‘It seemed as if this unhappy being was impelled by his ineffable destiny to deride the misery he inflicted, in proportion to its bitterness. His sarcastic levity bore a direct and fearful proportion to his despair. Perhaps this is also the case in circumstances and characters less atrocious. A mirth which is not gaiety is often the mask which hides the convulsed and distorted features of agony – and laughter, which never yet was the expression of rapture, has often been the only intelligible language of madness and misery. Extacy only smiles, – despair laughs. It seemed, too, as if no keenness of ironical insult, no menace of portentous darkness, had power to revolt the feelings, or alarm the apprehensions, of the devoted being to whom they were addressed. Her ‘most exquisite reasons,’ demanded in a tone of ruthless irony, were given in one whose exquisite and tender melody seemed still to retain the modulation on which its first sounds had been formed, – that of the song of birds, mingled with the murmur of waters.
‘I love music, because when I hear it I think of you. I have ceased to love dancing, though I was at first intoxicated with it, because, when dancing, I have sometimes forgot you. When I listen to music, your image floats on every note, – I hear you in every sound. The most inarticulate murmurs that I produce on my guitar (for I am very ignorant) are like a spell of melody that raises a form indescribable – not you, but my idea of you. In your presence, though that seems necessary to my existence, I have never felt that exquisite delight that I have experienced in that of your image, when music has called it up from the recesses of my heart. Music seems to me like the voice of religion summoning to remember and worship the God of my heart. Dancing appears like a momentary apostasy, almost a profanation.’ – ‘That, indeed, is a sweet and subtle reason,’ answered Melmoth, ‘and one that, of course, has but one failure, – that of not being sufficiently flattering to the hearer. And so my image floats on the rich and tremulous waves of melody one moment, like a god of the overflowing billows of music, triumphing in their swells, and graceful even in their falls, – and the next moment appears, like the dancing demon of your operas, grinning at you between the brilliant movement of your fandangoes,42 and flinging the withering foam of his black and convulsed lips into the cup where you pledge at your banquetting. Well – dancing – music – let them go together! It seems that my image is equally mischievous in both – in one you are tortured by reminiscence, and in the other by remorse. Suppose that image is withdrawn from you for ever, – suppose that it were possible to break the tie that unites us, and whose vision has entered into the soul of both.’ – You may suppose it,’ said Isidora, with maiden pride and tender grief blended in her voice; ‘and if you do, believe that I will try to suppose it too; the effort will not cost much, – nothing but – my life!’
‘As Melmoth beheld this blessed and beautiful being, once so refined amid nature, and now so natural amid refinement, still possessing all the soft luxuriance of her first angelic nature, amid the artificial atmosphere where her sweets were uninhaled, and her brilliant tints doomed to wither unappreciated, – where her pure and sublime devotedness of heart was doomed to beat like a wave against a rock, – exhaust its murmurs, – and expire; – As he felt this, and gazed on her, he cursed himself; and then, with the selfishness of hopeless misery, he felt that the curse might, by dividing it, be diminished.
‘Isidora!’ he whispered in the softest tones he could assume, approaching the casement, at which his pale and beautiful victim stood; ‘Isidora! will you then be mine?’ – ‘What shall I say?’ said Isidora; ‘if love requires the answer, I have said enough; if only vanity, I have said too much.’ – ‘Vanity! beautiful trifler, you know not what you say; the accusing angel himself might blot out that article from the catalogue of my sins. It is one of my prohibited and impossible offences; it is an earthly feeling, and therefore one which I can neither participate or enjoy. Certain it is that I feel some share of human pride at this moment.’ – ‘Pride! at what? Since I have known you, I have felt no pride but that of supreme devotedness, – that self-annihilating pride which renders the victim prouder of its wreath, than the sacrificer of his office.’ – ‘But I feel another pride,’ answered Melmoth, and in a proud tone he spoke it, – ‘a pride, which, like that of the storm that visited the ancient cities,43 whose destruction you may have read of, while it blasts, withers, and encrusts paintings, gems, music, and festivity, grasping them in its talons of annihilation, exclaims, Perish to all the world, perhaps beyond the period of its existence, but live to me in darkness and in corruption! Preserve all the exquisite modulation of your forms! all the indestructible brilliancy of your colouring! – but preserve it for me alone! – me, the single, pulseless, eyeless, heartless embracer of an unfertile bride, – the brooder over the dark and unproductive nest of eternal sterility, – the mountain whose lava of internal fire has stifled, and indurated, and inclosed for ever, all that was the joy of earth, the felicity of life, and the hope of futurity!’
‘As he spoke, his expression was at once so convulsed and so derisive, so indicative of malignity and levity, so thrilling to the heart, while it withered every fibre it touched and wrung, that Isidora, with all her innocent and helpless devotedness, could not avoid shuddering before this fearful being, while, in trembling and unappeasable solicitude, she demanded, ‘Will you then be mine? Or what am I to understand from your terrible words? Alas! my heart has never enveloped itself in mysteries – never has the light of its truth burst forth amid the thunderings and burnings in which you have issued the law of my destiny.’ – ‘Will you then be mine, Isidora?’ – ‘Consult my parents. Wed me by the rites, and in the face of the church, of which I am an unworthy member, and I will be yours for ever.’ – ‘For ever!’ repeated Melmoth; ‘well-spoken, my bride. You will then be mine for ever? – will you, Isidora?’ – ‘Yes! – yes – I have said so. But the sun is about to rise, I feel the increasing perfume of the orange blossoms, and the coolness of the morning air. Begone – I have staid too long here – the domestics may be about, and observe you – begone, I implore you.’ – ‘I go – but one word – for to me the rising of the sun, and the appearance of your domestics, and every thing in heaven above, and earth beneath, is equally unimportant. Let the sun stay below the horizon and wait for me. You are mine!’ – ‘Yes, I am yours; but you must solicit my family.’ – ‘Oh, doubtless! – solicitation is so congenial to my habits.’ – ‘And’ – ‘Well, what? – you hesitate.’ – ‘I hesitate,’ said the ingenuous and timid Isidora, ‘because’ – ‘Well?’ – ‘Because,’ she added, bursting into tears, ‘those with whom you speak will not utter to God language like mine. They will speak to you of wealth and dower; they will inquire about that region where you have told me your rich and wide possessions are held; and should they ask me of them, how shall I answer?’
‘At these words, Melmoth approached as close as possible to the casement, and uttered a certain word which Isidora did not at first appear to hear, or understand – trembling she repeated her request. In a still lower tone the answer was returned. Incredulous, and hoping that the answer had deceived her, she again repeated her petition. A withering monosyllable,44 not to be told, thundered in her ears, – and she shrieked as she closed the casement. Alas! the casement only shut out the form of the stranger – not his image.’
CHAPTER XXI
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.1
‘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 appear
ed 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.2 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.’3 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.’4 To her still the night was day, and her sun was the ‘moon walking in its brightness.’5 When she beheld it, the recollections of the isle rushed on her heart like a flood; and a figure soon appeared to recall 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,6 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.
Melmoth the Wanderer Page 50
