He sunk for a few moments into a fit of gloomy abstraction, till the sound of the clock striking twelve made him start, – it was the only sound he had heard for some hours, and the sounds produced by inanimate things, while all living beings around are as dead, have at such an hour an effect indescribably awful. John looked at his manuscript with some reluctance, opened it, paused over the first lines, and as the wind sighed round the desolate apartment, and the rain pattered with a mournful sound against the dismantled window, wished – what did he wish for? – he wished the sound of the wind less dismal, and the dash of the rain less monotonous. – He may be forgiven, it was past midnight, and there was not a human being awake but himself within ten miles when he began to read.
CHAPTER III
Apparebat eidolon senex.1
PLINY
The manuscript was discoloured, obliterated and mutilated beyond any that had ever before exercised the patience of a reader. Michaelis2 himself, scrutinizing into the pretended autograph of St Mark at Venice, never had a harder time of it. – Melmoth could make out only a sentence here and there. The writer, it appeared, was an Englishman of the name of Stanton, who had travelled abroad shortly after the Restoration. Travelling was not then attended with the facilities which modern improvement has introduced, and scholars and literati, the intelligent, the idle, and the curious, wandered over the Continent for years, like Tom Coryat, though they had the modesty, on their return, to entitle the result of their multiplied observations and labours only ‘crudities.’3
Stanton, about the year 1676, was in Spain; he was, like most of the travellers of that age, a man of literature, intelligence and curiosity, but ignorant of the language of the country, and fighting his way at times from convent to convent, in quest of what was called ‘Hospitality,’ that is, obtaining board and lodging on the condition of holding a debate in Latin, on some point theological or metaphysical, with any monk who would become the champion of the strife. Now, as the theology was Catholic, and the metaphysics, Aristotelian, Stanton sometimes wished himself at the miserable Posada4 from whose filth and famine he had been fighting his escape; but though his reverend antagonists always denounced his creed, and comforted themselves, even in defeat, with the assurance that he must be damned, on the double score of his being a heretic and an Englishman, they were obliged to confess that his Latin was good, and his logic unanswerable; and he was allowed, in most cases, to sup and sleep in peace. This was not doomed to be his fate on the night of the 17th August 1677, when he found himself in the plains of Valencia, deserted by a cowardly guide, who had been terrified by the sight of a cross erected as a memorial of a murder, had slipped off his mule unperceived, crossing himself every step he took on his retreat from the heretic, and left Stanton amid the terrors of an approaching storm, and the dangers of an unknown country. The sublime and yet softened beauty of the scenery around, had filled the soul of Stanton with delight, and he enjoyed that delight as Englishmen generally do, silently.
The magnificent remains of two dynasties that had passed away, the ruins of Roman palaces, and of Moorish fortresses, were around and above him; – the dark and heavy thunderclouds that advanced slowly, seemed like the shrouds of these spectres of departed greatness; they approached, but did not yet overwhelm or conceal them, as if nature herself was for once awed by the power of man; and far below, the lovely valley of Valencia blushed and burned in all the glory of sunset, like a bride receiving the last glowing kiss of the bridegroom before the approach of night. Stanton gazed around. The difference between the architecture of the Roman and Moorish ruins struck him. Among the former are the remains of a theatre, and something like a public place; the latter present only the remains of fortresses, embattled, castellated and fortified from top to bottom, – not a loop-hole for pleasure to get in by,5 – the loop-holes were only for arrows; all denoted military power and despotic subjugation a l’outrance6 The contrast might have pleased a philosopher, and he might have indulged in the reflection, that though the ancient Greeks and Romans were savages, (as Dr Johnson says all people who want a press must be, and he says truly7), yet they were wonderful savages for their time, for they alone have left traces of their taste for pleasure in the countries they conquered, in their superb theatres, temples (which were also dedicated to pleasure one way or another), and baths, while other conquering bands of savages never left any thing behind them but traces of their rage for power. So thought Stanton, as he still saw strongly defined, though darkened by the darkening clouds, the huge skeleton of a Roman amphitheatre, its arched and gigantic colonnades now admitting a gleam of light, and now commingling with the purple thunder-cloud; and now the solid and heavy mass of a Moorish fortress, no light playing between its impermeable walls, – the image of power, dark, isolated, impenetrable. Stanton forgot his cowardly guide, his loneliness, his danger amid an approaching storm and an inhospitable country, where his name and country would shut every door against him, and every peal of thunder would be supposed justified by the daring intrusion of a heretic in the dwelling of an old Christian,8 as the Spanish Catholics absurdly term themselves, to make the distinction between them and the baptised Moors. – All this was forgot in contemplating the glorious and awful scenery before him, – light struggling with darkness, – and darkness menacing a light still more terrible, and announcing its menace in the blue and livid mass of cloud that hovered like a destroying angel in the air, its arrows aimed, but their direction awfully indefinite. But he ceased to forget these local and petty dangers, as the sublimity of romance would term them, when he saw the first flash of the lightning, broad and red as the banners of an insulting army whose motto is Væ victis,9 shatter to atoms the remains of a Roman tower; – the rifted stones rolled down the hill and fell at the feet of Stanton. He stood appalled, and, awaiting his summons from the Power in whose eye pyramids, palaces and the worms whose toil has formed them, and the worms who toil out their existence under their shadow or their pressure, are perhaps all alike contemptible, he stood collected, and for a moment felt that defiance of danger which danger itself excites, and we love to encounter it as a physical enemy, to bid it ‘do its worst,’ and feel that its worst will perhaps be ultimately its best for us. He stood and saw another flash dart its bright, brief and malignant glance over the ruins of ancient power, and the luxuriance of recent fertility. Singular contrast! The relics of art for ever decaying, – the productions of nature for ever renewed. – (Alas! for what purpose are they renewed, better than to mock at the perishable monuments10 which men try in vain to rival them by). The pyramids themselves must perish, but the grass that grows between their disjointed stones will be renewed from year to year. Stanton was thinking thus, when all power of thought was suspended, by seeing two persons bearing between them the body of a young, and apparently very lovely girl, who had been struck dead by the lightning. Stanton approached, and heard the voices of the bearers repeating, ‘There is none who will mourn for her!’ ‘There is none who will mourn for her!’ said other voices, as two more bore in their arms the blasted and blackened figure of what had once been a man, comely and graceful; – ‘there is not one to mourn for her now!’ They were lovers, and he had been consumed by the flash that had destroyed her, while in the act of endeavouring to defend her. As they were about to remove the bodies, a person approached with a calmness of step and demeanour, as if he were alone unconscious of danger, and incapable of fear; and after looking on them for some time, burst into a laugh so loud, wild and protracted, that the peasants, starting with as much horror at the sound as at that of the storm, hurried away, bearing the corse11 with them. Even Stanton’s fears were subdued by his astonishment, and, turning to the stranger, who remained standing on the same spot, he asked the reason of such an outrage on humanity. The stranger, slowly turning round, and disclosing a countenance which – (Here the manuscript was illegible for a few lines),12 said in English – (A long hiatus followed here, and the next passage that was legible, though its proved
to be a continuation of the narrative, was but a fragment).
*
The terrors of the night rendered Stanton a sturdy and unappeasable applicant; and the shrill voice of the old woman, repeating, ‘no heretic – no English – Mother of God protect us – avaunt Satan!’ – combined with the clatter of the wooden casement (peculiar to the houses in Valentia)13 which she opened to discharge her volley of anathematization,14 and shut again as the lightning glanced through the aperture, were unable to repel his importunate request for admittance, in a night whose terrors ought to soften all the miserable petty local passions into one awful feeling of fear for the Power who caused it, and compassion for those who were exposed to it. – But Stanton felt there was something more than national bigotry in the exclamations of the old woman; there was a peculiar and personal horror of the English. – and he was right; but this did not diminish the eagerness of his
*
The house was handsome and spacious, but the melancholy appearance of desertion
*
– The benches were by the wall, but there were none to sit there; the tables were spread in what had been the hall, but it seemed as if none had gathered round them for many years; – the clock struck audibly, there was no voice of mirth or of occupation to drown its sound; time told his awful lesson to silence alone; – the hearths were black with fuel long since consumed; – the family portraits looked as if they were the only tenants of the mansion; they seemed to say, from their mouldering frames, ‘there are none to gaze on us;’ and the echo of the steps of Stanton and his feeble guide, was the only sound audible between the peals of thunder that rolled still awfully, but more distantly, – every peal like the exhausted murmurs of a spent heart. As they passed on, a shriek was heard. Stanton paused, and fearful images of the dangers to which travellers on the Continent are exposed in deserted and remote habitations, came into his mind. ‘Don’t heed it,’ said the old woman, lighting him on with a miserable lamp; – ‘it is only he
*
The old woman having now satisfied herself, by ocular demonstration, that her English guest, even if he was the devil, had neither horn, hoof, or tail, that he could bear the sign of the cross without changing his form, and that, when he spoke, not a puff of sulphur came out of his mouth, began to take courage, and at length commenced her story, which, weary and comfortless as Stanton was,
*
‘Every obstacle was now removed; parents and relations at last gave up all opposition, and the young pair were united. Never was there a lovelier, – they seemed like angels who had only anticipated by a few years their celestial and eternal union. The marriage was solemnized with much pomp, and a few days after there was a feast in that very wainscotted chamber which you paused to remark was so gloomy. It was that night hung with rich tapestry, representing the exploits of the Cid, particularly that of his burning a few Moors15 who refused to renounce their accursed religion. They were represented beautifully tortured, writhing and howling, and ‘Mahomet! Mahomet!’ issuing out of their mouths, as they called on him in their burning agonies; – you could almost hear them scream. At the upper end of the room, under a splendid estrade, over which was an image of the blessed Virgin, sat Donna Isabella de Cardoza, mother to the bride, and near her Donna Ines, the bride, on rich almohadas,16 the bridegroom sat opposite her; and though they never spoke to each other, their eyes, slowly raised, but suddenly withdrawn, (those eyes that blushed), told to each other the delicious secret of their happiness. Don Pedro de Cardoza had assembled a large party in honour of his daughter’s nuptials; among them was an Englishman of the name of Melmoth, a traveller; no one knew who had brought him there. He sat silent like the rest, while the iced waters and the sugared wafers were presented to the company. The night was intensely hot, and the moon glowed like a sun over the ruins of Saguntum;17 the embroidered blinds flapped heavily, as if the wind made an effort to raise them in vain, and then desisted.
(Another defect in the manuscript occurred here, but it was soon supplied).
*
The company were dispersed through various alleys of the garden; the bridegroom and bride wandered through one where the delicious perfume of the orange trees mingled itself with that of the myrtles in blow. On their return to the hall, both of them asked, Had the company heard the exquisite sounds that floated through the garden just before they quitted it? No one had heard them. They expressed their surprise. The Englishman had never quitted the hall; it was said he smiled with a most particular and extraordinary expression as the remark was made. His silence had been noticed before, but it was ascribed to his ignorance of the Spanish language, an ignorance that Spaniards are not anxious either to expose or remove by speaking to a stranger. The subject of the music was not again reverted to till the guests were seated at supper, when Donna Ines and her young husband, exchanging a smile of delighted surprise, exclaimed they heard the same delicious sounds floating round them. The guests listened, but no one else could hear it; – every one felt there was something extraordinary in this. Hush! was uttered by every voice almost at the same moment. A dead silence followed, – you would think, from their intent looks, that they listened with their very eyes. This deep silence, contrasted with the splendour of the feast, and the light effused from torches held by the domestics, produced a singular effect, – it seemed for some moments like an assembly of the dead. The silence was interrupted, though the cause of wonder had not ceased, by the entrance of Father Olavida, the Confessor of Donna Isabella, who had been called away previous to the feast, to administer extreme unction to a dying man in the neighbourhood. He was a priest of uncommon sanctity, beloved in the family, and respected in the neighbourhood, where he had displayed uncommon taste and talents for exorcism; – in fact, this was the good Father’s forte, and he piqued himself on it accordingly. The devil never fell into worse hands than Father Olavida’s, for when he was so contumacious18 as to resist Latin, and even the first verses of the Gospel of St John in Greek, which the good Father never had recourse to but in cases of extreme stubbornness and difficulty, – (here Stanton recollected the English story of the Boy of Bilsdon,19 and blushed even in Spain for his countrymen), – then he always applied to the Inquisition; and if the devils were ever so obstinate before, they were always seen to fly out of the possessed, just as, in the midst of their cries, (no doubt of blasphemy), they were tied to the stake. Some held out even till the flames surrounded them; but even the most stubborn must have been dislodged when the operation was over, for the devil himself could no longer tenant a crisp and glutinous lump of cinders. Thus Father Olavida’s fame spread far and wide, and the Cardoza family had made uncommon interest to procure him for a Confessor, and happily succeeded. The ceremony he had just been performing, had cast a shade over the good Father’s countenance, but it dispersed as he mingled among the guests, and was introduced to them. Room was soon made for him, and he happened accidentally to be seated opposite the Englishman. As the wine was presented to him, Father Olavida, (who, as I observed, was a man of singular sanctity), prepared to utter a short internal prayer. He hesitated, – trembled, – desisted; and, putting down the wine, wiped the drops from his forehead with the sleeve of his habit. Donna Isabella gave a sign to a domestic, and other wine of a higher quality was offered to him. His lips moved, as if in the effort to pronounce a benediction on it and the company, but the effort again failed; and the change in his countenance was so extraordinary, that it was perceived by all the guests. He felt the sensation that his extraordinary appearance excited, and attempted to remove it by again endeavouring to lift the cup to his lips. So strong was the anxiety with which the company watched him, that the only sound heard in that spacious and crowded hall, was the rustling of his habit, as he attempted to lift the cup to his lips once more – in vain. The guests sat in astonished silence. Father Olavida alone remained standing; but at that moment the Englishman rose, and appeared determined to fix Olavida’s regards by a gaze like that of fascination. Olav
ida rocked, reeled, grasped the arm of a page, and at last, closing his eyes for a moment, as if to escape the horrible fascination of that unearthly glare, (the Englishman’s eyes were observed by all the guests, from the moment of his entrance, to effuse a most fearful and preternatural lustre), exclaimed, ‘Who is among us? – Who?20 – I cannot utter a blessing while he is here. I cannot feel one. Where he treads, the earth is parched! – Where he breathes, the air is fire! – Where he feeds, the food is poison! – Where he turns, his glance is lightning! – Who is among us? – Who?’ repeated the priest in the agony of adjuration, while his cowl fallen back, his few thin hairs around the scalp instinct and alive with terrible emotion, his outspread arms protruded from the sleeves of his habit, and extended towards the awful stranger, suggested the idea of an inspired being in the dreadful rapture of prophetic denunciation. He stood – still stood, and the Englishman stood calmly opposite to him. There was an agitated irregularity in the attitudes of those around them, which contrasted strongly the fixed and stern postures of those two, who remained gazing silently at each other. ‘Who knows him?’ exclaimed Olavida, starting apparently from a trance; ‘who knows him? who brought him here?’
The guests severally disclaimed all knowledge of the Englishman, and each asked the other in whispers, ‘who had brought him there?’ Father Olavida then pointed his arm to each of the company, and asked each individually, ‘Do you know him?’ ‘No! no! no!’ was uttered with vehement emphasis by every individual. ‘But I know him,’ said Olavida, ‘by these cold drops!’ and he wiped them off; – ‘by these convulsed joints!’ and he attempted to sign the cross, but could not. He raised his voice, and evidently speaking with increased difficulty, – ‘By this bread and wine, which the faithful receive as the body and blood of Christ, but which his presence converts into matter as viperous as the suicide foam of the dying Judas, – by all these – I know him, and command him to be gone! – He is – he is – ’and he bent forwards as he spoke, and gazed on the Englishman with an expression which the mixture of rage, hatred and fear, rendered terrible. All the guests rose at these words, – the whole company now presented two singular groupes, that of the amazed guests all collected together, and repeating, ‘Who, what is he?’ and that of the Englishman, who stood unmoved, and Olavida, who dropped dead in the attitude of pointing to him.
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