CHAPTER XIX.

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.
XN this part of the manuscript, which I read in the vault of Adonijah the Jew," said ]Mon9ada, continuing his narrative, " there were several pages destroyed, and the contents of many following wholly obliterated — nor could Adonijah supply
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the deficiency. From the next pages that were legible, it appeared that Isidora im- prudently continued to permit her myste- rious visitor to frequent the garden at night, and to converse with him from the casement, though unable to prevail on liim to declare himself to her family, and per- haps 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 con- ferences, 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 se- cret 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 delu-
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sion. 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 lan- guid 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 seem- ed 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 tliat 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
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314 ^ >!ELMOTH :
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 ac- ceptable 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 unnatu- ral regularity on her eye and soul, and she turned to heaven for relief Who does^ not, even in the first sweet agony of pas- sion ? 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 ou those thousand rays that its bright, and eold, and passionless orbs, are for ever
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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, Xo matter. Reve- lation 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, w^hose 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 bright- ness." When she beheld it, the recollec- tions 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
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witli which Mel moth apparently defied both, and visited the garden every night, vet such was the influence of her former dream-like and romantic existence, that his continued presence, under circumstan- ces so extraordinary, never drev/ from her a question with regard to the means by which he was enabled to surmount diffi- culties insurmountable to all others.
" There were, indeed, tw^o 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 in- quired what circumstances could have led to a meeting so unexpected and extraor- dinary. On Isidora's part this incurious feeling -was easily accounted for. Her for- mer existence had been one of such a fa- bulous and fantastic character, that the im- probable had become familiar to her, — and the familiar only, improbable. Wonders were her natural element; and she felt^
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perhaps, less surprised at seeing Melmoth in Spain, than when she first beheld bini treading the sands of her lonely island. With ^lelmoth the cause was different, though the effect was the same. His des- tiny 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 dis- tinct 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 astonish- ment, 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 win- dow being nearly fourteen feet above the
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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 attrac- tions 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 con- queror. It decorates him with all its spoils, and feels prouder to behold him arrayed in them, than when she wore them in tri- umph herself That is the first bright hour of excitement, of trembling, but hopeful and felicitous anxiety. Then we
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think we never can display enough of ta- lent, of imagination, of all that can inter- est, of all that can dazzle. We pride our- selves in the homage we receive from so- ciety, from the hope of sacrificing that ho- mage to our beloved — we feel a pure and almost spiritualized delight in our own praises, from imagining they render us more worthy of meriting Im, from whom we have received the grace of love to de- serve 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 accumu- lated 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 abstrac- tion from seity, has perhaps felt a purer sentiment of perfect devotedness, than the female who, in her first hours of love,
r
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offers, at the feet of her worshipped one, the brilHant 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 be- ing (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 play- ed,— and whose single sigh is heard;, and heard alone, amid the plaudits of thou- sands [ Yet how delicious to her to whis- per 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 ac- customed 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 Jier into woman.
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»nd the marble melts into flesh under tiie 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 breath- ed into her frame. And when the splen- did portfolio is displayed, or the richly- wrought tapestry expanded by outstretch- ed arms, and cavaliers gaze, and ladies en- vy, and every eye is busy in examination, and every tongue loud in praise, just in the inverted proportion of the ability of ihe 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 judg- ment, 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
o 2
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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 ^vith 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 be- lieve, 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 him- self 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 intro- duction into European society.
" This had been her hope during the
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earlier period of his visits ; but innocent and flattering to its object as it was, she was disappointed. To Mel moth " no- thing 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 rat- tle 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 flery indignation," to which he believed their possessors irreversibly devoted, and to the infliction of which he looked for- ward 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
324 MELMOTH :
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 ver- dure of ImiToalee's heart, — for she was Im- malee 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 hunting 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 ; — per- haps 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 preten- sions. She had given up the hope to in- terest 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
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ambition to he beloved, but in the sole wish to love. She no longer alluded to the enlargement of her faculties, the ac- quisition 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 trans- fer the office of hearing into the eyes, or ratiier, 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, — Isi- dora'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 liis portentous expression, — and they never uttered a word to each otlier, till the wav- ing of Isidora's hand, as the dawn appear- ed, was the tacit signal for their parting.
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" 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 ex- quisite inversion of earthly feeling and habit, darkness is light, and silence elo- quence.
" At their last interviews, Isidora some- times 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 pa- rents, and demanding her at their hands. Something she murmured also of her de- clining 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
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(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 re- luctant guide.
" In its first, with the innocent and ve- nial art of woman, she had tried to inte- rest him by the display of her new ac- quirements, without the consciousness that they were not new to him. The har- mony of civilized society, of which she was at once weary and proud, was dis- cord to his ear. He had examined all the strings that formed this curious but ill-
35^8 MELMOTH :
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 her- self, 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 re- splendent colours, that they seemed to have been painted by the finger of happi- ness itself The brilliant hue diffused it- self over every object of her eye and heart. Her mother appeared no longer a cold and gloomy bigot, and eVei? her brother seem- ed kind. There was not a tree in the gar- den whose foliage was not illumined as by the light of a settincr sun ; and the breeze spoke to her in a voice whose melody was borrowed from her own heart.
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" 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 — ab- sorbed 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 impas- sioned 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 inten- sity 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
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only by a profound but uneasy silence, or by a levity whose wild and frightful sal- lies 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 cer- tainty, and w^ho mocks the captive by ask- ing " 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 harmo- nized habits, — of a felicitous congeniality of pursviits, — 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, — eccen- tric in his habits, — wild and unsearchable in his feelings, — and inaccessible in the settled purpose of his fearful and fearless
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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 civi- lized 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), 7/ if^oi kch ro*." — «« I loved you," answered the Spanish maiden, speaking in the same pure, firm, and ten- der 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, — 1 utter the same sounds. What can woman, what can man, in all the boasted superiority of his character and
333 MELMOTH :
feeling, (which I have learned only since 1 became a Christian, or an European), do more ? You but insult me when you ap- pear to doubt that feeling, ^vhich you may wish to have analysed, because you do not experience or cannot comprehend it. Tell me, then, what it is to love f 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, in- quire 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 smiHng, but not in mirth, " so congenial to my feel- ings and habits of thought, that the exe- cution 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 )ove there is neither day or night, summer
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or winter, society or solitude. They have but two eras in their delicious but vision- ary existence, — and those are thus marked in the heart's calendar — pixsencc — absence. These are the substitutes for all the dis- tinctions of nature and society. The world to them contains but one indivi- dual,— 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," pur- sued Melmoth, "is to live in an existence of perpetual contradictions — to feel that absence is insupportable, and yet be doom- ed to experience the presence of the ob- ject 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 unac-
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countable, robbed of the power of expres- sing 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 ima- gined it would restore to energy — to be the statue tliat meets the sun, hut without the music his presence s/wuld 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 un- der its overwhelming and intolerable glo- ry, and almost wish it were night again — this is love !" — " Then I believe I love," said Isidora half audibly. " To feel," added Mel- moth 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 he only because he is — and to have no other use of being but to devote it to hira.
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while our humiliation increases in pro- portion 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 in- cluded. That she who loves, must re- member no longer her individual exis- tence, her natural existence — that she must consider parents, country, nature, society, religion itself — (you tremble, Im- malee — 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 in- deed 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 njust be so, parents, — country, — the habits
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which I hav^e acquired, — the thoughts which I have learnt, — the rehgion 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 re- nounce 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 pros- trate 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 rebel- lious 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
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Oil that symbol, — his eyes were imme- diately averted ; — yet now he looked long and intently at her as she knelt before it. He seemed to suspend the diabolical in- stinct that governed his existence, and to view her for the pure pleasure of sight. Her prostrate figure, — her rich robes that float- ed round her like drapery round an invio- late shrine, — her locks of light streaming over her naked shoulders, — her small white hands locked in agony of prayer, — the pu- rity of expression that seemed to identify the agent w^ith the employment, and made one believe they saw not a suppliant, but the embodied spirit of supphcation, and feel, that lips like those had never held communion with aught below heaven. — All this Mel moth 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 burn- ing eye saw no tear there.
" Had he looked a moment longer, he might have beheld a change in the expres-
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338 MELMOTH :
sion of Isidora too flattering to his pride^ if not to his heart. He might have mark- ed all that profound and perilous absorp- tion of the soul, when it is determined to penetrate the mysteries of love or of reli- gion, 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, w^hile 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 com- posure, more elevation in her air. There was also that air of decision which an un- reserved appeal to the Searcher of hearts never fails to communicate even to the w^eakest of those he has made.
" Melmoth, returning to his station be- neath the casement, looked on her for some time with a mixture of compassion and w^onder — feelings that he hasted to repel, as he eagerly demanded, *•' What proof are you ready to give of that love I have
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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 a- mid mystery and grief, — to follow you in exile and lonehness (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 ri- vals 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 con- summated— 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
340 MELMOTH :
slender form, that seemed to announce that pride of purity, — that confidence in exter- nal 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 ever}' 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, throb- bed in his veins, and thrilled in his heart. He saw her in her beauty, — her devoted- iiess, — her pure and perfect innocence, — her sole feeling for one who could not, by the fearful power of his unnatural exis- tence, feel for mortal being. He turned aside, and did not weep; or if he did.
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wiped away his tears, as a fiend might do, with his burning talons, when he sees a new victim arrive for torture ; and, i^e- penting of his i^epentance, 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," answer- ed 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 nie 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 in-
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spire — of that love which, under happier circumstances, I might But no mat- ter— it is not my business to analyse the feeling, but to give the proof." He ex- tended his arm toward the casement at which she stood " Would you then con- sent to unite your destiny with mine? Would you indeed be mine amid mys- tery 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 minef — my own — my only Immalee?" — " I would — I will !"— " Then," answered Mel- moth, ** on this spot receive the proof of my eternal gratitude. On this spot 1 re- nounce your sight ! — I disannul your en- gagement ! — I fly from you for ever !" And as he spoke, he disappeared.