He saw the eternal fire that keeps,
In the unfathomable deeps,
Its power for ever, and made a sign
To the morning prince divine;
Who came across the sulphurous flood,
Obedient to the master-call,
And in angel-beauty stood,
High on his star-lit pedestal.
“In this part of the manuscript, which I read in the vault of Adonijah
the Jew,” said Monçada, continuing his narrative, “there were several
pages destroyed, and the contents of many following wholly
obliterated--nor could Adonijah supply the deficiency. From the next
pages that were legible, it appeared that Isidora imprudently continued
to permit her mysterious visitor to frequent the garden at night, and to
converse with him from the casement, though unable to prevail on him to
declare himself to her family, and perhaps conscious that his
declaration would not be too favourably received. Such, at least,
appeared to be the meaning of the next lines I could decypher.
“She had renewed, in these nightly conferences, her former visionary
existence. Her whole day was but a long thought of the hour at which she
expected to see him. In the day-time she was silent, pensive,
abstracted, feeding on thought--with the evening her spirits perceptibly
though softly rose, like those of one who has a secret and
incommunicable store of delight; and her mind became like that flower
that unfolds its leaves, and diffuses its odours, only on the approach
of night.
“The season favoured this fatal delusion. It was that rage of summer
when we begin to respire only towards evening, and the balmy and
brilliant night is our day. The day itself is passed in a languid and
feverish doze. At night alone she existed,--at her moon-lit casement
alone she breathed freely; and never did the moonlight fall on a
lovelier form, or gild a more angelic brow, or gleam on eyes that
returned more pure and congenial rays. The mutual and friendly light
seemed like the correspondence of spirits who glided on the alternate
beams, and, passing from the glow of the planet to the glory of a mortal
eye, felt that to reside in either was heaven. * * * * * * * *
“She lingered at that casement till she imagined that the clipped and
artificially straitened treillage of the garden was the luxuriant and
undulating foliage of the trees of her paradise isle--that the flowers
had the same odour as that of the untrained and spontaneous roses that
once showered their leaves under her naked feet--that the birds sung to
her as they had once done when the vesper-hymn of her pure heart
ascended along with their closing notes, and formed the holiest and most
acceptable anthem that perhaps ever wooed the evening-breeze to waft it
to heaven.
“This delusion would soon cease. The stiff and stern monotony of the
parterre, where even the productions of nature held their place as if
under the constraint of duty, forced the conviction of its unnatural
regularity on her eye and soul, and she turned to heaven for relief. Who
does not, even in the first sweet agony of passion? Then we tell that
tale to heaven which we would not trust to the ear of mortal--and in the
withering hour that must come to all whose love is only mortal, we again
call on that heaven which we have intrusted with our secret, to send us
back one bright messenger of consolation on those thousand rays that its
bright, and cold, and passionless orbs, are for ever pouring on the
earth as if in mockery. We ask, but is the petition heard or answered?
We weep, but do not we feel that those tears are like rain falling on
the sea? _Mare infructuosum._ No matter. Revelation assures us there is
a period coming, when all petitions suited to our state shall be
granted, and when “tears shall be wiped from all eyes.” In revelation,
then, let us trust--in any thing but our own hearts. But Isidora had not
yet learned that theology of the skies, whose text is, “Let us go into
the house of mourning.” To her still the night was day, and her sun was
the “moon walking in its brightness.” When she beheld it, the
recollections of the isle rushed on her heart like a flood; and a figure
soon appeared to recal and to realize them.
“That figure appeared to her every night without disturbance or
interruption; and though her knowledge of the severe restraint and
regularity of the household caused her some surprise at the facility
with which Melmoth apparently defied both, and visited the garden every
night, yet such was the influence of her former dream-like and romantic
existence, that his continued presence, under circumstances so
extraordinary, never drew from her a question with regard to the means
by which he was enabled to surmount difficulties insurmountable to all
others.
“There were, indeed, two extraordinary circumstances attendant on these
meetings. Though seeing each other again in Spain, after an interval of
three years elapsing since they had parted on the shores of an isle in
the Indian sea, neither had ever inquired what circumstances could have
led to a meeting so unexpected and extraordinary. On Isidora’s part this
incurious feeling was easily accounted for. Her former existence had
been one of such a fabulous and fantastic character, that the improbable
had become familiar to her,--and the familiar only, improbable. Wonders
were her natural element; and she felt, perhaps, less surprised at
seeing Melmoth in Spain, than when she first beheld him treading the
sands of her lonely island. With Melmoth the cause was different, though
the effect was the same. His destiny forbid alike curiosity or surprise.
The world could show him no greater marvel than his own existence; and
the facility with which he himself passed from region to region,
mingling with, yet distinct from all his species, like a wearied and
uninterested spectator rambling through the various seats of some vast
theatre, where he knows none of the audience, would have prevented his
feeling astonishment, had he encountered Isidora on the summit of the
Andes.
“During a month, through the course of which she had tacitly permitted
these nightly visits beneath her casement--(at a distance which indeed
might have defied Spanish jealousy itself to devise matter of suspicion
out of,--the balcony of her window being nearly fourteen feet above the
level of the garden, where Melmoth stood)--during this month, Isidora
rapidly, but imperceptibly, graduated through those stages of feeling
which all who love have alike experienced, whether the stream of passion
be smooth or obstructed. In the first, she was full of anxiety to speak
and to listen, to hear and to be heard. She had all the wonders of her
new existence to relate; and perhaps that indefinite and unselfish hope
of magnifying herself in the eyes of him she loved, which induces us in
our first encounter to display all the eloquence, all the powers, all
the attractions we possess, not with the pride of a competitor, but with
the humiliation of a victim. The conquered city displays all its wealth
in hopes of propitiating the conqueror. It decorates him with all its
spoils, and feels prouder to behold him arrayed in them, than when she
wore them in triumph herself. That is the first bright hour of
excitement, of trembling, but hopeful and felicitous anxiety. Then we
think we never can display enough of talent, of imagination, of all that
can interest, of all that can dazzle. We pride ourselves in the homage
we receive from society, from the hope of sacrificing that homage to our
beloved--we feel a pure and almost spiritualized delight in our own
praises, from imagining they render us more worthy of meriting _his_,
from whom we have received the _grace_ of love to deserve them--we
glorify ourselves, that we may be enabled to render back the glory to
him from whom we received it, and for whom we have kept it in trust,
only to tender it back with that rich and accumulated interest of the
heart, of which we would pay the uttermost farthing, if the payment
exacted the last vibration of its fibres,--the last drop of its blood.
No saint who ever viewed a miracle performed by himself with a holy and
self-annihilating abstraction from _seity_, has perhaps felt a purer
sentiment of perfect devotedness, than the female who, in her first
hours of love, offers, at the feet of her worshipped one, the brilliant
wreath of music, painting, and eloquence,--and only hopes, with an
unuttered sigh, that the rose of love will not be unnoticed in the
garland.
“Oh! how delicious it is to such a being (and such was Isidora) to touch
her harp amid crowds, and watch, when the noisy and tasteless bravoes
have ceased, for the heart-drawn sigh of _the one_, to whom alone her
soul, not her fingers, have played,--and whose single sigh is heard, and
heard alone, amid the plaudits of thousands! Yet how delicious to her to
whisper to herself, “I heard his sigh, but he has heard the applause!”
“And when she glides through the dance, and in touching, with easy and
accustomed grace, the hands of many, she feels there is but one hand
whose touch she can recognize; and, waiting for its thrilling and
life-like vibration, moves on like a statue, cold and graceful, till the
Pygmalion-touch warms her into woman, and the marble melts into flesh
under the hands of the resistless moulder. And her movements betray, at
that moment, the unwonted and half-unconscious impulses of that fair
image to which love had given life, and who luxuriated in the vivid and
newly-tried enjoyment of that animation which the passion of her lover
had breathed into her frame. And when the splendid portfolio is
displayed, or the richly-wrought tapestry expanded by outstretched arms,
and cavaliers gaze, and ladies envy, and every eye is busy in
examination, and every tongue loud in praise, just in the inverted
proportion of the ability of the one to scrutinize with accuracy, and
the other to applaud with taste--then to throw round the secret silent
glance, that searches for that eye whose light alone, to her intoxicated
gaze, contains all judgment, all taste, all feeling--for that lip whose
very censure would be dearer than the applause of a world!--To hear,
with soft and submissive tranquillity, censure and remark, praise and
comment, but to turn for ever the appealing look to one who alone can
understand, and whose swiftly-answering glance can alone reward
it!--This--this had been Isidora’s hope. Even in the isle where he first
saw her in the infancy of her intellect, she had felt the consciousness
of superior powers, which were then her solace, not her pride. Her value
for herself rose with her devotion to him. Her passion became her pride;
and the enlarged resources of her mind, (for Christianity under its most
corrupt form enlarges every mind), made her at first believe, that to
behold her admired as she was for her loveliness, her talents, and her
wealth, would compel this proudest and most eccentric of beings to
prostrate himself before her, or at least to acknowledge the power of
those acquirements which she had so painfully been arrived at the
knowledge of, since her involuntary introduction into European society.
“This had been her hope during the earlier period of his visits; but
innocent and flattering to its object as it was, she was disappointed.
To Melmoth “nothing was new under the sun.” Talent was to him a burden.
He knew more than man could tell him, or woman either. Accomplishments
were a bauble--the rattle teazed his ear, and he flung it away. Beauty
was a flower he looked on only to scorn, and touched only to wither.
Wealth and distinction he appreciated as they deserved, but not with the
placid disdain of the philosopher, or the holy abstraction of the saint,
but with that “fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation,”
to which he believed their possessors irreversibly devoted, and to the
infliction of which he looked forward with perhaps a feeling like that
of those executioners who, at the command of Mithridates, poured the
melted ore of his golden chains down the throat of the Roman ambassador.
“With such feelings, and others that cannot be told, Melmoth experienced
an indescribable relief from the eternal fire that was already kindled
within him, in the perfect and unsullied freshness of what may be called
the untrodden verdure of Immalee’s heart,--for she was Immalee still to
him. She was the Oasis of his desert--the fountain at which he drank,
and forgot his passage over the burning sands--and the _burning_ sands
to which his passage must conduct him. He sat under the shade of the
gourd, and forgot the worm was working at its root;--perhaps the undying
worm that gnawed, and coiled, and festered in his own heart, might have
made him forget the corrosions of that he himself had sown in hers.
“Isidora, before the second week of their interview, had lowered her
pretensions. She had given up the hope to interest or to dazzle--that
hope which is twin-born with love in the purest female heart. 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.
“This is the marked graduation of profound feeling. Language is no
longer necessary to those whose beating hearts converse audibly--whose
eyes, even by moonlight, are more intelligible to each other’s stolen
and shadowed glances, than the broad converse of face to face in the
brightest sunshine--to whom, in the exquisite inversion of earthly
feeling and habit, darkness is light, and silence eloquence.
“At their last interviews, Isidora sometimes spoke,--but it was only to
remind her lover, in a soft and chastened tone, of a promise which it
seems he had at one time made of disclosing himself to her parents, and
demanding her at their hands. Something she murmured also of her
declining health--her exhausted spirits--her breaking heart--the long
delay--the hope deferred--the mysterious meeting; and while she spoke
she wept, but hid her tears from him.
“It is thus, Oh God! we are doomed (and justly doomed when we fix our
hearts on any thing below thee) to feel those hearts repelled like the
dove who hovered over the shoreless ocean, and found not a spot where
her foot might rest,--not a green leaf to bring back in her beak. Oh
that the ark of mercy may open to such souls, and receive them from that
stormy world of deluge and of wrath, with which they are unable to
contend, and where they can find no resting-place!
“Isidora now had arrived at the last stage of that painful pilgrimage
through which she had been led by a stern and reluctant guide.
“In its first, with the innocent and venial art of woman, she had tried
to interest him by the display of her new acquirements, without the
consciousness that they were not new to him. The harmony of civilized
society, of which she was at once weary and proud, was discord to his
ear. He had examined all the strings that formed this curious but
ill-constructed instrument, and found them all false.
“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.
“Melmoth gazed on her as she stood. One generous, one human feeling,
throbbed in his veins, and thrilled in his heart. He saw her in her
beauty,--her devotedness,--her pure and perfect innocence,--her sole
feeling for one who could not, by the fearful power of his unnatural
existence, feel for mortal being. He turned aside, and did not weep; or
if he did, wiped away his tears, as a fiend might do, with his burning
talons, when he sees a new victim arrive for torture; and, _repenting of
his repentance_, rends away _the blot_ of compunction, and arms himself
for his task of renewed infliction.
“Well, then, Isidora, you will give me no proof of your love? Is that
what I must understand?”--“Demand,” answered the innocent and
high-souled Isidora, “any proof that woman ought to give--more is not in
human power--less would render the proof of no value!”
“Such was the impression that these words made on Melmoth, whose heart,
however, plunged in unutterable crimes, had never been polluted by
sensuality, that he started from the spot where he stood,--gazed on her
for a moment,--and then exclaimed, “Well! you have given me proofs of
love unquestionable! It remains for me to give you a proof of that love
which I have described--of that love which only _you_ could inspire--of
that love which, under happier circumstances, I might---- But no
matter--it is not my business to analyse the feeling, but to give the
proof.” He extended his arm toward the casement at which she
stood.--“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.