Melmoth the Wanderer, Vol. 3

by Charles Robert Maturin

“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.