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? — — —
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.
Three years having elapsed, two persons in Madrid are, at the same time, exciting much interest and curiosity. One of them is a stranger of whom fearful rumours are abroad, although there is nothing extraordinary about him except the appalling lustre in his eyes; the other is a most beautiful female, who has recently turned up in Madrid as the new-found daughter of the merchant Aliaga and who lives in her father’s villa near the town. Once these two persons accidentally meet in the street, which accident is to have fatal consequences to all the members of the merchant’s family.
The household of Aliaga, who himself is absent on a voyage in the Indies, consists of his wife Donna Clara, his son Don Fernan, and the family confessor Fra Jose. Of these none is capable in the least of understanding Immalee—or Isidora, as she is now called—and she feels deeply unhappy in her new surroundings. Her unrestrained freedom of yore has been replaced by the strictest etiquette prescribing her duties to be ‘perfect obedience, profound submission, and unbroken silence, except when addressed to;’ and her warm and generous feelings are chilled by the cold and rigid Catholicism, very different from her own notions of religion. These latter are, indeed, considered to denote sheer madness after she once expresses the hope ‘that the heretics in the train of the English ambassador might not be everlastingly damned.’ Donna Clara is a woman of rigid mind and mediocrity of intellect, chiefly occupied in religious meditations of the narrowest kind. Her son is a selfish and brutal character from whom no kindness is to be expected. Isidora’s best friend is the priest, who, in contrast to his counterpart in the Spaniard’s tale, is described as a good and well-meaning person. Yet for the power of the church he, too, is prepared to sacrifice everything. Thus he, taking for pretext some superstitious rumours concerning the early life of Isidora, insists on her taking the veil, which scheme is indignantly opposed by Don Fernan, who calculates that the extraordinary beauty of his sister will be the means of the family forming, by marriage, a connection with the highest nobility of Spain. Before, however, either project has been realized, her meeting with Melmoth takes place, and he begins nightly to visit her under her casement.
These nocturnal meetings, which form the principal contents of the story, are quite worthy of the corresponding scenes in the first part. The present desolate state of Isidora is as convincingly described as her longing for the Indian island, to dream of which is her only happiness. The image of Melmoth is united to all that is dear to her, and she loves him as she loves the memories of bygone days:
“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 a 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 me, and 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.”
In her artlessness she understands him as little as ever. At the renewal of their intercourse she feels an innocent desire—Maturin was too acute a psychologist to omit this circumstance—do dazzle him with her newly-acquired accomplishments, without being aware that the more unlike she is to everybody else, the more attractive she must be to him—that her sole attraction, in fact, lies in her being something new even in his worldwide experience. Seeing, however, that her accomplishments do not please him, she gives up every thought of herself:
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.
The mental process which Melmoth undergoes is much the same as before. He approaches her with withering sarcasm and torments her with his diabolical laugh and terrible allusions, which she bears with gentleness and patience. She is still the only being who does not understand that he is to be feared, and in whose society—as described in the fine passage quoted above—he can obtain some rest and oblivion; and in these moments his human nature is again appealed to, and his better feelings prompt him once more to leave her. The only thing Isidora ever asks of him—from a sense of inborn dignity rather than acquired conventionality—is to discontinue his clandestine visits and appear before her family as her wooer. Once united to him by the rites of the Catholic church, she promises to follow him wherever it shall be. On one of these occasions Melmoth finds strength to take the decisive step: