Melmoth the Wanderer, Vol. 3

by Charles Robert Maturin

“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.