answer this appeal. “Who
you are, I know not—but I am yours.—Whom
you serve, I know not—but him
will I serve—I will be yours for ever.
Forsake me if you will, but when I am
dead, come back to this isle, and say to
yourself, The roses have bloomed and
faded—the streams have flowed and been
dried up—the rocks have been removed
from their places—and the lights of heaven
have altered in their courses,—but there
was one who never changed, and she is not
here!”
“As she spoke the enthusiasm of passion
struggling with grief, she added,
“You have told me you possess the happy
art of writing thought.—Do not write
one thought on my grave, for one word
traced by your hand would revive me.
Do not weep, for one tear would make
me live again, perhaps to draw a tear from
you.”—“Immalee!” said the stranger. The
Indian looked up, and, with a mingled
feeling of grief, amazement, and compunction,
beheld him shed tears. The next
moment he dashed them away with the
hand of despair; and, grinding his teeth,
burst into that wild shriek of bitter and
convulsive laughter that announces the
object of its derision is ourselves.
“Immalee, whose feelings were almost
exhausted, trembled in silence at his feet.
“Hear me, wretched girl!” he cried in
tones that seemed alternately tremulous
with malignity and compassion, with habitual
hostility and involuntary softness;
“hear me! I know the secret sentiment
you struggle with better than the innocent
heart of which it is the inmate knows
it. Suppress, banish, destroy it. Crush
it as you would a young reptile before its
growth had made it loathsome to the eye,
and poisonous to existence!”—“I never
crushed even a reptile in my life,” answered
Immalee, unconscious that this matter-of-fact
answer was equally applicable in
another sense. “You love, then,” said
the stranger; “but,” after a long and ominous
pause, “do you know whom it is
you love?”—“You!” said the Indian, with
that purity of truth that consecrates the
impulse it yields to, and would blush more
for the sophistications of art than the confidence
of nature; “you! You have taught
me to think, to feel, and to weep.”—“And
you love me for this?” said her companion,
with an expression half irony, half commiseration.
“Think, Immalee, for a moment,
how unsuitable, how unworthy, is the object
of the feelings you lavish on him. A
being unattractive in his form, repulsive
in his habits, separated from life and humanity
by a gulph impassable; a disinherited
child of nature, who goes about to
curse or to tempt his more prosperous brethren;
one who——what withholds me
from disclosing all?”
“At this moment a flash of such vivid
and terrific brightness as no human sight
could sustain, gleamed through the ruins,
pouring through every fissure instant and
intolerable light. Immalee, overcome by
terror and emotion, remained on her
knees, her hands closely clasped over her
aching eyes.
“For a few moments that she remained
thus, she thought she heard other
sounds near her, and that the stranger was
answering a voice that spoke to him. She
heard him say, as the thunder rolled to a
distance, “This hour is mine, not thine—begone,
and trouble me not.” When she
looked up again, all trace of human emotion
was gone from his expression. The
dry and burning eye of despair that he
fixed on her, seemed never to have owned
a tear; the hand with which he grasped
her, seemed never to have felt the flow of
blood, or the throb of a pulse; amid the
intense and increasing heat of an atmosphere
that appeared on fire, its touch was
as cold as that of the dead.
“Mercy!” cried the trembling Indian,
as she in vain endeavoured to read a human
feeling in those eyes of stone, to
which her own tearful and appealing ones
were uplifted—“mercy!” And while she
uttered the word, she knew not what she
deprecated or dreaded.
“The stranger answered not a word,
relaxed not a muscle; it seemed as if he
felt her not with the hands that grasped
her,—as if he saw her not with the eyes
that glared fixedly and coldly on her. He
bore, or rather dragged, her to the vast
arch that had once been the entrance to
the pagoda, but which, now shattered and
ruinous, resembled more the gulphing
yawn of a cavern that harbours the inmates
of the desert, than a work wrought
by the hands of man, and devoted to the
worship of a deity. “You have called for
mercy,” said her companion, in a voice
that froze her blood even under the burning
atmosphere, whose air she could scarce
respire. “You have cried for mercy, and
mercy you shall have. Mercy has not
been dealt to me, but I have courted my
horrible destiny, and my reward is just
and sure. Look forth, trembler—look
forth,—I command thee!” And he stamped
with an air of authority and impatience
that completed the terror of the delicate
and impassioned being who shuddered in
his grasp, and felt half-dead at his frown.
“In obedience to his command, she removed
the long tresses of her auburn hair,
which had vainly swept, in luxuriant and
fruitless redundance, the rock on which
the steps of him she adored had been fixed.
With that mixture of the docility of
the child, and the mild submission of woman,
she attempted to comply with his
demand, but her eyes, filled with tears,
could not encounter the withering horrors
of the scene before her. She wiped those
brilliant eyes with hairs that were every
day bathed in the pure and crystal lymph,
and seemed, as she tried to gaze on the desolation,
like some bright and shivering
spirit, who, for its further purification, or
perhaps for the enlargement of the knowledge
necessary for its destination, is compelled
to witness some evidence of the Almighty’s
wrath, unintelligible in its first
operations, but doubtless salutary in its final
results.
“Thus looking and thus feeling, Immalee
shudderingly approached the entrance
of that building, which, blending
the ruins of nature with those of art, seemed
to announce the power of desolation
over both, and to intimate that the primeval
rock, untouched and unmodulated by
human hands, and thrown upwards perhaps
by some volcanic eruption, perhaps
deposited there by some meteoric discharge,
and the gigantic columns of stone, whose
erection had been the work of two centuries,—were
alike dust beneath the feet of
that tremendous conqueror, whose victories
alone are without noise and without
resistance, and the progress of whose
triumph is marked by tears instead of
blood.
“Immalee, as she gazed around her,
felt, for the first time, terror at the aspect
of nature. Formerly, she had
considered all its phenomena as equally
splendid or terrific. And her childish,
though active imagination, seemed to consecrate
alike the sun-light and the storm,
to the devotion of a heart, on whose pure
altar the flowers and the fires of nature
flung their undivided offering.
“But since she had seen the stranger,
new emotions had pervaded her young
heart. She learned to weep and to fear;
and perhaps she saw, in the fearful aspect
of the heavens, the developement of that
mysterious terror, which always trembles
at the bottom of the hearts of those who
dare to love.
“How often does nature thus become
an involuntary interpreter between us and
our feelings! Is the murmur of the ocean
without a meaning?—Is the roll of the
thunder without a voice?—Is the blasted
spot on which the rage of both has been
exhausted without its lesson?—Do not
they all tell us some mysterious secret,
which we have in vain searched our hearts
for?—Do we not find in them, an answer
to those questions with which we are for
ever importuning the mute oracle of our
destiny?—Alas! how deceitful and inadequate
we feel the language of man, after
love and grief have made us acquainted
with that of nature!—the only one, perhaps,
capable of a corresponding sign for those
emotions, under which all human expression
faints. What a difference between
words without meaning, and that meaning
without words, which the sublime phenomena
of nature, the rocks and the ocean,
the moon and the twilight, convey to those
who have “ears to hear.”
“How eloquent of truth is nature in her
very silence! How fertile of reflections
amid her profoundest desolations! But
the desolation now presented to the eyes of
Immalee, was that which is calculated to
cause terror, not reflection. Earth and
heaven, the sea and the dry land, seemed
mingling together, and about to replunge
into chaos. The ocean, deserting its eternal
bed, dashed its waves, whose white
surf gleamed through the darkness, far
into the shores of the isle. They came on
like the crests of a thousand warriors,
plumed and tossing in their pride, and,
like them, perishing in the moment of
victory. There was a fearful inversion of
the natural appearance of earth and sea, as
if all the barriers of nature were broken,
and all her laws reversed.
“The waves deserting their station, left,
from time to time, the sands as dry as
those of the desert; and the trees and
shrubs tossed and heaved in ceaseless agitation,
like the waves of a midnight storm.
There was no light, but a livid grey that
sickened the eye to behold, except when
the bright red lightning burst out like the
eye of a fiend, glancing over the work of
ruin, and closing as it beheld it completed.
“Amid this scene stood two beings,
one whose appealing loveliness seemed to
have found favour with the elements even
in their wrath, and one whose fearless
and obdurate eye appeared to defy them.
“Immalee,” he cried, “is this a place or
an hour to talk of love!—all nature is appalled—heaven
is dark—the animals have
hid themselves—and the very shrubs, as
they wave and shrink, seem alive with
terror.”—“It is an hour to implore protection,”
said the Indian, clinging to him
timidly. “Look up,” said the stranger,
while his own fixed and fearless eye seemed
to return flash for flash to the baffled
and insulted elements; “Look up, and
if you cannot resist the impulses of your
heart, let me at least point out a fitter object
for them. Love,” he cried, extending
his arm towards the dim and troubled
sky, “love the storm in its might of destruction—seek
alliance with those swift
and perilous travellers of the groaning
air,—the meteor that rends, and the
thunder that shakes it! Court, for sheltering
tenderness, those masses of dense
and rolling cloud,—the baseless mountains
of heaven! Woo the kisses of the
fiery lightnings, to quench themselves on
your smouldering bosom! Seek all that
is terrible in nature for your companions
and your lover!—woo them to burn and
blast you—perish in their fierce embrace,
and you will be happier, far happier, than
if you lived in mine! Lived!—Oh who
can be mine and live! Hear me, Immalee!”
he cried, while he held her hands
locked in his—while his eyes, rivetted on
her, sent forth a light of intolerable lustre—while
a new feeling of indefinite enthusiasm
seemed for a moment to thrill his
whole frame, and new-modulate the tone
of his nature; “Hear me! If you will be
mine, it must be amid a scene like this for
ever—amid fire and darkness—amid hatred
and despair—amid——” and his voice
swelling to a demoniac shriek of rage and
horror, and his arms extended, as if to
grapple with the fearful objects of some imaginary
struggle, he was rushing from the
arch under which they stood, lost in the
picture which his guilt and despair had
drawn, and whose images he was for ever
doomed to behold.
“The slender form that had clung to
him was, by this sudden movement, prostrated
at his feet; and, with a voice choaked
with terror, yet with that perfect devotedness
which never issued but from
the heart and lip of woman, she answered
his frightful questions with the simple demand,
“Will you be there?”—“Yes!—THERE
I must be, and for ever! And will
you, and dare you, be with me?” And a
kind of wild and terrible energy nerved
his frame, and strengthened his voice, as he
spoke and cowered over pale and prostrate
loveliness, that seemed in profound and
reckless humiliation to court its own destruction,
as if a dove exposed its breast,
without flight or struggle, to the beak of a
vulture. “Well, then,” said the stranger,
while a brief convulsion crossed his pale
visage, “amid thunder I wed thee—bride
of perdition! mine shalt thou be for ever!
Come, and let us attest our nuptials before
the reeling altar of nature, with the
lightnings of heaven for our bed-lights,
and the curse of nature for our marriage-benediction!”
The Indian shrieked in
terror, not at his words, which she did not
understand, but at the expression which
accompanied them. “Come,” he repeated,
“while the darkness yet is witness to
our ineffable and eternal union.” Immalee,
pale, terrified, but resolute, retreated
from him.
“At this moment the storm, which had
obscured the heavens and ravaged the
earth, passed away with the rapidity common
in those climates, where the visitation
of an hour does its work of destruction
unimpeded, and is instantly succeeded
by the smiling lights and brilliant skies
of which mortal curiosity in vain asks the
question, Whether they gleam in triumph
or in consolation over the mischief they
witness?
“As the stranger spoke, the clouds
passed away, carrying their diminished
burden of wrath and terror where sufferings
were to be inflicted, and terrors to
be undergone, by the natives of other
climes—and the bright moon burst forth
with a glory unknown in European
climes. The heavens were as blue as
the waves of the ocean, which they seemed
to reflect; and the stars burst forth
with a kind of indignant and aggravated
brilliancy, as if they resented the
usurpation of the storm, and asserted the
eternal predominance of nature over the
casual influences of the storms that obscured
her. Such, perhaps, will be the
developement of the moral world. We
shall be told why we suffered, and for
what; but a bright and blessed lustre
shall follow the storm, and all shall yet be
light.
“The young Indian caught from this
object an omen alike auspicious to her
imagination and her heart. She burst
from him—she rushed into the light of nature,
whose glory seemed like the promise
of redemption, gleaming amid the darkness
of the fall. She pointed to the moon,
that sun of the eastern nights, whose broad
and brilliant light fell like a mantle of
glory over rock and ruin, over tree and
flower.
“Wed me by this light,” cried Immalee,
“and I will be yours for ever!” And
her beautiful countenance reflected the
full light of the glorious planet that rode
bright through the cloudless heaven—and
her white and naked arms, extended towards
it, seemed like two pure attesting
pledges of the union. “Wed me by this
light,” she repeated, sinking on her knees,
“and I will be yours for ever!”
“As she spoke, the stranger approached,
moved with what feelings no mortal
thought can discover. At that moment
a trifling phenomenon interfered to
alter her destiny. A darkened cloud at
that moment covered the moon—it seemed
as if the departed storm collected in
wrathful haste the last dark fold of its
tremendous drapery, and was about to
pass away for ever.
“The eyes of the stranger flashed on
Immalee the brightest rays of mingled
fondness and ferocity. He pointed to the
darkness,—“Wed me by this light!”
he exclaimed, “and you shall be mine for
ever and ever!” Immalee, shuddering at
the grasp in which he held her, and trying
in vain to watch the expression of his
countenance, yet felt enough of her danger
to tear herself from him. “Farewell
for ever!” exclaimed the stranger, as he
rushed from her.
“Immalee, exhausted by emotion and
terror, had fallen senseless on the sands
that filled the path to the ruined pagoda.
He returned—he raised her in his arms—her
long dark hair streamed over them
like the drooping banners of a defeated
army—her arms sunk down as if declining
the support they seemed to implore—her
cold and colourless cheek rested on his
shoulder.
“Is she dead?” he murmured. “Well,
be it so—let her perish—let her be any
thing but mine!” He flung his senseless
burden on the sands, and departed—nor
did he ever revisit the island.
CHAPTER XIX .
Que donne le monde aux siens plus souvent,
Echo Vent.
Que dois-je vaincre ici, sans jamais relacher,
Echo la chair.
Qui fit le cause des maux, qui me sont survenus,
Echo Venus.
Que faut dire après d’une telle infidelle,
Echo Fi d’elle.
Magdaleniade, by Father Pierre de St Louis.
“Three years had elapsed since the parting
of Immalee and the stranger, when
one evening the attention of some Spanish
gentlemen, who were walking in a public
place in Madrid, was arrested by a figure
that passed them, habited in the dress of
the country, (only without a sword), and
walking very slowly. They stopt by a
kind of simultaneous movement, and seemed
to ask each other, with silent looks,
what had been the cause of the impression
this person’s appearance had made on them.
There was nothing remarkable in his figure,—his
demeanour was quiet; it was
the singular expression of his countenance
which had struck them with a sensation
they could neither define or account for.
“As they paused, the person returned
alone, and walking slowly—and they again
encountered that singular expression of
the features, (the eyes particularly), which
no human glance could meet unappalled.
Accustomed to look on and converse with
all things revolting to nature and to man,—for
ever exploring the mad-house, the
jail, or the Inquisition,—the den of famine,
the dungeon of crime, or the death-bed of
despair,—his eyes had acquired a light and
a language of their own—a light that none
could gaze on, and a language that few
dare understand.
“As he passed slowly by them, they
observed two others whose attention was
apparently fixed on the same singular object,
for they stood pointing after him,
and speaking to each other with gestures
of strong and obvious emotion. The curiosity
of the groupe for once overcame
the restraint of Spanish reserve, and approaching
the two cavaliers, they inquired
if the singular personage who had passed
was not the subject of their conversation,
and the cause of the emotion which appeared
to accompany it. The others replied
in the affirmative, and hinted at their
knowledge of circumstances in the character
and history of that extraordinary being
that might justify even stronger marks of
emotion at his presence. This hint operated
still more strongly on their curiosity—the
circle of listeners began to deepen.
Some of them, it appeared, had, or pretended
to have, some information relative
to this extraordinary subject. And that
kind of desultory conversation commenced,
whose principal ingredients are a plentiful
proportion of ignorance, curiosity, and
fear, mingled with some small allowance
of information and truth;—that conversation,
vague, unsatisfactory, but not uninteresting,
to which every speaker is welcome
to contribute his share of baseless report,—wild
conjecture,—anecdote the more incredible
the better credited,—and conclusion
the more falsely drawn the more likely to
carry home conviction.
“The conversation passed very much
in language incoherent as this:—“But
why, if he be what he is described, what
he is known to be,—why is he not seized
by order of government?—why is he not
immured in the Inquisition?”—“He has
been often in the prison of the holy office—oftener,
perhaps, than the holy fathers
wished,” said another. “But it is a well-known
fact, that whatever transpired on
his examination, he was liberated almost
immediately.” Another added, “That the
stranger had been in almost every prison
in Europe, but had always contrived either
to defeat or defy the power in whose grasp
he appeared to be inclosed,—and to be active
in his purposes of mischief in the remotest
parts of Europe at the moment he was
supposed to be expiating them in others.”
Another demanded, “If it was known to
what country he belonged?” and was answered,
“He is said to be a native of Ireland—(a
country that no one knows, and
which the natives are particularly reluctant
to dwell in from various causes)—and
his name is Melmoth.” The Spaniard
had great difficulty in expressing the
theta, unpronounceable by continental lips.
“Another, who had an appearance of more
intelligence than the rest, added the extraordinary
fact of the stranger’s being
seen in various and distant parts of the
earth within a time in which no power
merely human could be supposed to traverse
them—that his marked and fearful
habit was every where to seek out the
most wretched, or the most profligate, of
the community among which he flung
himself—what was his object in seeking
them was unknown.”—“It is well known,”
said a deep-toned voice, falling on the ears
of the startled listeners like the toll of a
strong but muffled bell,—“it is well known
both to him and them.”
“It was now twilight, but the eyes of
all could distinguish the figure of the
stranger as he passed; and some even averred
they could see the ominous lustre
of those eyes which never rose on human
destiny but as planets of woe. The groupe
paused for some time to watch the retreat
of the figure that had produced on them
the effect of the torpedo. It departed
slowly,—no one offered it molestation.
“I have heard,” said one of the company,
“that a delicious music precedes
the approach of this person when his destined
victim,—the being whom he is permitted
to tempt or to torture,—is about to
appear or to approach him. I have heard
a strange tale of such music being heard;
and—Holy Mary be our guide! did you
ever hear such sounds?”—“Where—what?—”
and the astonished listeners took
off their hats, unclasped their mantles,
“opened their lips, and drew in their
breath,” in delicious ecstasy at the sounds
that floated round them. “No wonder,”
said a young gallant of the party, “no
wonder that such sounds harbinger the
approach of a being so heavenly. She
deals with the good spirits; and the blessed
saints alone could send such music
from above to welcome her.” As he spoke,
all eyes were turned to a figure, which,
though moving among a groupe of brilliant
and attractive females, appeared the only
one among them on whom the eye could
rest with pure and undivided light and
love. She did not catch observation—observation
caught her, and was proud of
its prize.
“At the approach of a large party of females,
there was all that anxious and flattering
preparation among the cavaliers,—all
that eager arrangement of capas, and
hats, and plumes,—that characterized the
manners of a nation still half-feudal, and
always gallant and chivalrous. These preliminary
movements were answered by
corresponding ones on the part of the fair
and fatal host approaching. The creaking
of their large fans—the tremulous and
purposely-delayed adjustment of their floating
veils, whose partial concealment flattered
the imagination beyond the most
full and ostentatious disclosure of the
charms they seemed jealous of—the folds
of the mantilla, of whose graceful falls,
and complicated manœuvres, and coquettish
undulations, the Spanish women
know how to avail themselves so well—all
these announced an attack, which the
cavaliers, according to the modes of gallantry
in that day (1683), were well prepared
to meet and parry.
“But, amid the bright host that advanced
against them, there was one whose
arms were not artificial, and the effect of
whose singular and simple attractions
made a strong contrast to the studied arrangements
of her associates. If her fan
moved, it was only to collect air—if she
arranged her veil, it was only to hide her
face—if she adjusted her mantilla, it was
but to hide that form, whose exquisite
symmetry defied the voluminous drapery
of even that day to conceal it. Men of
the loosest gallantry fell back as she approached,
with involuntary awe—the libertine
who looked on her was half-converted—the
susceptible beheld her as one
who realized that vision of imagination
that must never be embodied here—and
the unfortunate as one whose sight alone
was consolation—the old, as they gazed on
her, dreamt of their youth—and the young
for the first time dreamt of love—the only
love which deserves the name—that which
purity alone can inspire, and perfect purity
alone can reward.
“As she mingled among the gay groupes
that filled the place, one might observe a
certain air that distinguished her from
every female there,—not by pretension to
superiority, (of that her unequalled loveliness
must have acquitted her, even to the
vainest of the groupe), but by an untainted,
unsophisticated character, diffusing itself
over look and motion, and even thought—turning
wildness into grace—giving an emphasis
to a single exclamation, that made
polished sentences sound trifling—for ever
trespassing against etiquette with vivid and
fearless enthusiasm, and apologizing the
next moment with such timid and graceful
repentance, that one doubted whether
the offence or the apology were most
delightful.
“She presented altogether a singular
contrast to the measured tones, the mincing
gait, and the organized uniformity of
dress, and manner, and look, and feeling,
of the females about her. The harness of
art was upon every limb and feature from
their birth, and its trappings concealed or
crippled every movement which nature
had designed for graceful. But in the
movement of this young female, there was
a bounding elasticity, a springiness, a luxuriant
and conscious vitality, that made every
action the expression of thought; and
then, as she shrunk from the disclosure,
made it the more exquisite interpreter of
feeling. There was around her a mingled
light of innocence and majesty, never
united but in her sex. Men may long retain,
and even confirm, the character of
power which nature has stamped on their
frames, but they very soon forfeit their
claim to the expression of innocence.
“Amid the vivid and eccentric graces
of a form that seemed like a comet in the
world of beauty, bound by no laws, or by
laws that she alone understood and obeyed,
there was a shade of melancholy, that, to a
superficial observer, seemed transitory and
assumed, perhaps as a studied relief to the
glowing colours of a picture so brilliant,
but which, to other eyes, announced, that
with all the energies of intellect occupied,—with
all the instincts of sense excited,—the
heart had as yet no inmate, and wanted
one.
“The groupe who had been conversing
about the stranger, felt their attention irresistibly
attracted by this object; and the
low murmur of their fearful whispers was
converted into broken exclamations of delight
and wonder, as the fair vision passed
them. She had not long done so, when
the stranger was seen slowly returning,
seeming, as before, known to all, but
knowing none. As the female party turned,
they encountered him. His emphatic
glance selected and centered in one alone.
She saw him too, recognized him, and, uttering
a wild shriek, fell on the earth senseless.
“The tumult occasioned by this accident,
which so many witnessed, and none
knew the cause of, for some moments drew
off the attention of all from the stranger—all
were occupied either in assisting or inquiring
after the lady who had fainted.
She was borne to her carriage by more assistants
than she needed or wished for—and
just as she was lifted into it, the voice
of some one near her uttered the word
“Immalee!” She recognized the voice,
and turned, with a look of anguish and
a feeble cry, towards the direction from
which it proceeded. Those around her
had heard the sound,—but as they did not
understand its meaning, or know to whom
it was addressed, they ascribed the lady’s
emotion to indisposition, and hastened to
place her in her carriage. It drove away,
but the stranger pursued its course with
his eyes—the company dispersed, he remained
alone—twilight faded into darkness—he
appeared not to notice the change—a
few still continued lingering at the
extremity of the walk to mark him—they
were wholly unmarked by him.
“One who remained the longest said,
that he saw him use the action of one who
wipes away a tear hastily. To his eyes
the tear of penitence was denied for ever.
Could this have been the tear of passion?
If so, how much woe did it announce to
its object!
CHAPTER XX .
Oh what was love made for, if ’tis not the same
Through joy and through torment, through glory and shame!
I know not, I ask not, what guilt’s in thine heart,
I but know I must love thee, whatever thou art.
Moore.
“The next day, the young female who
had excited so much interest the preceding
evening, was to quit Madrid, to pass
a few weeks at a villa belonging to her family,
at a short distance from the city.
That family, including all the company,
consisted of her mother Donna Clara di
Aliaga, the wife of a wealthy merchant,
who was monthly expected to return from
the Indies; her brother Don Fernan di
Aliaga, and several servants; for these
wealthy citizens, conscious of their opulence
and formerly high descent, piqued
themselves upon travelling with no less
ceremony and pompous tardiness than accompanied
the progress of a grandee. So
the old square-built, lumbering carriage,
moved on like a hearse; the coachman sat
fast asleep on the box; and the six black
horses crawled at a pace like the progress
of time when he visits affliction. Beside
the carriage rode Fernan di Aliaga and
his servants, with umbrellas and huge
spectacles; and within it were placed
Donna Clara and her daughter. The interior
of this arrangement was the counterpart
of its external appearance,—all announced
dullness, formality, and withering
monotony.
“Donna Clara was a woman of a cold
and grave temper, with all the solemnity
of a Spaniard, and all the austerity of a
bigot. Don Fernan presented that union
of fiery passion and saturnic manners not
unusual among Spaniards. His dull and
selfish pride was wounded by the recollection
of his family having been in trade;
and, looking on the unrivalled beauty of
his sister as a possible means of his obtaining
an alliance with a family of rank, he
viewed her with that kind of selfish partiality
as little honourable to him who feels
it, as to her who was its object.
“And it was amid such beings that the
vivid and susceptible Immalee, the daughter
of nature, “the gay creature of the
elements,” was doomed to wither away
the richly-coloured and exquisitely-scented
flower of an existence so ungenially transplanted.
Her singular destiny seemed to
have removed her from a physical wilderness,
to place her in a moral one. And,
perhaps, her last state was worse than her
first.
“It is certain that the gloomiest prospect
presents nothing so chilling as the aspect
of human faces, in which we try in
vain to trace one corresponding expression;
and the sterility of nature itself is luxury
compared to the sterility of human hearts,
which communicate all the desolation they
feel.
“They had been some time on their
way, when Donna Clara, who never spoke
till after a long preface of silence, perhaps
to give what she said a weight it might
otherwise have wanted, said, with oracular
deliberation, “Daughter, I hear you fainted
in the public walks last night—did you
meet with any thing that surprised or terrified
you?”—“No, Madam.”—“What,
then, could be the cause of the emotion
you betrayed at the sight, as I am told—I
know nothing—of a personage of extraordinary
demeanour?”—“Oh, I cannot,
dare not tell!” said Isidora, dropping her
veil over her burning cheek. Then the irrepressible
ingenuousness of her former nature,
rushing over her heart and frame like a
flood, she sunk from the cushion on which
she sat at Donna Clara’s feet, exclaiming,
“Oh, mother, I will tell you all!”—“No!”
said Donna Clara, repelling her with a
cold feeling of offended pride; “no!—there
is no occasion. I seek no confidence
withheld and bestowed in the same breath;
nor do I like these violent emotions—they
are unmaidenly. Your duties as a child are
easily understood—they are merely perfect
obedience, profound submission, and unbroken
silence, except when you are addressed
by me, your brother, or Father
Jose. Surely no duties were ever more
easily performed—rise, then, and cease to
weep. If your conscience disturbs you,
accuse yourself to Father Jose, who will,
no doubt, inflict a penance proportioned
to the enormity of your offence. I trust
only he will not err on the side of indulgence.”
And so saying, Donna Clara,
who had never uttered so long a speech
before, reclined back on her cushion, and
began to tell her beads with much devotion,
till the arrival of the carriage at its
destination awoke her from a profound and
peaceful sleep.
“It was near noon, and dinner in a cool
low apartment near the garden awaited
only the approach of Father Jose, the confessor.
He arrived at length. He was a
man of an imposing figure, mounted on a
stately mule. His features, at first view,
bore strong traces of thought; but, on
closer examination, those traces seemed rather
the result of physical conformation,
than of any intellectual exercise. The
channel was open, but the stream had not
been directed there. However, though
defective in education, and somewhat narrow
in mind, Father Jose was a good
man, and meant well. He loved power,
and he was devoted to the interests of the
Catholic church; but he had frequently
doubts, (which he kept to himself), of
the absolute necessity of celibacy, and he
felt (strange effect!) a chill all over him
when he heard of the fires of an auto da
fe. Dinner was concluded; the fruit and
wine, the latter untasted by the females,
were on the table,—the choicest of them
placed before Father Jose,—when Isidora,
after a profound reverence to her mother and
the priest, retired, as usual, to her apartment.
Donna Clara turned to the confessor with
a look that demanded to be answered. “It
is her hour for siesta,” said the priest, helping
himself to a bunch of grapes. “No,
Father, no!” said Donna Clara sadly; “her
maid informs me she does not retire to
sleep. She was, alas! too well accustomed
to that burning climate where she was lost
in her infancy, to feel the heat as a Christian
should. No, she retires neither to
pray or sleep, after the devout custom of
Spanish women, but, I fear, to”—— “To
do what?” said the priest, with horror in
his voice—“To think, I fear,” said Donna
Clara; “for often I observe, on her return,
the traces of tears on her face. I tremble,
Father, lest those tears be shed for that
heathen land, that region of Satan, where
her youth was past.”—“I’ll give her a penance,”
said Father Jose, “that will save
her the trouble of shedding tears on the
score of memory at least—these grapes are
delicious.”—“But, Father,” pursued Donna
Clara, with all the weak but restless
anxiety of a superstitious mind, “though
you have made me easy on that subject, I
still am wretched. Oh, Father, how she
will talk sometimes!—like a creature self-taught,
that needed neither director or
confessor but her own heart.”—“How!”
exclaimed Father Jose, “need neither
confessor or director!—she must be beside
herself.”—“Oh, Father,” continued Donna
Clara, “she will say things in her mild
and unanswerable manner, that, armed
with all my authority, I”—— “How—how
is that?” said the priest, in a tone of
severity—“does she deny any of the tenets
of the holy Catholic church?”—“No! no!
no!” said the terrified Donna Clara crossing
herself. “How then?”—“Why, she
speaks in a manner in which I never heard
you, reverend Father, or any of the reverend
brethren, whom my devotion to the
holy church has led me to hear, speak before.
It is in vain I tell her that true religion
consists in hearing mass—in going
to confession—in performing penance—in
observing the fasts and vigils—in undergoing
mortification and abstinence—in believing
all that the holy church teaches—and
hating, detesting, abhorring, and
execrating——” “Enough, daughter—enough,”
said Father Jose; “there can be
no doubt of the orthodoxy of your creed?”—“I
trust not, holy Father,” said the anxious
Donna Clara. “I were an infidel
to doubt it,” interposed the priest; “I
might as well deny this fruit to be exquisite,
or this glass of Malaga to be
worthy the table of his Holiness the Pope,
if he feasted all the Cardinals. But
how, daughter, as touching the supposed
or apprehended defalcations in Donna
Isidora’s creed?”—“Holy Father, I
have already explained my own religious
sentiments.”—“Yes—yes—we have had
enough of them; now for your daughter’s.”—“She
will sometimes say,” said Donna
Clara, bursting into tears—“she will
say, but never till greatly urged, that
religion ought to be a system whose
spirit was universal love. Do you understand
any thing of that, Father?”—“Humph—humph!”—“That
it must be
something that bound all who professed it
to habits of benevolence, gentleness, and
humility, under every difference of creed
and of form.”—“Humph—humph!”—“Father,”
said Donna Clara, a little piqued at
the apparent indifference with which Father
Jose listened to her communications,
and resolved to rouse him by some terrific
evidence of the truth of her suspicions,
“Father, I have heard her dare to express
a hope that the heretics in the train
of the English ambassador might not be
everlastingly”—— “Hush!—I must not
hear such sounds, or it might be my duty
to take severer notice of these lapses.
However, daughter,” continued Father
Jose, “thus far I will venture for your
consolation. As sure as this fine peach is
in my hand—another, if you please—and
as sure as I shall finish this other glass of
Malaga”—here a long pause attested the
fulfilment of the pledge—“so sure”—and
Father Jose turned the inverted glass on
the table—“Madonna Isidora has—has the
elements of a Christian in her, however
improbable it may seem to you—I swear
it to you by the habit I wear;—for the
rest, a little penance—a——I shall consider
of it. And now, daughter, when your
son Don Fernan has finished his siesta,—as
there is no reason to suspect him of retiring
to think,—please to inform him I
am ready to continue the game of chess
which we commenced four months ago. I
have pushed my pawn to the last square
but one, and the next step gives me a
queen.”—“Has the game continued so
long?” said Donna Clara. “Long!” repeated
the priest, “Aye, and may continue
much longer—we have never played
more than three hours a-day on an average.”
“He then retired to sleep, and the evening
was passed by the priest and Don
Fernan, in profound silence at their chess—by
Donna Clara, in silence equally profound,
at her tapestry—and by Isidora at
the casement, which the intolerable heat
had compelled them to leave open, in gazing
at the lustre of the moon, and inhaling the
odour of the tube-rose, and watching the
expanding leaves of the night-blowing cereus.
The physical luxuries of her former
existence seemed renewed by these objects.
The intense blue of the heavens, and the
burning planet that stood in sole glory in
their centre, might have vied with all that
lavish and refulgent opulence of light in
which nature arrays an Indian night. Below,
too, there were flowers and fragrance;
colours, like veiled beauty, mellowed, not
hid; and dews that hung on every leaf,
trembling and sparkling like the tears of
spirits, that wept to take leave of the
flowers.
“The breeze, indeed, though redolent
of the breath of the orange blossom, the
jasmine, and the rose, had not the rich and
balmy odour that scents the Indian air by
night.
Ενθα νησον μακαρων Αυραι περιπνεουσιν.
“Except this, what was not there that
might not renew the delicious dream of
her former existence, and make her believe
herself again the queen of that fairy isle?—One
image was wanting—an image whose
absence made that paradise of islands, and
all the odorous and flowery luxury of a
moonlight garden in Spain, alike deserts
to her. In her heart alone could she hope
to meet that image,—to herself alone did
she dare to repeat his name, and those
wild and sweet songs of his country(20)
which he had taught her in his happier
moods. And so strange was the contrast
between her former and present existence,—so
subdued was she by constraint and
coldness,—so often had she been told that
every thing she did, said, or thought, was
wrong,—that she began to yield up the
evidences of her senses, to avoid the perpetual
persecutions of teazing and imperious
mediocrity, and considered the appearance
of the stranger as one of those visions
that formed the trouble and joy of
her dreamy and illusive existence.
“I am surprised, sister,” said Fernan,
whom Father Jose’s gaining his queen had
put in unusually bad humour—“I am
surprised that you never busy yourself, as
young maidens use, at your needle, or in
some quaint niceties of your sex.”—“Or
in reading some devout book,” said Donna
Clara, raising her eyes one moment from
her tapestry, and then dropping them
again; “there is the legend of that (21)Polish
saint, born, like her, in a land of darkness,
yet chosen to be a vessel——I have forgot
his name, reverend Father.”—“Check to
the king,” said Father Jose in reply.
“You regard nothing but watching a
few flowers, or hanging over your lute, or
gazing at the moon,” continued Fernan,
vexed alike at the success of his antagonist
and the silence of Isidora. “She is eminent
in alms-deeds and works of charity,”
said the good-natured priest. “I was
summoned to a miserable hovel near your
villa, Madonna Clara, to a dying sinner, a
beggar rotting on rotten straw!”—“Jesu!”
cried Donna Clara with involuntary horror,
“I washed the feet of thirteen beggars,
on my knees in my father’s hall, the
week before my marriage with her honoured
father, and I never could abide the
sight of a beggar since.”—“Associations
are sometimes indelibly strong,” said the
priest drily;—then he added, “I went as
was my duty, but your daughter was there
before me. She had gone uncalled, and
was uttering the sweetest words of consolation
from a homily, which a certain poor
priest, who shall be nameless, had lent her
from his humble store.”
“Isidora blushed at this anonymous
vanity, while she mildly smiled or wept at
the harassings of Don Fernan, and the
heartless austerity of her mother. “I heard
her as I entered the hovel; and, by the
habit I wear, I paused on the threshold
with delight. Her first words were——Check-mate!”
he exclaimed, forgetting
his homily in his triumph, and pointing,
with appealing eye, and emphatic finger,
to the desperate state of his adversary’s
king. “That was a very extraordinary
exclamation!” said the literal Donna Clara,
who had never raised her eyes from her
work.—“I did not think my daughter was
so fond of chess as to burst into the house
of a dying beggar with such a phrase in
her mouth.”—“It was I said it, Madonna,”
said the priest, reverting to his game, on
which he hung with soul and eye intent
on his recent victory. “Holy saints!” said
Donna Clara, still more and more perplexed,
“I thought the usual phrase on such
occasions was pax vobiscum, or”—— Before
Father Jose could reply, a shriek from
Isidora pierced the ears of every one. All
gathered round her in a moment, reinforced
by four female attendants and two pages,
whom the unusual sound had summoned
from the antichamber. Isidora had not
fainted; she still stood among them pale
as death, speechless, her eye wandering
round the groupe that encircled her, without
seeming to distinguish them. But she
retained that presence of mind which never
deserts woman where a secret is to be
guarded, and she neither pointed with finger,
or glanced with eye, towards the casement,
where the cause of her alarm had
presented itself. Pressed with a thousand
questions, she appeared incapable of answering
them, and, declining assistance,
leaned against the casement for support.
“Donna Clara was now advancing with
measured step to proffer a bottle of curious
essences, which she drew from a pocket of
a depth beyond calculation, when one of
the female attendants, aware of her favourite
habits, proposed reviving her by the
scent of the flowers that clustered round
the frame of the casement; and collecting
a handful of roses, offered them to Isidora.
The sight and scent of these beautiful
flowers, revived the former associations of
Isidora; and, waving away her attendant,
she exclaimed, “There are no roses like
those which surrounded me when he beheld
me first!”—“He!—who, daughter?”
said the alarmed Donna Clara. “Speak,
I charge you, sister,” said the irritable Fernan,
“to whom do you allude?”—“She
raves,” said the priest, whose habitual penetration
discovered there was a secret,—and
whose professional jealousy decided
that no one, not mother or brother, should
share it with him; “she raves—ye are to
blame—forbear to hang round and to question
her. Madonna, retire to rest, and the
saints watch round your bed!” Isidora,
bending thankfully for this permission, retired
to her apartment; and father Jose
for an hour appeared to contend with the
suspicious fears of Donna Clara, and the
sullen irritability of Fernan, merely that
he might induce them, in the heat of controversy,
to betray all they knew or dreaded,
that he might strengthen his own conjectures,
and establish his own power by
the discovery.
“Scire volunt secreta domus, et inde timeri.”
And this desire is not only natural but
necessary, in a being from whose heart his
profession has torn every tie of nature and
of passion; and if it generates malignity,
ambition, and the wish for mischief, it is
the system, not the individual, we must
blame.
“Madonna,” said the Father, “you are
always urging your zeal for the Catholic
church—and you, Senhor, are always reminding
me of the honour of your family—I
am anxious for both—and how can the
interests of both be better secured than by
Donna Isidora taking the veil?”—“The
wish of my soul!” cried Donna Clara,
clasping her hands, and closing her eyes,
as if she witnessed her daughter’s apotheosis.
“I will never hear of it, Father,”
said Fernan; “my sister’s beauty and
wealth entitle me to claim alliance with
the first families in Spain—their baboon
shapes and copper-coloured visages might
be redeemed for a century by such a graft
on the stock, and the blood of which they
boast would not be impoverished by a
transfusion of the aurum potabile of ours
into it.”—“You forget, son,” said the
priest, “the extraordinary circumstances
attendant on the early part of your sister’s
life. There are many of our Catholic nobility
who would rather see the black blood
of the banished Moors, or the proscribed
Jews, flow in the veins of their descendants,
than that of one who”—— Here a
mysterious whisper drew from Donna
Clara a shudder of distress and consternation,
and from her son an impatient motion
of angry incredulity. “I do not credit
a word of it,” said the latter; “you wish
that my sister should take the veil, and
therefore you credit and circulate the monstrous
invention.”—“Take heed, son, I
conjure you,” said the trembling Donna
Clara. “Take you heed, Madam, that
you do not sacrifice your daughter to an
unfounded and incredible fiction.”—“Fiction!”
repeated Father Jose—“Senhor, I
forgive your illiberal reflections on me,—but
let me remind you, that the same immunity
will not be extended to the insult
you offer to the Catholic faith.”—“Reverend
Father,” said the terrified Fernan,
“the Catholic church has not a more devoted
and unworthy professor on earth
than myself.”—“I do believe the latter,”
said the priest. “You admit all that the
holy church teaches to be irrefragably
true?”—“To be sure I do.”—“Then you
must admit that the islands in the Indian
seas are particularly under the influence
of the devil?”—“I do, if the church requires
me so to believe.”—“And that he
possessed a peculiar sway over that island
where your sister was lost in her infancy?”—“I
do not see how that follows,” said
Fernan, making a sudden stand at this
premise of the Sorites. “Not see how that
follows!” repeated Father Jose, crossing
himself;
“Excæcavit oculos eorum ne viderent.
But why waste I my Latin and logic on
thee, who art incapable of both? Mark
me, I will use but one unanswerable argument,
the which whoso gainsayeth is a—gainsayer—that’s
all. The Inquisition at
Goa knows the truth of what I have asserted,
and who will dare deny it now?”—“Not
I!—not I!” exclaimed Donna
Clara; “nor, I am sure, will this stubborn
boy. Son, I adjure you, make
haste to believe what the reverend Father
has told you.”—“I am believing as
fast as I can,” answered Don Fernan, in
the tone of one who is reluctantly swallowing
a distasteful mess; “but my
faith will be choaked if you don’t allow it
time to swallow. As for digestion,” he
muttered, “let that come when it pleases
God.”—“Daughter,” said the priest, who
well knew the mollia tempora fandi, and
saw that the sullen and angry Fernan
could not well bear more at present;
“daughter, it is enough—we must lead
with gentleness those whose steps find
stumbling-blocks in the paths of grace.
Pray with me, daughter, that your son’s
eyes may yet be opened to the glory and
felicity of his sister’s vocation to a state
where the exhaustless copiousness of divine
benignity places the happy inmates above
all those mean and mundane anxieties,
those petty and local wants, which——Ah!—hem—verily
I feel some of those
wants myself at this moment. I am hoarse
with speaking; and the intense heat of
this night hath so exhausted my strength,
that methinks the wing of a partridge
would be no unseasonable refreshment.”
“At a sign from Donna Clara, a salver
with wine appeared, and a partridge that
might have provoked the French prelate
to renew his meal once more, spite of his
horror of toujours perdrix. “See, daughter,
see how much I am exhausted in this
distressing controversy—well may I say,
the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.”—“Then
you and the zeal of the house
will soon be quit,” muttered Fernan as
he retired. And drawing the folds of his
mantle over his shoulder, he threw a glance
of wonder at the happy facility with which
the priest discussed the wings and breast
of his favourite bird,—whispering alternately
words of admonition to Donna Clara,
and muttering something about the omission
of pimento and lemon.
“Father,” said Don Fernan, stalking
back from the door, and fronting the priest—“Father,
I have a favour to ask of you.”—“Glad,
were it in my power to comply
with it,” said Father Jose, turning over
the skeleton of the fowl; “but you see
here is only the thigh, and that somewhat
bare.”—“It is not of that I speak or think,
reverend Father,” said Fernan, with a
smile; “I have but to request, that you
will not renew the subject of my sister’s vocation
till the return of my father.”—“Certainly
not, son, certainly not. Ah! you
know the time to ask a favour—you know
I never could refuse you at a moment like
this, when my heart is warmed, and softened,
and expanded, by—by—by the evidences
of your contrition and humiliation,
and all that your devout mother, and your
zealous spiritual friend, could hope or wish
for. In truth, it overcomes me—these
tears—I do not often weep but on occasions
like these, and then I weep abundantly,
and am compelled to recruit my
lack of moisture thus.”—“Fetch more
wine,” said Donna Clara.—The order was
obeyed.—“Good night, Father,” said Don
Fernan.—“The saints watch round you,
my son! Oh I am exhausted!—I sink in
this struggle! The night is hot, and requires
wine to slake my thirst—and wine
is a provocative, and requires food to take
away its deleterious and damnable qualities—and
food, especially partridge, which
is a hot and stimulative nutritive, requires
drink again to absorb or neutralize its exciting
qualities. Observe me, Donna Clara—I
speak as to the learned. There is
stimulation, and there is absorption; the
causes of which are manifold, and the effects
such as——I am not bound to tell
you at present.”—“Reverend Father,”
said the admiring Donna Clara, not guessing,
in the least, from what source all this
eloquence flowed, “I trespassed on your
time merely to ask a favour also.”—“Ask
and ’tis granted,” said Father Jose, with a
protrusion of his foot as proud as that of
Sixtus himself. “It is merely to know,
will not all the inhabitants of those accursed
Indian isles be damned everlastingly?”—“Damned
everlastingly, and without
doubt,” returned the priest. “Now my
mind is easy,” rejoined the lady, “and I
shall sleep in peace to-night.”
“Sleep, however, did not visit her so
soon as she expected, for an hour after she
knocked at Father Jose’s door, repeating,
“Damned to all eternity, Father, did you
not say?”—“Be damned to all eternity!”
said the priest, tossing on his feverish bed,
and dreaming, in the intervals of his troubled
sleep, of Don Fernan coming to confession
with a drawn sword, and Donna
Clara with a bottle of Xeres in her hand,
which she swallowed at a draught, while
his parched lips were gaping for a drop
in vain,—and of the Inquisition being
established in an island off the coast of
Bengal, and a huge partridge seated with a
cap on at the end of a table covered with
black, as chief Inquisitor,—and various and
monstrous chimeras, the abortive births of
repletion and indigestion.
“Donna Clara, catching only the last
words, returned to her apartment with light
step and gladdened heart, and, full of pious
consolation, renewed her devotions before
the image of the virgin in her apartment,
at each side of whose niche two wax tapers
were burning, till the cool morning
breeze made it possible for her to retire
with some hope of rest.
“Isidora, in her apartment, was equally
sleepless; and she, too, had prostrated herself
before the sacred image, but with different
thoughts. Her feverish and dreamy
existence, composed of wild and irreconcileable
contrasts between the forms of the
present, and the visions of the past,—the
difference between all that she felt within,
and all that she saw around her,—between
the impassioned life of recollection, and
the monotonous one of reality,—was becoming
too much for a heart bursting with
undirected sensibilities, and a head giddy
from vicissitudes that would have deeply
tried much firmer faculties.
“She remained for some time repeating
the usual number of ave’s, to which she
added the litany of the Virgin, without
any corresponding impulses of solace or
illumination, till at length, feeling that
her prayers were not the expressions of
her heart, and dreading this heterodoxy
of the heart more than the violation of the
ritual, she ventured to address the image
of the Virgin in language of her own.
“Mild and beautiful Spirit!” she cried,
prostrating herself before the figure—“you
whose lips alone have smiled on
me since I reached your Christian land,—you
whose countenance I have sometimes
imagined to belong to those who
dwelt in the stars of my own Indian sky,—hear
me, and be not angry with me!
Let me lose all feeling of my present existence,
or all memory of the past! Why
do my former thoughts return? They
once made me happy, now they are thorns
in my heart! Why do they retain their
power since their nature is altered?
I cannot be what I was—Oh, let me
then no longer remember it! Let me,
if possible, see, feel, and think as those around
me do! Alas! I feel it is much
easier to descend to their level than to raise
them to mine. Time, constraint, and dullness,
may do much for me, but what time
could ever operate such a change on them!
It would be like looking for the pearls at
the bottom of the stagnant ponds which
art has dug in their gardens. No, mother
of the Deity! divine and mysterious woman,
no!—they never shall see another throb
of my burning heart. Let it consume in its
own fires before a drop of their cold compassion
extinguishes them! Mother divine!
are not burning hearts, then, worthiest of
thee?—and does not the love of nature assimilate
itself to the love of God! True,
we may love without religion, but can we
be religious without love? Yet, mother
divine! dry up my heart, since there is no
longer a channel for its streams to flow
through!—or turn all those streams into
the river, narrow and cold, that holds its
course on to eternity! Why should I
think or feel, since life requires only duties
that no feeling suggests, and apathy
that no reflection disturbs? Here let me
rest!—it is indeed the end of enjoyment,
but it is also the end of suffering; and a
thousand tears are a price too dear for the
single smile which is sold for them in the
commerce of life. Alas! it is better to
wander in perpetual sterility than to be
tortured with the remembrance of flowers
that have withered, and odours that have
died for ever.” Then a gush of uncontroulable
emotion overwhelming her, she
again bowed before the Virgin. “Yes,
help me to banish every image from my
soul but his—his alone! Let my heart be
like this lonely apartment, consecrated by
the presence of one sole image, and illuminated
only by that light which affection
kindles before the object of its adoration,
and worships it by for ever!”
“In an agony of enthusiasm she continued
to kneel before the image; and when
she rose, the silence of her apartment, and
the calm smile of the celestial figure, seemed
at once a contrast and a reproach to
this excess of morbid indulgence. That
smile appeared to her like a frown. It is
certain, that in agitation we can feel no solace
from features that express only profound
tranquillity. We would rather wish
corresponding agitation, even hostility—any
thing but a calm that neutralizes and
absorbs us. It is the answer of the rock
to the wave—we collect, foam, dash, and
disperse ourselves against it, and retire
broken, shattered, and murmuring to the
echoes of our disappointment.
“From the tranquil and hopeless aspect
of the divinity, smiling on the misery it
neither consoles or relieves, and intimating
in that smile the profound and pulseless
apathy of inaccessible elevation, coldly
hinting that humanity must cease to be,
before it can cease to suffer—from this the
sufferer rushed for consolation to nature,
whose ceaseless agitation seems to correspond
with the vicissitudes of human destiny
and the emotions of the human heart—whose
alternation of storms and calms,—of
clouds and sun-light,—of terrors and delights—seems
to keep a kind of mysterious
measure of ineffable harmony with
that instrument whose chords are doomed
alternately to the thrill of agony and rapture,
till the hand of death sweeps over all
the strings, and silences them for ever.—With
such a feeling, Isidora leaned against
her casement, gasped for a breath of air,
which the burning night did not grant, and
thought how, on such a night in her Indian
isle, she could plunge into the stream shaded
by her beloved tamarind, or even venture
amid the still and silvery waves of the
ocean, laughing at the broken beams of
the moonlight, as her light form dimpled
the waters—snatching with smiling delight
the brilliant, tortuous, and enamelled
shells that seemed to woo her white footsteps
as she turned to the shore. Now
all was different. The duties of the
bath had been performed, but with a
parade of soaps, perfumes, and, above all,
attendants, who, though of her own sex,
gave Isidora an unspeakable degree of disgust
at the operation. The sponges and
odours sickened her unsophisticated senses,
and the presence of another human being
seemed to close up every pore.
“She had felt no refreshment from the
bath, or from her prayers—she sought it
at her casement, but there also in vain.
The moon was as bright as the sun of
colder climates, and the heavens were all
in a blaze with her light. She seemed
like a gallant vessel ploughing the bright
and trackless ocean alone, while a thousand
stars burned in the wake of her quiet glory,
like attendant vessels pursuing their
course to undiscovered worlds, and pointing
them out to the mortal eye that lingered
on their course, and loved their
light.
“Such was the scene above, but what
a contrast to the scene below! The glorious
and unbounded light fell on an inclosure
of stiff parterres, cropped myrtles
and orange-trees in tubs, and quadrangular
ponds, and bowers of trellis-work, and nature
tortured a thousand ways, and indignant
and repulsive under her tortures every
way.
“Isidora looked and wept. Tears had
now become her language when alone—it
was a language she dared not utter before
her family. Suddenly she saw one of the
moonlight alleys darkened by an approaching
figure. It advanced—it uttered her
name—the name she remembered and loved—the
name of Immalee! “Ah!” she
exclaimed, leaning from the casement, “is
there then one who recognizes me by that
name?”—“It is only by that name I can
address you,” answered the voice of the
stranger—“I have not yet the honour of
being acquainted with the name your
Christian friends have given you.”—“They
call me Isidora, but do you still call me
Immalee. But how is it,” she added in a
trembling voice,—her fears for his safety
overcoming all her sudden and innocent
joy at his sight—“how is it that you are
here?—here, where no human being is
ever beheld but the inmates of the mansion—how
did you cross the garden wall?—how
did you come from India? Oh!
retire for your own safety! I am among
those whom I cannot trust or love. My
mother is severe—my brother is violent.
Oh! how did you obtain entrance into the
garden?—How is it,” she added in a broken
voice, “that you risk so much to see
one whom you have forgotten so long?”—“Fair
Neophyte, beautiful Christian,”
answered the stranger, with a diabolical
sneer, “be it known to you that
I regard bolts, and bars, and walls, as
much as I did the breakers and rocks
of your Indian isle—that I can go
where, and retire when I please, without
leave asked or taken of your brother’s
mastiffs, or Toledos, or spring-guns,
and in utter defiance of your mother’s advanced
guard of duennas, armed in spectacles,
and flanked with a double ammunition
of rosaries, with beads as large as——”
“Hush!—hush!—do not utter such impious
sounds—I am taught to revere those
holy things. But is it you?—and did I
indeed see you last night, or was it a
thought such as visits me in dreams, and
wraps me again in visions of that beautiful
and blessed isle where first I——Oh
that I never had seen you!”—“Lovely
Christian! be reconciled to your horrible
destiny. You saw me last night—I crossed
your path twice when you were sparkling
among the brightest and most beautiful
of all Madrid. It was me you saw—I
rivetted your eye—I transfixed your slender
frame as with a flash of lightning—you
fell fainting and withered under my
burning glance. It was me you saw—me,
the disturber of your angelical existence
in that isle of paradise—the hunter
of your form and your steps, even amid the
complicated and artificial tracks in which
you have been concealed by the false forms
of the existence you have embraced!”—“Embraced!—Oh
no! they seized on me—they
dragged me here—they made me
a Christian. They told me all was for my
salvation, for my happiness here and hereafter—and
I trust it will, for I have been
so miserable ever since, that I ought to be
happy somewhere.”—“Happy,” repeated
the stranger with his withering sneer—“and
are you not happy now? The delicacy
of your exquisite frame is no longer
exposed to the rage of the elements—the
fine and feminine luxury of your taste is
solicited and indulged by a thousand inventions
of art—your bed is of down—your
chamber hung with tapestry. Whether
the moon be bright or dark, six wax tapers
burn in your chamber all night.
Whether the skies be bright or cloudy,—whether
the earth be clothed with flowers,
deformed with tempests,—the art of the
limner has surrounded you with “a new
heaven and a new earth;” and you may
bask in suns that never set, while the heavens
are dark to other eyes,—and luxuriate
amid landscapes and flowers, while half
your fellow-creatures are perishing amid
snows and tempests!” (Such was the overflowing
acrimony of this being, that he
could not speak of the beneficence of nature,
or the luxuries of art, without interweaving
something that seemed like a satire
on, or a scorn of both.) “You also
have intellectual beings to converse with
instead of the chirpings of loxias, and the
chatterings of monkeys.”—“I have not
found the conversation I encounter much
more intelligible or significant,” murmured
Isidora, but the stranger did not appear to
hear her. “You are surrounded by every
thing that can flatter the senses, intoxicate
the imagination, or expand the heart. All
these indulgences must make you forget
the voluptuous but unrefined liberty of
your former existence.”—“The birds in
my mother’s cages,” said Isidora, “are for
ever pecking at their gilded bars, and
trampling on the clear seeds and limpid
water they are supplied with—would they
not rather rest in the mossy trunk of a
doddered oak, and drink of whatever
stream they met, and be at liberty, at
all the risk of poorer food and fouler drink—would
they not rather do any thing than
break their bills against gilded wires?”—“Then
you do not feel your new existence
in this Christian land so likely to
surfeit you with delight as you once
thought? For shame, Immalee—shame
on your ingratitude and caprice! Do you
remember when from your Indian isle you
caught a glimpse of the Christian worship,
and were entranced at the sight?”—“I
remember all that ever passed in that
isle. My life formerly was all anticipation,—now
it is all retrospection. The life
of the happy is all hopes,—that of the unfortunate
all memory. Yes, I remember
catching a glimpse of that religion so beautiful
and pure; and when they brought
me to a Christian land, I thought I should
have found them all Christians.”—“And
what did you find them, then, Immalee?”—“Only
Catholics.”—“Are you aware of
the danger of the words you utter? Do
you know that in this country to hint a
doubt of Catholicism and Christianity being
the same, would consign you to the
flames as a heretic incorrigible? Your
mother, so lately known to you as a mother,
would bind your hands when the
covered litter came for its victim; and
your father, though he has never yet beheld
you, would buy with his last ducat
the faggots that were to consume you to
ashes; and all your relations in their gala
robes would shout their hallelujahs to
your dying screams of torture. Do you
know that the Christianity of these countries
is diametrically opposite to the Christianity
of that world of which you caught
a gleam, and which you may see recorded
in the pages of your Bible, if you are permitted
to read it?”
“Isidora wept, and confessed she had
not found Christianity what she had at
first believed it; but with her wild and
eccentric ingenuousness, she accused herself
the next moment of her confession,—and
she added, “I am so ignorant in
this new world,—I have so much to learn,—my
senses so often deceive me,—and
my habits and perceptions so different
from what they ought to be—I mean from
what those around me are—that I should
not speak or think but as I am taught.
Perhaps, after some years of instruction
and suffering, I may be able to discover
that happiness cannot exist in this new
world, and Christianity is not so remote
from Catholicism as it appears to me now.”—“And
have you not found yourself happy
in this new world of intelligence and
luxury?” said Melmoth, in a tone of
involuntary softness. “I have at times.”—“What
times?”—“When the weary
day was over, and my dreams bore me
back to that island of enchantment. Sleep
is to me like some bark rowed by visionary
pilots, that wafts me to shores of beauty
and blessedness,—and all night long I
revel in my dreams with spirits. Again
I live among flowers and odours—a thousand
voices sing to me from the brooks
and the breezes—the air is all alive and
eloquent with invisible melodists—I walk
amid a breathing atmosphere, and living
and loving inanimation—blossoms that
shed themselves beneath my steps—and
streams that tremble to kiss my feet, and
then retire; and then return again, wasting
themselves in fondness before me, and
touching me, as my lips press the holy
images they have taught me to worship
here!”—“Does no other image ever visit
your dreams, Immalee?”—“I need not
tell you,” said Isidora, with that singular
mixture of natural firmness, and partial
obscuration of intellect,—the combined result
of her original and native character,
and extraordinary circumstances of her
early existence—“I need not tell you—you
know you are with me every night!”—“Me?”—“Yes,
you; you are for ever
in that canoe that bears me to the Indian
isle—you gaze on me, but your expression
is so changed, that I dare not speak
to you—we fly over the seas in a moment,
but you are for ever at the helm, though
you never land—the moment the paradise
isle appears, you disappear; and as we return,
the ocean is all dark, and our course
is as dark and swift as the storm that
sweeps them—you look at me, but never
speak—Oh yes! you are with me every
night!”—“But, Immalee, these are all
dreams—idle dreams. I row you over the
Indian seas from Spain!—this is all a vision
of your imagination.”—“Is it a dream
that I see you now?” said Isidora—“is it
a dream that I talk with you?—Tell me,
for my senses are bewildered; and it appears
to me no less strange, that you should
be here in Spain, than that I should be in
my native island. Alas! in the life that
I now lead, dreams have become realities,
and realities seem only like dreams. How
is it you are here, if indeed you are here?—how
is it that you have wandered so far
to see me? How many oceans you must
have crossed, how many isles you must
have seen, and none like that where I first
beheld you! But is it you indeed I behold?
I thought I saw you last night,
but I had rather trust even my dreams
than my senses. I believed you only a
visitor of that isle of visions, and a haunter
of the visions that recall it—but are
you in truth a living being, and one whom
I may hope to behold in this land of cold
realities and Christian horrors?”—“Beautiful
Immalee, or Isidora, or whatever other
name your Indian worshippers, or Christian
god-fathers and god-mothers, have
called you by, I pray you listen to me,
while I expound a few mysteries to you.”
And Melmoth, as he spoke, flung himself
on a bed of hyacinths and tulips that displayed
their glowing flowers, and sent up
their odorous breath right under Isidora’s
casement. “Oh you will destroy my
flowers!” cried she, while a reminiscence
of her former picturesque existence, when
flowers were the companions alike of her
imagination and her pure heart, awoke
her exclamation. “It is my vocation—I
pray you pardon me!” said Melmoth, as
he basked on the crushed flowers, and
darted his withering sneer and scowling
glance at Isidora. “I am commissioned
to trample on and bruise every
flower in the natural and moral world—hyacinths,
hearts, and bagatelles of
that kind, just as they occur. And now,
Donna Isidora, with as long an et cetera
as you or your sponsors could wish, and
with no possible offence to the herald, here
I am to-night—and where I shall be to-morrow
night, depends on your choice.
I would as soon be on the Indian seas,
where your dreams send me rowing every
night, or crashing through the ice near
the Poles, or ploughing with my naked
corse, (if corses have feeling), through
the billows of that ocean where I must
one day (a day that has neither sun or
moon, neither commencement or termination),
plough forever, and reap despair!”—“Hush!—hush!—Oh
forbear such horrid
sounds! Are you indeed he whom I saw in
the isle? Are you he, inwoven ever since
that moment with my prayers, my hopes,
my heart? Are you that being upon whom
hope subsisted, when life itself was failing?
On my passage to this Christian land, I
suffered much. I was so ill you would
have pitied me—the clothes they put on
me—the language they made me speak—the
religion they made me believe—the
country they brought me to—Oh you!—you
alone!—the thought—the image of you,
could alone have supported me! I loved,
and to love is to live. Amid the disruption
of every natural tie,—amid the loss of
that delicious existence which seems a
dream, and which still fills my dreams,
and makes sleep a second existence,—I have
thought of you—have dreamt of you—have
loved you!”—“Loved me?—no being yet
loved me but pledged me in tears.”—“And
have I not wept?” said Isidora—“believe
these tears—they are not the first I have shed,
nor I fear will be the last, since I owe the
first to you.” And she wept as she spoke.
“Well,” said the wanderer, with a bitter
and self-satirizing laugh, “I shall be persuaded
at last that I am “a marvellous proper
man.” Well, if it must be so, happy
man be his dole! And when shall the auspicious
day, beautiful Immalee, still beautiful
Isidora, in spite of your Christian
name, (to which I have a most anti-catholic
objection)—when shall that bright day
dawn on your long slumbering eye-lashes,
and waken them with kisses, and beams,
and light, and love, and all the paraphernalia
with which folly arrays misery previous
to their union—that glittering and
empoisoned drapery that well resembles
what of old Dejanira sent to her husband—when
shall the day of bliss be?” And
he laughed with that horrible convulsion
that mingles the expression of levity with
that of despair, and leaves the listener no
doubt whether there is more despair in
laughter, or more laughter in despair. “I
understand you not,” said the pure and timid
Isidora; “and if you would not terrify
me to madness, laugh no more—no
more, at least, in that fearful way!”—“I
cannot weep,” said Melmoth, fixing on her
his dry and burning eyes, strikingly visible
in the moonlight; “the fountain of
tears has been long dried up within me,
like that of every other human blessing.”—“I
can weep for both,” said Isidora, “if
that be all.” And her tears flowed fast, as
much from memory as from grief—and
when those sources are united, God and
the sufferer only know how fast and bitterly
they fall. “Reserve them for our
nuptial hour, my lovely bride,” said Melmoth
to himself; “you will have occasion
for them then.”
“There was a custom then, however
indelicate and repulsive it may sound to
modern ears, for ladies who were doubtful
of the intentions of their lovers to demand
of them the proof of their purity and honour,
by requiring an appeal to their family,
and a solemn union under the sanction
of the church. Perhaps there was
more genuine spirit of truth and chastity
in this, than in all the ambiguous flirtation
that is carried on with an ill-understood
and mysterious dependence on principles
that have never been defined, and
fidelity that has never been removed.
When the lady in the Italian tragedy(22)
asks her lover, almost at their first interview,
if his intentions are honourable, and
requires, as the proof of their being so,
that he shall espouse her immediately,
does she not utter a language more unsophisticated,
more intelligible, more heartedly
pure, than all the romantic and incredible
reliance that other females are
supposed to place in the volatility of impulse,—in
that wild and extemporaneous
feeling,—that “house on the sands,”—which
never has its foundation in the immoveable
depths of the heart. Yielding
to this feeling, Isidora, in a voice that faultered
at its own accents, murmured, “If
you love me, seek me no more clandestinely.
My mother is good, though she is
austere—my brother is kind, though he
is passionate—my father—I have never
seen him! I know not what to say, but
if he be my father, he will love you. Meet
me in their presence, and I will no longer
feel pain and shame mingled with the delight
of seeing you. Invoke the sanction
of the church, and then, perhaps,”——
“Perhaps!” retorted Melmoth; “You
have learned the European ‘perhaps!’—the
art of suspending the meaning of an
emphatic word—of affecting to draw the
curtain of the heart at the moment you
drop its folds closer and closer—of bidding
us despair at the moment you intend we
should feel hope!”—“Oh no!—no!” answered
the innocent being; “I am truth.
I am Immalee when I speak to you,—though
to all others in this country,
which they call Christian, I am Isidora.
When I loved you first, I had only one
heart to consult,—now there are many,
and some who have not hearts like mine.
But if you love me, you can bend to them
as I have done—you can love their God,
their home, their hopes, and their country.
Even with you I could not be happy, unless
you adored the cross to which your
hand first pointed my wandering sight,
and the religion which you reluctantly
confessed was the most beautiful and beneficent
on earth.”—“Did I confess that?”
echoed Melmoth; “It must have been
reluctantly indeed. Beautiful Immalee!
I am a convert to you;” and he stifled a
Satanic laugh as he spoke; “to your new
religion, and your beauty, and your Spanish
birth and nomenclature, and every
thing that you would wish. I will incontinently
wait on your pious mother, and
angry brother, and all your relatives, testy,
proud, and ridiculous as they may be. I
will encounter the starched ruffs, and rustling
manteaus, and whale-boned fardingales
of the females, from your good mother
down to the oldest duenna who sits
spectacled, and armed with bobbin, on her
inaccessible and untempted sopha; and the
twirled whiskers, plumed hats, and shouldered
capas of all your male relatives.
And I will drink chocolate, and strut
among them; and when they refer me to
your mustachoed man of law, with his
thread-bare cloke of black velvet over his
shoulder, his long quill in his hand, and
his soul in three sheets of wide-spread
parchment, I will dower you in the most
ample territory ever settled on a bride.”—“Oh
let it be, then, in that land of music
and sunshine where we first met! One
spot where I might set my foot amid its
flowers, is worth all the cultivated earth
of Europe!” said Isidora.—“No!—it shall
be in a territory with which your bearded
men of law are far better acquainted, and
which even your pious mother and proud
family must acknowledge my claim to,
when they shall hear it asserted and explained.
Perchance they may be joint-tenants
with me there; and yet (strange
to say!) they will never litigate my exclusive
title to possession.”—“I understand
nothing of this,” said Isidora; “but I
feel I am transgressing the decorums of
a Spanish female and a Christian, in holding
this conference with you any longer. If
you think as you once thought,—if you
feel as I must feel for ever,—there needs
not this discussion, which only perplexes
and terrifies. What have I to do with
this territory of which you speak? That
you are its possessor, is its only value
in my eyes!”—“What have you
to do with it?” repeated Melmoth; “Oh,
you know not how much you may have
to do with it and me yet! In other
cases, the possession of the territory is the
security for the man,—but here the man
is the security for the everlasting possession
of the territory. Mine heirs must inherit
it for ever and ever, if they hold by
my tenure. Listen to me, beautiful Immalee,
or Christian, or whatever other
name you choose to be called by! Nature,
your first sponsor, baptized you with the
dews of Indian roses—your Christian sponsors,
of course, spared not water, salt, or
oil, to wash away the stain of nature from
your regenerated frame—and your last
sponsor, if you will submit to the rite, will
anoint you with a new chrism. But of
that hereafter. Listen to me while I announce
to you the wealth, the population,
the magnificence of that region to which
I will endower you. The rulers of the
earth are there—all of them. There be
the heroes, and the sovereigns, and the tyrants.
There are their riches, and pomp,
and power—Oh what a glorious accumulation!—and
they have thrones, and
crowns, and pedestals, and trophies of
fire, that burn for ever and ever, and
the light of their glory blazes eternally.
There are all you read of in story,
your Alexanders and Cæsars, your Ptolemies
and Pharaohs. There be the princes
of the East, the Nimrods, the Belshazzars,
and the Holoferneses of their day.
There are the princes of the North, the
Odins, the Attilas, (named by your church
the scourge of God), the Alarics, and all
those nameless and name-undeserving barbarians,
who, under various titles and
claims, ravaged and ruined the earth they
came to conquer. There be the sovereigns
of the South, and East, and West,
the Mahommedans, the Caliphs, the Saracens,
the Moors, with all their gorgeous
pretensions and ornaments—the crescent,
the Koran, and the horse-tail—the trump,
the gong, and the atabal, (or to suit it to
your Christianised ear, lovely Neophyte!)
‘the noise of the captains, and the shoutings.’
There be also those triple-crowned
chieftains of the West, who hide their
shorn heads under a diadem, and for every
hair they shave, demand the life of a sovereign—who,
pretending to humility, trample
on power—whose title is, Servant of servants—and
whose claim and recognizance
is, Lord of lords. Oh! you will not lack
company in that bright region, for bright
it will be!—and what matter whether its
light be borrowed from the gleam of sulphur,
or the trembling light of the moon,
by which I see you look so pale?”—“I
look pale!” said Isidora gasping; “I feel
pale! I know not the meaning of your
words, but I know it must be horrible.
Speak no more of that region, with its
pride, its wickedness, and its splendour!
I am willing to follow you to deserts, to
solitudes, which human step never trod
but yours, and where mine shall trace,
with sole fidelity, the print of yours. Amid
loneliness I was born; amid loneliness
I could die. Let me but, wherever
I live, and whenever I die, be yours!—and
for the place, it matters not, let it be
even”—— and she shivered involuntarily
as she spoke; “Let it be even”——
“Even—where?” asked Melmoth, while
a wild feeling of triumph in the devotedness
of this unfortunate female, and of
horror at the destination which she was
unconsciously imprecating on herself, mingled
in the question. “Even where you
are to be,” answered the devoted Isidora,
“let me be there! and there I must be
happy, as in the isle of flowers and sun-light,
where I first beheld you. Oh! there
are no flowers so balmy and roseate as
those that once blew there! There are
no waters so musical, or breezes so fragrant,
as those that I listened to and inhaled,
when I thought that they repeated
to me the echo of your steps, or the melody
of your voice—that human music the
first I ever heard, and which, when I cease
to hear”—— “You will hear much better!”
interrupted Melmoth; “the voices
of ten thousand—ten millions of spirits—beings
whose tones are immortal, without
cessation, without pause, without interval!”—“Oh
that will be glorious!” said
Isidora, clasping her hands; “the only
language I have learned in this new world
worth speaking, is the language of music.
I caught some imperfect sounds from birds
in my first world, but in my second world
they taught me music; and the misery
they have taught me, hardly makes a balance
against that new and delicious language.”—“But
think,” rejoined Melmoth,
“if your taste for music be indeed so exquisite,
how it will be indulged, how it
will be enlarged, in hearing those voices
accompanied and re-echoed by the thunders
of ten thousand billows of fire, lashing
against rocks which eternal despair has
turned into adamant! They talk of the
music of the spheres!—Dream of the music
of those living orbs turning on their
axis of fire for ever and ever, and ever
singing as they shine, like your brethren
the Christians, who had the honour to illuminate
Nero’s garden in Rome on a rejoicing
night.”—“You make me tremble!”—“Tremble!—a
strange effect of fire.
Fie! what a coyness is this! I have promised,
on your arrival at your new territory,
all that is mighty and magnificent,—all
that is splendid and voluptuous—the
sovereign and the sensualist—the inebriated
monarch and the pampered slave—the
bed of roses and the canopy of fire!”—“And
is this the home to which you invite
me?”—“It is—it is. Come, and be
mine!—myriads of voices summon you—hear
and obey them! Their voices thunder
in the echoes of mine—their fires flash
from my eyes, and blaze in my heart.
Hear me, Isidora, my beloved, hear me!
I woo you in earnest, and for ever! Oh
how trivial are the ties by which mortal
lovers are bound, compared to those in
which you and I shall be bound to eternity!
Fear not the want of a numerous
and splendid society. I have enumerated
sovereigns, and pontiffs, and heroes,—and
if you should condescend to remember the
trivial amusements of your present sejour,
you will have enough to revive its associations.
You love music, and doubtless you
will have most of the musicians who have
chromatized since the first essays of Tubal
Cain to Lully, who beat himself to death
at one of his own oratorios, or operas, I
don’t know which. They will have a singular
accompaniment—the eternal roar of
a sea of fire makes a profound bass to the
chorus of millions of singers in torture!”—“What
is the meaning of this horrible description?”
said the trembling Isidora;
“your words are riddles to me. Do you
jest with me for the sake of tormenting,
or of laughing at me?”—“Laughing!”
repeated her wild visitor; “that is an exquisite
hint—vive la bagatelle! Let us
laugh for ever!—we shall have enough to
keep us in countenance. There will be
all that ever have dared to laugh on earth—the
singers, the dancers, the gay, the
voluptuous, the brilliant, the beloved—all
who have ever dared to mistake their destiny,
so far as to imagine that enjoyment
was not a crime, or that a smile was not
an infringement of their duty as sufferers.
All such must expiate their error under
circumstances which will probably compel
the most inveterate disciple of Democritus,
the most inextinguishable laugher
among them, to allow that there, at least,
‘laughter is madness.’”—“I do not understand
you,” said Isidora, listening to
him with that sinking of the heart which
is produced by a combined and painful
feeling of ignorance and terror. “Not
understand me?” repeated Melmoth, with
that sarcastic frigidity of countenance
which frightfully contrasted the burning
intelligence of his eyes, that seemed like
the fires of a volcano bursting out amid
masses of snow heaped up to its very edge;
“not understand me!—are you not, then,
fond of music?”—“I am.”—“Of dancing,
too, my graceful, beautiful love?”—“I
was.”—“What is the meaning of the different
emphasis you give to those answers?”—“I
love music—I must love it for
ever—it is the language of recollection.
A single strain of it wafts me back to
the dreamy blessedness, the enchanted
existence, of my own—own isle. Of
dancing I cannot say so much. I have
learnt dancing—but I felt music. I shall
never forget the hour when I heard it for
the first time, and imagined it was the
language which Christians spoke to each
other. I have heard them speak a different
language since.”—“Doubtless their
language is not always melody, particularly
when they address each other on
controverted points in religion. Indeed,
I can conceive nothing less a-kin to harmony
than the debate of a Dominican and
Franciscan on the respective efficacy of the
cowl of the order, to ascertain the salvation
of him who happens to die in it. But
have you no other reason for being fond of
music, and for only having been fond of
dancing? Nay, let me have ‘your most
exquisite reason.’”
“It seemed as if this unhappy being
was impelled by his ineffable destiny
to deride the misery he inflicted,
in proportion to its bitterness. His sarcastic
levity bore a direct and fearful proportion
to his despair. Perhaps this is
also the case in circumstances and characters
less atrocious. A mirth which is not
gaiety is often the mask which hides the
convulsed and distorted features of agony—and
laughter, which never yet was the
expression of rapture, has often been the
only intelligible language of madness and
misery. Extacy only smiles,—despair
laughs. It seemed, too, as if no keenness
of ironical insult, no menace of portentous
darkness, had power to revolt the
feelings, or alarm the apprehensions, of
the devoted being to whom they were addressed.
Her “most exquisite reasons,”
demanded in a tone of ruthless irony,
were given in one whose exquisite and
tender melody seemed still to retain the
modulation on which its first sounds had
been formed,—that of the song of birds,
mingled with the murmur of waters.
“I love music, because when I hear it
I think of you. I have ceased to love
dancing, though I was at first intoxicated
with it, because, when dancing, I have
sometimes forgot you. When I listen to
music, your image floats on every note,—I
hear you in every sound. The most inarticulate
murmurs that I produce on my
guitar (for I am very ignorant) are like a
spell of melody that raises a form indescribable—not
you, but my idea of you. In
your presence, though that seems necessary
to my existence, I have never felt
that exquisite delight that I have experienced
in that of your image, when music
has called it up from the recesses of my
heart. Music seems to me like the voice
of religion summoning to remember and
worship the God of my heart. Dancing
appears like a momentary apostasy, almost
a profanation.”—“That, indeed, is a sweet
and subtle reason,” answered Melmoth,
“and one that, of course, has but one failure,—that
of not being sufficiently flattering
to the hearer. And so my image
floats on the rich and tremulous waves of
melody one moment, like a god of the
overflowing billows of music, triumphing
in their swells, and graceful even in their
falls,—and the next moment appears, like
the dancing demon of your operas, grinning
at you between the brilliant movement
of your fandangoes, and flinging the
withering foam of his black and convulsed
lips into the cup where you pledge at your
banquetting. Well—dancing—music—let
them go together! It seems that my
image is equally mischievous in both—in
one you are tortured by reminiscence, and
in the other by remorse. Suppose that
image is withdrawn from you for ever,—suppose
that it were possible to break the
tie that unites us, and whose vision has
entered into the soul of both.”—“You
may suppose it,” said Isidora, with maiden
pride and tender grief blended in her
voice; “and if you do, believe that I will
try to suppose it too; the effort will not
cost much,—nothing but—my life!”
“As Melmoth beheld this blessed and
beautiful being, once so refined amid nature,
and now so natural amid refinement,
still possessing all the soft luxuriance of
her first angelic nature, amid the artificial
atmosphere where her sweets were uninhaled,
and her brilliant tints doomed to
wither unappreciated,—where her pure
and sublime devotedness of heart was
doomed to beat like a wave against a
rock,—exhaust its murmurs,—and expire;—As
he felt this, and gazed on her,
he cursed himself; and then, with the
selfishness of hopeless misery, he felt that
the curse might, by dividing it, be diminished.
“Isidora!” he whispered in the softest
tones he could assume, approaching the
casement, at which his pale and beautiful
victim stood; “Isidora! will you then be
mine?”—“What shall I say?” said Isidora;
“if love requires the answer, I have
said enough; if only vanity, I have said
too much.”—“Vanity! beautiful trifler,
you know not what you say; the accusing
angel himself might blot out that article
from the catalogue of my sins. It is one
of my prohibited and impossible offences;
it is an earthly feeling, and therefore one
which I can neither participate or enjoy.
Certain it is that I feel some share of human
pride at this moment.”—“Pride! at
what? Since I have known you, I have
felt no pride but that of supreme devotedness,—that
self-annihilating pride which
renders the victim prouder of its wreath,
than the sacrificer of his office.”—“But I
feel another pride,” answered Melmoth,
and in a proud tone he spoke it,—“a
pride, which, like that of the storm that
visited the ancient cities, whose destruction
you may have read of, while it
blasts, withers, and encrusts paintings,
gems, music, and festivity, grasping them
in its talons of annihilation, exclaims,
Perish to all the world, perhaps beyond
the period of its existence, but live to me
in darkness and in corruption! Preserve
all the exquisite modulation of your forms!
all the indestructible brilliancy of your colouring!—but
preserve it for me alone!—me,
the single, pulseless, eyeless, heartless
embracer of an unfertile bride,—the brooder
over the dark and unproductive nest of
eternal sterility,—the mountain whose lava
of internal fire has stifled, and indurated,
and inclosed for ever, all that was the
joy of earth, the felicity of life, and the
hope of futurity!”
“As he spoke, his expression was at
once so convulsed and so derisive, so indicative
of malignity and levity, so thrilling
to the heart, while it withered every fibre
it touched and wrung, that Isidora, with
all her innocent and helpless devotedness,
could not avoid shuddering before this
fearful being, while, in trembling and
unappeaseable solicitude, she demanded,
“Will you then be mine? Or what am
I to understand from your terrible words?
Alas! my heart has never enveloped itself
in mysteries—never has the light of its
truth burst forth amid the thunderings
and burnings in which you have issued
the law of my destiny.”—“Will you then
be mine, Isidora?”—“Consult my parents.
Wed me by the rites, and in the face of
the church, of which I am an unworthy
member, and I will be yours for ever.”—“For
ever!” repeated Melmoth; “well-spoken,
my bride. You will then be mine
for ever?—will you, Isidora?”—“Yes!—yes!—I
have said so. But the sun is about
to rise, I feel the increasing perfume
of the orange blossoms, and the coolness
of the morning air. Begone—I have staid
too long here—the domestics may be about,
and observe you—begone, I implore you.”—“I
go—but one word—for to me the
rising of the sun, and the appearance of
your domestics, and every thing in
heaven above, and earth beneath, is
equally unimportant. Let the sun stay
below the horizon and wait for me.
You are mine!”—“Yes, I am yours;
but you must solicit my family.”—“Oh,
doubtless!—solicitation is so congenial
to my habits.”—“And”—— “Well,
what?—you hesitate.”—“I hesitate,” said
the ingenuous and timid Isidora, “because”——
“Well?”—“Because,” she
added, bursting into tears, “those with
whom you speak will not utter to God
language like mine. They will speak to
you of wealth and dower; they will inquire
about that region where you have
told me your rich and wide possessions are
held; and should they ask me of them,
how shall I answer?”
“At these words, Melmoth approached
as close as possible to the casement, and
uttered a certain word which Isidora did
not at first appear to hear, or understand—trembling
she repeated her request. In
a still lower tone the answer was returned.
Incredulous, and hoping that the answer
had deceived her, she again repeated her
petition. A withering monosyllable, not
to be told, thundered in her ears,—and she
shrieked as she closed the casement. Alas!
the casement only shut out the form
of the stranger—not his image.
CHAPTER XXI .
He saw the eternal fire that keeps,
In the unfathomable deeps,
Its power for ever, and made a sign
To the morning prince divine;
Who came across the sulphurous flood,
Obedient to the master-call,
And in angel-beauty stood,
High on his star-lit pedestal.
“In this part of the manuscript, which
I read in the vault of Adonijah the Jew,”
said Monçada, continuing his narrative,
“there were several pages destroyed, and
the contents of many following wholly
obliterated—nor could Adonijah supply
the deficiency. From the next pages that
were legible, it appeared that Isidora imprudently
continued to permit her mysterious
visitor to frequent the garden at
night, and to converse with him from the
casement, though unable to prevail on him
to declare himself to her family, and perhaps
conscious that his declaration would
not be too favourably received. Such, at
least, appeared to be the meaning of the
next lines I could decypher.
“She had renewed, in these nightly conferences,
her former visionary existence.
Her whole day was but a long thought of
the hour at which she expected to see him.
In the day-time she was silent, pensive,
abstracted, feeding on thought—with the
evening her spirits perceptibly though
softly rose, like those of one who has a secret
and incommunicable store of delight;
and her mind became like that flower that
unfolds its leaves, and diffuses its odours,
only on the approach of night.
“The season favoured this fatal delusion.
It was that rage of summer when
we begin to respire only towards evening,
and the balmy and brilliant night is our
day. The day itself is passed in a languid
and feverish doze. At night alone
she existed,—at her moon-lit casement
alone she breathed freely; and never did
the moonlight fall on a lovelier form, or
gild a more angelic brow, or gleam on eyes
that returned more pure and congenial
rays. The mutual and friendly light seemed
like the correspondence of spirits who
glided on the alternate beams, and, passing
from the glow of the planet to the glory
of a mortal eye, felt that to reside in either
was heaven. * * *
* * * * *
“She lingered at that casement till she
imagined that the clipped and artificially
straitened treillage of the garden was the
luxuriant and undulating foliage of the
trees of her paradise isle—that the flowers
had the same odour as that of the untrained
and spontaneous roses that once showered
their leaves under her naked feet—that
the birds sung to her as they had once
done when the vesper-hymn of her pure
heart ascended along with their closing
notes, and formed the holiest and most acceptable
anthem that perhaps ever wooed
the evening-breeze to waft it to heaven.
“This delusion would soon cease. The
stiff and stern monotony of the parterre,
where even the productions of nature held
their place as if under the constraint of
duty, forced the conviction of its unnatural
regularity on her eye and soul, and she
turned to heaven for relief. Who does
not, even in the first sweet agony of passion?
Then we tell that tale to heaven
which we would not trust to the ear of
mortal—and in the withering hour that
must come to all whose love is only mortal,
we again call on that heaven which we have
intrusted with our secret, to send us back
one bright messenger of consolation on
those thousand rays that its bright, and
cold, and passionless orbs, are for ever
pouring on the earth as if in mockery. We
ask, but is the petition heard or answered?
We weep, but do not we feel that those
tears are like rain falling on the sea?
Mare infructuosum. No matter. Revelation
assures us there is a period coming,
when all petitions suited to our state shall
be granted, and when “tears shall be
wiped from all eyes.” In revelation, then,
let us trust—in any thing but our own
hearts. But Isidora had not yet learned
that theology of the skies, whose text is,
“Let us go into the house of mourning.”
To her still the night was day, and her
sun was the “moon walking in its brightness.”
When she beheld it, the recollections
of the isle rushed on her heart like a
flood; and a figure soon appeared to recal
and to realize them.
“That figure appeared to her every
night without disturbance or interruption;
and though her knowledge of the severe
restraint and regularity of the household
caused her some surprise at the facility
with which Melmoth apparently defied
both, and visited the garden every night,
yet such was the influence of her former
dream-like and romantic existence, that
his continued presence, under circumstances
so extraordinary, never drew from her
a question with regard to the means by
which he was enabled to surmount difficulties
insurmountable to all others.
“There were, indeed, two extraordinary
circumstances attendant on these meetings.
Though seeing each other again in Spain,
after an interval of three years elapsing
since they had parted on the shores of an
isle in the Indian sea, neither had ever inquired
what circumstances could have led
to a meeting so unexpected and extraordinary.
On Isidora’s part this incurious
feeling was easily accounted for. Her former
existence had been one of such a fabulous
and fantastic character, that the improbable
had become familiar to her,—and
the familiar only, improbable. Wonders
were her natural element; and she felt,
perhaps, less surprised at seeing Melmoth
in Spain, than when she first beheld him
treading the sands of her lonely island.
With Melmoth the cause was different,
though the effect was the same. His destiny
forbid alike curiosity or surprise.
The world could show him no greater
marvel than his own existence; and the
facility with which he himself passed from
region to region, mingling with, yet distinct
from all his species, like a wearied and
uninterested spectator rambling through
the various seats of some vast theatre,
where he knows none of the audience,
would have prevented his feeling astonishment,
had he encountered Isidora on the
summit of the Andes.
“During a month, through the course
of which she had tacitly permitted these
nightly visits beneath her casement—(at
a distance which indeed might have defied
Spanish jealousy itself to devise matter of
suspicion out of,—the balcony of her window
being nearly fourteen feet above the
level of the garden, where Melmoth stood)—during
this month, Isidora rapidly, but
imperceptibly, graduated through those
stages of feeling which all who love have
alike experienced, whether the stream of
passion be smooth or obstructed. In the
first, she was full of anxiety to speak and
to listen, to hear and to be heard. She
had all the wonders of her new existence
to relate; and perhaps that indefinite and
unselfish hope of magnifying herself in the
eyes of him she loved, which induces us
in our first encounter to display all the
eloquence, all the powers, all the attractions
we possess, not with the pride of a
competitor, but with the humiliation of a
victim. The conquered city displays all
its wealth in hopes of propitiating the conqueror.
It decorates him with all its spoils,
and feels prouder to behold him arrayed
in them, than when she wore them in triumph
herself. That is the first bright
hour of excitement, of trembling, but
hopeful and felicitous anxiety. Then we
think we never can display enough of talent,
of imagination, of all that can interest,
of all that can dazzle. We pride ourselves
in the homage we receive from society,
from the hope of sacrificing that homage
to our beloved—we feel a pure and
almost spiritualized delight in our own
praises, from imagining they render us
more worthy of meriting his, from whom
we have received the grace of love to deserve
them—we glorify ourselves, that we
may be enabled to render back the glory
to him from whom we received it, and for
whom we have kept it in trust, only to
tender it back with that rich and accumulated
interest of the heart, of which we would
pay the uttermost farthing, if the payment
exacted the last vibration of its fibres,—the
last drop of its blood. No saint who ever
viewed a miracle performed by himself
with a holy and self-annihilating abstraction
from seity, has perhaps felt a purer
sentiment of perfect devotedness, than the
female who, in her first hours of love,
offers, at the feet of her worshipped one,
the brilliant wreath of music, painting,
and eloquence,—and only hopes, with an
unuttered sigh, that the rose of love will
not be unnoticed in the garland.
“Oh! how delicious it is to such a being
(and such was Isidora) to touch her
harp amid crowds, and watch, when the
noisy and tasteless bravoes have ceased, for
the heart-drawn sigh of the one, to whom
alone her soul, not her fingers, have played,—and
whose single sigh is heard, and
heard alone, amid the plaudits of thousands!
Yet how delicious to her to whisper
to herself, “I heard his sigh, but he
has heard the applause!”
“And when she glides through the
dance, and in touching, with easy and accustomed
grace, the hands of many, she
feels there is but one hand whose touch
she can recognize; and, waiting for its
thrilling and life-like vibration, moves on
like a statue, cold and graceful, till the
Pygmalion-touch warms her into woman,
and the marble melts into flesh under the
hands of the resistless moulder. And her
movements betray, at that moment, the
unwonted and half-unconscious impulses
of that fair image to which love had given
life, and who luxuriated in the vivid and
newly-tried enjoyment of that animation
which the passion of her lover had breathed
into her frame. And when the splendid
portfolio is displayed, or the richly-wrought
tapestry expanded by outstretched
arms, and cavaliers gaze, and ladies envy,
and every eye is busy in examination,
and every tongue loud in praise, just in
the inverted proportion of the ability of
the one to scrutinize with accuracy, and
the other to applaud with taste—then to
throw round the secret silent glance, that
searches for that eye whose light alone, to
her intoxicated gaze, contains all judgment,
all taste, all feeling—for that lip
whose very censure would be dearer than
the applause of a world!—To hear, with
soft and submissive tranquillity, censure
and remark, praise and comment, but to
turn for ever the appealing look to one
who alone can understand, and whose
swiftly-answering glance can alone reward
it!—This—this had been Isidora’s hope.
Even in the isle where he first saw her in
the infancy of her intellect, she had felt
the consciousness of superior powers, which
were then her solace, not her pride. Her
value for herself rose with her devotion to
him. Her passion became her pride; and
the enlarged resources of her mind, (for
Christianity under its most corrupt form
enlarges every mind), made her at first believe,
that to behold her admired as she
was for her loveliness, her talents, and her
wealth, would compel this proudest and
most eccentric of beings to prostrate himself
before her, or at least to acknowledge
the power of those acquirements which
she had so painfully been arrived at the
knowledge of, since her involuntary introduction
into European society.
“This had been her hope during the
earlier period of his visits; but innocent
and flattering to its object as it was, she
was disappointed. To Melmoth “nothing
was new under the sun.” Talent
was to him a burden. He knew more
than man could tell him, or woman either.
Accomplishments were a bauble—the rattle
teazed his ear, and he flung it away.
Beauty was a flower he looked on only
to scorn, and touched only to wither.
Wealth and distinction he appreciated
as they deserved, but not with the placid
disdain of the philosopher, or the holy
abstraction of the saint, but with that
“fearful looking for of judgment and
fiery indignation,” to which he believed
their possessors irreversibly devoted, and
to the infliction of which he looked forward
with perhaps a feeling like that of
those executioners who, at the command
of Mithridates, poured the melted ore of
his golden chains down the throat of the
Roman ambassador.
“With such feelings, and others that
cannot be told, Melmoth experienced
an indescribable relief from the eternal fire
that was already kindled within him, in
the perfect and unsullied freshness of
what may be called the untrodden verdure
of Immalee’s heart,—for she was Immalee
still to him. She was the Oasis of
his desert—the fountain at which he drank,
and forgot his passage over the burning
sands—and the burning sands to which
his passage must conduct him. He sat
under the shade of the gourd, and forgot
the worm was working at its root;—perhaps
the undying worm that gnawed, and
coiled, and festered in his own heart, might
have made him forget the corrosions of
that he himself had sown in hers.
“Isidora, before the second week of
their interview, had lowered her pretensions.
She had given up the hope to interest
or to dazzle—that hope which is
twin-born with love in the purest female
heart. She now had concentrated all her
hopes, and all her heart, no longer in the
ambition to be beloved, but in the sole
wish to love. She no longer alluded to
the enlargement of her faculties, the acquisition
of new powers, and the expansion
and cultivation of her taste. She ceased
to speak—she sought only to listen—then
her wish subsided into that quiet listening
for his form alone, which seemed to transfer
the office of hearing into the eyes, or
rather, to identify both. She saw him
long before he appeared,—and heard him
though he did not speak. They have
been in each other’s presence for the short
hours of a Spanish summer’s night,—Isidora’s
eyes alternately fixed on the sun-like
moon, and on her mysterious lover,—while
he, without uttering a word, leaned
against the pillars of her balcony, or the
trunk of the giant myrtle-tree, which cast
the shade he loved, even by night, over
his portentous expression,—and they never
uttered a word to each other, till the waving
of Isidora’s hand, as the dawn appeared,
was the tacit signal for their parting.
“This is the marked graduation of
profound feeling. Language is no longer
necessary to those whose beating hearts
converse audibly—whose eyes, even by
moonlight, are more intelligible to each
other’s stolen and shadowed glances, than
the broad converse of face to face in the
brightest sunshine—to whom, in the exquisite
inversion of earthly feeling and
habit, darkness is light, and silence eloquence.
“At their last interviews, Isidora sometimes
spoke,—but it was only to remind
her lover, in a soft and chastened tone, of
a promise which it seems he had at one
time made of disclosing himself to her parents,
and demanding her at their hands.
Something she murmured also of her declining
health—her exhausted spirits—her
breaking heart—the long delay—the hope
deferred—the mysterious meeting; and
while she spoke she wept, but hid her
tears from him.
“It is thus, Oh God! we are doomed
(and justly doomed when we fix our hearts
on any thing below thee) to feel those
hearts repelled like the dove who hovered
over the shoreless ocean, and found not a
spot where her foot might rest,—not a green
leaf to bring back in her beak. Oh that the
ark of mercy may open to such souls, and
receive them from that stormy world of
deluge and of wrath, with which they are
unable to contend, and where they can
find no resting-place!
“Isidora now had arrived at the last
stage of that painful pilgrimage through
which she had been led by a stern and reluctant
guide.
“In its first, with the innocent and venial
art of woman, she had tried to interest
him by the display of her new acquirements,
without the consciousness that
they were not new to him. The harmony
of civilized society, of which she
was at once weary and proud, was discord
to his ear. He had examined all the
strings that formed this curious but ill-constructed
instrument, and found them
all false.
“In the second, she was satisfied with
merely beholding him. His presence
formed the atmosphere of her existence—in
it alone she breathed. She said to herself,
as evening approached, “I shall see
him!”—and the burden of life rolled from
her heart as she internally uttered the
words. The constraint, the gloom, the
monotony of her existence, vanished like
clouds at the sun, or rather like those
clouds assuming such gorgeous and resplendent
colours, that they seemed to
have been painted by the finger of happiness
itself. The brilliant hue diffused itself
over every object of her eye and heart.
Her mother appeared no longer a cold and
gloomy bigot, and even her brother seemed
kind. There was not a tree in the garden
whose foliage was not illumined as by
the light of a setting sun; and the breeze
spoke to her in a voice whose melody was
borrowed from her own heart.
“When at length she saw him,—when
she said to herself, He is there,—she felt as
if all the felicity of earth was comprised in
that single sensation,—at least she felt that
all her own was. She no longer indulged
the wish to attract or to subdue him—absorbed
in his existence, she forgot her own—immersed
in the consciousness of her
own felicity, she lost the wish, or rather
the pride, of BESTOWING it. In the impassioned
revelry of the heart, she flung the
pearl of existence into the draught in
which she pledged her lover, and saw it
melt away without a sigh. But now she
was beginning to feel, that for this intensity
of feeling, this profound devotedness,
she was entitled at least to an honourable
acknowledgement on the part of her lover;
and that the mysterious delay in which
her existence was wasted, might make that
acknowledgement come perhaps too late.
She expressed this to him; but to these
appeals, (not the least affecting of which had
no language but that of looks), he replied
only by a profound but uneasy silence, or
by a levity whose wild and frightful sallies
had something in them still more
alarming.
“At times he appeared even to insult
the heart over which he had triumphed,
and to affect to doubt his conquest with
the air of one who is revelling in its certainty,
and who mocks the captive by asking
“if it is really in chains?”
“You do not love?” he would say;—“you
cannot love me at least. Love, in
your happy Christian country, must be
the result of cultivated taste,—of harmonized
habits,—of a felicitous congeniality
of pursuits,—of thought, and hopes, and
feelings, that, in the sublime language of
the Jewish poet, (prophet I meant), ‘tell
and certify to each other; and though they
have neither speech or language, a voice is
heard among them.’ You cannot love a
being repulsive in his appearance,—eccentric
in his habits,—wild and unsearchable
in his feelings,—and inaccessible in the
settled purpose of his fearful and fearless
existence. No,” he added in a melancholy
and decided tone of voice, “you cannot
love me under the circumstances of your
new existence. Once——but that is past.—You
are now a baptized daughter of the
Catholic church,—the member of a civilized
community,—the child of a family
that knows not the stranger. What, then,
is there between me and thee, Isidora, or,
as your Fra Jose would phrase it, (if he
knows so much Greek), τι εμοι και σοι.”—“I
loved you,” answered the Spanish maiden,
speaking in the same pure, firm, and tender
voice in which she had spoken when
she first was the sole goddess of her fairy
and flowery isle; “I loved you before I
was a Christian. They have changed my
creed—but they never can change my
heart. I love you still—I will be yours
for ever! On the shore of the desolate
isle,—from the grated window of my
Christian prison,—I utter the same sounds.
What can woman, what can man, in all
the boasted superiority of his character and
feeling, (which I have learned only since I
became a Christian, or an European), do
more? You but insult me when you appear
to doubt that feeling, which you may
wish to have analysed, because you do
not experience or cannot comprehend it.
Tell me, then, what it is to love? I defy
all your eloquence, all your sophistry, to
answer the question as truly as I can. If
you would wish to know what is love, inquire
not at the tongue of man, but at the
heart of woman.”—“What is love?” said
Melmoth; “is that the question?”—“You
doubt that I love,” said Isidora—“tell me,
then, what is love?”—“You have imposed
on me a task,” said Melmoth smiling, but
not in mirth, “so congenial to my feelings
and habits of thought, that the execution
will doubtless be inimitable. To
love, beautiful Isidora, is to live in a world
of the heart’s own creation—all whose
forms and colours are as brilliant as they
are deceptive and unreal. To those who
love there is neither day or night, summer
or winter, society or solitude. They have
but two eras in their delicious but visionary
existence,—and those are thus marked
in the heart’s calendar—presence—absence.
These are the substitutes for all the distinctions
of nature and society. The
world to them contains but one individual,—and
that individual is to them the
world as well as its single inmate. The
atmosphere of his presence is the only air
they can breathe in,—and the light of his
eye the only sun of their creation, in whose
rays they bask and live.”—“Then I love,”
said Isidora internally. “To love,” pursued
Melmoth, “is to live in an existence
of perpetual contradictions—to feel that
absence is insupportable, and yet be doomed
to experience the presence of the object
as almost equally so—to be full of ten
thousand thoughts while he is absent, the
confession of which we dream will render
our next meeting delicious, yet when the
hour of meeting arrives, to feel ourselves,
by a timidity alike oppressive and unaccountable,
robbed of the power of expressing
one—to be eloquent in his absence,
and dumb in his presence—to watch for
the hour of his return as for the dawn of a
new existence, yet when it arrives, to feel
all those powers suspended which we imagined
it would restore to energy—to be
the statue that meets the sun, but without
the music his presence should draw from
it—to watch for the light of his looks,
as a traveller in the deserts looks for the
rising of the sun; and when it bursts on
our awakened world, to sink fainting under
its overwhelming and intolerable glory,
and almost wish it were night again—this
is love!”—“Then I believe I love,” said
Isidora half audibly. “To feel,” added Melmoth
with increasing energy, “that our
existence is so absorbed in his, that we have
lost all consciousness but of his presence—all
sympathy but of his enjoyments—all
sense of suffering but when he suffers—to
be only because he is—and to have no
other use of being but to devote it to him,
while our humiliation increases in proportion
to our devotedness; and the lower
you bow before your idol, the prostrations
seem less and less worthy of being the
expression of your devotion,—till you are
only his, when you are not yourself—To
feel that to the sacrifice of yourself, all
other sacrifices are inferior; and in it,
therefore, all other sacrifices must be included.
That she who loves, must remember
no longer her individual existence,
her natural existence—that she
must consider parents, country, nature,
society, religion itself—(you tremble, Immalee—Isidora
I would say)—only as
grains of incense flung on the altar of the
heart, to burn and exhale their sacrificed
odours there.”—“Then I do love,” said
Isidora; and she wept and trembled indeed
at this terrible confession—“for I
have forgot the ties they told me were
natural,—the country of which they said
I was a native. I will renounce, if it
must be so, parents,—country,—the habits
which I have acquired,—the thoughts
which I have learnt,—the religion which
I——Oh no! my God! my Saviour!” she
exclaimed, darting from the casement, and
clinging to the crucifix—“No! I will
never renounce you!—I will never renounce
you!—you will not forsake me in
the hour of death!—you will not desert
me in the moment of trial!—you will not
forsake me at this moment!”
“By the wax-lights that burned in her
apartment, Melmoth could see her prostrate
before the sacred image. He could
see that devotion of the heart which made
it throb almost visibly in the white and
palpitating bosom—the clasped hands that
seemed imploring aid against that rebellious
heart, whose beatings they vainly
struggled to repress; and then, locked and
upraised, asked forgiveness from heaven
for their fruitless opposition. He could
see the wild but profound devotion with
which she clung to the crucifix,—and he
shuddered to behold it. He never gazed
on that symbol,—his eyes were immediately
averted;—yet now he looked long
and intently at her as she knelt before it.
He seemed to suspend the diabolical instinct
that governed his existence, and to
view her for the pure pleasure of sight. Her
prostrate figure,—her rich robes that floated
round her like drapery round an inviolate
shrine,—her locks of light streaming
over her naked shoulders,—her small white
hands locked in agony of prayer,—the purity
of expression that seemed to identify
the agent with the employment, and made
one believe they saw not a suppliant, but
the embodied spirit of supplication, and
feel, that lips like those had never held
communion with aught below heaven.—All
this Melmoth beheld; and feeling that
in this he could never participate, he turned
away his head in stern and bitter agony,—and
the moon-beam that met his burning
eye saw no tear there.
“Had he looked a moment longer, he
might have beheld a change in the expression
of Isidora too flattering to his pride,
if not to his heart. He might have marked
all that profound and perilous absorption
of the soul, when it is determined to
penetrate the mysteries of love or of religion,
and chuse “whom it will serve”—that
pause on the brink of an abyss, in
which all its energies, its passions, and its
powers, are to be immersed—that pause,
while the balance is trembling (and we
tremble with it) between God and man.
“In a few moments, Isidora arose from
before the cross. There was more composure,
more elevation in her air. There
was also that air of decision which an unreserved
appeal to the Searcher of hearts
never fails to communicate even to the
weakest of those he has made.
“Melmoth, returning to his station beneath
the casement, looked on her for some
time with a mixture of compassion and
wonder—feelings that he hasted to repel,
as he eagerly demanded, “What proof
are you ready to give of that love I have
described—of that which alone deserves
the name?”—“Every proof,” answered
Isidora firmly, “that the most devoted of
the daughters of man can give—my heart
and hand,—my resolution to be yours amid
mystery and grief,—to follow you in
exile and loneliness (if it must be) through
the world!”
“As she spoke, there was a light in her
eye,—a glow on her brow,—an expansive
and irradiated sublimity around her figure,—that
made it appear like the rare and
glorious vision of the personified union of
passion and purity,—as if those eternal rivals
had agreed to reconcile their claims,
to meet on the confines of their respective
dominions, and had selected the form of
Isidora as the temple in which their league
might be hallowed, and their union consummated—and
never were the opposite
divinities so deliciously lodged. They
forgot their ancient feuds, and agreed to
dwell there for ever.
“There was a grandeur, too, about her
slender form, that seemed to announce that
pride of purity,—that confidence in external
weakness, and internal energy,—that
conquest without armour,—that victory
over the victor, which makes the latter blush
at his triumph, and compels him to bow
to the standard of the besieged fortress at
the moment of its surrender. She stood
like a woman devoted, but not humiliated
by her devotion—uniting tenderness with
magnanimity—willing to sacrifice every
thing to her lover, but that which must
lessen the value of the sacrifice in his eyes—willing
to be the victim, but feeling
worthy to be the priestess.
“Melmoth gazed on her as she stood.
One generous, one human feeling, throbbed
in his veins, and thrilled in his heart.
He saw her in her beauty,—her devotedness,—her
pure and perfect innocence,—her
sole feeling for one who could not, by
the fearful power of his unnatural existence,
feel for mortal being. He turned
aside, and did not weep; or if he did,
wiped away his tears, as a fiend might do,
with his burning talons, when he sees a
new victim arrive for torture; and, repenting
of his repentance, rends away the
blot of compunction, and arms himself for
his task of renewed infliction.
“Well, then, Isidora, you will give me
no proof of your love? Is that what I
must understand?”—“Demand,” answered
the innocent and high-souled Isidora,
“any proof that woman ought to give—more
is not in human power—less would
render the proof of no value!”
“Such was the impression that these
words made on Melmoth, whose heart,
however, plunged in unutterable crimes,
had never been polluted by sensuality,
that he started from the spot where he
stood,—gazed on her for a moment,—and
then exclaimed, “Well! you have given
me proofs of love unquestionable! It
remains for me to give you a proof of
that love which I have described—of
that love which only you could inspire—of
that love which, under happier
circumstances, I might—— But no matter—it
is not my business to analyse the
feeling, but to give the proof.” He extended
his arm toward the casement at
which she stood.—“Would you then consent
to unite your destiny with mine?
Would you indeed be mine amid mystery
and sorrow? Would you follow me
from land to sea, and from sea to land,—a
restless, homeless, devoted being,—with
the brand on your brow, and the curse on
your name? Would you indeed be mine?—my
own—my only Immalee?”—“I
would—I will!”—“Then,” answered Melmoth,
“on this spot receive the proof of
my eternal gratitude. On this spot I renounce
your sight!—I disannul your engagement!—I
fly from you for ever!”
And as he spoke, he disappeared.
CHAPTER XXII .
I’ll not wed Paris,—Romeo is my husband.
Shakespeare.
“Isidora was so accustomed to the wild
exclamations and (to her) unintelligible allusions
of her mysterious lover, that she
felt no unwonted alarm at his singular
language, and abrupt departure. There
was nothing in either more menacing or
formidable than she had often witnessed;
and she recollected, that after these paroxysms,
he often re-appeared in a mood
comparatively tranquil. She felt sustained,
therefore, by this reflection,—and perhaps
by that mysterious conviction impressed
on the hearts of those who love profoundly—that
passion must always be united
with suffering; and she seemed to hear,
with a kind of melancholy submission to
the fatality of love, that her lot was to
suffer from lips that were sure to verify the
oracle. The disappearance, therefore, of
Melmoth, gave her less surprise than a summons
from her mother a few hours after,
which was delivered in these words:
“Madonna Isidora, your lady-mother desires
your presence in the tapestried chamber—having
received intelligence by a certain
express, which she deems fitting you
should be acquainted withal.”
“Isidora had been in some degree prepared
for extraordinary intelligence by an
extraordinary bustle in this grave and
quiet household. She had heard steps
passing, and voices resounding, but
“She wist not what they were,”
and thought not of what they meant. She
imagined that her mother might have
some communication to make about some
intricate point of conscience which Fra Jose
had not discussed to her satisfaction, from
which she would make an instant transition
to the levity visible in the mode in
which one attendant damsel arranged her
hair, and the suspected sound of a ghitarra
under the window of another, and then
fly off at a tangent to inquire how the capons
were fed, and why the eggs and Muscadine
had not been duly prepared for Fra
Jose’s supper. Then would she fret about
the family clock not chiming synchronically
with the bells of the neighbouring
church where she performed her devotions.
And finally, she fretted about every thing,
from the fattening of the “pullen,” and
the preparation for the olio, up to the increasing
feuds between the Molinists and
Jansenists, which had already visited Spain,
and the deadly dispute between the Dominican
and Franciscan orders, relative to
the habit in which it was most effective to
salvation for the dying body of the sinner
to be wrapped. So between her kitchen
and her oratory,—her prayers to the saints,
and her scoldings to her servants,—her devotion
and her anger,—Donna Clara continued
to keep herself and domestics in a
perpetual state of interesting occupation
and gentle excitement.
“Something of this Isidora expected
on the summons, and she was, therefore,
surprised to see Donna Clara seated at
her writing desk,—a large and fairly written
manuscript of a letter extended before
her,—and to hear words thereafter uttered
thus: “Daughter, I have sent for you,
that you might with me partake of the
pleasure these lines should afford both;
and that you may do so, I desire you to
sit and hear while they are read to you.”
“Donna Clara, as she uttered these
words, was seated in a monstrous high-backed
chair, of which she actually seemed
a part, so wooden was her figure, so
moveless her features, so lack-lustre her
eyes.
“Isidora curtsied low, and sat on one
of the cushions with which the room was
heaped,—while a spectacled duenna, enthroned
on another cushion at the right
hand of Donna Clara, read, with sundry
pauses and some difficulty, the following
letter, which Donna Clara had just received
from her husband, who had landed, not
at Ossuna(23), but at a real sea-port town
in Spain, and was now on his way to join
his family.
“Donna Clara,
“It is about a year since I received
your letter advising me of the recovery of
our daughter, whom we believed lost with
her nurse on her voyage to India when an
infant, to which I would sooner have replied,
were I not otherwise hindered by
concerns of business.
“I would have you understand, that
I rejoice not so much that I have recovered
a daughter, as that heaven hath
regained a soul and a subject, as it were,
e faucibus Draconis—e profundis Barathri—the
which terms Fra Jose will
make plain to your weaker comprehension.
“I trust that, through the ministry of
that devout servant of God and the church,
she is now become as complete a Catholic
in all points necessary, absolute, doubtful,
or incomprehensible,—formal, essential,
venial, and indispensible, as becomes the
daughter of an old Christian such as I
(though unworthy of that honour) boast
myself to be. Moreover, I expect to find
her, as a Spanish maiden should be, equipped
and accomplished with all the virtues
pertaining to that character, especially
those of discretion and reserve. The
which qualities, as I have always perceived
to reside in you, so I hope you have laboured
to transfer to her,—a transfer by
which the receiver is enriched, and the
giver not impoverished.
“Finally, as maidens should be rewarded
for their chastity and reserve by being
joined in wedlock with a worthy husband,
so it is the duty of a careful father to provide
such a one for his daughter, that she
do not pass her marriageable age, and sit in
discontent and squalidness at home, as one
overlooked of the other sex. My fatherly
care, therefore, moving me, I shall bring
with me one who is to be her husband,
Don Gregorio Montilla, of whose qualifications
I have not now leisure to speak,
but whom I expect she will receive as becomes
the dutiful daughter, and you as the
obedient wife, of
Francisco di Aliaga.”
“You have heard your father’s letter,
daughter,” said Donna Clara, placing herself
as in act to speak, “and doubtless sit
silent in expectation of hearing from me a
rehearsal of the duties pertaining to the
state on which you are so soon to enter,
and which, I take it, are three; that is to
say, obedience, silence, and thriftiness.
And first of the first, which, as I conceive,
divides itself into thirteen heads,”——
“Holy saints!” said the duenna under her
breath, “how pale Madonna Isidora grows!”—“First
of the first,” continued Donna
Clara, clearing her throat, elevating her
spectacles with one hand, and fixing three
demonstrative fingers of the other on a
huge clasped volume, containing the life
of St Francis Xavier, that lay on the desk
before her,—“as touching the thirteen
heads into which the first divides itself,
the eleven first, I take it, are the most
profitable—the two last I shall leave you
to be instructed in by your husband.
First, then,”—— Here she was interrupted
by a slight noise, which did not,
however, draw her attention, till she was
startled by a scream from the duenna,
who exclaimed, “The Virgin be my protection!
Madonna Isidora has fainted!”
“Donna Clara lowered her spectacles,
glanced at the figure of her daughter, who
had fallen from her cushion, and lay breathless
on the floor, and, after a short pause,
replied, “She has fainted. Raise her.—Call
for assistance, and apply some cold
water, or bear her into the open air. I
fear I have lost the mark in the life of this
holy saint,” muttered Donna Clara when
alone; “this comes of this foolish business
of love and marriage. I never loved in
my life, thank the saints!—and as to marriage,
that is according to the will of God
and of our parents.”
“The unfortunate Isidora was lifted
from the floor, conveyed into the open air,
whose breath had the same effect on her
still elementary existence, that water was
said to have on that of the ombre pez,
(man-fish), of whom the popular traditions
of Barcelona were at that time, and still
have been, rife.
“She recovered; and sending an apology
to Donna Clara for her sudden indisposition,
intreated her attendants to leave
her, as she wished to be alone. Alone!—that
is a word to which those who love
annex but one idea,—that of being in society
with one who is their all. She wished
in this (to her) terrible emergency, to
ask counsel of him whose image was ever
present to her, and whose voice she heard
with the mind’s ear distinctly even in absence.
“The crisis was indeed one calculated
to try a female heart; and Isidora’s, with
its potency of feeling, opposed to utter
destitution of judgment and of experience,—its
native habits of resolution and self-direction,
and its acquired ones of timidity
and diffidence almost to despondency,—became
the victim of emotions,
whose struggle seemed at first to threaten
her reason.
“Her former independent and instinctive
existence revived in her heart at some
moments, and suggested to her resolutions
wild and desperate, but such as the most
timid females have been known, under the
pressure of a fearful exigency, to purpose,
and even to execute. Then the constraint
of her new habits,—the severity of her factitious
existence,—and the solemn power
of her newly-learned but deeply-felt religion,—made
her renounce all thoughts of
resistance or opposition, as offences against
heaven.
“Her former feelings, her new duties,
beat in terrible conflict against her heart;
and, trembling at the isthmus on which
she stood, she felt it, under the influence
of opposing tides, narrowing every moment
under her feet.
“This was a dreadful day to her. She
had sufficient time for reflection, but she
had within her the conviction that reflection
could be of no use,—that the circumstances
in which she was placed, not her
own thoughts, must decide for her,—and
that, situated as she was, mental power was
no match for physical.
“There is not, perhaps, a more painful
exercise of the mind than that of treading,
with weary and impatient pace, the entire
round of thought, and arriving at the same
conclusion for ever; then setting out again
with increased speed and diminished
strength, and again returning to the very
same spot—of sending out all our faculties
on a voyage of discovery, and seeing them
all return empty, and watch the wrecks as
they drift helplessly along, and sink before
the eye that hailed their outward expedition
with joy and confidence.
“All that day she thought how it was
possible to liberate herself from her situation,
while the feeling that liberation was
impossible clung to the bottom of her
heart; and this sensation of the energies
of the soul in all their strength, being in
vain opposed to imbecillity and mediocrity,
when aided by circumstances, is one
productive alike of melancholy and of irritation.
We feel, like prisoners in romance,
bound by threads to which the power of
magic has given the force of adamant.
“To those whose minds incline them rather
to observe, than to sympathize with the
varieties of human feeling, it would have
been interesting to watch the restless agony
of Isidora, contrasted with the cold and
serene satisfaction of her mother, who employed
the whole of the day in composing,
with the assistance of Fra Jose, what Juvenal
calls “verbosa et grandis epistola,”
in answer to that of her husband; and to
conceive how two human beings, apparently
of similarly-constructed organs, and
destined apparently to sympathize with
each other, could draw from the same
fountain waters sweet and bitter.
“On her plea of continued indisposition,
Isidora was excused from appearing
before her mother during the remainder
of the day. The night came on,—the
night, which, by concealing the artificial
objects and manners which surrounded
her, restored to her, in some degree, the
consciousness of her former existence, and
gave her a sense of independence she
never felt by day. The absence of Melmoth
increased her anxiety. She began
to apprehend that his departure was intended
to be final, and her heart sunk at
the thought.
“To the mere reader of romance, it
may seem incredible that a female of Isidora’s
energy and devotedness should feel
anxiety or terror in a situation so common
to a heroine. She has only to stand proof
against all the importunities and authority
of her family, and announce her desperate
resolution to share the destiny of a mysterious
and unacknowledged lover. All
this sounds very plausible and interesting.
Romances have been written and read,
whose interest arose from the noble and
impossible defiance of the heroine to all
powers human and superhuman alike.
But neither the writers or readers seem
ever to have taken into account the thousand
petty external causes that operate on
human agency with a force, if not more
powerful, far more effective than the grand
internal motive which makes so grand a
figure in romance, and so rare and trivial
a one in common life.
“Isidora would have died for him she
loved. At the stake or the scaffold she
would have avowed her passion, and triumphed
in perishing as its victim. The
mind can collect itself for one great effort,
but it is exhausted by the eternally-recurring
necessity of domestic conflicts,—victories
by which she must lose, and defeats
by which she might gain the praise
of perseverance, and feel such gain was
loss. The last single and terrible effort of
the Jewish champion, in which he and his
enemies perished together, must have been
a luxury compared to his blind drudgery
in his mill.
“Before Isidora lay that painful and
perpetual struggle of fettered strength
with persecuting weakness, which, if the
truth were told, would divest half the heroines
of romance of the power or wish to
contend against the difficulties that beset
them. Her mansion was a prison—she had
no power (and if she possessed the power,
would never have exercised it) of obtaining
an unpermitted or unobserved egress
from the doors of the house for one moment.
Thus her escape was completely
barred; and had every door in the house
been thrown open, she would have felt
like a bird on its first flight from the cage,
without a spray that she dared to rest on.
Such was her prospect, even if she could
effect her escape—at home it was worse.
“The stern and cold tone of authority
in which her father’s letter was written,
gave her but little hope that in her father
she would find a friend. Then the feeble
and yet imperious mediocrity of her
mother—the selfish and arrogant temper
of Fernan—the powerful influence and incessant
documentising of Fra Jose, whose
good-nature was no match for his love of
authority—the daily domestic persecution—that
vinegar that would wear out any
rock—the being compelled to listen day
after day to the same exhausting repetition
of exhortation, chiding, reproach, and
menace, or seek refuge in her chamber, to
waste the weary hours in loneliness and
tears—this strife maintained by one strong
indeed in purpose, but feeble in power, against
so many all sworn to work their
will, and have their way—this perpetual
conflict with evils so trivial in the items,
but so heavy in the amount, to those who
have the debt to pay daily and hourly,—was
too much for the resolution of Isidora,
and she wept in hopeless despondency, as
she felt that already her courage shrunk
from the encounter, and knew not what
concessions might be extorted from her
increasing inability of resistance.
“Oh!” she cried, clasping her hands in
the extremity of her distress, “Oh that
he were but here to direct, to counsel me!—that
he were here even no longer as my
lover, but only as my adviser!”
“It is said that a certain power is always
at hand to facilitate the wishes that
the individual forms for his own injury;
and so it should seem in the present instance,—for
she had scarce uttered these
words, when the shadow of Melmoth was
seen darkening the garden walk,—and the
next moment he was beneath the casement.
As she saw him approach, she uttered
a cry of mingled joy and fear, which
he hushed by making a signal of silence
with his hand, and then whispered, “I
know it all!”
“Isidora was silent. She had nothing
but her recent distress to communicate,—and
of that, it appeared, he was already
apprized. She waited, therefore, in mute
anxiety for some words of counsel or
of comfort. “I know all!” continued
Melmoth; “your father has landed in
Spain—he brings with him your destined
husband. The fixed purpose of your
whole family, as obstinate as they are
weak, it will be bootless in you to resist;
and this day fortnight will see you the
bride of Montilla.”—“I will first be the
bride of the grave,” said Isidora, with perfect
and fearful calmness.
“At these words, Melmoth advanced
and gazed on her more closely. Any
thing of intense and terrible resolution,—of
feeling or action in extremity,—made
harmony with the powerful but disordered
chords of his soul. He required her to
repeat the words—she did so, with quivering
lip, but unfaultering voice. He advanced
still nearer to gaze on her as she
spoke. It was a beautiful and fearful sight
to see her as she stood;—her marble face—her
moveless features—her eyes in which
burned the fixed and livid light of despair,
like a lamp in a sepulchral vault—the
lips that half opened, and remaining unclosed,
appeared as if the speaker was unconscious
of the words that had escaped
them, or rather, as if they had burst
forth by involuntary and incontroulable
impulse;—so she stood, like a statue, at
her casement, the moonlight giving her
white drapery the appearance of stone,
and her wrought-up and determined
mind lending the same rigidity to her
expression. Melmoth himself felt confounded—appalled
he could not feel. He
retreated, and then returning, demanded,
“Is this your resolution, Isidora?—and
have you indeed resolution to”——
“To die!” answered Isidora, with the
same unaltered accent,—the same calm
expression,—and seeming, as she spake,
capable of all she expressed; and this union,
in the same slight and tender form, of those
eternal competitors, energy and fragility,
beauty and death, made every human pulse
in Melmoth’s frame beat with a throbbing
unknown before. “Can you, then,”
he said, with averted head, and in a tone
that seemed ashamed of its own softness—“Can
you, then, die for him you will not
live for?”—“I have said I will die sooner
than be the bride of Montilla,” answered
Isidora. “Of death I know nothing, nor
do I know much of life—but I would rather
perish, than be the perjured wife of
the man I cannot love.”—“And why can
you not love him?” said Melmoth, toying
with the heart he held in his hand, like a
mischievous boy with a bird, around whose
leg he has fastened a string.—“Because I
can love but one. You were the first human
being I ever saw who could teach
me language, and who taught me feeling.
Your image is for ever before me, present
or absent, sleeping or waking. I have
seen fairer forms,—I have listened to softer
voices,—I might have met gentler
hearts,—but the first, the indelible image,
is written on mine, and its characters will
never be effaced till that heart is a clod of
the valley. I loved you not for comeliness,—I
loved you not for gay deportment, or
fond language, or all that is said to be
lovely in the eye of woman,—I loved you
because you were my first,—the sole connecting
link between the human world and
my heart,—the being who brought me acquainted
with that wondrous instrument
that lay unknown and untouched within
and me, whose chords, as long as they vibrate,
will disdain to obey any touch but that
of their first mover—because your image is
mixed in my imagination with all the glories
of nature—because your voice, when
I heard it first, was something in accordance
with the murmur of the ocean, and
the music of the stars. And still its tones
recal the unimaginable blessedness of those
scenes where first I heard it,—and still I
listen to it like an exile who hears the
music of his native country in a land that
is very far off,—because nature and passion,
memory and hope, alike cling round your
image; and amid the light of my former
existence, and the gloom of my present,
there is but one form that retains its reality
and its power through light and shade.
I am like one who has traversed many
climates, and looks but to one sun as the
light of all, whether bright or obscure. I
have loved once—and for ever!” Then,
trembling at the words she uttered, she
added, with that sweet mixture of maiden
pride and purity that redeems while it
pledges the hostage of the heart, “The
feelings I have entrusted you with may
be abused, but never alienated.”—“And
these are your real feelings?” said Melmoth,
pausing long, and moving his frame
like one agitated by deep and uneasy
thoughts. “Real!” repeated Isidora, with
some transient glow on her cheek—“real!
Can I utter any thing but what is real?
Can I so soon forget my existence?” Melmoth
looked up once more as she spoke—“If
such is your resolution,—if such be
your feelings indeed,”—— “And they
are!—they are!” exclaimed Isidora, her
tears bursting through the slender fingers,
which, after extending towards him, she
clasped over her burning eyes. “Then
look to the alternative that awaits you!”
said Melmoth slowly, bringing out the
words with difficulty, and, as it appeared,
with some feeling for his victim; “a
union with the man you cannot love,—or
the perpetual hostility, the wearying, wasting,
almost annihilating persecution of your
family! Think of days that”—— “Oh
let me not think!” cried Isidora, wringing
her white and slender hands; “tell me—tell
me what may be done to escape them!”—“Now,
in good troth,” answered Melmoth,
knitting his brows with a most cogitative
wrinkle, while it was impossible
to discover whether his predominant expression
was that of irony or profound and
sincere feeling—“I know not what resource
you have unless you wed me.”—“Wed
you!” cried Isidora, retreating
from the window—“Wed you!” and she
clasped her hands over her pale forehead;—and
at this moment, when the hope
of her heart, the thread on which her existence
was suspended, was within her
reach, she trembled to touch it. “Wed
you!—but how is that possible?”—“All
things are possible to those who love,”
said Melmoth, with his sardonic smile,
which was hid by the shades of the night.
“And you will wed me, then, by the
rites of the church of which I am a member?”—“Aye!
or of any other!”—“Oh
speak not so wildly!—say not aye in that
horrible voice! Will you wed me as a
Christian maiden should be wed?—Will
you love me as a Christian wife should be
loved? My former existence was like a
dream,—but now I am awake. If I unite
my destiny to yours,—if I abandon my
family, my country, my”—— “If you
do, how will you be the loser?—your family
harasses and confines you—your
country would shout to see you at the
stake, for you have some heretical feelings
about you, Isidora. And for the rest”——
“God!” said the poor victim, clasping her
hands, and looking upwards, “God, aid
me in this extremity!”—“If I am to wait
here only as a witness to your devotions,”
said Melmoth with sullen asperity, “my
stay will not be long.”—“You cannot
leave me, then, to struggle with fear and
perplexity alone! How is it possible for
me to escape, even if”—— “By whatever
means I possess of entering this place
and retiring unobserved,—by the same
you may effect your escape. If you have
resolution, the effort will cost you little,—if
love,—nothing. Speak, shall I be here
at this hour to-morrow night, to conduct
you to liberty and”—— Safety he would
have added, but his voice faultered. “To-morrow
night,” said Isidora, after a long
pause, and in accents almost inarticulate.
She closed the casement as she spoke, and
Melmoth slowly departed.
END OF THIRD VOLUME.
(1)
Quilibet postea paterfamilias, cum gallo præ manibus,
in medium primus prodit. * *
* * * * * *
Deinde expiationem aggreditur et capiti suo ter
gallum allidit, singulosque ictus his vocibus prosequitur.
Hic Gallus sit permutio pro me, &c. *
* * * * * *
Gallo deinde imponens manus, eum statim mactat, &c.
Vide Buxtorf, as quoted in Dr Magee (Bishop of
Raphoe’s) work on the atonement. Cumberland in
his Observer, I think, mentions the discovery to have
been reserved for the feast of the Passover. It is just
as probable it was made on the day of expiation.
(2)
The Jews believe in two Messias, a suffering
and a triumphant one, to reconcile the prophecies
with their own expectations.
(3)
This extraordinary fact occurred after the dreadful
fire which consumed sixteen persons in one house,
in Stephen’s Green, Dublin, 1816. The writer of
this heard the screams of sufferers whom it was impossible
to save, for an hour and a half.
(4)
This circumstance occurred in Ireland 1797,
after the murder of the unfortunate Dr Hamilton.
The officer was answered, on inquiring what was that
heap of mud at his horse’s feet,—“The man you
came for.”
(5)
In the year 1803, when Emmett’s insurrection
broke out in Dublin—(the fact from which this account
is drawn was related to me by an eye-witness)—Lord
Kilwarden, in passing through Thomas Street,
was dragged from his carriage, and murdered in the
most horrid manner. Pike after pike was thrust
through his body, till at last he was nailed to a door,
and called out to his murderers to “put him out of
his pain.” At this moment, a shoemaker, who lodged
in the garret of an opposite house, was drawn to the
window by the horrible cries he heard. He stood at
the window, gasping with horror, his wife attempting
vainly to drag him away. He saw the last blow
struck—he heard the last groan uttered, as the sufferer
cried, “put me out of pain,” while sixty pikes
were thrusting at him. The man stood at his window
as if nailed to it; and when dragged from it,
became—an idiot for life.
(6)
Written mountains, i. e. rocks inscribed with
characters recordative of some remarkable event, are
well known to every oriental traveller. I think it is
in the notes of Dr Coke, on the book of Exodus,
that I have met with the circumstance alluded to above.
A rock near the Red Sea is said once to have
borne the inscription, “Israel hath passed the flood.”
(10)
The curtain behind which women are concealed.
(11)
From the fire-flies being so often found in the
nest of the loxia, the Indians imagine he illuminates
his nest with them. It is more likely they are the
food of his young.
(13)
Tippoo Saib wished to substitute the Mohamedan
for the Indian mythology throughout his dominions.
This circumstance, though long antedated,
is therefore imaginable.
(14)
I trust the absurdity of this quotation here will
be forgiven for its beauty. It is borrowed from Miss
Baillie, the first dramatic poet of the age.
(15)
As, by a mode of criticism equally false and
unjust, the worst sentiments of my worst characters,
(from the ravings of Bertram to the blasphemies of
Cardonneau), have been represented as my own, I
must here trespass so far on the patience of the reader
as to assure him, that the sentiments ascribed to
the stranger are diametrically opposite to mine, and
that I have purposely put them into the mouth of an
agent of the enemy of mankind.
(16)
The Catholics and Protestants were thus distinguished
in the wars of the League.
(21)
I have read the legend of this Polish saint, which
is circulated in Dublin, and find recorded among the
indisputable proofs of his vocation, that he infallibly
swooned if an indecent expression was uttered in his
presence—when in his nurse’s arms!