Melmoth the Wanderer, Vol. 3

by Charles Robert Maturin

“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.