“Would you then consent to unite your destiny with mine? Would you indeed be mine amid mystery 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 mine? my own—my only Immalee?”—“I would—I will!”—“Then,” answered Melmoth, “on this spot receive the proof of my eternal gratitude. On this spot I renounce your sight!—I disannul your engagement!—I fly from you for ever!” And as he spoke, he disappeared.
Some time, however, after this disappearance of Melmoth, unexpected events again throw these ill-fated lovers together. Donna Clara receives a letter from her husband, who has landed in Spain and is slowly making his way homewards, to the effect that he intends to bring with him the destined bridegroom of Isidora, a Spanish nobleman called Montilla. Isidora learns this piece of news with great despair—but the same night Melmoth reappears beneath her balcony. Isidora assures him that she will be the bride of the grave rather than of Montilla, and that her love is unaltered; whereupon Melmoth, ‘bringing out the words with difficulty,’ proposes that she should be ready to wed him the following night. She consents, and the scheme is carried out in a scene which has been called one of the greatest in the book[139] and which indeed is saturated with the keenest suspense. The episode is typically ‘Gothic;’ it is like a ballad of Lenore in prose. In the darkness they set out and travel with supernatural rapidity towards a neighbouring mountain where, Melmoth informs Isidora, a holy hermit is dwelling near a ruinous monastery. Arriving at a mountain river they hear foot-steps pursuing them, and a figure is indistinctly seen approaching. After a short struggle the pursuer, whom Isidora, by his voice, recognizes to be an ancient domestic of the family, is flung into the river. The lovers continue their way and Isidora is dragged up into the ruins, where a hand places hers into that of Melmoth. Almost unconscious as she is from terror, she feels the hand to be cold as death; and afterwards it is discovered that the hermit really had died the previous night. This is one of the few supernatural incidents in the story that does not directly relate to the personality of Melmoth.—The same night Donna Clara and the priest sit brooding over a new letter from Aliaga, in which he hints at some terrible and mysterious tidings he has learned—it appears later that he has met Melmoth, who, beset by pangs of conscience, has warned him that his daughter is in danger. They are roused by a noise in the house, and discover that Isidora’s casement is open and her room empty. Her mother passes the night in frantic anxiety, but in the morning Isidora is found sleeping heavily in her bed. What has happened to her nothing can induce her to disclose, and Donna Clara and the priest prudently determine also to keep the matter secret. It takes Aliaga rather a long time to get home, in spite of the warning he has received. In the meantime Melmoth keeps on visiting his wife, but cannot be prevailed upon to appear before the family. Otherwise his tenderness towards Isidora increases, as there is evidence of her becoming a mother. The night before the event is expected to take place, Melmoth has the news that her father and Montilla will arrive that very day, and in the evening a great masquerade is to be held in honour of the betrothed. Melmoth promises to be there at midnight to take her away. The news appears to be true, and Isidora is forced to take part in the feast. The costume of the time fortunately conceals her altered figure, as the mask covers her pale and haggard countenance. When the clock strikes twelve Melmoth is beside her. They prepare to leave the assembly, but are detected by Don Fernan, who steps into their way. A fight ensues which ends with the death of Don Fernan, whereat the dreaded figure of Melmoth the Wanderer is disclosed to all the guests, some of whom recognize him with a terror unspeakable. Isidora throws herself upon the corpse of her brother, and Melmoth departs alone and unmolested, nobody daring to lift a hand against him. The house is rapidly deserted and its horrified inmates left alone. The same night Isidora is delivered of a daughter, and, on admitting that she is married to Melmoth, conveyed into the prison of the Inquisition. Her parents shortly afterwards die of grief, but the good priest is allowed to visit her, and to him she makes a full confession of her marriage. The Holy Office condemns her to lifelong imprisonment, but she dies, after having strangled her child when the officials have come to take it from her. Before expiring she yet confesses to Fra Jose that Melmoth has been with her in the prison and offered to effect her liberation on a fearful and unutterable condition. With her last strength she has rejected it, although her love for him is unabated.—
The end of the Tale of the Indians calls for a few remarks from a logical point of view—if logic is to be applied to a composition like this. It never becomes quite clear why Melmoth brings Isidora back to her home after their wedding, all the world being open to him; nor it is easy to understand why he should delay the second elopement until the house is full of guests and the disappearance of Isidora most difficult to bring about. As he, after the failure of this enterprise, completely loses his human character and only appears in that of the tempter, it might be inferred that Isidora’s last calamity is of his own contrivance; but this, again, is contradicted by what he says after the duel with Don Fernan: ‘Would that breathless fool had yielded to my bidding, not to my sword—there was but one human chord that vibrated in my heart—it is broken to-night, and for ever!’ Those critics that derided the clumsiness with which the schemes of Melmoth are, in general, executed, were not entirely wrong in this instance; the lack of plausibility in these incidents—the supernatural power of Melmoth once taken for granted—is here of a character injurious to the tale as a work of art.—In the descriptions of everyday life in Aliaga’s house Maturin does not give of his best, in spite of his having recourse to his humorous vein. The personages themselves are depicted in rather a conventional fashion, and the stupidity and narrow-mindedness of Donna Clara, and the confessor’s excessive fondness for food and drink, can bear no comparison with the humorous passages in Women. Only the characterization of Isidora is carried out with the same unfailing power to the very last.
The end of the Tale of the Indians, especially the unravelling of the plot, contains, no doubt, some hints from Goethe’s Faust.[140] The parallels are but details of secondary importance, yet too distinct to be quite overlooked. Margarete and Isidora are equally anxious about their respective lovers’ relations to church and religion, and propose the same questions to them. Margarete:
Nun sag, wie hast du’s mit der Religion?
— — — — — —
Du ehrst auch nicht die heil’gen Sacramente.
— — — — — —
Zur Messe, zur Beichte bist du lange nicht gegangen.
Isidora expresses her fear that Melmoth does not believe in what the Holy Church requires, and asks, further: ‘Do you ever visit the church? — — Do you ever receive the Holy Sacrament?’—Faust fights a duel with Margarete’s brother under similar circumstances and with the same consequence as Melmoth with Don Fernan; Margareta, like Isidora, dies in prison, after having put her child to death in a state of partial insanity, and both refuse to follow their lovers out of the prison.—With Mephistopheles, Melmoth has in common the power of arresting, with a look, the hands raised to seize him.