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 DUKE
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

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 :

M E L MO T H
THE

WANDERER:

TALE.
BY THE AUTHOR OF '' BERTRAM/' &c.

IN FOUR VOLUMES.

VOL. IIL

EDINBURGH
PRINTED FOR ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY,
AND HURST, ROBINSON, AND CO. CHEAFSIDE,
LONDON.

1820.
 Tr.R.

A^
MELMOTH.

CHAPTER XII.

Juravi lingua, mentem injuratam gero.

Who brought you first acquainted with the devil?

Shirley's St Patrick for Ireland.

I RAN on had no longer breath or

till I
strength, (without perceiving that I was
in a dark passage), till I was stopt by a
door. In falhng against it, I burst it open,
and found myself in a low dark room.
When I raised myself, for Ihad fallen on
my hands and knees, I looked round, and
saw something so singular, as to suspend
even my personal anxiety and terror for a
moment.
VOL. III. A
 ;

2 melmoth:
" The room was very small and ; I could
perceive by the rents, that I had not only
broken open a door, but a large curtain
which hung before it, whose ample folds
still afforded me concealment if I required
it. There was no one in the room, and I
had time to study its singular furniture at
leisure.
" There was a table covered with cloth
oh were placed a vessel of a singular con-
it

struction, a book, into whose pages I look-

ed, but could not make out a single letter.
I therefore wisely took it for a book of ma-
gic, and closed it with a feeling of excul-
patory horror. (It happened to be a

copy of the Hebrew Bible, marked with

the Samaritan points). There was a knife
too and a cock was fastened to the leg of
;

the table, whose loud crows announced his

impatience of further constraint *.

* Quilibet postea paterfamilias, cum gallo prse ma-

iiibus, in medium primus prodit. * *
* * * * * *
 A TALE. 3

" I felt that this apparatus was some-

what singular — it looked like a prepara-
tion for a sacrifice. I shuddered, and

wrapt myself in the volumes of the dra-

pery which hung before the door my fall
had broken open. A dim lamp, suspended
from the ceiling, discovered to me all these
objects, and enabled me to observe what
followed almost immediately. A man of
middle age, but whose physiognomy had
something peculiar in it, even to the eye
of a Spaniard, from the clustering darkness
of his eye-brows, his prominent nose, and
a certain lustre in the balls of his eyes, en-

Deinde expiationem aggreditur et capiti suo tei*

gallum allidit^ singulosque ictus his vocibus prose-

quitur. Hie Gallus sit permutio pro me, &c. *
^ ^ ^ TtS" ^tP ^sfe

Gallo deinde imponens manus^ eum statim mactat,&c.

Vide Buxtorfj as quoted in Dr Magee (Bishop of
Raphoe's) work on the atonement. Cumberland in
his Observer, I think, mentions the discovery to have
been reserved for the feast of the Passover. It is just
as probable it was made on the day of expiation.
 —

4 MELMOTH :

tered the room, knelt before the table, kiss-

ed the book that lay on it, and read from

itsome sentences that were to precede, as I

imagined, some horrible sacrifice; felt the —
edge of the knife, knelt again, uttered
some words which I did not understand,
(as they were in the language of that book),

and then called aloud on some one by the

name of Manasseh-ben-Solomon. No one
answered. He sighed, passed his hand
over his eyes with the air of a man who is

asking pardon of himself for a short forget-

fulness,and then pronounced the name of
" Antonio." A
young man immediately
entered, and answered, " Did you call me.
—
Father?" ^But while he spoke, he threw
a hollow and wandering glance on the sin-
gular furniture of the room.
" I called you, my son, and why did you
not answer me T — " I did not hear you, fa-

ther — I mean, did not think

I was on it

me you called. I heard only a name I

was never called by before. When you
said * Antonio,' I obeyed you —I came."
 —

A TALE. 5

" But that is the name by which you

must in future be called and be known,
to me at least, unless you prefer another.
—
You shall have your choice." " My father,
I shall adopt whatever name you choose."
— " No; the choice of your new name

—
must be your own you must, for the fu-
ture, either adopt the name you have heard,
or another."—" What other. Sir ?"—" That
ofparricide,''' The youth shuddered with
horror, less at the words than at the ex-
pression that accompanied them and, af-
;

ter looking at his father for some time in

a posture of tremulous and supplicating
inquiry, he burst into tears. The father
seized the moment. He grasped the arms
of his son, " My child, I gave you life, and
you may repay the gift — my life is in your
power. You think me I have
a Catholic —
brought you up as one for the preserva-
tion of our mutual lives, in a country where
the confession of the true faith would in-
fallibly cost both. I am one of that un-
happy race every where stigmatized and
 —

6 MELMOTH;

spoken against, yet on whose industry and

talent the ungrateful country that anathe-
matizes us, depends for half the sources of
its national prosperity. I am a Jew, " an
Israelite," one of those to whom, even by
the confession of a Christian apostle, " per-
tain the adoption, and the glory, and the
coTenants, and the giving of the law, and
the service of God, and the promises; whose
and of whom as concerning
are the fathers,
the flesh "
—
Here he paused, not willing
to go on with a quotation that would have
contradicted his sentiments. He added,
" The Messias will come, whether suffer-
ing or triumphant ^. I am a Jew. I call-

ed you hour of your birth by the

at the
name of Manasseh-ben- Solomon. I called
on you by that name, which I felt had
clung to the bottom of my heart from that
hour, and which, echoing from its abyss,
— — \

* The Jews believe in two Messias, a suffering

and a triumphant one^ to reconcile the prophecies

with their own expectations.
 A TALE. %

I almost hoped you would have recogniz-

ed. Itwas a dream, but will you not, my
beloved child, realize that dream ? Will
—
you not? will you not? The God of
your fathers is waiting to embrace you —
and your father is at your feet, imploring
you to follow the faith of your father A-
braham, the prophet Moses, and all the
holy prophets who are with God, and
who look down on this moment of your
soul's vacillation between the abominable
idolatries of those wlio not only adore
the Son of the carpenter, but even im-
piously compel you to fall down before
the image of the woman mother,his
and adore her by the blasphemous name
—
of Mother of God, and the pure voice of
those who call on you to worship the God
of your fathers, the God of ages, the eter-
nal God of heaven and earth, without son
or mother, without child or descendant, (as
impiously presumed in their blasphemous
creed), without even worshipper, save those
who, like me, sacrifice their hearts to him
 —

8 MELMOTH :

in solitude, at the risk of those hearts be-

ing PIERCED BY THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
" At these words, the young man, over-
come by he saw and heard, and quite
all

unprepared for this sudden transition from

Catholicism to Judaism, burst into tears.
The father seized the moment, " My child,
you are now to profess yourself the slave
of these idolaters, who are cursed in the
law of Moses, and by the commandment
—
of God, or to enrol yourself among the
faithful, whose rest shall be in the bosom

of Abraham, and who, reposing there, shall

see the unbelieving crawling over the burn-
ing ashes of hell, and supplicate you in
vain for a drop of water, according to the
legends of their own prophet. And does
not such a picture excite your pride to de-
ny them a drop?" — " I would not deny
them a drop," sobbed the youth, " I would
give them these tears." — " Reserve them
for your father's grave," added the Jew,
**
for to the grave you have doomed me.
I have lived, sparing, watching, tempori?5-
 — —

A TALE. 9

iiig, with these accursed idolaters, for you.

And now —and now you reject a God who

is alone able to save, and a father kneeling
to implore you to accept that salvation."
" No, I do not," said the bewildered youth.
—" What, then, do you determine —I am ?

at your feet to know your resolution. Be-

hold, the mysterious instruments of your
initiation are ready. There is the uncor-
rupted book of Moses, the prophet of God,
as these idolaters themselves confess.
There are all the preparations for the year
of expiation —determine whether those
rites shall now you to the true
dedicate
God, or seize yom' father, (who has put his
life into your hands), and drag him by the

throat into the prisons of the Inquisition.

You may —you can will you V
" In prostrate and tremulous agony, the
father held up his locked hands to his
child. I seized the moment — despair had
made me reckless. I understood not a
word of what Avas said, except the refe-
rence to the Inquisition. I seized on that
A Q
10 MELMOTH :

last word —I grasped, in my despair, at the

heart of father and child. I rushed from
behind the curtain, and exclaiming, " If
he does not betray you to the Inquisition,
I will" I fell at his feet. This mix-
ture of defiance and prostration, my squa-
lid figure, my inquisitorial habit, and my

bursting on this secret and solemn in-

terview, struck the Jew with a horror he
vainly gasped to express, till, risingfrom
my knees, on which I had fallen from my
weakness, I added, " Yes, I will betray
you to the Inquisition, unless you instant-
ly promise to shelter me from it." The
Jew glanced at my dress, perceived his
danger and mine, and, with Si physical pre-
sence of mind unparalleled, except in a
man under strong impressions of mental
excitation and personal danger, bustled a-
bout to remove every trace of the expiato-
ry sacrifice, and of my inquisitorial cos-
tume, in a moment. In the same breath
he called aloud for Rehekahi to remove the
vessels from the table bid Antonio quit
j
 A TALE. H
the apartment, and hastened to clothe me
in some he had snatched from a
dress that
wardrobe collected from centuries while ;

he tore off my inquisitorial dress with a

violence that left me actually naked, and
the habit in rags.
" There was something at once fear-
ful and ludicrous in the scene that follow
ed. Rebekah, an old Jewish woman, came
at his call ; but, seeing a third person, re-
treated in terror, while her master, in his
confusion, called her in vain by her Chris-
tia?i name of Maria. Obliged to remove
the table alone, he overthrew it, and broke

the leg of the unfortunate animal fasten-

ed to it, who, not to be without his share
in the tumult, uttered the most shrill and
intolerable screams, while the Jew, snatch-
ing up the sacrificial knife, repeated eager-
ly, " Statim mactat gallum," and put the
wretched bird out of its pain ; then, trem-
bling at this open avowal of his Judaism,
he sat down amid the ruins of the over.,
thrown table, the fragments of the broken
 : ;

12 MELMOTH
vessels, and the remains of the martyred
cock. He gazed at me with a look of stu-
pified and ludicrous inanity, and demand-
ed in delirious tones, what " my lords the
Inquisitors had pleased to visit his humble
but highly-honoured mansion for ?" I
was scarce less deranged than he was
and, though we both spoke the same lan-
guage, and were forced by circumstances
into the same strange and desperate confi-
dence with each other, we really needed,
for the first half-hour, a rational interpreter
of our exclamations, starts of fear, and
bursts of disclosure. At last our mutual
terror acted honestly between us, and we
understood each other. The end of the
matter was, that, in less than an hour, I
felt myself clad in a comfortable garment,
seated at a table amply spread, watched
over by my involuntary host, and watch-
ing him in turn with red wolfish eyes,
which glanced from his board to his per-
moment's hint of
son, as if I could, at a
danger from Ms treachery, have chang-
 A TALE. 13

ed my meal, and feasted on his life-blood.

No such danger occurred, —my host was
more afraid of me than I had reason to be
of him, and for many causes. He was a
Jew innate, an impostor, —a wretch, who,
drawing sustenance from the bosom of our
holy mother the church, had turned her
nutriment to poison, and attempted to in-
fuse that poison into the lips of his son.
I was but a fugitive from the Inquisition,
— a prisoner, who had a kind of instinc-
tive and very venial dislike to giving the
Inquisitors the trouble of lighting the fag-
gots for me, which would be much better
employed in consuming the adherent to
the law of Moses. In fact, impartiality
considered, there w^as every thing in my
favour, and the Jew just acted as if he felt

so, — but all this I ascribed to his terrors of

the Inquisition.
" That night I slept, —I know not how
or where. had wild dreams before I
I
slept, if I did sleep and after, such vi-
; —
sions,— such things, passed in dread and
 ;

14} MELMOTH;

stern reality before me. I have often in

my memory searched for the traces of the
first night I passed under the roof of the
Jew, but can find nothing,— nothing except
a conviction of my utter insanity. It might
not have been so, — I know not how it was.
I remember his lighting me up a narrow
stair, and my asking him, was he lighting

me down the steps of the dungeons of the

Inquisition? —his throwing open a door,
and my asking him, was it the door of the
torture-room ? — his attempting to undress
me, and my exclaiming, " Do not bind
me too tight, — I know I must suffer, but
be merciful ;"
—his throwing me on the
bed, while I shrieked, " Well, you have
bound me on the rack, then ? — strain it

hard, that I may forget myself the sooner

but your surgeon not be near to watch
let

my pulse, —
let it cease to throb, and let

me cease to suffer." I remember no more

for many days, though I have struggled
to do so, and caught from time to time
glimpses of thoughts better lost. Oh, Sir,
 A TALE. 15

there are some criminals of the imagina-

tion, whom if we could plunge into the
oubliettes of its magnificent but lightly-
based fabric, its lord would reign more
happy. * * *
* # * *
" Many days elapsed, indeed, before the
Jew began to feel his immunity somewhat
dearly purchased, by the additional main-
tenance of a troublesome, and, I fear, a
deranged inmate. He took the first op-
portunity that the recovery of my intel-
lect offered, of hinting this to me, and in-
quired mildly what 1 purposed to do, and
where I meant to go. This question for
the first time opened to my view that
range of hopeless and interminable desola-
tion that lay before —
me, the Inquisition
had laid waste the whole track of life, as
with fire and sword. I had not a spot to
stand on, a meal to earn, a hand to grasp,
a voice to greet, a roof to crouch under,
in the whole realm of Spain.
" You are not to learn, Sir, that the power
 ;

16 MELMOTH:

of the Inquisition, like that of death, sepa-

rates you, by its single touch, from all mor-
tal relations. From the moment its grasp
has seized you, all human hands unlock their

hold of yours, —you have no longer father,

mother, sister, or child. The most devot-
ed and affectionate of all those relatives,
who, in the natural intercourse of human
life, would have laid their hands under
your feet to procure you a smoother pas-
sage over its roughnesses, would be the
first to grasp the faggot that was to reduce

you to ashes, if the Inquisition were to

demand the sacrifice. I knew all this
and I felt, besides, that, had I never been
a prisoner in the Inquisition, I was an iso-
lated being, rejected by father and mother,
— -the involuntary murderer of my brother,
the only being on earth who loved me, or
whom I could love or profit by, —that be-
ing who seemed to flash across my brief
human existence, to illuminate and to
blast. The bolt had perished with the vic-
tim. In Spain it was impossible for me
 A TALE. 17

to live without detection, unless I plung-

ed myself into an imprisonment as pro-
found and hopeless as that of the Inquisi-
tion. And, if wTOUght to
a miracle were
convey me out of Spain, ignorant as I was
of the language, the habits, and the modes
of obtaining subsistence, in that or any
other country, how could I support my-
self even for a day. Absolute famine
stared me and a sense of de-
in the face,
gradation accompanying my consciousness
of ray own utter and desolate helplessness,
was the keenest shaft in the quiver,
whose contents were lodged in my heart.
My consequence Avas actually lessened in
my own by ceasing to become the
eyes,
victim of persecution, by which I had
suffered so long. While people think it
worth their while to torment us, we are
never without some dignity, though pain-
ful and imaginary. Even in the Inquisi-
tion I belonged to somebody, I was —
watched and guarded now, I was the
;
—
18 MELMOTH:

outcast of the whole earth, and I wept

with equal bitterness and depression at
the hopeless vastness of the desert I had
to traverse.
" The Jew, not at all disturbed by these
feelings, went daily out for intelligence,
and returned one evening in such raptures,
that I could easily discover he had ascer-
tained his own safety at least, if not mine.
He informed me that the current report in
Madrid was, that I had perished in the
fallof the burning ruins on the night of
the fire. He added, that this report had
received additional currency and strength
from the fact, that the bodies of those who
had perished by the fall of the arch, were,
when discovered, so defaced by fire, and
so crushed by the massive fragments, as
to be utterly undistinguishable ;
—their re-
mains had been collected, however, and
mine were supposed to be among the num-
ber. A mass had been performed for
them, and their cinders, occupying hut a
 A TALE. 19

*, were interred in the vaults

single coffin
of the Dominican church, while some of
the first families of Spain, in the deepest
mourning, and their faces veiled, testified
their grief in silence for those whom they
would have shuddered to acknowledge
their mortal relationship to, had they been
still living. Certainly a lump of cinders
was no longer an object even of religi-
ous hostility. My mother, he added, was
among the number of mourners, but with
a veil so long and thick, and attendance so
few, that it would have been impossible
to have known the Duchess di Mon^ada,
but for the whisper that her appearance
there had been enjoined for penance. He
added, what gave me more perfect satis-
faction, that the holy office was very glad

* This extraordinary fact occurred after the dread-

ful fire which consumed sixteen persons in one house.,

in Stephen's Green^ Dublin, 1816. The writer of
this heard the screams of sufferers whom it was zm^
possible to save^ for an hour and a half
20 MELMOTH :

to accredit the story of my death they

;

wished me to be believed dead, and what

the Inquisition wishes to be believed, is

rarely denied belief in Madrid. This sign-

ing my certificate of death, was to me the
best security for In the communica-
life.

tiveness of his joy, which had expanded

his heart, if not his hospitality, the Jew,
as I swallowed my bread and water, (for
my stomach still loathed all animal food),
informed me that there was a procession to
take place that evening, the most solemn
and superb ever witnessed in Madrid.
The holy office was to appear in all the
pomp and plenitude of its glory, accompa-
nied by the standards of St Dominic and
the cross, while all the ecclesiastical orders
in Madrid were to attend with their ap-
propriate insignia, invested by a strong
military guard, (which, for some reason or
other, was judged necessary or proper),
and, attended by the whole populace of
Madrid, was to proceed to the principal
church to humiliate themselves for the re-
 A TALE. 21

cent calamity they had undergone, and

implore the saints to be more personally
active in the event of a future conflagra-
tion.
" The evening came on — ^the Jew left

me ; and, under an impression at once un-

accountable and irresistible, I ascended
to the highest apartment in his house,
and, with a beating heart, listened for the
toll of the bells that was to announce the
commencement of the ceremony. I had
not long to wait. At the close of twilight,
every steeple in the city was vibrating
with the tolls of their well-plied bells. I
was in an upper room of the house.
There was but one window but, hiding ;

myself behind the blind, which I withdrew

from time to time, I had a full view of the
spectacle. The house
of the Jew looked
out on an open space, through which the
procession was to pass, and which was al-

ready so filled, that I wondered how the

procession could ever make its way through
such a wedged and impenetrable mass. At
 22 MELMOTH:

last, I could distinguish a motion like that

of a distant power, giving a kind of inde-
impulse to the vast body that rolled
finite
and blackened beneath me, like the ocean
under the first and far-felt agitations of the
storm.
" The crowd rocked and reeled, but did
not seem to give way an inch. The pro-
cessioncommenced. I could see it ap-
proach, marked as it was by the crucifix,
—
banner, and taper (for they had reserved
the procession till a late hour, to give it the
imposing effect of torch-light.) And I saw
the multitude at a vast distance give way
at once. Then came on the stream of the
procession, rushing, like a magnificent
river, between two banks of human bo-
dies, who kept as regular and strict dis-

tance, as if they had been ramparts of

stone,^ —
the banners, and crucifixes, and
tapers, appearing like the crests of foam
on advancing billows, sometimes rising,
sometimes sinking. At last they came on,
and the whole grandeur of the procession
 —

A TALE. 23

burst on my view, and nothing was ever

more imposing, or more magnificent. The
habits of the ecclesiastics, the glare of the
torches struggling with the dying twilight,
and seeming to say to heaven. have a We
sun though your's is set ;
—
the solemn and
resolute look of the whole party, who trod
as if their march were on the bodies of
kings, and looked as if they would have
said. What is the sceptre to the cross ?

the black crucifix itself, trembling in the

rear, attended by the banner of St Domi-
nick, with its awful inscription. It was a —
sight to convert and I exulted I
all hearts,

was a Catholic. Suddenly a tumult seem-

ed to arise among the crowd I knew not —
from what it could arise all seemed so—
pleased and so elated.
" I drew away the blind, and saw, by
torch-light, among a crowd of officials who
clustered round the standard of St Domi-
nick, the figure of my companion. His
story was well known. At first a faint
hiss was heard, then a wild and smothered
 :

24i MELMOTH
howl. Then I heard voices among the
crowd repeat, in audible sounds, " What
is this for ? Why
do they ask why the
Inquisition has been half-burned? why —
the virgin has withdrawn her protection ?
—why the saints turn away their faces
from us? —when a parricide marches a-
mong the officials of the Inquisition. Are
the hands that have cut a father's throat
fit to support the banner of the cross?"
These were the words but of a few at first,
but the whisper spread rapidly among the
crowd ; and fierce looks were darted, and
hands were clenched and raised, and some
stooped to the earth for stones. The pro-
cession went on, however, and every one
knelt to the crucifixes as they advanced,
held aloft by the priests. But the mur-
murs increased too, and the words, " par-
ricide, profanation, and victim," resounded
on every side, even from those who knelt
in the mire as the cross passed by. The
murmur increased — it could no longer be
mistaken for that of adoration. The fore-
 A TALE. 25

most priests paused in terror ill concealed

— and this seemed the signal for the terri-
ble scene that was about to follow. An
officer belonging to the guard at this time

ventured to intimate to the chief Inquisi-

tor the danger that might be apprehended,
but was dismissed with the short and sul-

len answer, "Move on— the servants of

Christ have nothing to fear." The proces-
sion attempted to proceed, but their pro-
gress was obstructed by the multitude,
who now seemed bent on some deadly-
purpose. A
few stones were thrown but ;

the moment the priests raised their cruci-

fixes, the multitude were on their knees
again, still, however, holding the stones
in their hands. The miHtary officers a-
gain addressed the chief Inquisitor, and
intreated his permission to disperse the
crowd. Theyreceived the same dull
and stern answer, " The cross is sufficient
for the protection of its servants —what-
ever fears you may feel, I feel none."
Incensed at the reply, a young officer
VOL. III. B
 :

£6 MELMOTH

sprung on his horse, which he had quitted

from respect while addressing the Supre-
ma, and was in a moment levelled by the
blow of a stone that fractured his skull.
He turned his blood-swimming eyes on
the Inquisitor, and died. The multitude
raised a wild shout, and pressed closer.
Their intentions were now too plain.
They pressed close on that part of the pro-
cession among which their victim was
placed. Again, and in the most urgent
terms, the officers implored leave to dis-
perse the crowd, or at least cover the re-
treat of the obnoxious object to some
neighbouring church, or even to the walls
of the Inquisition. And the wretched
man himself, with loud outcries, (as he
saw the danger thickening around him),
joined in their petition. The Supre-
ma, though looking pale, bated not a jot
of his pride. " These are my arms !" he
exclaimed, pointing to the crucifixes, " and
their inscription is 6v-T8rft;-vw«, I forbid a
sword to be drawn, or a musket to be
 A TALE. 27

levelled. On, in the name of God." And

on they attempted to move, but the pres-
sure now rendered it impossible. The mul-
titude, unrepressed by the military, became
ungovernable the crosses reeled and rock-
;

ed like standards in a battle ; the eccle-

siastics, in confusion and terror, pressed on
each other. Amid that vast mass, every
particle of which seemed in motion, there
was but one emphatic and discriminate
—
movement that which bore a certain part
of the crowd strait on to the spot where
their victim, though inclosed and inwrapt
by all that is formidable in earthly, and all
that is awful in spiritual power— sheltered
by the —
and the sword stood trem-
crucifix
bling to the bottom of his soul. The Su-
prema saw his error too late, and now call-
ed loudly on the military to advance, and
disperse the crowd by any means. They
attempted to obey him but by this time
;

they were mingled among the crowd them-

selves. All order had ceased; and besides,
there appeared a kind of indisposition to
28 MELMOTH:

this service,from the very first, among the

military. They attempted to charge, how-
ever but, entangled as they were among
;

the crowd, who clung round their horses

hoofs, it was impossible for them even to
form, and the first shower of stones threw
them into total confusion. The danger
increased every moment, for one spirit now
seemed to animate the whole multitude.
What had been the stifled growl of a few,
—
was now the audible yell of all " Give
—
him to us we must have him ;" and they
tossed and roared like a thousand waves
assailing a wreck. As the military re-
treated, a hundred priests instantly closed
round the unhappy man, and with gene-
rous despair exposed themselves to the fu-
ry of the multitude. While the Suprema,
hastening to the dreadful spot, stood in
the front of the priests, with the cross
uplifted, —
^his facewas like that of the
dead, but his eye had not lost a single
flash of its fire, nor his voice a tone of
 A TALE. 29

its pride. It was in vain; the multi-

tude proceeded calmly, and even respect-
fully, (when not resisted), to remove all

that obstructed their progress; in doing

so, they took every care of the persons of
priests whom they were compelled to re-
move, repeatedly asking their pardon for
the violence they were guilty of. And
this tranquillity of resolved vengeance was
the most direful indication of its never
desisting till its purpose w^as accomplished.
—
The last ring w^as broken the last resister
overcome. Amid yells like those of a
thousand tigers, the victim was seized and
dragged forth, grasping in both hands frag-
ments of the robes of those he had clung
to in vain, and holding them up in the
impotence of despair.
" The cry was hushed for a moment, as
they felt him in their talons, and gazed on
him with thirsty eyes. Then it was re-
newed, and the work of blood began.
They dashed him to the earth —tore hira
 :

30 MELMOTH
—
up again ^flung him into the air tossed —
him from hand to hand, as a bull gores the
howling mastiff with horns right and left.

Bloody, defaced, blackened with earth,

and battered with stones,he struggled and
roared among them, till a loud cry an-
nounced the hope of a termination to a
scene alike horrible to humanity, and dis-
graceful to civilization. The military,
strongly reinforced, came galloping on,
and all the ecclesiastics, with torn habits,
and broken crucifixes, following fast in

the —
rear,^ all eager in the cause of hu-
man nature — all on fire to prevent this
base and barbarous disgrace to the name
of Christianity and of human nature.
'^Alas! this interference only hastened
the horrible catastrophe. There was but
a shorter space for the multitude to work
their furious will. I saw, I felt, but I can-
not describe, the moments of this hor^
last

rible 3cene. Dragged from the mud and

stones, they dashed a mangled lump of
 ;

A TALE. 31

flesh right against the door of the house

where I was. With his tongue hanging
from his lacerated mouth, like that of a
baited bull with one eye torn from the
;

socket, and dangling on his bloody cheek

with a fracture in every limb, and a wound
for every pore, he still howled for " life-
— —
life life mercy !" till a stone, aimed by
some pitying hand, struck him down.
He fell, trodden in one moment into san-
guine and discoloured mud by a thou-
sand feet. The cavalry came on, charg-
ing with fury. The crowd, saturated
with cruelty and blood, gave way in grim
silence. But they had not left a joint of
his little finger —a hair of his head —a slip

of his skin. Had Spain mortgaged all her

reliques from Madrid to Monserrat, fi'om
the Pyrennees to Gibraltar, she could not
have recovered the paring of a nail to ca-
nonize. The officer who headed the troop
dashed hLs horse's hoofs into a bloody form-
less mass, and demanded, *'
Where was
the victim ?" He was answered, " Beneath
 —

32 . MELMOTH:

your
g^^

" It
*****
horse's

is
*

a
feet

fact. Sir,
^;"
*
and they depart-
i^

that while witnessing

*

this horrible execution, I felt all the effects

vulgarly ascribed to fascination. I shud-
dered at the first movement —the dull and
deep whisper among the crowd. I shriek-
ed involuntarily when the first decisive
movements began among them but when ;

at last the human shapeless carrion was

dashed against the door, I echoed the wild
shouts of the multitude with a kind of sa-
vage instinct. I bounded I clasped my —
hands for a moment then I echoed the —
screams of the thing that seemed no lon-
ger to live, but still could scream and I ;

screamed aloud and wildly for life life —

and mercy ! One face was turned towards

* This circumstance occurred in Ireland 1797,

after the murder of the unfortunate Dr Hamilton.
The officer was answered, on inquiring what was that
Ixeap of mud at his horse's feetj— " The m^n yo\^

came for,"
 A TALE. S3

me as I shrieked in unconscious tones.

The glance, fixed on me for a moment,
was in a moment withdrawn. The
flash of the well-known eyes made no
impression on me then. My existence
was so purely mechanical, that, without
the least consciousness of my own danger,
(scarce less than that of the victim, had I
been detected), I remained uttering shout
for shoutj and scream for scream offering —
worlds in imagination to be able to remove
from the window, yet feeling as if every
shriek I uttered was as a nail that fastened
—
me to it dropping my eye-lids, and feel-
ing as if a hand held them open, or cut
—
them away forcing me to gazt on all that
passed below, like Regulus, with his lids
cut off, compelled to gaze on the sun that
withered lip his eye-balLs —
till sense, and

sight,and soul, failed me, and I, fell grasp-

ing by the bars of the window, and mi-
micking, in my horrid trance, the shouts
of the multitude, and the yell of the de-
B 2
 —

34 MELMOTH :

voted % I actually for a moment believed

myself the object of their cruelty. The
drama of terror has the irresistible power
of converting its audience into its victims.
" The Jew had kept apart from the tu-
mult of the night. He had, I suppose,

* In the year 1803, when Emmett's insurrection

broke out in Dublin-^(^Ae Jhct from which this ac-

count is drawn was related to me by an eye-witness)

Lord Kilwarden, in passing through Thomas Street,
was dragged from his carriage, and murdered in the
most horrid manner. Pike after pike was thrust
through his body, till at last he was nailed to a door,
and called out to his murderers to ^^ put him out of
his pain/' At this moment, a shoemaker, who lodged
in the garret of an opposite house, was drawn to the
window by the horrible cries he heard. He stood at
the window, gasping with horror, his wife attempting
vainly to drag him away. He saw the last blow
struck —he heard the last groan uttered, as the suf-
ferer cried, '^
put me out of pain," while sixty pikes
were thrusting at him. The man stood at his win-
dow as if nailed to it ; and when dragged from it,
became—an idiot for life.
 —

A TALE. S5

been saying within himself, in the lan-

guage of your admirable poet,
'^ Oh_, Father Abraham^ what these Christians are !"

But when he returned at a late hour, he

was struck with horror at the state in
which he found me. I was delirious,
raving, and all he could say or do to soothe
me, was in vain. My imagination had
been fearfully impressed, and the conster-
nation of the poor Jew was, I have been
told, equally ludicrous and dismal. In his
terror, he forgot all the technical formality
of the Christian names by which he had
uniformly signalized his household, since
his residence in Madrid at least. He call-

ed aloud on Maiiasseh-ben- Solomon his

son, and Rebekah his maid, to assist in
holding me. ** Oh, Father Abraham, my
ruin is certain, this maniac will discover
all, and Manasseh-ben- Solomon, my son,

will die un circumcised."

" These words operating on my deli-
rium, I started up, and, grasping the Jew
 :

36 SIELMOTH

by the throat, arraigned him as a prisoner

of the Inquisition. The terrified wretch,
falling on his knees, vociferated, " My
cock, — —
my cock, my cock oh I am un- ! !

done !" Then, grasping my knees, " I am

—
no Jew, my son, Manasseh-ben- Solomon,
is a Christian you will not betray him,
;

you will not betray me^ me who have —

saved your life. Manasseh, —I mean An-
tonio, —Kebekah,— no, Maria, help me to
hold him. Oh God of Abraham, my
cock, and my sacrifice of expiation, and
this maniac to burst on the recesses of our
privacy, to tear open the veil of the taber-
nacle 1" —" Shut the tabernacle," said Re-
bekah, the old domestic whom I have be-
fore mentioned ;
" yea, shut the tabernacle,
and close up the veils thereof, for behold
there be men knocking at the door, —men
who are children of Belial, and they knock
with staff and stone ; and, verily, they are
about to break in the door, and demolish
the carved work thereof with axes and
hammers," —" Thou liest," said the Jew,
 A TALE. 3T

in much perturbation :
" there is no carved
work thereabout, nor dare they break it
down with axes and hammers peradven- ;

ture it is but an assault of the children of

Belial, in their riotingand drunkenness.
I pray thee, Rebekah, to watch the door,
and keep off the sons of Belial, even the
sons of the mighty of the sinful city the —
city of Madrid, while I remove this blas-
pheming carrion, who struggleth with me,
— yea, struggleth mightily," (and struggle
I did mightily). But, as I struggled, the
knocks at the door became louder and
stronger and, as I was carried off, the
;

Jew continued to repeat, " Set thy face a-

gainst them, Bebekah yea, set thy
; face
like a flint." As he retired, Bebekah ex-
claimed, " Behold I have set my back a-
gainst them, for my face now availeth not.
My back is that which I will oppose, and
verily I shall prevail." —" I pray thee, Be-
bekah," cried the Jew, " oppose thy face
unto them, and verily that shall prevail.
Try not the adversary with thy back, but
 :

38 MELMOTH
oppose thy face unto them and behold, if
;

they are men, they shall flee, even though

they were a thousand, at the rebuke of
one. I pray thee try thy face once more,
Rebekah, while I send this scape-goat
into the wilderness. Surely thy face is
enough to drive away those who knocked
by night at the door of that house in Gi-
beah, in the matter of the wife of the Ben-
jamite." The knocking all this time in-
creased. " Behold my back is broken,"
cried Rebekah, giving up her watch
and ward, " for, of a verky, the wea-

pons of the mighty do smite the lintels

and door-posts; and mine arms are not
steel, neither are my ribs iron, and behold

—
I fail, yea, I fail, and fall backwards into
the hands of the uncircumcised." And so
saying, she fell backwards as the door gave ^

way, and fell not, as she feared, into the

hands of the uncircumcised, but into those

of two of her countrymen, who, it appear-
ed, had some extraordinary reason for this

late visit and forcible entrance.

 A TALE. <
39

" The Jew, apprized who they were,

quitted me, after securing the door, and
sat up the greater part of the night, in
earnest conversation with his visitors.

Whatever was their subject, it left traces

of the most intense anxiety on the coun-
tenance of the Jew the next morning.
He went out early, did not return till a
late hour, and then hastened to the room
I occupied, and expressed the utmost de-
light at finding me sane and composed.
Candles were placed on the table, Rebe-
kah dismissed, the door secured, and the
Jew, after taking many uneasy turns about
the narrow apartment, and often clearing
his throat, at length sat down, and ven-
tured to entrust me with the cause of his
perturbation, in which, with the fatal con-
sciousness of the unhappy, I already be-
gan to feel / must have a share. He told
me, that though the report of my death,
so universally credited through Madrid,
had at first set his mind at ease, there was
now a wild story, which, with all its false-
 —

40 , MELMOTH:

hood and impossibility, might, in its circu-

lation, menace us with the most fearful
consequences. He asked me, was it pos-
sible I could have been so imprudent as to

expose myself to view on the day of that

horrible execution? and when I confessed
that 1 had stood at a window, and had in-
voluntarily uttered cries that I feared
might have reached some ears, he wrung
his hands, and a sweat of consternation
burst out on his pallid features. When he
recovered himself, he told me it was uni-
versally believed that my spectre had ap-
—
peared on that terrible occasion, that I
had been seen hovering in the air, to wit-
ness the sufferings of the dying wretch,
and that my voice had been heard sum-
moning him to his eternal doom. He
added, that this story, possessing all the
credibility of superstition,was now repeat-
ed bv a thousand mouths and whatever
;

contempt might be attached to its absur-

dity, it would infallibly operate as a hint
to the restless vigilance, and unrelaxing
 A TALE. 41

industry of the holy office, and might ulti-

mately lead to my discovery. He there-

fore was about to disclose to me a secret,
the knowledge of which would enable me
to remain in perfect security even in the
centre of Madrid, untilsome means might
be devised of effecting my escape, and
procuring me the means of subsistence in
some Protestant country, beyond the reach
of the Inquisition.
" As he was about to disclose this secret
on which the safety of both depended, .and
which I bent in speechless agony to hear, a
knock was heard at the door, very unlike
the knocks of the preceding night. It w^as
single, solemn, peremptory, —
and followed
by a demand to open the doors of the house
in the name of the most holy Inquisition.
At these terrible words, the wretched Jew
flung himself on his knees, blew out the
candles, called on the names of the twelve
patriarchs, and slipped a large rosary on
his arm, in less time than it is possible to
conceive any human frame could go
 : —

42 MELMOTH
through such a variety of movements.
—
The knock was repeated, I stood para-
lyzed but the Jew, springing on his feet,
;

raised one of the boards of the floor in a

moment, and, with a motion between con-
vulsion and instinct, pointed to me to de-
scend. I didand found myself in a
so,

moment in darkness and in safety.

" I had descended but a few steps, on
the last of which I stood trembling, when
the officers of the Inquisition entered the
room, and stalked over the very board
that concealed me. I could hear every
word that passed. " Don Fernan," said
an officer to the Jew, who re-entered with

them, after respectfully opening the door,

'* why were we not admitted sooner ?"
" Holy Father," said the trembling Jew,
" my only domestic,Maria, is old and
deaf, the youth my son is in his bed, and
I was myself engaged in my devotions."
— ** It seems you can perform them in the

dark," said another, pointing to the can-

dles, which the Jew was re-lighting.
 A TALE. 43

" When the eye ofGod is on me, most

reverend fathers, I am never in darkness."
— " The eye of God is on you," said the
officer, sternly seating himself; "
and so is
another eye, to which he has deputed the
sleepless vigilance and resistless penetra-
tion of his ov/n, — the eye of the holy of-

fice. Don Fernan di Nunez," the name

by which the Jew went, ** you are not ig-
norant of the indulgence extended by the
church, to those who have renounced the
errors of that accursed and misbelieving
race from which you are descended, but
you must be also aware of its incessant vi-
gilance being directed towards such indi-
viduals, from the suspicion necessarily at-
tached to their doubtful conversion, and
possible relapse. We know that the black
blood of Grenada flowed in the tainted
veins of your ancestry, and that not more
than four centuries have elapsed, since your
forefathers trampledon that cross before
which you are now prostrate. You are an
old man, Don Fernan, but not an old
44 •
MELMOTH:
Christian; and, under these circumstan-
ces, it behoves the holy office to have a
watchful scrutiny over your conduct."
" The unfortunate Jew, invoking all the
he would feel the strictest
saints, protested

scrutiny with which the holy office might

honour him, as a ground of obligation and
—
a matter of thanksgiving, renouncing at
the same time the creed of his race in
terms of such exaggeration and vehemence,
as made me tremble for his probable sin-
cerity in any creed, and his fidelity to me.
The officers of the Inquisition, taking
little notice of his protestations, went on
to inform, him of the object of their visit.
They stated that a wild and incredible tale
of the spectre of a deceased prisoner of
the Inquisition having been seen hovering
in the air near his house, had suggested to
the wisdom of the holy office, that the
living individual might be concealed with-
in its walls.
" I could not see the trepidation of the
Jew, but I could feel the vibration of the
 A TALE. 45

boards on which he stood communicated

to the steps that supported me. In a
choaked and tremulous voice, he implored
the officers to search every apartment of
his house, and to raze it to the ground,
and inter him under its dust, if aught
were found in it which a faithful and or-
thodox son of the church might not har-
bour. " That shall doubtless be done,"
said the officer, taking him at his word
with the utmost sangfroid; " but, in the
mean time, suffer me to apprize you, Don
Fernan, of the peril you incur, if at any
future time, however remote, it shall be
discovered that you harboured or aided in
concealing a prisoner of the Inquisition,
and an enemy of the holy church, the —
very first and lightest part of that penalty
will be your dwelling being razed to the
ground." The Inquisitor raised his voice,
and paused with emphatic deliberation be-
tween every clause of the following sen-
tences, measuring as it were the effect of
his blows on the increasing terror of his
 —

46 IklELMOTHJ

auditor. " You will be conveyed to ouf

prison, under the suspected character of a
relapsed Jew. Your son wdll be commit-
ted to a convent, to remove him from the
pestilential influence of your presence ;—
and your whole property be confis- shall
your walls, the
cated, to the last stone in
last garment, on your person, and the last

denier in your purse.

" The poor Jew, who had marked the
gradations of his fear by groans more audi-
ble and end of every tre-
prolonged at the
mendous denunciatory clause, at the men-
tion of confiscation so total and desolating,
lost all self-possession, and, ejaculating
"Oh Father Abraham, and all the holy
prophets !'^ — ^fell, as I conjectured from the
sound, prostrate on the floor. I gave my-
self up for lost. Exclusive of his pusilla-
nimity, the words he had uttered were c-
nough to betray him to the oflicers of the
Inquisition ; and, without a moment's he-
sitation between the danger of falling into
their hands, and plunging into the dark-
 A TALE. •
47

ness of the recess into which I had de-

scended, I staggered down a few remain-
ing steps, and attempted to feel my way
along a passage, in which they seemed to
terminate.
 CHAPTER XIII.

There sat a spirit in the vault,

in shape, in hue, in lineaments, like life.

Southey's Thalaba.

**
JL AM convinced, that, had the passage
been as long and intricate as any that ever
an antiquarian pursued to discover the
tomb of Cheops in the Pyramids, I would
have rushed on in the blindness of my des-
peration, till famine or exhaustion had

compelled me to pause. But I had no

—
such peril to encounter, the floor of the
passage was smooth, and the walls were
 A TALE. 49

matted, and though I proceeded in dark-

ness, I proceeded in safety and provided ;

my progress removed me far enough from

the pursuit or discovery of the Inquisition,
I scarcely cared how it might terminate.
" Amid this temporary magnanimity of
despair, this state of mind which unites
the extremes of courage and pusillani-
mity, I saw a faint light. Faint it was,
but it was distinct, —I saw clearly it was
light. Great God! what a revulsion in
my blood and heart, in all my physical and
mental feelings, did this sun of my world
of darkness create! I venture to say,
that my speed in approaching it was in
the proportion of one hundred steps to
one, compared to my crawling progress in
the preceding darkness. As I approached,
I could discover that the light gleamed
through the broad crevices of a door,
which, disjointed by subterranean damps,
gave me as full a view of the apart-
ment within, as if it were opened t®
VOL. IIL c
 :

50 MELMOTH
me by the inmate. Through one of
these crevices, before which I knelt in a
mixture of exhaustion and curiosity, I
could reconnoitre the whole of the inte-
rior.
" It was a large apartment, hung with
dark-coloured baize within four feet of the
floor, and this intermediate part was thick-
ly matted, probably to intercept the sub-
terranean damps. In the centre of the
room stood a table covered with black
cloth it supported an iron lamp of an an-
;

tique and singular form, by whose light I

had been directed, and was now enabled
to descry furniture that appeared sufficient-
ly extraordinary. There were, amid maps
and globes, several instruments, of which
my ignorance did not permit me then to
know —
the use, some, I have since learn-
ed, were anatomical there was an electri-
;

fying machine, and a curious model of a

rack in ivory there were few books, but
;

several scrolls of parchment, inscribed with

 —

A TALE. 51

large characters in red and ochre coloured

ink; and around the room were placed
four skeletons, not in cases, but in a kind
of upright coffin, that gave their bony
emptiness a kind of ghastly and impera-
tive prominence, as if they were the real
and rightful tenants of that singular apart-
ment. Interspersed between them were
the stuffed figures of animals I knew not
then the names of, —an alligator, —some
gigantic bones, which I took for those of
Sampson, but which turned out to be
fragments of those of the Mammoth,
and antlers, which in my terror I believed
to be those of the devil, but afterwards
learned to be those of an Elk. Then I
saw figures smaller, but not less horrible,

human and brute abortions, in all their

states of anomalous and deformed con-
struction, not preserved in spirits, but
standing in the ghastly nakedness of their
white diminutive bones ; these I conceiv-
ed to be the attendant imps of some infer-
 ;

52 „ MELMOTH :

nal ceremony, which the grand wizard,

who now burst on my sight, was to pre-
side over.
"At the end of the table sat an old
man, wrapped in a head was
long robe ; his
covered with a black velvet cap, with a
broad border of furs, his spectacles were of
such a size as almost to hide his face, and
he turned over some scrolls of parchment
with an anxious and trembling hand
then seizing a scull that lay on the table,
and grasping it in fingers hardly less bony,
and not less yellow, seemed to apostrophize
it in the most earnest manner. All my
personal fears were lost in the thought of
my being the involuntary witness of some
infernal orgie. I was still kneeling at the
door, when my long suspended respiration
burst forth in a groan, which reached the
figure seated at the table in a moment.
Habitual vigilance supplied all the defects
of age on the part of the listener. It was
but the sensation of a moment to feel the
door thrown open, my arm seized by an
 A TALE. 03

arm powerful though withered by age, and

myself, as I thought, in the talons of a
demon.
"The door was closed and bolted. An
awful figure stood over me, (for I had
fallen on the floor), and thundered out,
" Who art thou,
and why art thou here ?"
I knew not what to answer, and gazed
with a fixed and speechless look on the
skeletons and the other furniture of this
terrible vault. " Hold," said the voice,
" thou art indeed exhausted, and needest
if

refreshment, drink of this cup, and thou

shalt be refreshed as with wine ; verily, it
shall come into thy bowels'* as water, and
as oil into thy bones," —and as he spoke he
offered to me
cup with some liquid in it.
a
I repelled him and
his drink, which I
had not a doubt was some magical drug,
with horror unutterable; and losing all
other fears in the overwhelming one of be-
coming a slave of Satan, and a victim of
one of his agents, as 1 believed this extra-
ordinary figure^ I called on the name of
54i MELMOTH:

the Saviour and the saints, and, cross-

ing myself at every sentence, exclaimed,
" No, tempter, keep your infernal potions
for the leprous lips of your imps, or swal-
low them yourself. I have but this
moment escaped from the hands of the
Inquisition, and a million times rather
would I return and yield myself their vic-
tim, than consent to become yours, your —
tender- mercies are the only cruelties I
dread. Even in the prison of the holy
office, where the faggots appeared to be
lit before my eyes, and the chain already

fastened round my body to bind it to the

stake, I was sustained by a power that en-
abled me to embrace objects so terrible to
nature, sooner than escape them at the
price of my salvation. The choice was
offered me, and I made my election, and —
so would I do were it to be offered a thou-
sand times, though the last were at the
stake, and the fire already kindling."
Here the Spaniard paused in some agi-
tation^ In the enthusiasm of his narra-
 A TALE. 55

tion, he had in some degree disclosed that

secret which he had declared was incom-
municable, except in confessing to a priest.

M'elmoth, who, from the narrative of

Stanton, had been prepared to suspect
something of this, did not think prudent
to press him for a farther disclosure, and
waited in silence till his emotion had sub-
sided, without remark or question. Mon-
9ada at length resumed his narrative.
" While I was speaking, the old man
viewed me
with a look of calm surprise,
that made me ashanjed of my fears, even
before I had ceased to utter them.
" What !" said he at length, fixing appa-
rently on some expressions that struck
him, " art thou escaped from the arm
that dealeth its blow in darkness, even the
arm of the Inquisition ? Art thou that
Nazarene youth who sought refuge in the
house of our brother Solomon, the son of
Hilkiah, who is called Fernan Nunez by
the idolaters in this land of his captivity ?
Verily 1 trusted thou shouldst this night
 :

56 HELMOTH
have eat of my bread, and drank of my
cup, and been unto me as a scribe, for our
brother Solomon testified concerning thee,
saying. His pen is even as the pen of a
ready writer."
" I gazed at him in astonishment. Some
vague recollections of Solomon's being a-
bout to disclose some safe and secret re-
treat wandered over my mind and, while
;

trembling at the singular apartment in

which we were seated, and the employ-
ment in which he seemed engaged, I yet
felt a hope hover about my heart, which

his knowledge of my situation appeared to

justify. " Sit down," said he, observing
with compassion that I was sinking alike
under the exhaustion of fatigue and the
distraction of terror " sit down, and eat
;

a morsel of bread, and drink a cup of

wine, and comfort thine heart, for thou
seemest to be as one who hath escaped
from the snare of the fowler, and from the
dart of the hunter." I obeyed him invo-

luntarily. I needed the refreshment he

 ;

A TALE. 57

offered, and was about to partake of

it, when an irresistible feeling of re-
pugnance and horror overcame me and, ;

as 1 thrust away the food he offered me, I

pointed to the objects around me as the
cause of my reluctance. He looked round
for a moment, as doubting whether ob-
jects so familiar to him, could be repul-
sive to a stranger, and then shaking his
head, " Thou art a fool," said he, " but
thou art and I pity thee
a Nazarene,
verily, those who had the teaching of thy
youth, not only have shut the book of
knowledge to thee, but have forgot to open
it for themselves. Were not thy masters,
the Jesuits, masters also of the healing
art, and art thou not acquainted with the
sight of its ordinary implements ? Eat, I
pray thee, and be satisfied that none of
these will hurt thee. Yonder dead bones
cannot weigh out or withhold thy food
nor can they bind thy joints, or strain
them with iron, or rend them with steel,
aswould the living arms that were stretch-
c 21
 —

5S MELMOTH : .

ed forth to seize thee as their prey. And,

as the Lord of hosts liveth, their prey
wouldst thou have been, and a prey unto
their iron and steel, were it not for the
shelter of the roof of Adonijah to-night."
" I took some of the food he offered me,
crossing myself at every mouthful, and
drank the wine, which the feverish thirst
of terror and anxiety made me swallow
like water, but not without an internal
prayer that it might not be converted into
some deleterious and diabolical poison.
The Jew Adonijah observed me with
increasing compassion and contempt.
" What," said he, " appals thee ? Were I
possessed of the powers the superstition of
thy sect ascribes to me, might I not make
thee a banquet for fiends, instead of offer-
ing thee food ? Might I not bring from
the caverns of the earth the voices of those
that " peep and mutter," instead of speak-
ing unto thee with the voice of man ?

Thou art in my power, yet have I no

power or "wiU to hurt thee. And dost
 A TALE. 59

thou, who art from the dunr

escaped
geons of the Inquisition, look as one that
feareth on the things that thou seest a-
round thee, the furniture of the ceil

of a secluded leach ? Within this apart-

ment Ihave passed the term of sixty
years, and dost thou shudder to visit it
for a moment ? These be the skeletons of
bodies, but in the den thou hast escaped
from were the skeletons of perished souls.
Here are relics of the wrecks or the ca-
prices of nature, but thou art come from
where the cruelty of man, permanent and
persevering, unrelenting and unmitigated,
hath never failed to leave the proofs of its

power in abortive intellects, crippled frames,

distorted creeds, and ossified hearts. More-
over, there are around thee parchments
and charts scrawled as it were with the
blood of man, but, were it even so, could
a thousand such volumes cause such terror
to the human eye, as a page of the history
€f thy prison, written as it is in blood,
 :

60 MELMOTH
drawn, not from the frozen veins of the
dead, but from the bursting hearts of the
living. Eat, Nazarene, there is no poi-
—
son in thy food, drink, there is no drug
in thy cup. Darest thou promise thyself
that in the prison of the Inquisition, or
even in the cells of the Jesuits ? Eat and
drink without fear in the vault, even in
the vault of Adonijah the Jew. If thou
daredst to have done so in the dwellings
of the Nazarenes, I had never beheld thee
here. Hast thou fed?" he added, and I
bowed. " Hast thou drank of the cup I
gave thee ?" my torturing thirst returned,
and I gave him back the cup. He smiled,
—
but the smile of age, the smile of lips
over which more than an hundred years
have passed, has an expression more repul-
sive and hideous than can be deemed it ;

is never the smile of pleasure, — it is a

frown of the mouth, and I shrunk before
its grim wrinkles, as the Jew Adonijah

added, ** If thou hast eat and drank, it is

 A TALE, 61

time for thee to rest. Come to thy bed,

it may be harder than they have given

thee in thy prison, but behold it shall be

safer. Come and rest thee there, it may
be that the adversary and the enemy shall
not there find thee out."
" I followed him through passages so de-
vious and intricate, that, bewildered as I
was with the events of the night, they
forced on my memory the well-known
fact, that in Madrid the Jews have sub-

terranean passages to each other's habita-

tions, which have hitherto baffled all the
industry of the Inquisition. I slept that
night, or rather day, the sun had
(for

risen), on a pallet on the floor of a

laid
room, small, lofty, and matted half-way
up the walls. One narrow and grated
window admitted the light of the sun,
that arose after that eventful night ; and
amid the sweet sound of bells, and the
still sweeter of human life, awake and in
motion around me, I sunk into a slumber
62 MELMOTH
/

that was unbroken even by a dream, till

the day was closing ; or, in the language

of Adonijah, " till the shadows of the
evening were upon the face of all the
earth."
 CHAPTER XIV.

Unde iratos deos timent, qui sic propitios merentur ?

Seneca,

**
When I awoke, he was standing by
my pallet. " Arise," said he, " eat and
drink, that thy strength may return unto
thee." He pointed to a small table as he
spoke, which was covered with food of the
plainest kind, and dressed with the utmost
simplicity. Yet he seemed to think an
apology was necessary for the indulgence
of this temperate fare. " I myself," said
 ;

64 MELMOTH:

he, " eat not the flesh of any animal, save

on the new moons and the feasts, yet the
days of the years of my Hfe have been one
hundred and seven sixty of which have
;

been passed in the chamber where thou

sawest me. Rarely do I ascend to the
upper chamber of this house, save on occa-
sions like this, or peradventure to pray,
with my window open towards the east,
for the turning away wrath from Jacob,
and the turning again the captivity of
Zion. Well saith the ethnic leach,

" Aer exclusus confert ad longevitatem/'

" Such hath been my life, as I tell thee.

The light of heaven hath been hidden from
mine eyes, and the voice of man is as the
voice of a stranger in mine ears, save those
of some of mine own nation, who weep for
the affliction of Israel ; yet the silver cord
isnot loosed, nor the golden bowl broken
and though mine eye be waxing dim, my
natural force is not abated." (As he spoke.
 — ;

A TALE. 65

my eyes hung in reverence on the hoary

majesty of his patriarchal figure, and 1 felt

as if I beheld an embodied representation

of the old law in all its stern simplicity
the unbending grandeur, and primeval an-
tiquity.) " Hast thou eaten, and art full ?

Arise, then, and follow me."

" We descended to the vault, where I
found the lamp was always burning. And
Adonijah, pointing to the parchments that
lay on the table, said, " This is the matter
wherein I need thy help; the collection
and transcription whereof hath been the
labour of more than half a life, prolonged
beyond the bounds allotted to mortality
but," pointing to his sunk and blood-shot
eyes, " those that look out of the windows
begin to be darkened, and I feel that I
need help from the quick hand and clear
eye of youth. Wherefore, it being certi-
fied unto me by our brother, that thou
wert a youth who couldst handle the pen
of a scribe, and, moreover, wast in need of
a city of refuge, and a strong wall of de«
 :

66 MELMOTH
fence, against the laying-in-wait of thy
j

brethren round about thee, I was Trill-

ing that thou shouldst come under my

roof, and eat of such things as I set before
thee, and such as thy soul desireth, except-
ing only the abominable things forbidden
in the law of the prophet and shouldst,
;

moreover, receive wages as an hired ser-

vant."
" You will perhaps smile, Sir; but even
in my wretched situation, I felta slight
but painful flush tinge my cheek, at the
thought of a Christian, and a peer of Spain,
becoming the amanuensis of a Jew for hire.
Adonijah continued, " Then, when my
task is completed, then will I be gathered
to my fathers, trusting surely in the Hope
of Israel, that mine eyes shall " behold the
King in his beauty, —they shall see the
land that is very far off" And peradven-
ture,"he added, in a voice that grief ren-
dered solemn, mellow, and tremulous,
" peradventure there shall I meet in bliss,
those with whom I parted in woe*— even
 A TALE. 67

thou, Zachariab, the son of my loins, and

thou, Leah, the wife of my bosom ;" apo-
strophizing two of the silent skeletons that

stood near. " And in the presence of the

God of our fathers, the redeemed of Zion
shall —
meet and meet as those who are to
part no more for ever and ever." At these
words, he closed his eyes, lifted up his
hands, and appeared to be absorbed in
mental prayer. Grief had perhaps sub-
—
dued my prejudices it had certainly sof-
—
tened my heart and at this moment I
half-believed that a Jew might find en-
trance and adoption amid the family and
fold of the blessed. This sentiment ope-
rated on my human sympathies, and I in-
quired, with unfeigned anxiety, after the
fate of Solomon the Jew, whose misfortune
in harbouring me had exposed him to the
visit of the Inquisitors. " Be at peace,"
said Adonijah, waving his bony and wrin-
kled hand, as if dismissing a subject below
his present feelings, " our 'brother Solo^

mon is in no peril of death ; neither shall

6S MELMOTH.-

his goods be taken for a spoil. If our ad-

yei'saries are mighty in power, so are we
mighty also to deal with them by our
wealth or our wisdom. Thy flight they
never can trace, thy existence on the face
of the earth shall also be unknown to them,
so thou wilt hearken to me, and heed my
words."
" I could not speak, but my expression
of mute and imploring anxiety spoke for
me. " Thou didst use words," said Ado-
nijah, " last night, w^hereof, though I re-
member not all the purport, the sound yet
maketh mine ears to tingle; even mine,
which have not vibrated to such sounds
for four times the space of thy youthful
years. Thou saidst thou wert beset by a
power that tempted thee to renounce the
Most High, whom Jew and Christian alike
profess to worship; and that thou didst
declare, that were the fires kindled around
thee, thou wouldst spit at the tempter, and
trample on the offer, though thy foot press-
ed the coal which the sons of Dominick
 —

A TALE. 69

were lighting beneath naked sole."

its

did—and I would—
« 1 did," I cried, " I
So help me God in mine extremity."
" Adonijah paused for a moment, as if
considering whether this were a burst of
passion, or a proof of mental energy. He
seemed at last inclined to believe it the
latter, though all men
of far- advanced age
are apt to distrust any marks of emotion
as a demonstration rather of weakness than
of sincerity. " Then," said he, after a long
and solemn pause, " then thou shalt know
the secret that hath been a burthen to the
soul of Adonijah, even as his hopeless soli-
tude is a burthen to the soul of him who
traverseth the desert,none accompanying
him with step, or cheering him with voice.
From my youth upward, even until now,
have I laboured, and behold the time of
my deliverance is at hand yea, and shall
;

be accomplished speedily.
" In the days of my childhood, a ru-
mour reached mine ears, even mine, of a
being sent abroad on the earth to tempt
 :

70 MELMOTH

Jew and Nazarene, and even the disciples

of Mohammed, whose name is accursed in
the mouth of our nation, with offers of de-
liverance at their utmost need and extre-
mity, so they would do that which my lips
dare not utter, even though there be no
ear to receive it but thine. Thou shud-
derest — well, then, thou art sincere, at
least, in thy faith of errors. I listened to
the tale, and mine ears received it, even as
the soul of the thirsty drinketh in rivers
of water, for my mind was full of the vain
fantasies of the Gentile fables, and I long-
ed, in the perverseness of my spirit, to see,

yea, and to consort with, yea, and to deal

with, the evil one in his strength. Like
our fathers in the wilderness, I despised
angel's food, and lusted after forbidden
meats, even the meats of the Egyptian
sorcerers. -And my presumption was re-
buked as thou seest: — childless, wifeless,

friendless, at the last period of an existence

prolonged beyond the bounds of nature,
am I now left, and, save thee alone, with-
 A TALE. 71

out one to record its events. I wiil not

trouble thee now with the tale of my
eventful life, farther than to tell thee, that
the skeletons thou treinblest to behold,
were once clothed in flesh far fairer than
thine. They are those of my wife and
child, whose history thou must not now
—
hear but those of the two others thou
must both hear and relate." And he
pointed to the two other skeletons oppo-
site, in their upright cases. " On my re-
turn to my country, even Spain, if a Jew
can be said to have a country, I set myself
down on this seat, and, lighted by this
lamp, I took in my hand the pen of a
scribe, and vowed by a vow, that this lamp
should not expire, nor this seat be forsaken,
nor this vault untenanted, until that the
recordis written in a book, and sealed as

with the king's signet. But, behold, I

was traced by those who are keen of scent,
and quick of pursuit, even the sons of Do-
minick. And they seized me, and laid
my feet fast in the bonds ; but my writ-
7^ MELMOTH:
ings they could not read, because they
were traced in a character unknown to
this idolatrous people. And behold, after
a space they set me free, finding no cause
of offence in me and they bade me de-
;

part,and trouble them no more. Then

vowed I ^ vow unto the God of Israel,
who had delivered me from their thral-
dom, that none but he who could read
these characters should ever transcribe
them. Moreover, I prayed, and said, O
Lord God of Israel who knowest that we
!

are the sheep of thy fold, and our enemies

as wolves round about us, and as lions who
roar for their evening prey, grant, that a
Nazarene escaped from their hands, and
fleeing unto us, even as a bird chased from
her nest, may put to shame the weapons
of the mighty, and laugh them to scorn.
Grant also, Lord God of Jacob, that he
may be exposed to the snare of the enemy,
even as those of whom I have written, and
that he may spit at it with his mouth, and
spurn at it with his feet, and trample on
 ;

A TALE. 73

th-e ensnarer, even as they have trampled

and then shall my soul, even mine, have
peace at the last. Thus I prayed — and
my prayer was heard, for behold, thou art
here."
" As I heard these w^ords, a horrid fore-
boding, like a night-mare of the heart,
hung heavily on me. 1 looked alternately
at the withering speaker, and the hopeless
task. To bear about that horrible secret
inurned in my heart, was not that enough?
but to be compelled to scatter its ashes a-
broad, and to rake into the dust of others
for the same purpose of unhallowed expo-
sure, revolted me beyond feelingand ut-
terance. As my eye fell listlessly on the

manuscripts, 1 saw they contained only the

Spanish language written in the Greek
characters —a mode of writing that, I
easily conceived, must have been as unin-
telligible to the officers of the Inquisition,
as the Hieroglyphics of the Egyptian
priests. Their ignorance, sheltered by
their pride, and that still more strongly
VOL. III. D
 : j

74 MELMOTH
by the impenetrable secresy at-
fortified
tached to their most minute proceedings,
made them hesitate to entrust to any one
the circumstance of their being in pos-
session of manuscript which they could
not decypher. So they returned the pa-
pers to Adonijah, and, in his own language,
" Behold, he abode in safety." But to me
this was a task of horror unspeakable. I
felt myself as an added link to the chain
the end of which, held by an invisible
hand, was drawing me to perdition and ;

I was now to become the recorder of my

own condemnation.
As I turned over the leaves with a
**

trembling hand, the towering form of A-

donijah seemed dilated with preternatural
emotion. " And what dost thou tremble at,
child of the dust ?" he exclaimed, " if thou
liast been tempted, so have they — if thou
hast resisted, so have they —if they are at
rest, so shalt thou be. There is not a pang
of soul or body thou hast undergone, or
 —

A TALE. 75

canst undergo, that they have not suffered

before thy birth was dreamt of. Boy^
thy hand trembles over pages it is un-
worthy to touch, yet still I must employ
thee, for I need thee. Miserable link of
necessity, that binds together minds so un-
congenial I would that the ocean were my
!

ink, and the rock my page, and mine arm,

even mine, the pen that should write there-
on letters that should last like those on
the written mountains for ever and ever
even the mount of Sinai, and those that
still bear the record, " Israel hath passed
the flood *." As he spoke, I again turned
over the manuscripts. Does thy hand
**

tremble still?" -said Adonijah; "and dost

* Written mountainSj L e. rocks inscribed with

characters recordative of some remarkable events are
well known to every oriental traveller. I think it is

in the notes of Dr Coke, on the book of Exodus,

that I have met with the circumstance alluded to a-
bove. A rock near the Red Sea is said once to have
borne the inscription, ^^ Israel hath passed the flood>"
 : !

76 MELMOTH
thou still hesitate to record the story of
those whose destiny a link, wondrous, in-
visible, and indissoluble, has bound to
thine. Behold, there are those near thee,
who, though they have no longer a tongue,
speak to thee with that eloquence which is
stronger than all the eloquence of living
tongues. Behold, there are those around
thee, whose mute and motionless arms of
bone plead to thee as no arms of flesh ever
pleaded. Behold, there are those who, be-
—
ing speechless, yet speak who, being dead,
are yet alive —
who, though in the abyss of
eternity, are yet around thee, and call on
thee, as with a mortal voice. Hear them
—take the pen in thine hand, and write."
I took the pen in my hand, but could not
write a line. Adonijah, in a transport of
ecstasy, snatching a skeleton from its re-
ceptacle, placed it before me. " Tell him
thy story thyself, peradventure he will be-
lieve thee, and record it." And support-
ing the skeleton with one hand, he point-
ed with the other, as bleached and bony
 A TALE. 77

as that of the dead, to the manuscript that

lay before me.
" It was a night of storms in the world
above us ; and, far below the surface of
the earth as we were, the murmur of the
winds, sighing through the passages, came
on my ear like the voices of the departed,
— like the pleadings of the dead. Invo-
luntarily I fixed my eye on the manu-
script I was to copy, and never withdrew
till I had finished its extraordinary con-
tents.

*« There isan island in the Indian sea,

not many leagues from the mouth of
the Hoogly, which, from the peculiarity
of its situation and internal circumstances,
 :

78 MELMOTH
long remained unknown to Europeans,
and unvisited by the natives of the conti-
guous islands, except on remarkable occa-
sions. It is surrounded by shallows that
render the approach of any vessel of
weight impracticable, and fortified by
rocks that threatened danger to the slight
canoes of the natives, but was rendered
it

still more formidable by the terrors with

which superstition had invested it. There

was a tradition that the first temple to the
black goddess Seeva*, had been erected
there and her hideous idol, with its collar
;

of human sculls, forked tongues darting

from its twenty serpent mouths, and seat-
ed on a matted coil of adders, had there
first recieved the bloody homage of the

mutilated limbs and immolated infants of

her worshippers.
" The temple had been overthrown, and
the island half depopulated, by an earth-
quake, that agitated all the shores of In-

* Vide Maxirice's Indian Antiquities,

 A T4.LE. 79

dia. It was rebuilt, however, by the zeal

of the worshippers, who again began to
re-visit the island, when a tufaun of fury
unparalleled even in those fierce latitudes,
burst over the devoted spot. The pagoda
was burnt by the lightning the
to ashes ;

inhabitants, their and their

dwellings,
plantations, swept away as with the besom
of destruction, and not a trace of humani-
ty, cultivation, or life, remained in the
desolate isle. The devotees consulted
their imagination for the cause of these
calamities ; and, while seated under the
shade of their cocoa-trees they told their
long strings of coloured beads, they as-
cribed it to the wrath of the goddess
Seeva at the increasing popularity of the
worship of Juggernaut. They asserted
that her image had been seen ascending a-
mid the blaze of lightning that consumed
her shrine and blasted her worshippers as
they clung to it for and firmly
protection,
believed she had withdrawn to some hap-
pier isle, where she might enjoy her feast
80 UEhUOTll :

of and draught of blood, unmolest-

flesh,

ed by the worship of a rival deity. So

the island remained desolate, and without
inhabitant for years.
" The crews of European vessels, assured
by the natives that there was neither ani-
mal, or vegetable, or water, to be found on
its surface, forbore to visit and the In-
;

dian of other isles, he passed it in his

as
canoe, threw a glance of melancholy fear
at its desolation, and flung something over-
board to propitiate the wrath of Seeva.
" The island, thus left to itself, became
vigorously luxuriant, some neglected
as
children improve in health and strength,
while pampered darlings die under exces-
sive nurture. Flowers bloomed, and fo-
liage thickened, without a hand to pluck,
a step to trace, or a lip to taste them,
when some (who had been
fishermen,
driven by a strong current toward the isle,
and worked with oar and sail in vain to
avoid its dreaded shore), after making a
 A TALE. 81

thousand prayers to propitiate Seeva, were

compelled to approach within an oar's length
of it ; and, unex-
on their return in
pected safety, reported they had heard
sounds so exquisite, that some other god-
dess, milder than Seeva, must have fixed
on that spot for her residence. The
younger fishermen added to this account,
that they had beheld a female figure of
supernatural loveliness, glide and disap-
pear amid the foliage which now luxu-
riantly overshadowed the rocks and, in ;

the spirit of Indian devotees, they hesi-

tated not to call this delicious vision an in-
carnated emanation of Vishnu, in a love-
lier form than ever he had appeared be-
fore, —
at least far beyond that which he
assumed, when he made one of his avatars
in the figure of a tiger.
" The inhabitants of the islands, as super-
stitious as they were imaginative, deified the
vision of the isles after their manner. The
old devotees, while invoking her, stuck
close to the bloody rites of Seeva and Ha-
D 2
82 MELMOTH :

ree, and muttered many a horrid vow over

their beads, which they took care to ren-
der effectual by striking sharp reeds into
their arms, and tinging every bead with
blood as they spoke. The young women
rowed their light canoes as near as they
dared to the haunted isle, making vows to
Camdeo *, and sending their paper vessels,
lit with wax, and filled with flowers, to-
wards its coast, where they hoped their
darling deity was about to fix his resi-
dence. The young men also, at least those
who were in love and fond of music, row-
ed close to the island to solicit the god
Krishnoo f to sanctify it by his presence;
and not knowing what to offer to the
deity, they sung their wild airs standing
high on the prow of the canoe, and at last
threw a figure of wax, with a kind of lyre
in its hand, towards the shore of the de-
solate isle.

* The Cupid of the Indian mythology,

t The Indian Apollo.
 o
A TALE. 8

For many a night these canoes might be

seen glancing past each other over the
darkened sea, Hke shooting stars of the
deep, with their Hghted paper lanthorns,
and their offerings of flowers and fruits,
left by some trembling hand on the sands,
or hung by a bolder one in baskets of cane
on the rocks and still the simple islanders
;

felt joy and devotion united in this " vo-

luntary humility." It was observed, how-

ever, that the w^orshippers departed with
very different impressions of the object of
their adoration. The women all clung to
their oars in breathless admiration of the
sweet soimds that issued from the isle ; and
when that ceased they departed, murmuring
over in their huts those " notes angelical," to
which their own language furnished no ap-
propriate sounds. The men rested long on
their oars, to catch a glimpse of the form
which, by the report of the fishermen,
wandered there and, when disappointed^,
;

they rowed home sadly.

84 melmoth:
" Gradually the isle lost itsbad cha-
racter for terror ; and in spite of some old
devotees, who told their blood-discoloured
beads, and talked of Seeva and Haree, and
even held burning splinters of" wood to
their scorched hands, and stuck sharp
pieces of iron, which they had purchased
or stolen from the crews of European ves-
sels, in the most fleshy and sensitive parts

of their bodies, —and, moreover, talked of

suspending themselves from trees with the
head downwards, till they were consumed
by insects, or calcined by the sun, or ren-
dered delirious by their position, —in spite
of which must have been very af-
all this,

young people went on their

fecting, the
own way,-^the girls offering their wreaths
to Camdeo, and the youths invoking
Krishnoo, till the devotees, in despair,
vowed to visit this accursed island, which
had body mad, and find out
set every
how the unknown
deity was to be re-
cognised and propitiated and whether i
 A TALE. 85

flowers, and fruits, and love- vows, and

the beatings of young hearts, were to
be substituted for the orthodox and legiti-
mate offering of nails grown into the
hands till they appeared through their
backs, and setons of ropes inserted into the
sides, on which the religionist danced his
dance of agony, till the ropes or his pa-
tience failed. In a word, they were de-
termined to find out what this deity was,
who demanded no suffering from her wor-
shippers, —and they fulfilled their resolu-
tion in amanner worthy of their purpose.
" One hundred and forty beings, crip-
pled by the austerities of their religion, un-
able to manage sail or oar, embarked in a
canoe to reach what they called the accurs-
ed isle. The natives, intoxicated with the
belief of their sanctity, stripped them-
selves naked, to push their boat through
the surf, and then, making their mlams,
implored them to use oars at least. The
devotees, all too intent on their beads,
and too well satisfied of their importance
86 MELMOTH :

in the eyes of their favourite deities, to ad-

mit a doubt of their safety, set off in tri-
—
umph, and the consequence may be easily
conjectured. The boat soon filled and
sunk, and the crew perished without a
single sigh of lamentation, except that they
had not feasted the alligators in the sacred
waters of the Ganges, or perished at least
under the shadow of the domes of the
holy city of Benares, in either of which
cases their salvation must have been un-
questionable.
" This circumstance, apparently so un-
toward, operated favourably on the po-
pularity of the new worship. The old
system lost ground every day. Hands,
instead of being scorched over the fire,

were employed only in gathering flowers.

Nails (with which it was the custom of the
devotees to lard their persons) actually fell

in price and a man might sit at his ease

;

on his hams with as safe a conscience,

and as fair a character, as if fourscore of
them occupied the interval between. On
 A TALE. 87

the other hand, fruits were every day-

scattered on the shores of the favourite
isle ; flowers, too, blushed on its rocks, in
all the dazzling luxuriance of colouring
with which the Flora of the East delights
to array herself There was that brilliant

and superb lily, which, to this day, illus-

trates the comparison between it and Solo-

mon, who, in allwas not arrayed
his glory,
like one of them. There was the rose un-
folding its " paradise of leaves," and the
scarlet blossom of the bombex, which an
English traveller has voluptuously describ-
ed as banqueting the eye with " its mass
of vegetable splendour" unparalleled. And
the female votarists at last began to imi-
tate some of " those sounds and sweet
airs" that every breeze seemed to waft to
their ears, with increasing strength of me-
lody, as they floated in their canoes round
this isle of enchantment.
" At length one circumstance occurred
that put its sanctity of character, and that
of its inmate, out of all doubt. A young
88 MELMOTH :

Indian who had in vain offered to his be-

loved the mystical bouquet, in which the
arrangement of the flowers is made to ex-
press love, rowed his eanoe to the island,
to learn his fate from its supposed inhabi-
tant and as he rowed, composed a song,
;

which expressed that his mistress despised

him, as if he were a Paria, but that he
would love her though he were descended
from the head of Brahma that her skin
;
—
was more polished than the marble steps
by which you descend to the tank of a
Ilajah, and her eyes brighter than any
whose glances were watched by presump-
tuous strangers through the rents of the
embroidered purdah * of a l^awaub that ;
—
she was loftier in his eyes than the black
pagoda of Juggernaut, and more briUiant
than the trident of the temple of Maha-
deva, when it sparkled in the beams of the
moon. And as both these objects were

* The curtain behind which women are conceal-

ed.
 —

A TALE. 89

visible to his eyes from the shore, as he

rowed on in the and glorious serenity
soft

of an Indian night, no wonder they found

a place in his verse. Finally, he promised,
that if she was propitious to his suit, he
would build her a hut, raised four feet a-
bove the ground to avoid the serpents ;

that her dwelling should be overshadowed

by the boughs of the tamarind and that
;

while she slept, he would drive the mus-

quitoes from her with a fan, composed of
the leaves of the first flowers which she ac-
cepted as a testimony of his passion.
** It so happened, that the same night,
the young female, whose reserve had been
the result of any thing but indifference,
attended by two of her companions, rowed
her canoe to the same spot, with the view
of discovering whether the vows of her
lover were sincere. They arrived about
the same time; and though it was now

twilight,and the superstition of these

timid beings gave a darker tinge to th€
90 MELMOTH :

shadows that surrounded them, they ven-

tured to land ; and, bearing then' baskets
of flowers in trembling hands, advanced to
hang them on the ruins of the pagoda,
amid which it was presumed the new god-
dess had fixed her abode. They proceed-
ed, not without difficulty, through thickets
of flowers that had sprung spontaneously
in the uncultivated soil —not without fear
that a tiger might spring on them at every
step, till they recollected that those ani-
mals chose generally the large jungles for
and seldom harboured amid
their retreat,
flowers. was the alligator to be
Still less

dreaded, amid the narrow streams that

they could cross without tinging their an-
cles with its pure water. The tamarind,
the cocoa, and the palm-tree, shed their
blossoms, and exhaled their odours, and
waved their leaves, over the head of the
trembling votarist as she approached
the ruin of the pagoda. It had been a
massive square building, erected amid
 A TALE. 91

rocks, that, by a caprice of nature not un-

common in the Indian isles, occupied its
centre, and appeared the consequence of
some volcanic explosion. The earthquake
that had overthrown had mingled the
it,

rocks and ruins together in a shapeless and

deformed mass, which seemed to bear alike
the traces of the impotence of art and na-
ture, when prostrated by the power that
has formed and can annihilate both. There
were pillars, wrought with singular cha-
racters, heaped amid stones that bore no
impress but that of some fearful and vio-
lent action of nature, that seemed to say^
Mortals, write your lines with the chisel,.
1 write my hieroglyphics in fire. There
were the disjointed piles of stones carved
into the form of snakes, on which the hi-
deous idol of Seeva had once been seated;
and close to them the rose was bursting
through the earth which occupied the fis^
sures of the rock, as if nature preached a
milder theology, and deputed her darling
92 MELMOTH :

flower as her missionary to her childrenJ

The idol itself had fallen, and lay in frag-
ments. The horrid mouth was still visi-l

hie, intowhich human hearts had been for-

merly inserted. But now, the beautifur
peacocks, with their rain-bow trains and
arched necks, were feeding their young a-
mid the branches of the tamarind that
overhung the blackened fragments. The
young Indians advanced with diminished
fear, for there was neither sight or sound
to inspire the fear that attends the ap-
proach to the presence of a spiritual being
— all was calm, still, and dark. Yet their
feet trod with involuntary lightness as they
advanced to these ruins, which combined
the devastations of nature with those of
the human passions, perhaps more bloody
and wild than the former. Near the ruins
there had formerly been a tank, as is usual,
near the pagodas, both for the purposes
of refreshment and purification ; but the
steps were now broken, and the water was
 A TALE. 9?

stagnated. The young Indians, however,

took up a few drops, invoked the ^* god-
dess of the isle," and approached the only
remaining arch. The exterior front of this
building had been constructed of stone,
but its interior had been hollowed out of
the rock; and its recesses resembled, in
some degree, those in the island of Ele-
phanta. There were monstrous figures
carved in stone, some adhering to the
rock, others detached from it, all frown-
ing in their shapeless and gigantic hideous-
ness, and giving to the eye of superstition
the terrible representation of " gods of
stone"
" Two of the young votarists, who
were distinguished for their courage, ad-
vanced and performed a kind of wild
dance before the ruins of the ancient
gods, they called them, and invok-
as
ed they might) the new resident of
(as

the isle to be propitious to the vows of

their companion, who advanced to hang
94 MELMOTH:

her wreath of flowers round the broken

remains of an idol half-defaced and half-
hidden among the fragments of stone, but
clustered over with that rich vegetation
which seems, in oriental countries, to anJ
nounce the eternal triumph of nature amid
the ruins of art Every year renews the
rose, but what year shall see a pyramid re-
built? As the young Indian hung her
wreath on the shapeless stone, a voice
murmured, " There is a withered flower
there." — — —
" Yes yes there is,^" answered
the votarist, " and that withered flower is

an emblem of my heart. I have cherished

many roses, but suffered one to wither that

was the sweetest to me of all the wreath.

Wilt thou revive him for me, unknown
goddess, and my wreath shall no longer be
—
a dishonour to thy shrine ?" " Wilt thou
revive the rose by placing it in the warmth
of thy bosom," said the young lover, ap-
pearing from behind the fragments of rock
and ruin that had sheltered him, and from
 A TALE. 95

which he had uttered his oracular re-

ply, and listened with delight to the em-
blematical but intelligible language of his
beloved. " Wilt thou revive the rose?"

he asked, in the triumph of love, as he

clasped her to his bosom. The young In-
dian, yielding at once to love and super-
stition, seemed half-melting in his embrace,

when, in a moment, she uttered a wild

shriek, repelled him with all her strengthj
and crouched in an uncouth posture of
fear, while she pointed with one quivering

hand to a figure that appeared, at that mo-

ment, in the perspective of that tumul-
tuous and indefinite heap of stone. The
lover, unalarmed by the shriek of his mis-
tress, was advancing to catch her in his

arms, when his eye fell on the object that

had struck hers, and he sunk on his face
to the earth, in mute adoration.
" The form was that of a female, but
such as they had never before beheld, for
her skin was perfectly white, (at least in
 :

96 MELMOTH
their eyes, who had never seen any but
the dark-red tint of the natives of the Ben-
galese islands). Her drapery (as well as
they could see) consisted only of flowers,
whose rich colours and fantastic grouping
harmonized well with the peacock's feathers
twined amongthetn, andaltogethercompos-
ed a feathery fan of wild drapery, which, in
truth, beseemed an " island goddess." Her
long hair, of a colour they had never be-
held before, pale auburn, flowed to her
feet, and was fantastically entwined with
the flowers and the feathers that formed
her dress. On her head was a coronal
of shells, of hue and lustre unknown
except in the Indian seas —the purple
and the green vied with the amethyst,
and the emerald. On her white bare
shoulder a loxia was perched, and round
her neck was hung a string of their
pearl —
like eggs, so pure and pellucid, that
the first sovereign in Europe might have
exchanged her richest necklace of pearls
 A Tale. 97

(or them. Her arms and feet were per-

fectly bare, and her step had a goddess-Hke
rapidity and lightness, that affected the
imagination of the Indians as much as
the extraordinary colour of her skin and
hair. The young lovers sunk in awe
before this vision as it passed before
their eyes. While they prostrated them-
selves, a delicious sound trembled on their
ears. The beautiful vision spoke to them,
but it was in a language they did not un-
derstand ; and this confirming their belief
that it was the language of the gods, they
prostrated themselves to her again. At
that moment, the loxia, springing from
her shoulder, came fluttering towards them.
" He is going to seek for fire-flies to light
his cell *," said the Indians to each other.
But the bird, who, with an intelligence

* From the fire-flies being so often found in the

nest of the loxia^ the Indians imagine he illmninates
his nest with them. It is more likely they are the
food of his young.

VOL. IIL E
 : ;

dS MELMOTH
peculiar to his understood and
species,
adopted the predilection of the fair being
he belonged to, for the fresh flowers in
which he saw her arrayed every day, dart-
ed at the withered fose-bud in the wreath
of the young Indian; and, striking his
slender beak through it, laid it at her
feet. The omen was interpreted auspi-
ciously by the bending once
lovers, and,
more to the earth, they rowed back to
their island, but no longer in separate
canoes. The lover steered that of his mis-
tress, while she sat beside him in silence
and the young people who accompanied
them chaunted verses in praise of the white
goddess, and the island sacred to her and
to lovers.
 .

CHAPTER XV,

But tell me to what saint, I pray.

What martyr, or what angel bright,

Is dedicate this holy day.
Which brings you here so gaily dight ?

Dost thou not, simple Palmer, know,

W^hat every child can tell thee here?—
Kor saint nor angel claims this show.
But the bright season of the year.
QuEEN-Hoo Hall, by Strutt.

**
The sole and beautiful inmate of the
isle, though disturbed at the appearance of
ker worshippers, soon recovered her tran-
quillity. She could not be conscious of
fear, for nothing of that world in which

she lived had ever borne a hostile appear-

ance to her. The sun and the shade the —
100 melmoth:

flowers and foliage —the tamarinds and

figs that prolonged her delightful exis-
tence —the water that she drank, wonder-
ing at the beautiful being who seemed to
drink whenever she did —the peacocks,
who spread out their rich and radiant plu-
mage the moment they beheld her and —
the loxia, who perched on her shoulder
and hand as she walked, and answered her
sweet voice with imitative chirpings — all

these were her friends, and she knew none

but these.
" The human forms that sometimes ap-
proached the island, caused her a slight
emotion ; but was rather that of curio-
it

sity than alarm and their gestures were

;

so expressive of reverence and mildness,

their offerings of flowers, in which she de-
lighted, so acceptable, and their visits so
silent and peaceful, that she saw them
without reluctance, and only wondered,
as they rowed away, how they could move
on the water in safety and how creatures
;

so dark, and with features so unattractive.

 A TALE. 101

happened to gro*w amid the beautiful

flowers they presented to her as the pro-
ductions of their abode. The elements
might be supposed to have impressed her
imagination with some terrible ideas but ;

the periodical regularity of these phoeno-

mena, in the climate she inhabited, divest-
ed them of their terrors to one who had
been accustomed to them, as to the alter-
—
nation of night and day who could not
remember the fearful impression of the
first, and, above all, who had never heard
any terror of them expressed by another,
—perhaps the primitive cause of fear in
most minds. Pain she had never felt of —
—
death she had no idea how, then, could
she become acquainted with fear ?
" When a north-wester, as it is termed,
visited the island, with all its terrific ac-
companiments of midnight darkness, clouds
of suffocating dust, and thunders like the
trumpet of doom, she stood amid the leafy
colonnades of the banyan- tree, ignorant of
her danger, watching the cowering wings
 : — ;

102 MELMOTH
and drooping heads of the birds, and the
ludicrous terror of the monkies, as they
skipt from branch to branch with their
young. When the lightning struck a tree,
she gazed would on a fire-work
as a child
played off for amusement but the next
its ;

day she wept, when she saw the leaves

would no longer grow on the blasted trunk.
When the rains descended in torrents, the
ruins of the pagoda afforded her a shelter
and she sat listening to the rushing of the
mighty waters, and the murmurs of the
troubled deep, till her soul took its colour
from the sombrous and magnificent ima-
gery around her, and she believed herself
precipitated to earth with the deluge
borne downward, like a leaf, by a cataract
— engulphed in the depths of the ocean
rising again to light on the swell of the
enormous billows, as if she were heaved on
—
the back of a whale deafened with the

—
roar giddy with the rush —
till terror and

delight embraced in that fearful exercise

of imagination. So she lived like a flower
 A TALE. 103

amid sun and storm, blooming in the light,

and bending to the shower, and drawing
the elements of her sweet and wild exis-
tence from both. And both seemed to
mingle their influences kindly for her, as
if she was a thing that nature loved, even
in her angry mood, and gave a commission
to the storm to nurture her, and to the
deluge to spare the ark of her innocenc^
as it floated over the waters. This exis-
tence of felicity, half physical, half imagi-
native, but neither intellectual or impas-
sioned, had continued till the seventeenth
year of this beautiful and mild being, when
a circumstance occurred that changed its
hue for ever.
" On the evening of the day after the In-
dians had departed, Immalee, for that was
the name her had given her, was
votarists
standing on the shore, when a being ap-
proached her unlike any she had ever beheld.
The colour of his face and hands resembled
her own more than those she was accustom-
ed to see, but his garments, (which were
 : —

104? MELMOTH
European), from their square uncouthness,
their shapelessness, and their disfiguring
projection about the hips, (it was the fa-

shion of the year 1680), gave her a mixed

sensation of ridicule, disgust, and wonder,
which her beautiful features could express
—
only by a smile that smile, a native of
the face from which not even surprise
could banish it.
" The stranger approached, and the
beautiful vision approached also, but not
like an European female with low and
graceful bendings, still less like an Indian
girl with her low salams, but like a young
fawn, all animation, timidity, confidence,
and cowardice, expressed in almost a sin-
gle action. She sprung from the sands
ran to her favourite tree ;
—returned again
with her guard of peacocks, who expanded
their superb trains with a kind of instinc-
tive motion, as if they felt the danger that
menaced their protectress, and, clapping her
hands with exultation, seemed to invite
them to share in the delight she felt in
 A TALE. ^ 105

gazing at the new flower that had grown

in the sand.
" The stranger advanced, and, to Im-
malee's utter astonishment, addressed her
in the language which she herself had re-
tained some words of since her infancy,
and had endeavoured in vain to make her
peacocks, parrots, and loxias, answer her
in corresponding sounds. But her lan-
guage, from want of practice, had become
so limited, that she was delighted to hear
itsmost unmeaning sounds uttered by hu-
man lips and when he said, according to
;

the form of the times, " How do you, fair

maid ?" she answered, " God made me,"
from the words of the Christian Catechism
that had been breathed into her infant lip.
" God never made a fairer creature," re-
plied the stranger, grasping her hand, and
fixing on her eyes that still burn in the
sockets of that arch-deceiver. " Oh yes!"
answered Immalee, " he made many things
more beautiful. The rose is redder than
I am —the palm-tree is taller than I am—
E 2
 :

106 . MELMOTH
and the wave is bluer than I am ^but they ; —
all change, and I never change. I have
grown taller and stronger, though the
rose fades every six moons and the rock ;

splits to let in the bats, when the earth

shakes ; and the waves fight in their anger
till they turn grey, and far different from
the beautiful colour they have when the
moon comes dancing on them, and send-
ing all the young, broken branches of her
light to kiss my feet, as I stand on the soft
sand. I have tried to gather them every
night, but they all broke in my hand the
moment I dipt it into water." —" And
have you fared better with the stars?" said
—
the stranger smiling. " No," answered the
innocent being, " the stars are the flowers
of heaven, and the rays of the moon the
boughs and branches ; but though they are
so bright, they only blossom in the night,
~and I love better the flowers that I can
gather, and twine in my hair. When I
have been all night wooing a star, and it
has listened and descended, springing
 A TALE. * 107^

downwards like a peacock from its nest,

it has hid itself often afterwards playfully

amid the mangoes and tamarinds where it
fell and though I have searched for it till
;

the moon looked wan and weary of light*

ing me, I never could find it. But where
—
do you come from ? you are not scaly
and voiceless like those who grow in the
waters, and show their strange shapes as I
sit on the shore at sun-set nor are you
;
—
red and diminutive like those who come
over the waters to me from other worlds,
in houses that can live on the deep, and
walk so swiftly, with their legs plunged
in the water. Where do you come from ?
— ^you are not so bright as the stars that
live in the blue sea above me, nor so de-
formed as those that toss in the darker sea
atmy feet. Where did you grow, and
how came you here? — there is not a canoe
on the sand ; and though the shells bear
the fish that live in them so lightly over
the waters, they never would bear me.
When I placed my foot on their scolloped
 :

108 JMELMOTH

edge of crimson and purple, they sunk in-

to the sand." —" Beautiful creature," said
the stranger, " I come from a world where
there are thousands like me." —" That is

impossible," said Immalee, " for I live

here alone, and other worlds must be like
this."
— " What I you is true, how-
tell

ever," said the stranger. Immalee paused

for a moment, as if making the first effort
—
of reflection an exertion painful enough
to a being whose existence was composed
of felicitous tacts and unreflecting instincts
—and then exclaimed, " We
both must
have grown in the world of voices, for I
know what you say better than the chirp of
the loxia, or the cry of the peacock. That
must be a delightful world where they all
—
speak what would I give that my roses
grew in the world of answers !"
" At this moment the stranger made cer-

tain signals of hunger, which Immalee un-

derstood in a moment, and told him to fol-
low her to where the tamarind and the fig
—
were shedding their fruit where the strearn
 A TALE. 109

was you could count the purple

so clear,
shells in its bed —
and where she would
scoop for him in the cocoa-shell the cool
waters that flowed beneath the shade of
the mango. As they went, she gave him
all the information about herself that she
could. She told him that she was the
daughter of a palm-tree, under whose shade
she had been first conscious of existence,
but that her poor father had been long
withered and dead —that she was very old,
having seen many roses decay on their
stalks; and though they were succeeded
by others, she did not love them so well
as thefirst, which were a great deal larger

—
and brighter that, in fact, every thing
had grown smaller latterly, for she was
now able to reach to the fruit which for-
merly she was compelled to wait for till it
dropt on the ground —
but that the water
;

was grown taller, for once she was forced

to drink it on her hands and knees, and
now she could scoop it in a cocoa-shell
Finally, she added, she was much older
 : — !

110 MELMOTH
than the moon, for she had seen it waste
away till was dimmer than the light of
it

a and the moon that was lighting

fire-fly ;

them now would decline too, and its suc-

cessor be so small, that she would never
again give it the name she had given to
the first— Sun of the Night. « But," said
her companion, " how are you able to
speak a language you never learned from
your —
and peacocks ?" " I will tell
loxias
you," said Immalee, with an air of solem-
nity, which her beauty and innocence made
at once ludicrous and imposing, and in
which she betrayed a slight tendency to
that wish to mystify that distinguishes her
delightful sex, —" there
came a spirit to
tne from the world of voices, and it whis-
pered to me sounds that I never have for-

gotten, long, long before I was born."

" Really ?" said the stranger. " Oh yes
—•long before I could gather a fig, or ga-
ther the water in my hand, and that must
be before I was born. When I was born,
I was not so high as the rose-bud, at which
 A TALE. Ill

I tried to catch, now I am as near the

moon as the palm-tree —sometimes I catch
her beams sooner than he does, therefore I
must be very old, and very high." At
these words, the stranger, with an express
sion indescribable, leaned against a tree.
He viewed that lovely and helpless being,
while he refused the fruits and water she
offered him, with a look, that, for the first
time, intimated compassion. The stranger
feeling' did not dwell long in a mansion
it was unused to. The expression was
soon exchanged for that half-ironical, half-
diabolical glance Immalee could not un-
derstand. And you live here alone," he
"
said, " and you have lived in this beauti-

ful place without a companion ?" " Oh —

no !" said Immalee, " I have a companion
more beautiful than all the flowers in the
isle. There is not a rose-leaf that drops in
the river so bright as its cheek. My
friend lives under the water, but its colours
are so bright. It kisses me too, but its

lips are very cold ; and when I kiss it, it

112 MELMOTH:
seems to dance, and its beauty is all bro-
ken into a thousand faces, that come smil-
ing at me like little stars. But, though
my friend has a thousand faces, and I
have but one, still there is one thing that
troubles me. There is but one stream
where it meets me, and that is where
are no shadows from the trees and I never —
can catch it but when the sun is bright.
Then when I catch it in the stream, I kiss
it on my knees ; but my friend has grown
so tall, that sometimes I wish it were
smaller. Its lips spread so much wider,
that I give it a thousand kisses for one
that I get." " Is your friend male or fe-
male," said the stranger. —" What is that ?"
answered Immalee. —" 1 mean, of what
sex is your friend ?"

But to this question he could obtain no

satisfactory answer and it was not till his
;

return the next day, when he revisited the

isle, that he discovered Immalee's friend

was what he suspected. He found this

innocent and lovely being bending over a
 A TALE. lis

stream that reflected her image, and woo-

irjg it with a thousand wild and graceful

attitudes of joyful fondness. The stranger

gazed at her for some time, and thoughts
it would be difficult for man to penetrate
into, threw their varying expression over
his features for a moment. It was the
first of his intended victims he had ever
beheld with compunction. The joy, too,
with which Immalee received him, almost
brought back human feelings to a heart
that had long renounced them ; and, for a
moment, he experienced a sensation like
that of his master when he visited para-
dise,—pity for the flowers he resolved to
wither for ever. He looked at her as she
round him with outspread arms
fluttered
and dancing eyes and sighed, while she
;

welcomed him in tones of such wild sweet-

ness, as suited a being who had hitherto
conversed with nothing but the melody of
birds and the murmur of waters. With
allher ignorance, however, she could not
help testifying her amazement at his ar^
 —

114 MELMOTH :

riving at the isle any visible

without
means of conveyance. He evaded answer-
ing her on this point, but said, " Immalee,
I come from a world wholly unlike that
you inhabit, amid inanimate flowers, and
unthinking birds* I come from a world
where all, as I do, think and speak." Im-
malee was speechless with wonder and
delight for some time at length she ex-
;

claimed, " Oh, how they must love each

,other !even I love my poor birds and
flowers, and the trees that shade, and the
waters that sing to me !" The stranger
smiled. " In all that world, perhaps there
is not another being beautiful and inno-
cent as you. It is a world of suffering,
guilt, and was with much diffi-
care." It
culty she was made to comprehend the
meaning of these words, but when she did,
she exclaimed, " Oh, that I could live in
that world, for I would make every one
happy !" *' But you could not, Immalee,"
said the stranger ;
" this world is of such
e^ctent that it would take your whole life

i
 A TALE. 115

to traverse it, and, during your progress,

you never could be conversant with more
than a small number of sufferers at a time,
and the evils they undergo are in many
instances such asyou or no human power
could relieve." At these words, Immalee
burst into an agony of tears. " Weak,
but lovely being," said the stranger, " could
your tears heal the corrosions of disease ?—
cool the burning throb of a cancered heart ?

— wash the pale slime from tlie clinging

lips of famine ? — or, more than all, quench
the fire of forbidden passion ?" Jrimalee
paused aghast at this enumeration, and
could only faulter out, that v/herever she
went, she would bring her flowers and'sun-
shineamong the healthy, and they should
under the shade of her own tamarind.
all sit

That for disease and death, she had long

been accustomed to see flowers wither and
die their beautiful death of nature, " And
perhaps," she added, after a reflective pause,
**
have often known them to retain
as I
their delicious odour even after they were
 :

116 MELMOTH
faded, perhaps what thinks may live too
after the form has faded, and that is a
thought of joy." Of passion, she said
she knew and could propose
nothing,
no remedy for an evil she was uncon-
scious of. She had seen flowers fade with
the season, but could not imagine why the
flower should destroy itself " But did
you never trace a worm in the flower?"
said the stranger, with the sophistry of
corruption. _ " Yes," answered Immalee,
" but the worm was not the native of the
flower ; its own leaves never could have
hurt it." This led to a discussion, which
Immalee's impregnable innocence, though
combined with ardent curiosity and quick
apprehension, rendered perfectly harnoless
to her. Her playful and desultory an-
swers, —her eccentricity of ima-
restless
gination, —her keen and piercing, though
weapons, —and, above
ill-poised intellectual
all, her instinctive and unfailing tact in
matters of right and wrong, formed alto-
gether an array that discomfited and baffled
 A TALE.^ 117

the tempter more than if he had been com-

pelled to encounter half the wranglers of
the European academies of that day. In
the loffic of the schools he was well- versed,
but in this logic of the heart and of nature,
he was " ignorance itself." It is said, that

the " awless lion" crouches before " a maid

in the pride of her purity." The tempter
was departing gloomily, when he saw tears
start from the bright eyes of Immalee, and
caught a wild and dark omen from her in-
nocent grief. " And you weep, Immalee ?"
**
Yes," said the beautiful being, " I always
weep when I see the sun set in clouds ; and
will you, the sun of my heart, set in darkness
too ? and will you not rise again ? will you
not ?" and, with the graceful confidence of
pure innocence, she pressed her red de-
licious lip to his hand as she spoke.
" Will you not ? I shall never love ray
roses and peacocks if you do not return,
for they cannot speak to me as you do,
nor can I give them one thought, but you
can give me many. Oh, I would like to
 ;;

lis MELMOTH:

Jiave many thoughts about the world tliai

suffers, from which you came ; and I be-'

lieve you came from it, for, till I saw you,
I never felt a pain that was not pleasure
but now, it is all pain when I think yoa
—
will not return." " I will return," said
the stranger, " beautiful Immalee, and will
shew you, at my return, a glimpse of that
world from which I come, and in which
you will soon be an inmate." " But shall —
I see you there," said Immalee, " other-
wise how shall I talk thoughts ? "
Oh —"
yes,—oh —" But why do you
certainly."
repeat the same words twice; your onc€
would have been enough."—" Well then,
yes."—" Then take this rose from me, and
let us inhale its odour together, as I say to

my friend in the fountain, when I bend to

kiss it ; but my friend withdraws its rose
before 1 have tasted it, and I leave mine
on the water. Will you not take my
rose," said the beautiful suppliant, bending
towards him. " I will," said the stranger
and he took a flower from the cluster Im-
 —

jl tale. 119

make held out to him. It was a withered

one. He snatched it, and hid it in his
breast. " And will you go without a ca-
noe across that dark sea ?" said Immalee.
— " We shall meet again, and meet in the
woi'id of suffering*^ said the stranger.
" Thank you, —oh, thank you," repeated
Immalee, as she saw him plunge fearless
amid the surf. The stranger answered on-
ly, "We shall meet again.*' Twice, as he
parted, he threw a glance at the beautiiul
and isolated being ; a lingering of huma-
nity trembled round his heart, — ^but he tore
the withered rose from his bosom, and to
the waved arm and angel-smile of Immalee,
he answered, " We shall meet again."
 CHAPTER XVI.

Piu non ho la dolce speranza.

DiDONE.

** Oeven mornings and evenings Immalee

paced the sands of her lonely isle, without
seeing the stranger. She had still his pro-
mise to console her, that they should meet
in the world of suffering ; and this she re-
peated to herself as if it was full of hope
and consolation. In this interval she tried

to educate herself for her introduction into

this world, and it was beautiful to see her
 —

A TALE, 121

attempting, and animal

from vegetable
analogies, to form some image of the in-
comprehensible destiny of man. In the
shade she watched the withering flower.
" The blood that ran red through its veins

yesterday is purple to-day, and will be

black and dry to-morrow," she said " but ;

it feels no pain —
it dies patiently, and —
the ranunculus and tulip near it are un-
touched by grief for their companion, or
their colours would not be so resplendent.
But can it be thus in the world that

thinks Could I see him wither and die,

?

without withering and dying along with

him. Oh no when that flower fades, I
!

will be the dew

that falls over him !"
" She attempted to enlarge her compre-
hension, by observing the animal world.
A young loxia had fallen dead from its
pendent nest and Immalee, looking into
;

the aperture which that intelligent bird

forms at the lower extremity of the nest
to secure it from birds of prey, perceived
the old ones with fire-flies in their small
VOL. III. F
122 melmoth:

beaks, their young one lying dead before

them. At this sight Iramalee burst into
tears.
— " Ah ! you cannot weep," she said,
" what an advantage I have over you!
You eat, though your young one, your
own one, is dead but could 1 ever drink
;

of the milk of the cocoa, if he could no

longer taste it? I begin to comprehend
what he said — ^to think, then, is to suffer
—and a world of thought must be a world
of pain ! But how delicious are these
tears ! Formerly I wept for pleasure but —
there is a pain sweeter than pleasure, that
I never felt till I beheld him. Oh who!

would not think, to have the joy of tears ?"

" But Immalee did not occupy this inter-
val solely in reflection ; a new anxiety be-
gan to agitate her ; and in the intervals of
her meditation and her tears, she searched
with avidity most glowing and fan-
for the
tastically wreatheddeck her arms
shells to
and hair with. She changed her drapery of
flowers every day, and never thought them
fresh after the first hour then she filled her ;
 A TALE. 123

largest shells with the most limpid water,

and her hollow cocoa nuts with the most
delicious figs, interspersed with roses, and
arranged them picturesquely on the stone
bench of the ruined pagoda. The time,
however, passed over without the arrival
of the stranger, and Immalee, on visiting
her fairy banquet the next day, wept over
the withered fruit, but dried her eyes, and
hastened to replace them.
" She was thus employed on the eighth
morning, when she saw the stranger ap-
proach and the wild and innocent delight
;

with which she bounded towards him, ex-

cited inhim for a moment a feeling of
gloomy and reluctant compunction, which
Immalee's quick susceptibility traced in
his pausing step and averted eye. She
stood trembling in lovely and pleading
diffidence, as if intreating pardon for an
unconscious offence, and asking permis-
sion to approach by the very attitude in
which she forbore it, while tears stood in
her eyes ready to fall at another repelling
 : —

124 MELMOTH
motion. This sight " whetted his almost
blunted purpose." She must learn to
suffer, to qualify her to become my pupil,
he thought. " Immalee, you weep," he
added, approaching her. " Oh yes !" said
Imm^alee, smiling like a spring morning
through her tears " you are to teach me
;

to suffer, and I shall soon be very fit for

—
your world but I had rather weep for
you, than smile on a thousand roses."
" Immalee," said the stranger, repelling
the tenderness that melted him in spite of
himself, " Immalee, I come to shew you
something of the world of thought you
are so anxious to inhabit, and of which
you must soon become an inmate. Ascend
this hill where the palm-trees are cluster-
ing, and you shall see a glimpse of part of
it."
—
" But I would like to see the whole,
and all at once !" said Immalee, with the
natural avidity of thirsty and unfed intel-
lect, that believes it can swallow all things,
and digest all things. " The whole, and
all at once !" said her conductor, turning to
 —!

A TALE. 125

smile at her as she bounded after him,

breathles and glowing with newly excited
feeling. " I doubt the part you will
see to-night will be more than enough to
satiate even your curiosity." As he spoke
he drew a tube from his vest, and bid her
apply it to her sight. The Indian obeyed
him but, after gazing a moment, uttered
;

the emphatic exclamation, " I am there

—or and sunk on the
are they here?"
earth in a frenzy of delight. She rose
again in a moment, and eagerly seizing
the telescope, applied it in a wrong direc-
tion,which disclosed merely the sea to her
view, and exclaimed sadly, " Gone !

gone —
all that beautiful world lived and
!

died in a moment — all that I love die so

— my dearest roses live not half so long
as those I neglect —you were absent for
seven moons since I first saw you, and the
beautiful world lived only a moment."
" The stranger again directed the tele-
scope towards the shore of India, from
which they were not far distant, and Im-
 ! —

126 MELMOTH :

malee again exclaimed in rapture, " Alive

and more beautiful than ever ! — all living,

thinking things !
— their very walk thinks.
No mute fishes, and senseless trees, but
wonderful rocks on which they look
*,

with pride, as if they were the works of

their own hands. Beautiful rocks! how

I love the perfect straitness of your sides,
and the crisped and flower-like knots of
your decorated tops Oh that flowers
!

grew, and birds fluttered round you, and

then I would prefer you even to the rocks
under which I watch the setting sun Oh !

what a world must that be where nothing

is natural, and every thing beautiful!—

thought must have done all that. But,

how little every thing is thought should —
have made every thing larger thought
should he a god. But," she added with
quick intelligence and self-accusing diffi-
dence, " perhaps I am wrong. Sometimes

* Intellige " buildings."

 A TALE, 127

I have thought I could lay hand on my

the top of a palm-tree, but when, after a
long, long time, I came close to it, I could
not have reached its lowest leaf were I ten
times higher than I am. Perhaps your
beautiful world may grow higher as I ap-
proach it."
—"
Hold, Immalee," said the
stranger, taking the telescope from her
hands, " to enjoy this sight you should
understand it."
—" Oh yes !" said Immalee,
with submissive anxiety, as the world of
sense rapidly lost ground in her imagina-
tion against the new-found world of mind,
—" yes— let
—
me think." " Immalee, have
you any religion ?" said the visitor, as an
indescribable feeling of pain made his
pale brow stillImmalee, quick
paler.
in understanding and sympathising with
physical feeling, darted away at these
words, returned in a moment with a ban-
yan leaf, with which she wiped the drops
from his livid forehead ; and then seating
herself at his feet, in an attitude of pro-
found but eager attention, repeated, " Be-
128 MELMOTH :

ligion! what is that? is it a new thought?"

—" It is the consciousness of a Being su-
perior to all worlds and their inhabitants,
because he is the Maker of all, and will be

their —
judge of a Being whom we cannot
see, but in whose power and presence we
must though invisible of one who
believe, —
is every where unseen; always acting,
though never in motion hearing all things,
;

but never heard." Immalee interrupted

with an air of distraction — " Hold! too
many thoughts will kill me— let me pause.
I have seen the shower that came to re-
fresh the rose-tree beat it to the earth.'*
After an effort of solemn recollection, she
added, The voice of dreams told me
"
something like that before I was born, but
it is so long ago, —
sometimes I have had
thoughts within me like that voice. I
have thought I loved the things around
me too much, and that I should love things
—
beyond me flowers that could not fade,
and a sun that never sets. I could have
sprung, like a bird into the air, after such
 —

;
A TALE. 129

a thought —but there was no one shew

to
me that path upward." And the young
enthusiast lifted towards heaven eyes in
which trembled the tears of ecstatic ima-
ginings, and then turned their mute plead-
ings on the stranger.
" It is right," he continued, " not only
to have thoughts of this Being, but to ex-
press them by some outward acts. The
inhabitants of the world you are about to
see, call this, wo?^s hip, —and they have

adopted (a Satanic smile curled his lip as

he spoke) very different modes so diffe- ;

rent, that, in fact, there is but one point in

—
which they all agree that of making their
religion a torment ;
—
the religion of some
prompting them to torture themselves, and
the religion of some prompting them to
torture others. Though, as I observed,
they all agree in this important point, yet
unhappily they differ so much about the
mode, that there has been much distur-
bance about it in the world that thinks."
" In the world that thinks T repeated Im-
F 2
 :

130 MELMOTH
malee, " Impossible ! Surely they must
know that a difference cannot be accepta-
ble to Him who is One." —" And have
you then adopted no mode of expressing
your thoughts of this Being, that is, of
worshipping him?" said the stranger.—
" I smile when the sun rises in its

beauty, and I weep when I see the even-

ing star rise," said Immalee. —" And do
you recoil at the inconsistencies of va-
ried modes of worship, and yet you
yourself employ smiles and tears in your
address to the Deity ?" — " I do, — ^for

they are both the expressions of joy with

me," said the poor Indian " the sun ;

is as happy when he smiles through the

rain-clouds, as when he burns in the mid-
height of heaven, in the fierceness of his
beauty; and I am happy whether I smile
or I weep." —" Those whom you are about
to see," said the stranger, offering her the
telescope, " are as remote in their forms
of worship as smiles from tears ; but they
are not, like you, equally happy in both."
 —

A TALE, 131

Immalee applied her eye to the telescope,

and exclaimed in rapture at what she saw.
" What do you see ?" said the stranger.
Immalee described what she saw with
many imperfect expressions, which, per-
haps, may be rendered more intelligible by
the explanatory words of the stranger.
" You see," said he, " the coast of In-
dia, the shores of the world near you.
There is the black pagoda of Juggernaut,
that enormous building on which your eye
is first fixed. Beside it stands a Turkish
mosque—you may distinguish it by a fi-

gure like that of the half-moon. It is th^

will of him who rules that world, that its
inhabitants should worship him by that
sign *. At a small distance you may see
a low building with a trident on its sum-
mit —that is the temple of Maha-deva, one
^—^'^—i—^—i*^M^I» I— !— ^ — —— III Ml I I IIMM I ^ I L M.. I I
^.^>^^M^1^^*»

* Tippoo Saib wished to substitute the Mohame-

dan for the Indian mythology throughout his domi-
nions. This circumstance, though long antedated,
is therefore imaginable.
132 melmoth:
of the ancient goddesses of the country."—
" But the houses are nothing to me," said
Immalee, " shew me the living things
that go there. The houses are not half
so beautiful as the rocks on the shore,
draperied all over with sea-weeds and
mosses, and shaded by the distant palm-
tree and cocoa." —" But those buildings,"
said the tempter, " are indicative of the
various modes of thinking of those who
frequent them. If it is into their thoughts
you wish to look, you must see them ex-
pressedby their actions. In their dealings
ivith each other, men are generally deceit-
ful, but in their dealings with their gods,
they are tolerably sincere in the expression
of the character they assign them in their
imaginations. If that character be formi-
dable, they express fear; if it be one of
cruelty, they indicate it by the sufferings
they on themselves; if it be gloomy,
inflict

the image of the god is faithfully reflected

in the visage of the worshipper. Look
and judge."
 A TALE. 13S

"
Immalee looked and saw a vast sandy
plain, with the dark pagoda of Juggernaut
in the perspective. On this plain lay the

bones of a thousand skeletons, bleaching

in the burning and unmoistened air. A
thousand human bodies, hardly more alive,
and scarce less emaciated, were trailing
their charred and blackened bodies over
the sands, to perish under the shadow of
the temple, hopeless of ever reaching that
of its walls.
*'
Multitudes of them dropt dead as they
crawled. Multitudes still living, faintly
waved their hands, to scare the vultures
that hovered nearer and nearer at every
swoop, and scooped the poor remnants of
flesh from the living bones of the scream-
ing victim, and retreated, with an answer-
ing scream of disappointment at the scan-
ty and tasteless morsel they had torn a-
way."
" Many and fanatic
tried, in their false

zeal, to double their torments, by crawling

through the sands on their hands and

lB4i melmoth:

knees; but hands through the backs of

which the nails had grown, and knees
worn literally to the bone, struggled but
feebly amid the sands and the skeletons,
and the bodies that were soon to be skele-
tons, and the vultures that were to make
them so.
" Immalee withheld her breath, as if
she inhaled the abominable effluvia of this
mass of putrefaction, which is said to deso-
late the shores near thetemple of Jugger-
naut, like a pestilence.
" Close to this fearful scene, came on a
pageant, whose splendour made a brilliant
and terrible contrast to the loathsome and
withering desolation of animal and intel-
lectual life, amid which its pomp came
towering, and sparkling, and trembling on.
An enormous fabric, more resembling a
moving palace than a triumphal car, sup-
ported the inshrined image of Juggernaut,
and was dragged forward by the unit-
ed strength of a thousand human bodies,
priests, victims, brahmins, faqueers and all.
 A TALE. 135

In spite of this huge foree, the impulse

was so unequal, that the whole edifice rock-

ed and tottered from time to time, and

this singular union of instability and splen-
dour, of trembling decadence and terrific
glory, gave a faithful image of the mere-
tricious exterior, and internal hoUowness,
of idolatrous religion. As the procession
moved on, sparkling amid desolation, and
triumphant amid death, multitudes rushed
forward fi'om time to time, to prostrate
themselves under the wheels of the enor-
mous machine, which crushed them to a-
toms in a moment, and passed on ;
—others
" cut themselves with knives and lancets
after their manner," and not believing
themselves worthy to perish beneath the
wheels of the idoPs chariot, sought to pro-
pitiate him by dying the tracks of those
wheels with their blood ;
— their relatives
and friends shouted with delight as they saw
the streams of blood dye the car and its line
of progress, and hoped for an interest in
these voluntary sacrifices, with as much e-
 —

1S6 MELMOTH:

nergy, and perhaps as much reason, as the

Catholic votarist does in the penance of St
Bruno, or the ex-oculation of St Lucia, or
the martyrdom of St Ursula and her eleven
thousand virgins, which, being interpreted,
means the martyrdom of a single female
named Undecimilla, which the Catholic
legends read Undecim Mille,
" The procession went on, amid that
mixture of rites that characterizes idolatry

in all —half resplendent, half hor-

countries,
rible—appealing to nature while they rebel
against her —mingling flowers with blood,
and casting alternately a screaming infant,
or a garland of roses, beneath the car of the
idol.
" Such was the picture that presented to
the strained, incredulous eyes of Immalee,
those mingled features of magnificence
and —
of joy and suffering, of
horror, —
crushed flowers and mangled bodies,^
of magnificence calling on torture for its

triumph, —and the steam of blood and the

incense of the rose, inhaled at once by the
 A TALE. 137

triumphant nostrils of an incarnate demon,

who rode amid the wrecks of nature and
the spoils of the heart ! Immalee gazed on
in horrid curiosity. She saw, by the aid
of the telescope, a boy seated on the front
of the moving temple, who " perfected the

praise" of the loathsome idol, with all the

outrageous lubricities of the Phallic wor-
ship. From the slightest consciousness of
the meaning of this phenomenon, her un-
imaginable purity protected her as with a
shield. was in vain that the tempter
It
plied her with questions, and hints of ex-
planation, and offers of illustration. He
found her chill, indifferent, and even in-
curious. He gnashed his teeth and gnaw-
ed his lip en jparenthese. But when she
saw mothers under the
cast their infants
wheels of the and then turn to watch
car,

the wild and wanton dance of the Almahs,

and appear, by their open lips and clapped
hands, to keep time to the sound of the
silver bells that tinkled round their slight

ankles, while their infants were writhing

 :

138 MELMOTH
in their dying agony,—she dropt the te-
lescope in horror, and exclaimed, " The
world that thinks does not feel. I never
!"
saw the rose kill the bud
" But look again," said the tempter,
*' round
to that square building of stone,
which a few stragglers are collected, and
whose summit is surmounted by a trident,
—that is the temple of Maha-deva, a god-
dess who possesses neither the power or
the popularity of the great idol Jugger-
naut. Mark how her worshippers ap-
proach her." Immalee looked, and saw
women fruits, and per-
offering flowers,
fumes; and some young girls brought
birds in cages, whom they set free ; others,
after making vows for the safety of some
absent, sent a small and gaudy boat of pa-
per, illuminated with wax, down the
stream of an adjacent river, with injunc-
tions never to sink till it reached him.

" Immalee smiled with pleasure at the

rites of this harmless and elegant super-
stition. " This is not the religion of tor-
 A TALE. 139

ment," said she. — " Look again," said the

stranger. She did, and beheld those very
women whose hands had been employed
in liberating birds from their cages, sus-
pending, on the branches of the trees
which shadowed the temple of Maha-deva,
baskets containing their new-born infants,
who were left there to perish with hun-
ger, or be devoured by the birds, while
their mothers danced and sung in honour
of the goddess.
" Others were occupied in conveying,
apparently with the most zealous and ten-
der watchfulness, their aged parents to the
banks of the river, where, after assisting
them to perform their ablations, with all
the intensity of filial and divine piety, they
left them half immersed in the water, to be
devoured by alligators, who did not suf-
fer their wretched prey to linger in long
expectation of their horrible death ; while
others were deposited in the jungles near
the banks of the river, where they met
with a fate as certain and as horrible^ from
140 ^
melmoth:

the tigers who infested it, and whose yell

soon hushed the feeble wail of their unre-
sisting victims.
" Immalee sunk on the earth at this
spectacle, and clasping both hands over
her eyes, remained speechless with grief
and horror.
" Look yet again," said the stranger,
" the rites of all religions are not so bloody."
Once more she looked, and saw a Turkish
mosque, towering in all the splendour that
accompanied the first introduction of the
religion of Mahomet among the Hindoos.
It reared its gilded domes, and carved mi-
narets, and crescented pinnacles, rich with
all the profusion which the decorative ima-

gination of Oriental architecture, at once

light and luxuriant, gorgeous and aerial,
delights to lavish on its favourite works.
" Agroup of stately Turks were ap-
proaching the mosque, at the call of the
muezzin. Around the building arose
neither tree nor shrub borrowed neither
; it

^hade nor ornament from nature it had ;

 ;

A TALE. 141

none of those soft and graduating shades

and hues, which seem to unite the works
of God and the creature for the glory of the
former, and calls on the inventive magnifi-
cence of art, and the spontaneous loveliness
of nature, to magnify the Author of both
it stood the independent work and em-

blem of vigorous hands and proud minds,

such as appeared to belong to those who
now approached it as worshippers. Their
finely featured and thoughtful counte-
nances, their majestic habits, and lofty fi-

gures, formed an imposing contrast to the

unintellectual expression, the crouching
posture, and the half naked squalidness of
some poor Hindoos, who, seated on their
hams, were eating their mess of rice, as
the stately Turks passed on to their devo-
tions. Immalee viewed them with a feel-
ing of awe and pleasure, and began to
think there might be some good in the re-
ligion professed by these noble-looking
beings. But, before they entered the
mosque, they spurned and spit at the un-
142 MELMOTH :

offending and terrified Hindoos; they

struck them with the flats of their sabres,
and, terming them dogs of idolaters, they
cursed them in the name of God and the
prophet. Immalee, revolted and indignant
at the sight, though she could not hear the
words that accompanied it, demanded the
reason of it. " Their religion," said the stran-
ger, " bindsthem to hate all who do not wor-
ship as they do."—^" Alas !" said Immalee,
weeping, " is not that hatred which their
religion teaches, a proof that theirs is the
worst ? But why," she added, her features
illuminated with all the wild and sparkling
intelligence of wonder, while flushed with
recent fears, " why do 1 not see among
them some of those lovelier beings, whose
habits differ from theirs, and whom you
call women? Why do they not worship
also; or have they a milder religion of
their own ?" —" That religion," replied the

stranger, " is not very favourable to those

beings, of whom you are the loveliest; it
teaches that men shall have different com-
 A TALE. 143

pan ions in the world of souls ; nor does it

clearly intimate that women shall ever ar-

rive there. Hence you may see some of
these excluded beings wandering amid
those stones that designate the place of
their dead, repeating prayers for the dead
whom they dare not hope to join and
;

others, who are old and indigent, seated

at the doors of the mosque, reading aloud
passages from a book lying on their knees,
(which they call the Koran), with the hope
of soliciting alms, not of exciting devotion."
At these desolating words, Immalee, who
had in vain looked to any of these systems
for that hope or solace which her pure
spirit and vivid imagination alike thirsted

for, felt a recoiling of the soul unutterable

at religion thus painted to her, and ex-
hibiting only a frightful picture of blood
and cruelty, of the inversion of every prin-
ciple of nature, and the disruption of every
tie of the heart.
" She flung herself on the ground, and
exclaiming, **
There is no God, if there be
 : ;

144 MELMOTH

none but theirs !" then, starting up as if to

take a last view, in the desperate hope that
all was an illusion, she discovered a small

obscure building overshaded by palm-trees,

and surmounted by a cross ; and struck by
the unobtrusive simplicity of its appear-
ance, and the scanty number and peaceable
demeanour of the few who were approach-
ing it, she exclaimed, that this must be a
new religion, and eagerly demanded its
name and rites. The stranger evinced
some uneasiness at the discovery she had
made, and testified still more reluctance to
answer the questions which it suggested
but they were pressed with such restless
and coaxing importunity, and the beauti-
ful being who urged them made such an
an artless transition fi-om profound and
meditative grief to childish, yet intelligent
curiosity, that it was not in man, or more
or less than man, to resist her.
Her glowing features, as she turned them
toward him, with an expression half impa-
tient, half pleading, were indeed those
 A TALE. 145

** * of a stilled infant smiling through its

tears." Perhaps, too, another cause might

have operated on this prophet of curses,
and made him utter a blessing where he
meant malediction but into this we dare ;

not inquire, nor will it ever be fully known

till the day when all secrets nmst be dis-

closed. However it was, he felt himself

compelled to was a new religion,
tell her it

the religion of Christ, whose rites and wor-

shippers she beheld. " But what are the
rites ?" asked Immalee. " Do they mur-
der their children, or their parents, to prove
their love to God ? Do they hang them
on baskets to perish, or leave them on the
banks of rivers to be devoured by fierce and
hideous animals?" " The religion they —
profess forbids that," said the stranger, with
reluctant truth ;
" it requires them to ho-
nour their parents, and to cherish their

* I trust the absurdity of this quotation here will

be forgiven for its beauty. It is borrowed from Miss
Baillie, the first dramatic poet of the age.
VOL. III. G
 :

14-6 MELMOTH
children." —
But why do they not spurn
*^

from the entrance to their church those

who do not think as they do ?" " Because —
their rehgion enjoins them to be mild, be-
nevolent, and tolerant and neither to re-
;

ject or disdain those who have not attained

its purer light."
—
" But why is there no
splendour or magnificence in their wor-
ship ; nothing grand or attractive ?" —" Be-
cause they know that God cannot be ac-
ceptably worshipped but by pure hearts
and crimeless hands and though their re-
;

ligion gives every hope to the penitent

guilty, it flatters none with false promises
of external devotion supplying the homage
of the heart ; or artificial and picturesque
religion standing in the place of that single
devotion to God, before whose throne,
though the proudest temples erected to his
honour crumble into dust, the heart burns
on the altar still, an inextinguishable and |
acceptable victim."
" As he spoke, (perhaps constrained by
a higher power), Immalee bowed her glow-
 — ,

A TALE. 147

ing face to the earth, and then raising it

with the look of a new-born angel, ex-

claimed, " Christ shall be my
God, and I
will be a Christian !" Again she bowed in
the deep prostration which indicates the
united submission of soul and body, and
remained in this attitude of absorption so
long, that, when she rose, she did not
perceive the absence of her companion.
" He fled murmuring, and with him fled
the shades of night."
 CHAPTER XIV.

i(
Why, I did say something about getting a licence

from the Cadi."

Blue Beard.

The visits of the stranger were inter-

rupted for some time, and when he re-
turned, it seemed as if their purpose was

no longer the same. He no longer at-

tempted to corrupt her principles, or so-
phisticate her understanding, or mystify
her views of religion. On the latter sub-
ject he was quite silent, seemed to re-
gret he had ever touched on it, and not
 ;

A TALE. 149

all her restless avidity of knowledge, or

caressing importunity of manner, could
extract from him another on the
syllable
subject. He repayed her amply, how-
ever, by the rich, varied, and copious
stores of a mind, furnished with matter
apparently beyond the power of human
experience to have collected, confined, as
it is, within the limits of threescore years
and ten. But this never struck Immalee
she took " no note of time ;" and the
tale of yesterday, or the record of past cen-
turies, were synchronized in a mind to
which facts and dates were alike unknown ;

and which was alike unacquainted with

the graduating shades of manner, and the
linked progress of events.
" They often sat on the shore of the
isle where Immalee always
in the evening,
prepared a seat of moss for her visitor, and
gazed together on the blue deep in silence ;

for Immalee's newly-awaked intellect and

heart felt that bankruptcy of language,
which profound feeling will impress on the
 150 MELMOTH:

most cultivated intellect, and which, in

her case, was increased alike by her inno-
cence and her ignorance; and her visitor
had perhaps reasons still stronger for his
silence. This silence, however, was often
broken. There was not a vessel that sail-
ed in the distance which did not suggest
an eager question from Immalee, and did
not draw a slow and extorted reply from the
stranger. His knowledge was immense,
various, and profound, (but this was rather
a subject of delight than of curiosity to his
beautiful pupil) ; and from the Indian ca-
noe, rowed by naked natives, to the splendid,
and clumsy, and ill-managed vessels of the
Rajahs, that floated like huge and gilded fish
tumbling in uncouth and shapeless mirth
on the wave, to the gallant and well-manned
vessels of Europe, that cameonlike the gods
of ocean bringing fertility and knowledge,
the discoveries of art, and the blessings of
civilization, wherever their sails were un-
furled and their anchors dropt, —
he could
tell her all, — describe the destination of
 ;

A TALE. . 151

every vessel, —the feelings, characters, and

national habits of the many-minded in-

mates, — and enlarge her knowledge to a

degree which books never could have done
for colloquial communication is always the
most vivid and impressive medium, and
lips have a prescriptive right to be the
first intelligencers in instruction and in
love.
"Perhaps this extraordinary being, with
regard to whom the laws of mortality and
the feelings of nature seemed to be alike
suspended, felt a kind of sad and wild re-
pose from the destiny that immitigably
pursued him, in the society of Immalee.
We know not, and can never tell, what
sensations her innocent and helpless beauty
inspired him with, but the result was, that
he ceased to regard her as his victim ; and,
when seated beside her listening to her
questions, or answering them, seemed to
enjoy the few lucid intervals of his insane
and morbid existence. Absent from her,
he returned to the world to torture and
152 MELMOTH:

to tempt in the mad-house where the

Englishman Stanton was tossing on his
"
straw
" Hold !" said Melmoth *' what name
—
;

have you mentioned?" " Have patience

with me, Senhor," said Mon9ada, who did
not like interruption " have patience, and
;

you will find we are all beads strung on

the same string. Why should we jar
against each other ? our union is indis-
soluble." He proceeded with the story of
the unhappy Indian, as recorded in the
parchments of Adonijah, which he had
been compelled to copy, and of which he
was anxious to impress every line and let-
ter on his listener, to substantiate his own
extraordinary story.
" When absent from her, his purpose
was what I have described; but while pre-
sent, that purpose seemed suspended he;

gazed often on her with eyes whose wild

and fierce lustre was quenched in a dew
that he hastily wiped away, and gazed on
her again. While he sat near her on the
 A TALE. 153

flowers she had collected for him,—while

he looked on those timid and rosy lips that
waited his signal to speak, like buds that
did not dare to blow till the sun shone on
—
them, while he heard accents issue from
those lips which he would be as im-
felt it

possible to pervert as would be to teach

it

the nightingale blasphemy,- -he sunk down

beside her, passed his hand over his livid
brow, and, wiping off some cold drops,
thought for a moment he was not the Cain
of the moral world, and that the brand was
effaced, —
at least for a moment. The habi-
tual and impervious gloom of his soul soon
returned. He felt again the gnawings of
the worm that never dies, and the scorch-
ings of the fire that is never to be quenched.
He turned the fatal light of his dark eyes
on the only being who never shrunk from
their expression, for her innocence made
her fearless. He looked intensely at her,
while rage, despair, and pity, convulsed his
heart ; and
he beheld the confiding and
as
conciliating smile with which this gentle
G2
 a

154i melmoth:
being met a look that might have withered
the heart of the boldest within him, —
Semele gazing in supplicating love on the
lightnings that were to blast her, one hu- —
man drop dimmed their portentous lustre,
as its softened rays fell on her. Turning
fiercely away, he flung his view on the ocean,
as if to find, in the sight of human life,

some fuel for the fire that was consuming

his vitals. The ocean, that lay calm and
bright before them as a sea of jasper, never
reflected two more diflerent countenances,
or sent more opposite feelings to two hearts.
Over Immalee's, it breathed that deep and
delicious reverie, which those forms of na-
ture that unite tranquillity and profundity
diffuse over souls whose innocence gives
them a right to an unmingled and exclu-
sive enjoyment of nature. None but crime-
less and unim passioned minds ever truly

enjoyed earth, ocean, and heaven. At

our first transgression, nature expels us,
as it did our first parents, from her para-
dise for ever.
" To the stranger the view was fraught
 A TALE. 155

with viewed it
far different visions. He
as a tiger views a forest abounding with
prey there might be the storm and the
;

wreck or, if the elements were obstinate-

;

ly calm, there might be the gaudy and

gilded pleasure barge, in which a Rajah
and the beautiful women of his haram were
inhaling the sea breeze under canopies of
silk and gold, overturned by the unskil-
fulness of their rowers, and their plunge,
and struggle, and dying agony, amid the
smile and beauty of the calm ocean, pro-
duce one of those contrasts in which his
fierce spirit dehghted. Or, were even this
denied, he could watch the vessels as they
floated by, and, from the skiff to the huge
trader, be sure that every one bore its
freight of woe and crime. There came on
the European vessels full of the passions and
crimes of another world, —of its sateless cu-
pidity, remorseless cruelty, its intelligence,
all awake and ministrant in the cause of
its evil passions, and its very refinement
operating as a stimulant to more inventive
 : ;

156 MELMOTH
indulgence, and more systematized vice.
He saw them approach to traffic for gold, **

and silver, and the souls of men;" to —

grasp, with breathless rapacity, the gems
and precious produce of those luxuriant
climates, and deny the inhabitants the rice
that supported their inoffensive existence
—to discharge the load of their crimes, their
lust and their avarice, and after ravaging
the land, and plundering the natives, de-
part, leaving behind them famine, de-
spair, and execration and bearing with
;

them back to Europe, blasted constitu-

tions, inflamed passions, ulcerated hearts,
and consciences that could not endure
the extinction of a light in their sleeping
apartment,
" Such were the objects for which he
watched ; and one evening, when solicited
by Immalee's incessant questions about
the worlds to which the vessels were has-
tening, or to which they were returning,
he gave her a description of_ the world,
after his manner, in a spirit of mingled
 A TALE. 157

derision, malignity, and impatient bitter-

ness at the innocence of her curiosity.

There was a mixture of fiendish acrimony,
biting irony, and fearful truth, in his wild
sketch, which was often interrupted by
the cries of astonishment, grief, and terror,
from his hearer. " They come," |said he,
pointing to the European vessels, " from a
world where the only study of the inhabi-
tants is how to increase their own suffer-

ings, and those of others, to the utmost

possible degree and, considering they
;

have only had 4000 years practice at the

task, it must be allowed they are tolerable
proficients."
—" But is it possible ?" —" You
shall judge. In aid, doubtless, of this de-
sirable object, they have been all originally
gifted with imperfect constitutions and
evil passions and, not to be ungrateful,
;

they pass their lives in contriving how to

augment the infirmities of the one, and
aggravate the acerbities of the other.
They are not like you, Immalee, a being
who breathes amid roses, and subsists only
 158 melmoth:
on the juices of fruits, and the lymph of
the pure element. In order to render
their thinking powers more gross, and
their spirits more fiery, they devour ani-
mals, and torture from abused vegetables
a drink, that, without quenching thirst,

has the power of extinguishing reason, in-

flaming passion, and shortening —the
life

best result of all —for life under such cir-

cumstances owes its only felicity to the

shortness of its duration."
" Immalee shuddered at the mention of
animal food, as the most delicate Euro-
pean would at the mention of a cannibal
feast; and while tears trembled in her
beautiful eyes, she turned them wistfully
on her peacocks with an expression that
made the stranger smile. " Some," said
he, by way of consolation, ** have a taste
by no means so sophisticated, they con- —
tent themselves at their need with the flesh
of their fellow-creatures; and as human
life is always miserable, and animal life

never so, (except from elementary causes),

 A TALE. 159

one would imagine this the most humane

and salutary way of at once gratifying the
appetite, and diminishing the mass of hu-
man suffering. But as these people pique
themselves on their ingenuity in aggravat-
ing the sufferings of their situation, they
leave thousands of human beings yearly to
perish by hunger and grief, and amuse
themselves in feeding on animals, whom,
by depriving of existence, they deprive of
the only pleasure their condition has allot-
ted them. When they have thus, by un-
natural diet and outrageous stimulation,
happily succeeded in corrupting infirmity
into disease, and exasperating passion into
madness, they proceed to exhibit the proofs
of their success, with an expertness and
consistency truly admirable. They do not,
like you, Immalee, live in the lovely inde-
—
pendence of nature lying on the earth,
and sleeping with all the eyes of heaven
—
unveiled to watch you treading the same
grass till your light step feels a friend in
every blade it —and
presses conversing
160 MELMOTH :

with flowers, till you feel yourself and

them children of the united family of na-
ture, whose mutual language of love youi
have almost learned to speak to each other
^
—no, to effect their purpose, their food,
which is of itself poison, must be rendered
more fatal by the air they inhale; and
therefore the more civiHzed crowd all to-
gether into a space which their own re-
spiration, and the exhalation of their bo-
dies, renders pestilential, and which gives

a celerity inconceivable to the circulation

of disease and mortality. Four thousand
of them will live together in a space small-
and lightest colonnade of
er than the last
your young banyan- tree, in order, doubt-
less, to increase the effects of foetid air, ar-

tificial heat, unnatural habits, and imprac-

ticable exercise. The result of these judi-
cious precautions is just what may be
guessed. The most trifling complaint be-
comes immediately infectious, and, during
the ravages of the pestilence, which this
habit generates, ten thousand lives a-day
 A TALE. 161

are the customary sacrifice to the habit of

living in cities." —"
But they die in ^he
arms of those they love," said Immalee,
whose tears flowed fast at this recital;
" and is not that better than even life
in solitude, — as mine was before I beheld
you ?"
" The stranger was too intent on his
description to heed her. " To these cities
they resort nominally for security and pro-
tection, but really for the sole purpose to
which their existence is devoted, —that of
aggravating its by every ingenui-
miseries
ty of refinement. For example, those who
live in uncontrasted and untantalized mi-
sery, can hardly feel it —
suffering becomes
their habit, and they feel no more jealousy
of their situation than the bat, who clings
in blind and famishing stupefaction to the
cleft of a rock, feels of the situation of the
butterfly, who drinks of the dew, and
bathes in the bloom of every flower. But
the people of the other worlds have in-
vented, by means of living in cities, a new
 —

162 MELMOTH :

and singular mode of aggravating human

wretchedness —that of contrasting it with
the wild and wanton excess of superfluous
and extravagant splendour."
" Here the stranger had incredible diffi-
culty to make Immalee comprehend how
there could be an unequal division of the
means of existence; and when he had done
his utmost to explain it to her, she conti-
nued on her
to repeat, (her white finger
and her small foot beating the
scarlet lip,
moss), in a kind of pouting inquietude,
" Why should some have more than they
can eat, and others nothing to eat?"
" This," continued the stranger, " is the
most exquisite refinement on that art of
torture which those beings are so expert
in—to place misery by the side of opu-
lence —to bid the wretch who dies for
want feed on the sound of the splendid
equipages which shake his hovel as they
pass, but leave no relief behind —to bid
the industrious, the ingenious, and the
imaginative, starve, while bloated medio-
 A TALE. 163

crity pants —
from excess to bid the dying
sufferer feel that life might be prolonged
by one drop of that exciting liquor, which,
wasted, produces only sickness or madness
in those whose lives it undermines; — to
do this is their principal object, and it is
fully attained. The sufferer through whose
rags the wind of winter blows, like arrows
—
lodging in every pore whose tears freeze
—
before they fall whose soul is as dreary
as the night under whose cope his resting-
—
place must be whose glued and clammy
lips are unable to receive the food which

famine, lying like a burning coal at his vi-

—
tals, craves and who, amid the horrors of
a houseless winter, might prefer its deso-
lation to that of the den that abuses the
— —
name of home without food without
—
light where the bowlings of the storm
are answered by the fiercer cries of hun-
—
ger and he must stumble to his murky
and strawless nook over the bodies of his
children, who have sunk on the floor, not
 — ; '

164 MELMOTH :

for rest, but despair. Such a being, is he

?''
not sufficiently miserable
" Immalee's shudderings were her only
answer, (though of many parts of his de-
scription she had a very imperfect idea).
" No, he is not enough so yet," pursued
the stranger, pressing the picture on her
" let his steps, that know not where they
wander, conduct him to the gates of the
affluent —
and the luxurious let him feel
that plenty and mirth are removed from
him but by the interval of a wall, and yet
more distant than if severed by worlds
let him feel that while his world is dark*

ness and cold, the eyes of those within are

aching with the blaze of light, and hands
relaxed by artificial heat, are soliciting with
fans the refreshment of a breeze ^let him —
feel that every groan he utters is answered
by a song or a laugh —and let him die on
the steps of the mansion, while his last

conscious pang is aggravated by the

thought, that the price of the hundredth
 A TALE. 165

part of the luxuries that he un tasted be-

fore heedless beauty and sated epicurism,
would have protracted his existence, while
it poisons theirs —
let him die of want on

the threshold of a banquet-hall, and then

admire with me the ingenuity that dis-
plays itself in this new combination of mi-
sery. The inventive activity of the peo-
ple of the world, in the multiplication of
calamity, is inexhaustibly fertile in resour-
ces. ]Not satisfied with diseasesand fa-
mine, with sterility of the earth, and tem-
pests of the air, they must have laws and
marriages, and kiqgs and tax-gatherers,
and wars and fetes, and every variety of
artificial misery inconceivable to you."
" Immalee, overpowered by this torrent of
words, to her unintelligible words, in vain
asked a connected explanation of them.
The demon of his superhuman misanthro-
py had now fully possessed him, and not
even the tones of a voice as sweet as the
strings of David's harp, had power to ex^
166 MELMOTH:

pel the evil one. So he went on flinging i

about his fire-brands and arrows, and then

saying, "Am Inotin sport? These people*,"
said he, " have made unto themselves kings,
that is, beings whom they voluntarily invest
with the privilege of draining, by taxation,
whatever wealth their vices have left to
the rich, and whatever means of subsis-
tence their want has left to the poor, till

their extortion is cursed from the castle to

the cottage —and this to support a few
pampered favourites, who are harnessed by-
silken reins to the car, which they drag

* As, by a mode of criticism equally false and

unjust, the worst sentiments of my worst characters,
(from the ravings of Bertram to the blasphemies of
Cardonneau), have been represented as mt/ atvn, I
must here trespass so far on the patience of the read-,
er as to assure him, that the sentiments ascribed to
the stranger are diametrically opposite to mine, and
that I have purposely put them into the mouth of an
agent of the enemy of mankind.
 A TALE. 167

over the prostrate bodies of the multitude.

Sometimes exhausted by the monotony of
perpetual fruition, which has no parallel
even in the monotony of suffering, (for the
excitement of hope,
latter has at least the
which is for ever denied to the former),
they amuse themselves by making war,
that is, collecting the greatest number of
human beings that can be bribed to the
task, to cut the throats of a less, equal,
or greater number of beings, bribed
in the same manner for the same pur-
pose. These creatures have not the least
cause of enmity to each other they do —
not know, they never beheld each other.
Perhaps they might, under other circum-
stances, wish each other well, as far as hu-
man malignity would suffer them; but
from the moment they are hired for legal-
ized massacre, hatred is their duty, and

murder their delight. The man who

would feel reluctance to destroy the rep-
tile that crawls in his path, will equip him*
 —

16S MELMOTH :

self with metals fabricated for the purpose

of destruction, and snaile to see it stained
with the blood of a being, whose existence
and happiness he would have sacrificed his
own to promote, under other circumstan-
ces. So strong is this habit of aggravating
misery under artificial circumstances, that
it has been known, when in a sea-fight a
vessel has blown up, (here a long explana-
tion was owed to Immalee, which may be
spared the reader), the people of that world
have plunged into the water to save, ati

the risk of their own lives, the lives of

those with whom they were grappling
amid and blood a moment before, and
fire

whom, though they would sacrifice to their

passions, their pride refused to sacrifice to
the elements." —" Oh that is beautiful !

that is glorious !" said Immalee, clasping

her white hands; " 1 could bear all you
!"
describe to see that sight
" Her smile of innocent delight, her
spontaneous burst of high-toned feeling.
 A TALE. 169

had the usual effect of adding a darker

shade to the frown of the stranger, and a
sterner curve to the repulsive contraction
of his upper lip, which was never raised
but to express hostility or contempt.
" But what do the kings do ?" said Im>
malee, " while they are making men kill
—
each other for nothing ?" " You are ig-
norant, Immalee," said the stranger, ^' very
ignorant, or you would not have said it
was for nothing. Some of them fight for
—
ten inches of barren sand some for the
—
dominion of the salt wave some for any
— —
thing and some for nothing but all for
pay 'and poverty, and occasional excitement,
and the love of action, and the love of
change, and the dread of home, and the
consciousness of evil passions, and the
hope of death, and the admiration of the
showy dress in which they are to perish.
The best of the jest is, they contrive not
only to reconcile themselves to these cruel
and wicked absurdities, but to dignify
them with the most imposing names their
VOL. III. H
 :

170 MELMOTH
perverted language supplies —the names of
fame, of glory, of recording memory, and
admiring posterity.
" Thus a wretch whom want, idleness,
or intemperance, drives to this reckless and
heart-withering business, —who leaves his
wife and children to the mercy of stran-
gers, or to famish, (terms nearly synoni-
mous), the moment he has assumed the
blushing badge that privileges massacre,
becomes, in the imagination of this intoxi-
cated people, the defender of his country,
entitled to her gratitude and to her praise.
The idle stripling, who hates the cultiva-
tion of intellect, and despises the meanness
of occupation, feels, perhaps, a taste for ar-
raying his person in colours as gaudy as
the parrot's or the peacock's ; and this ef-
feminate propensity is baptised by the|
prostituted name of the love of glory — ^and
this complication of motives borrowed from
vanity and from vice, from the fear of dis-
tress, the wantonness of idleness, and the
appetite for mischief, finds one convenient
 A TALE. 171

and sheltering appellation in the single

sound — patriotism. And those beings who
never knew one generous impulse, one in-
dependent feeling, ignorant of either the
principles or the justice of the cause for
which they contend, and wholly uninte-
rested in the result, except so far as it in-

volves the concerns of their own vanity,

cupidity, and avarice, are, while living,
hailed by the infatuated world as its be-
nefactors, and when dead, canonized as its
martyrs. He died in his country's cause,
is the epitaph inscribed by the rash hand
of indiscriminating eulogy on the grave of
ten thousand, who had ten thousand dif-
ferent motives for their choice and their
fate, —who might have lived to be their
country's enemies if they had not happened
—
to fall in her defence, and whose love of
their country, if fairly analysed, was, under
its various forms of vanity, restlessness, the
love of tumult, or the love of —
show pure-
ly love of themselves. There let them
rest—nothing but the wish to disabuse
172 ^vmLMOTH:

their idolaters, who prompt the sacrifice,

and then applaud the victim they have

made, could have tempted me to dwell
thus long on beings as mischievous in
their lives, as they are insignificant in their
death.
^' Another amusement of these people,
so ingenious in multiplying the sufferings
of their destiny, is what they call law.
They pretend to find in this a security for
their persons and their properties —with
how much justice, their own felicitous ex-
perience must inform them ! Of the secu-
rity it gives to the latter, judge, Immalee,
when I tell you, that you might spend
your life in their courts, without being
able to prove that those roses you have
gathered and twined in your hair were
your own —that
you might starve for this
day's meal, while proving your right to a
property which must incontestibly be
yours, on the condition of your being
able to fast on a few years, and survive to
enjoy it—and that, finally, with the sen-

i
 —

A TALE. 173

timents of all upright men, the opinions of

the judges of the land, and the fullest con-
viction of your own conscience in your fa-

vour, you cannot obtain the possession of

what you and all feel to be your own,
while your antagonist can start an objec-
tion, purchase a fraud, or invent a lie. So
pleadings go on, and years are wasted, and
property consumed, and hearts broken,
and law triumphs. One of its most admi-
rable triumphs is in that ingenuity by
which it contrives to convert a difficulty
into an impossibility, and punish a man
for not doing what it has rendered imprac-
ticable for him to do.
" When he is unable to pay his debts,
it deprives him of liberty and credit, to in-
sure that inability still and while
further ;

destitute alike of themeans of subsistence,

or the power of satisfying his creditors, he
is enabled, by this righteous arrangement,

to console himself, at least, with the reflec-

tion, that he can injure his creditor as
much as he has suffered from him—that
 174 MELMOTH :

certain loss is the reward of immitigable

cruelty —and that, while he famishes in
prison, the page in which his debt is re-
corded rots away faster than his body and ;

the angel of death, with one obliterating

sweep of his wing, cancels misery and
debt, and presents, grinning in horrid tri-
umph, the release of debtor and debt, sign-
ed by a hand that makes the judges trem-
ble on their seats." —
" But they have reli-
gion," said the poor Indian, trembling at
this horrible description ;
" they have that
religion which you shewed me its mild —
—
and peaceful spirit its quietness and re-
signation — —
no blood no cruelty." " Yeff, —
— true," said the stranger, with some re-
luctance, " they have religion ; for in their
zeal for suffering, they feel the torments
of one world not enough, unless aggravat-.
ed by the terrors of another. They have]
such a religion, but what use have they
made of it ? Intent on their settled pur-
pose of discovering misery wherever it

could be traced, and inventing it where it

 A TALE. 175

could not, they have found, even in the

pure pages of that book, which, they pre-
sume to say, contains their title to peace
on earth, and happiness hereafter, a right
to hate, plunder, and murder each other.
Here they have been compelled to exercise
an extraordinary share of perverted inge-
nuity. The book contains nothing but
what is good, and evil must be the minds,
and hard the labour of those evil minds, to
extort a tinge from it to colour their pre-
tensions withal. But mark, in pursuance
of their great object, (the aggravation of
general misery), mark how subtilly they
have wrought. They call themselves by
various names, to excite passions suitable
to the names they bear. Thus some for-
bid the perusal of that book to their disci-
ples, and others assert, that from the ex-
clusive study of pages alone, can the
its

hope of salvation be learned or substantiat-

ed. It is singular, however, that with all
their ingenuity, they have never been able
to extract a subject of difference from the
 —

176 MELMOTH :

essential contents of that book, to which

they all appeal — so they proceed after their
manner.
" They never dare to dispute that it

contains irresistible injunctions, that

those who should live in ha-
believe in it

bits of peace, benevolence, and harmony,

that they should love each other in pro-
sperity, and assist each other in adversity.
They dare not deny that the spirit that
book inculcates and inspires, is a spirit
whose fruits are love, joy, peace, long-suf-
fering, mildness, and truth. On these
points they never presumed to differ.
They are too plain to be denied, so they
contrive to make matter of difference out
of the various habits they wear and they ;

God,
cut each other's throats for the love of
oi> the important subject *, whether their

iackets should be red or white— or whether

* The Catholics and Protestants were thus distin.

guished in the wars of the League.

 A TALj:. 177

their priests should be arrayed in silk rib-

bons *, or white linen f or black household

,

garments :|: —
or whether they should im-
merse their children in water, or sprinkle
them with a few drops of it or whether —
they should partake of the memorials of
the death of him they all profess to love,
standing or on their knees —or But
I weary you with this display of human
wickedness and absurdity. One point is

plain, they all agree that the language of

the book is, " Love one another," while
they all translate that language, " Hate one
another." But as they can find neither
materials or excuse from that book, they
search for them in their own minds, —and
there they are never at a loss, for human
minds are inexhaustible in malignity and
hostility; and when they borrow the name
of that book to sanction them, the deifica-
tion of their passions becomes a duty, and
their worst impulses are hallowed and

* Catholics, t Protestants.. |, Dissenters*

H 2
 : —

178 MELMOTH
practised as virtues." —" Are there no pa-
rents or children in these horrible worlds?"
said Immalee, turning her tearful eyes on
this traducer of humanity; " none that
love each other as I loved the tree under
which I was first conscious of existence, or
the flowers that grew with me ?" —" Pa-
rents ? —children ?" said the stranger ;
" Oh
yes ! There are fathers who instruct their
sons " And his voice was lost —he
struggled to recover it.
" After a long pause, he said, "There
are some kind parents among those sophis-
ticated people." —" And who are they ?**

saidImmalee, whose heart throbbed spon-

taneously at the mention of kindliness.
" Those," said the stranger, with a wither-
ing smile, " who murder their children at
the hour of their birth, or, by medical art,

dismiss them before they have seen the

light ; Ttud, in so doing, they give the only
credible evidence of parental affection."
" He ceased,and Immalee remained
silent in melancholy meditation on what
 A TALE. 179
t

she had heard. The acrid and searing

irony of his language had made no impres-
sion on one with whom " speech was
truth,"and who could have no idea why a
circuitous mode of conveying meaning
could be adopted, when even a direct one
was often attended with difficulty to her-
self. But she could understand, that he
had spoken much of evil and of suffering,
names unknown to her before she beheld
him, and she turned on him a glance that
seemed at once to thank and reproach him
for her painful initiation into the mys-
teries of a new existence. She had, in-
deed, tasted of the tree of knowledge, and
her eyes were opened, but its fruit was
bitter to her taste, and her looks conveyed
a kind of mild and melancholy gratitude,
that would have wrung the heart for giv-
ing its first lesson of pain to the heart of a

being so beautiful, so gentle, and so inno-

cent. The stranger marked this blended
expression, and exulted.
" He had distorted life thus to her ima.
180 MELMOTH:
gination, perhaps with the purpose of ter-
rifying her from a nearer view of it per- ;

haps in the wild hope of keeping her for

ever in this solitude, where he might
sometimes see her, and catch, from the
atmosphere of purity that surrounded
her, the only breeze that floated over
the burning desert of his own existence.
This hope was strengthened by the ob-
vious impression his discourse had made
on her. The sparkling intelligence, —the
breathless curiosity, — ^the vivid gratitude
of her former expression, —were all extin-
guished, and her down cast and thought-
ful eyes were full of tears.
Has my conversation wearied you,
"
—
Immalee?" said he. " It has grieved me,
yet I wish to listen still," answered the
Indian. " I love to hear the murmur of
the stream, though the crocodile may be
beneath the waves." — " Perhaps you wish
to encounter the people of world, this so
full
—
of crime and misfortune." " I do, for
it is the world you came from, and when
 —

A TALE. 185

you return to it all will be happy but me."

—" And is it, then, in my power to con-

fer happiness ?" said her companion " is ;

it for this purpose I wander among man-

kind ?" A
mingled and indefinable ex-
pression of derision, malevolence, and de-
spair, overspread his features, as he added,
" You do me too much honour, in devis-
ing for me an occupation so mild and so
congenial to my spirit."
" Immalee, whose eyes were averted, did
not see this expression, and she replied^
" I know not, but you have taught me the
joy of grief ; before I saw you I only smil-
ed, but since I saw you, I weep, and my
tears are delicious. Oh ! they are far dif-
ferent from those I shed for the setting
sun, or the faded rose ! And yet I know
not ''
And the poor Indian, oppressed by
emotions she could neither understand or
express, clasped her hands on her bosom,
as if to hide the secret of its new palpita-
tions, and, with the instinctive diffidence
of her purity, signified the change of her
 :

182 MELMOTH
feelings, by few steps from her
retiring a
<»ompanion, and casting on the earth eyes
which could contain their tears no longer.
The stranger appeared troubled, —an emo-
tion new to himself agitated him for a mo-
ment, —then a smile of self-disdain curled
he reproached himself for the
his lip, as if
indulgence of human feeling even for a mo-
ment. Again his features relaxed, as he
turned to the bending and averted form of
Immalee, and he seemed like one conscious
of agony of soul himself, yet inclined to
sport with the agony of another's. This
union of inward despair and outward le-
vity is not unnatural. Smiles are the le-

gitimate offspring of happiness, but laugh-

ter is often the misbegotten child of mad-
ness,^ that mocks its parent to her face.

With such an expression he turned to-

wards her, and asked, " But what is your
meaning, Immalee ?" —A
long pause fol-
lowed this question, and at length the In-
dian answered, " I know not," with that
natural and delicious art which teaches the
 ;

A TALE. 183

sex to disclose their meaning in words that

seem to contradict it. " I know not,"

means, " I know too well." Her com-

panion understood this, and enjoyed his
anticipated triumph. "And why do your
tears flow, Immalee ?" —" I know not,"
said the poor Indian, and her tears flowed
faster at the question.
" At these words, or rather at these
tears, the stranger forgot himself for a mo-
ment. He felt that melancholy triumph
which the conqueror is unable to enjoy
that triumph which announces a victory
over the weakness of others, obtained at
the expence of a greater weakness in our-
selves. A human feeling, in spite of him,
pervaded his whole soul, as he said, in ac-
cents of involuntary softness, " What
would you have me do, Immalee ?" The
difficulty of speaking a language that
might be at once intelligible and reserved,
— that might convey her wishes without
—
betraying her heart, and the unknown
nature of her new emotions, made Im-
184 MELMOTH :

malee faulter long before she could an-

—
swer, " Stay with me, return not to that
—
world of evil and sorrow. Here the flowers
will always bloom, and the sun be as bright
as on the first day I beheld you. Why —
will you go back to the world to think
and to be unhappy ?" The wild and dis-
cordant laugh of her companion, startled
and silenced her. " Poor girl," he ex-
claimed, with that mixture of bitterness
and commiseration, that at once terrifies
and humiliates " and is this the destiny
;

I am to fulfil ? — to listen to the chirping

of birds, and watch the opening of buds ?
Is this to be my lot ?" and with another
wild burst of unnatural laughter, he flung
away the hand which Immalee had ex-
tended to him as she had finished her sim-
ple appeal. — " Yes, doubtless, I am well
fitted for such a fate, and such a partner.
Tell me," he added, with still wilder fierce-
ness, " tell me from what line of my
features, —from what accent of my voice,
—from what sentiment of my discourse.
 A TALE. 185

have you extracted the foundation of a

hope that insults me with the view of fe-
licity ?" Immalee, who might have re-
pHed, " understand a fury in your words,
I

but not your words," had yet sufficient aid

from her maiden pride, and female pene-
tration, to discover that she was rejected
by the stranger and a brief emotion of in-
;

dignant grief struggled with the tender-

ness of her exposed and devoted heart.
She paused a moment, and then checking
her tears, said, in her firmest tones, " Go,
—
then, to your world, since you wish to be
unhappy go — —
Alas it is not necessary
!
!

to go there to be unhappy, for I must be

so here. —
Go, but take with you these
roses, for they will all wither when you are
gone !
—
take with you these shells, for I
shallno longer love to wear them when you
no longer see them !" And as she spoke,
with simple, but emphatic action, she un-
twined from her bosom and hair the shells
and flowers with which they were adorned,
and threw them at his feet then turning ;
186 MELMOTH:

to throw one glance of proud and melan-

choly grief at him, she was retiringf
—
" Stay, Immalee, stay, and hear me for
a moment," said the stranger; and he
would, at that moment, have perhaps dis-
covered the ineffable and forbidden secret
of his destiny, but Immalee, in silence,
which her look of profound grief made
eloquent, shook sadly her averted head,
and departed.
 —

CHAPTER XVII.

Miseram me omnia terent, et maris sonitus, et

scopuli, et solitude, et sanctitudo Apollinis.
Latin Plav.

" JM-ANY days elapsed before the stranger

revisited the isle. How he was occupied,
or what feelings agitated him in the inter-
val> itwould be beyond human conjecture
to discover. Perhaps he sometimes ex-
ulted in the misery he had inflicted,
perhaps he sometimes pitied it. His
stormy mind was like an ocean that had
swallowed a thousand wrecks of gallant
 —

188 melmoth:

ships, and now seemed to dally with th^i

loss of a little slender skiff, that could
hardly make way on its surface in the pro-
foundest calm. Impelled, however, by
malignity, or tenderness, or curiosity, or
weariness of artificial life, so vividly con-
trasted by the unadulterated existence of
Immalce, into whose pure elements no-
thing but flowers and fragrance, the spark-
ling of the heavens, and the odours of earth,
had transfused their essence or, possibly,—
by a motive more powerful than all, Ms
own will; which, never analysed, and
hardly ever confessed to be the ruling
principle of our actions, governs nine-
tenths of them. —
He returned to the shore
of the haunted isle, the name by which it

was distinguished by those who knew not

how new goddess who was
to classify the
it, and who were
supposed to inhabit as
much puzzled by this new specimen in
their theology, as Linnaeus himself could
have been by a non-descript in botany.
Alas the varieties in moral botany far
!
 A TALE. 189

exceed the wildest anomalies of those in

the natural. However it was, the stranger
But he had to traverse
returned to the isle.
many paths, where human foot but his
had never been, and to rend away branches
that seemed to tremble at a human touch,
and to cross streams into which no foot
but his had ever been dipped, before he
could discover where Immalee had conceal-
ed herself.
" Concealment, however, was not in her
thoughts. When he found was
her, she
leaning against a rock; the ocean was
pouring its eternal murmur of waters at
her feet ; she had chosen the most desolate
spot she could find; —there was neither
flower or shrub near her; —the calcined
rocks, the offspring of volcano —the rest-
lessroar of the sea, whose waves almost
touched her small foot, that seemed by its
heedless protrusion at once to court and
neglect danger—these objects were all
that surrounded her. The first time he
had beheld her, she was embowered amid
 ;;

190 MELMOTH :

flowers and odours, amid all the glorious

luxuries of vegetable and animal nature
the roses and the peacocks seemed emulous
which should expand their leaves or their
plumes, as a shade to that loveliness which
seemed to hover between them, alternately-
borrowing the fragrance of the one, and
the hues of the other. Now she stood as
if deserted even by nature, whose child she
was ; the rock was her resting-place, and
the ocean seemed the bed where she pur-
posed to rest ; she had no shells on her
bosom, no roses in her hair—her character
seemed to have changed with her feelings
she no longer loved all that is beautiful in
nature ; she seemed, by an anticipation of
her destiny, to make alliance with all that
is awful and ominous. She had begun to
love the rocks and the ocean, the thunder
of the wave, and the sterility of the sand,
—awful objects, the incessant recurrence
of whose very sound seems intended to re-

mind us of grief and of eternity. .Their

restless monotony of repetition, corre-
 A TALE. 191

spends with the beatings of a heart which

asks its destiny from the phenomena of na-
ture,
—
and feels the answer is " Misery."
" Those who love may seek the luxuries
of the garden, and inhale added intoxica-
tion from its perfumes, which seem the
offerings of nature on that altar which is
already erected and burning in the heart of
the worshipper ;
—
but let those who have
loved seek the shores of the ocean, and
they shall have their answer too.
" There was a sad and troubled air
about her, as she stood so lonely, that
seemed at once to express the conflict of
her internal emotions, and to reflect the
gloom and agitation of the physical objects
around her for nature was preparing for
;

one of those awful convulsions one of —

those abortive throes of desolation, that
seems to announce a more perfect wrath
to come and while it blasts the vegeta-
;

tion, and burns up the soil of some visit-

ed portion, seems to proclaim in the
192 MELMOTH :

murmur of its receding thunders, that]

it will return in that day, when the
universe shall pass away as a scroll, and
the elements melt with fervent heat,
and return to fulfil the dreadful pro-
mise, which its partial and initiatory
devastation has left incomplete. Is there
a peal of thunder that does not mutter a
menace, " For me, the dissolution of the
world is reserved, I depart, but 1 shall
return?" Is there a flash of lightning
that does not say, visibly , if not audibly;
" Sinner, I cannot now penetrate the reces-
ses of your soul ; but how will you en-
counter my glare, when the hand of the
judge armed with me, and my penetrat-
is

ing glance displays you to the view of as-

sembled worlds ?"
" The evening was very dark heavy ;

clouds, rolling on like the forces of an hos-

tile army, obscured the horizon from east

to west. There was a bright but ghastly

blue in the heaven above, like that in the
 —

A TALE. 193

eye of the dying, where the last forces of

life are collected, while its powers are ra-

pidly forsaking the frame, and feeling

their extinguishment must shortly be.
There was not a breath of air to heave the
ocean, —the trees drooped without a whis-
per to woo their branches or their buds,
the birds had retired, with that instinct
which teaches them to avoid the fearful
encounter of the elements, and nestled
with cowering wings and drooping heads
among their favourite trees. There was
not a human sound in the isle ; the very
rivulet seemed to tremble at its own tink-
lings, and its small waves flowed as if a
subterranean hand arrested and impeded
their motion. Nature, in these grand and
terrific operations, seems in some degree to

assimilate herself to a parent, whose most

fearful denunciations are preceded by an
awful silence, or rather to a judge, whose
final sentence is felt with less horror than
the pause that intervenes before it is pro-
nounced.
VOL. III. I
194 MELMOTH :

" Immalee gazed on the awful scene by

which she was surrounded, without any
emotion derived from physical causes. To
her, light and darkness had hitherto been
the same she loved the sun for its lustre,
;

and the lightning for its transitory brilli-

ancy, and the ocean for its sonorous music,
and the tempest for the agitation which it
gave to the trees, under whose bending
and welcoming shadow she danced, in time
kept by the murmur of their leaves, that
hung low, as if to crown their votarist.
And she loved the night, when all was
still, but what she was accustomed to call

the music of a thousand streams, that

made the stars rise from their beds, to
sparkle and nod to that wild melody.
" Such she had been. Now, her eye
w^as intently fixed on the declining light,
—
and the approaching darkness, that preter-
natural gloom, that seems to say to the
brightestand most beautiful of the works
of God, " Give place to me, thou shalt
shine no more/'
 A TALE. 195

" The darkness increased, and the clouds

collected like an army that had mustered
its utmost force, and stood in obdured and
collected strength against the struggling
light of heaven. A broad, red, and dusky
line of gloomy light, gathered round
the horizon, like an usurper watching
the throne of an abdicated sovereign^
and expanding its portentous circle, sent
forth alternately flashes of lightning, pale
—
and red; the murmur of the sea increased,
and the arcades of the banyan-tree, that
had struck its patriarchal root not five
hundred paces from where Immalee stood,
resounded the deep and almost unearthly
murmur of the approaching storm through
all its colonnades the primeval trunk
;

rocked and groaned, and the everlasting

fibres seemed to withdraw their grasp from
the earth, and quiver in air at the sound.
Nature, with every voice she could inspire
from earth, or air, or water, announced
danger to her children.
" That was the moment the stranger
 ;

196 MELMOTH :

chose to approach Immalee of danger he

;

was he was unconscious

insensible, of fear
his miserable destiny had exempted him
from both, but what had it left him ? No
hope—but that of plunging others into his
own condemnation. No fear but that —
his victim might escape him. Yet with
all his diabolical heartlessness, he did feel
some relen tings of his human nature, as
he beheld the young Indian her cheek ;

was palcj but her eye was fixed, and her

figure, turned from him, (as if she preferred
to encounter the tremendous rage of the
storm), seemed to him to say, " Let me
fall into the hands of God, and not into

those of man."
" This attitude, so unintentionally as-
sumed by Immalee, and so little expressive
of her real feelings, restored all the malig-
nant energies of the stranger's feelings;
the former evil purposes of his heart, and
the habitual character of his dark and
fiendish pursuit, rushed back on him.
Amid this contrasted scene of the convul-
 A TALE. 197

sive rage of nature, and the passive help-

lessness of her unsheltered loveliness, he
felt a glow of excitement, like that which

pervaded him, when the fearful powers of

his " charmed life" enabled him to pene-
trate the cells of a madhouse, or the dun-
geons of an Inquisition.
" He saw this pure being surrounded
by the and felt a wild and
terrors of nature,
terrible conviction, thatthough the light-
ning might blast her in a moment, yet
there was a bolt more burning and more
fatal, which was wielded by his own hand,

and which, if he could aim it aright, must

transfix her very soul.
" Armed with all his malignity and all
his power, he approached I mm alee, armed
only with her purity, and standing like the
reflected beam of the last ray of light
on whose extinction she was gazing.
There was a contrast in her form and her
situation, that might have touched any
feelings but those of the wanderer.
" The light of her figure shining out a^
 :

198 MELMOTH :

mid the darkness that enveloped her, — its

undulating softness rendered still softer

to the eye by the rock against which it
reclined,— its softness, brightness, and flexi-

bility, presenting a kind of playful hos-

tility to the tremendous aspect of nature

overcharged with wrath and ruin.

" The stranger approached her unob-
served; his steps were unheard amid the
rush of the ocean, and the deep, portentous
murmur of the elements but, as he ad-
;

vanced, he heard sounds that perhaps ope-

rated on his feelings as the whispers of Eve
to her flowers on the organs of the serpent.
Both knew their power, and felt their time.
Amid the fast approaching terrors of a
storm, more terrible than any she had ever
witnessed, the poor Indian, unconscious,
or perhaps insensible of its was
dangers,
singing her wild song of desperation and
love to the echoes of the advancing storm.
Some words of this strain of despair and
passion reached the ear of the stranger.
They were thus
 A TALE. 199.

*'
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 ?
" I lived but in the light of his presence
—why should I not die when that light is
withdraw^n ? Anger of the clouds, what
have I to fear from you ? You may scorch
me to dust, as I have seen you scorch the
branches of the eternal trees but the trunk —
still remained, and my heart will be his

for ever.
" Roar on, terrible ocean ! thy waves,
which I cannot count, can never wash his
—
image from my soul, thou dashest a thou-
sand waves against a rock, but the rock is
—
unmoved and so would be my heart a-
mid 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."
" She paused in her wild song, and then
 200 MELMOTH
renewed it, regardless alike of the terrors 1
of the elements, and the possible presence
of one whose subtle and poisonous po-
tency was more fatal than all the elements
in their united wrath.
" When w^e first met, my bosom was
covered with roses —now it is shaded with
the dark leaves of the oeynum. When he
saw me first, the living things all loved
—
me now I care not whether they love
—
me or not I have forgot to love them.
When he came to the isle every night, I
hoped the moon would be bright —now I
care not whether she rises or sets, whether
she is clouded or bright. Before he came,
every thing loved me, and I had more
things to love than I could reckon by the
hairs of my head — now I feel I can love
but one, and that one has deserted me.
Since I have seen him all things have
changed. The flowers have not the co-
lours they once had —there is no music
in the flow of the waters —the stars do not
 —

A TALE. 201

smile on me from heaven as they did,

and I myself begin to love the storm bet-
ter than the calm."
**
As she ended her melancholy strain,
she turned from the spot where the in-
creasing fury of the storm made it no
longer possible for her to stand, and turn-
ing,met the gaze of the stranger fixed on
her. A suffusion, the most rich and vivid,
mantled over her from brow to bosom;
she did not utter her usual exclamation of
joy at his sight, but, with averted eyes
and faultering step, followed him as he
pointed her to seek shelter amid the ruins
of the pagoda. They approached it in si-
lence ; amid the convulsions and fury
and,
of nature, it was singular to see two beings
walk on together without exchanging a
word of apprehension, or feeling a thought
—
of dangei', the one armed by despair, the
other by innocence. Immalee would ra-
ther have sought the shelter of her fa-
vourite banyan-tree, but the stranger tried
to make her comprehend, that her danger
12
202 MELMOTH :

would be much greater there than in the

spot he pointed out to her. " Danger !"
said the Indian, while a bright and wild
smile irradiated her features ;
" can there
be danger when you are near me ?" " Is —
there, then, no danger in my presence 1 —
few have met me without dreading, and
without feeling it too !" and his counte-
nance, as he spoke, grew darker than the
heaven at which he scowled. " Immalee,"
he added, in a voice still deeper and more
thrilling,from the unwonted operation of
human emotion in its tones " Immalee,
;

you cannot be weak enough to believe

that I hav^ power of controuling the ele-
ments? If I had," he continued, " by the
heaven that is frowning at me, the first
exertion of my power should be to collect
the most swift and deadly of thehghtnings
that are hissing around us, and transfix
—
yon where you stand !" " Me ?" repeated
the trembling Indian, her cheek growing
paler at his words, and the voice in which
they were uttered, than at the redoubling
 —

A TALE. 2!03

fury of the storm, amid whose pauses she

scarce heard them. —"
Yes you you — —
lovely as you and innocent, and pure,
are,

before a fire more deadly consumes your

existence, and drinks your heart-blood
before you are longer exposed to a danger
a thousand times more fatal than those
with which the elements menace you —the
danger of my accursed and miserable pre-
sence !"
" Immalee, unconscious of his meaning,
but trembling with impassioned grief at
the agitation with which he spoke, ap-
proached him to soothe the emotion of
which she knew neither the name or the
cause. Through the fractures of the ruin
the red and ragged lightnings disclosed,
from time to time, a glimpse of her figure,
— —
her dishevelled hair, her pallid and ap-
—
pealing look, her locked hands, and the
imploring bend of her slight form, as if
she was asking pardon for a crime of which
—
she was unconscious, and soliciting an in-
terest in griefs not her own. All around
 :

204 MELMOTH
her wild, unearthly, and terrible, —the floor
strewed with fragments of stone, and
mounds of sand, —the vast masses of ruin-
ed architecture, whose formation seemed the
work of no human hand, and whose destruc-
tion appeared the sport of demons, the —
yawning fissures of the arched and ponde-
rous roof, through which heaven darkened
and blazed alternately with a gloom that
wrapt every thing, or a light more fear-
ful than that gloom. —
All around her
gave to her form, when it it was momently
visible, a relief so strong and so touching,
that it might have immortalized the hand
who had sketched her as the embodied pre-
sence of an angel who had descended to
the regions of woe and wrath, —of dark-
ness and of on a message of reconcilia-
fire,

tion, —and descended in vain.

" The stranger threw on her, as she
bent before him, one of those looks that,
but her own, no mortal eye had yet
encountered unappalled. Its expression
seemed only to inspire a higher feeling of
 A TALE. ^05

devotedness in the victim. Perhaps an

involuntary sentiment of terror mingled
itself with that expression, as this beauti-

ful being sunk on her knees before her

writhing and distracted enemy; and, by
the silent supplication of her attitude,
seemed to implore him to have mercy on
himself. As the lightnings flashed around
her, — as the earth trembled beneath her
white and slender feet, — as the elements
seemed sworn to the destruction of
all

every living thing, and marched on from

heaven to the accomplishment of their pur-
pose, with Vce victis written and legible to
every eye, in the broad unfolded banners of
that resplendent and sulphurous light that
seemed to display the day of hell—the feel-
ings of the devoted Indian seemed concen-
trated on the ill-chosen object of their ido-
latry alone. Her graduating attitudes
beautifully,but painfully, expressed the
submission of a female heart devoted to its
object, to his frailties, his passions, and his
very crimes. When subdued by the image
206 MELMOTH :

o£ power, which the mind of man exercises

over that of woman, that impulse becomes
irresistibly humiliating. Immalee had at
first bowed to conciliate her beloved, and
her had taught her frame that first
spirit

inclination. In her next stage of suffer-

ing, she had sunk on her knees, and,
remaining at a distance from him, she
had trusted to this state of prostration
to produce that effect on his heart which
those who love always hope compassion
may produce, —that illegitimate child of
love, often more cherished than its pa-
rent. In her last efforts she clung to
his hand —
she pressed her pale lips to it,
and was about to utter a few words her —
voice failed her, but her fast dropping
tears spohe to the hand which she held,-
and its grasp, which for a moment convul-j
sively returned hers, and then flung it

away, answered her.

" The Indian remained prostrate and a-^
ffhast. " Immalee," said the stranger, in

a struggling voice, " Do you wish me to

i
 ——

A TALE. 20T

tell you the feelings with which my pre-

sence should inspire you no^ ?" —" No—
no !" said the Indian, applying her white
and delicate hands to her ears, and then
clasping them on her bosom; " I feel them
too much." —
" Hate me —
curse me !" said
the stranger, not heeding her, and stamp-
ing till the reverberation of his steps on
the hollow and loosened stones almost con-
tended with the thunder " hate me, for ;

—
I hate you I hate all things that live
— all things that are dead — I am myself
hated and hateful !" —" Not by me," said
the poor Indian, feeling, through the
blindness of her tears, for his averted
hand. " Yes, by you, if you knew whose
I am, and whom I serve." Immalee a-
roused her newly-excited energies of heart
and intellect to answer this appeal. " Who
you are, I know not — but I am yours.
Whom you serve, I know not —but him
will 1 serve— I will be yours for ever.
Forsake me if you will, but when I am
dead, come back to this isle, and say to
 :

208 MELMOTH
yourself. The have bloomed and
roses
—
faded the streams have flowed and been
—
dried up the rocks have been removed
—
from their places and the lights of heaven
have altered in their courses, but there —
was one who never changed, and she is not
!"
here
** As she spoke the enthusiasm of pas-
sion struggling with grief, she added,
" You have told me you possess the hap-
py art of writing thought. —Do not write
one thought on my grave, for one word
traced by your hand would revive me.
Do not weep, for one tear would make
me live again, perhaps to draw a tear from
—
you." V Immalee !" said the stranger. The
Indian looked up, and, with a mingled
feeling of grief, amazement, and compunc-
tion, beheld him shed tears. The next
moment he dashed them away with the
hand of despair ; and, grinding his teeth,
burst into that wild shriek of bitter and
convulsive laughter that announces the
object of its derision is ourselves..
 ;

A TALE. 209

" Immalee, whose feelings were almost

exhausted, trembled in silence at his feet.
" Hear me, wretched girl !" he cried in
tones that seemed alternately tremulous
with malignity and compassion, with ha-
bitual hostility and involuntary softness
*'
hear me! I know the secret sentiment
you struggle with better than the inno-
cent heart of which it is the inmate knows
it. Suppress, banish, destroy it. Crush
it as you would a young reptile before its

growth had made it loathsome to the eye,

and poisonous to existence!" " I never —
crushed even a reptile in my life," answer-
ed Immalee, unconscious that this matter-
of-fact answer was equally applicable in
another sense. You love, then," said
"
the stranger " but," after a long and o-
;

minous pause, " do you know whom it is

you love?" —" You!" said the Indian, with
that purity of truth that consecrates the
impulse it yields to, and would blush more
for the sophistications of art than the confi-
dence of nature ;
" you ! You have taught
 :

I!10 MELMOTH
me to think, to feel, and to weep." —" And
you love me for this ?"
said her companion,
with an expression half irony, half commise-!
ration. " Think, Immalee, for a moment,
how unsuitable, how unworthy, is the ol
jeet of the feelings you lavish on him. A
being unattractive in his form, repulsive
in his habits, separated from life and hu^
manity by a gulph impassable ; a disinhe-'
rited child of nature, who goes about to
curse or to tempt his more prosperous bre-
thren ; one who what withholds me
from disclosing all ?"

" At this moment a flash of such vivid

and terrific brightness as no human sight
could sustain, gleamed through the ruins,
pouring through every fissure instant and
intolerable light. Immalee, overcome by
terror and emotion, remained on her
knees, her hands closely clasped over her
aching eyes.
" For a few moments that she remain-
ed thus, thought she heard other
she
sounds near her, and that the stranger was
 —

A TALE. 211

answering a voice that spoke to him. She

heard him say, as the thunder rolled to a
distance, " This hour is mine, not thine
begone, and trouble me not." When she
looked up again, all trace of human emo-
tion was gone from his expression. The
dry and burning eye of despair that he
fixed on her, seemed never to have owned
a tear ; the hand with which he grasped
her, seemed never to have felt the flow of
blood, or the throb of a pulse ; amid the
intense and increasing heat of an atmo-
sphere that appeared on fire, its touch was
as cold as that of the dead.
" Mercy !" cried the trembling Indian,
as she in vain endeavoured to read a hu-
man feeling in those eyes of stone, to
which her own tearful and appealing ones
were uplifted—-" mercy !" And while she
uttered the word, she knew not what she
deprecated* or dreaded.
" The stranger answered not a word,
relaxed not a muscle ; it seemed as if he
felt her not with the hands that grasped
2i2 melmoth:
her, — as if he saw her not with the eyes
that glared fixedly and coldly on her. Hd
bore, or rather dragged, her to the vast
arch that had once been the entrance tci
the pagoda, but which, now shattered and*
ruinous, more the gulphing
resembled
yawn of a cavern that harbours the in4
mates of the desert, than a work wrought
by the hands of man, and devoted to the
worship of a deity. " You have called for
mercy," said her companion, in a voice
that froze her blood even under the burn-
ing atmosphere, whose air she could scarce
respire. " You have cried for mercy, and
mercy you shall have. Mercy has not
been dealt to me, but 1 have courted my
horrible destiny, and my reward is just
and sure. Look forth, trembler —look
forth,-— I command thee !'*
And he stamp-
ed with an air of authority and impatience
that completed the terror of the delicate
and impassioned being who shuddered in
his grasp, and felt half-dead at his frown,
^ In obedience to his command, she re-.
 A TALE. 213

.moved the long tresses of her auburn hair,

which had vainly swept, in luxuriant and
fruitless redundance, the rock on which
the steps of him she adored had been fix-

?d. With that mixture of the docility of

the child, and the mild submission of wo-
Tian, she attempted to comply with his
lemand, but her eyes, filled with tears,

lould not encounter the withering horrors

)f the scene before her. She wiped those
>riliiant eyes with hairs that were every
lay bathed in the pure and crystal lymph,
ind seemed, as she tried to gaze on the de-
olation, like some bright and shivering
pirit, who, for its further purification, or
)erhaps for the enlargement of (he know-
edge necessary for its com-
destination, is

)elled to witness some evidence of the Al-

nighty's wrath, unintelligible in its first
operations, but doubtless salutary in its fi-

lal results.
" Thus looking and thus feeling, Im-
halee shudderingly approached the en-
rance of that building, which, blending
ai4
*
MELMOTH:

the ruins of nature with those of art, seen^

ed to announce the power of desolatior

over both, and to intimate that the prime
val rock, untouched and unmodulated hy
human hands, and thrown upwards pei|
haps by some volcanic eruption, perhap
deposited there by some meteoric discharge
and the gigantic columns of stone, whoi
erection had been the work of two centw
ries, —
were alike dust beneath the feet a
that tremendous conqueror, whose victof
ries alone are without noise and withoii
resistance, and the progress of whoa
triumph is marked by tears instead
blood.
" Immalee, as she gazed around heij

felt, for the first time, terror at the ai

pect of nature. Formerly, she hat
considered all its phenomena as equallj
splendid or terrific. And her chiidisli

though active imagination, seemed to con

secrate alike the sun-light and the storm
to the devotion of a heart, on whose pur<
 ;

A TALE. 215

altar the flowers and the fires of nature

flung their undivided offering.
" But since she had seen the stranger,
new emotions had pervaded her young
heart. She learned to weep and to fear
and perhaps she saw, in the fearful aspect
of the heavens, the developement of that
mysterious terror, which always trembles
at the bottom of the hearts of those who
dare to love.
" How often does nature thus become
an involuntary interpreter between us and
our feelings ! Is the murmur of the ocean
without a meaning ? — Is the roll of the
thunder without a voice ? — Is the blasted
spot on which the rage of both has been
exhausted without its lesson? — Do not
they all tell us some mysterious secret,

which we have in vain searched our hearts

for ? —Do we not find in them, an answer
to those questions with which we are for
ever importuning the mute oracle of our
destiny ? —Alas how deceitful and inade-
!
 216 melmoth:
quate we feel the language of man, after
love and grief have made us acquainted
with that of nature !
—the only one, perhaps,
capable of a corresponding sign for those
emotions, under which all human expres-
sion faints. What a difference between
words without meaning, and that meaning
without wordsy which the sublime pheno-
mena of nature, the rocks and the ocean,
the moon and the twilight, convey to those
who have ^ ears to hear."
" How eloquent of truth is nature in her
very silence ! How fertile of reflections
amid her profoundest desolations ! But
the desolation now presented to the eyes of
Immalee, was that which is calculated to
cause terror, not reflection. Earth and
heaven, the sea and the dry land, seemed
mingling together, and about to replunge
into chaos. The ocean, deserting its eter-

nal bed, dashed its waves, whose white

surf gleamed through the darkness, far
into the shores of the isle. They came on
 A TALE. 217

like the crests of a thousand warriors,

plumed and tossing in their pride, and.
like them, perishing in the moment of
victory. There was a fearful inversion of
the natural appearance of earth and sea, as
if all the barriers of nature were broken,
and all her laws reversed.
The waves deserting their station, left,

from time to time, the sands as dry as

those of the desert and the ; trees and
shrubs tossed and heaved in ceaseless agi-
waves of a midnight storm.
tation, like the
There was no light, but a livid grey that
sickened the eye to behold, except when
the bright red lightning burst out like the
eye of a fiend, glancing over the work of
ruin, and closing as it beheld it completed.
" Amid this scene stood two beings,
one whose appealing loveliness seemed to
have found favour with the elements even
in their \^tatb, and one whose fearless
and obdurate eye appeared to defy them.
" Immalee," he cried, " is this a place or

an hour to talk of love all nature is ap-

!
—
YOL. III. K
 :

218 MELMOTH
palled —heaven is dark — the animals have
—
hid themselves and the very shrubs, as
they wave and shrink, seem alive with
terror." —" It is an hour to implore pro-
tection," said the Indian, clinging to him
timidly. " Look up," said the stranger,
while his own fixed and fearless eye seem-
ed to return flash for flash to the baffled
and insulted elements; " Look up, and
if you cannot resist the impulses of your
heart, let me at least point out a fitter ob-
ject for them. Love," he cried, extending
his arm towards the dim and troubled
sky, " love the storm in its might of de-
struction —seek alliance with those swift
and perilous travellers of the groaning
air,—the meteor that rends, and the!
thunder that shakes it! Court, for shel-|
tering tenderness, those masses of dense
and rolling cloud, —the baseless moun-
tains of heaven ! Woo the kisses of the
fiery lightnings, to quench themselves on
your smouldering bosom Seek all that
!

is terrible in nature for your companions

 A TALE. 219

and your lover !

—
woo them to burn and
blast you— perish in their fierce embrace,
and you will be happier, far happier, than
if you lived in mine Lived I Oh who
! —
can be mine and live Hear me, Imma-
!

lee!" he cried, while he held her hands

—
locked in his while his eyes, rivetted on
her, sent forth a light of intolerable lustre
—while a new feeling of indefinite enthu-
siasm seemed for a moment to thrill his
whole frame, and new-modulate the tone
of his nature " Hear me
; If you will be
!

mine, it must be amid a scene like this for

—
ever ^amid fire and darkness amid ha- —
—
tred and despair amid and his voice
''

swelling to a demoniac shriek of rage and

horror, and his arms extended, as if to
grapple with the fearful objects of some ima-
ginary struggle, he was rushing from the
arch under which they stood, lost in the
picture which his guilt and despair had
drawn, and whose images he w^as for ever
doomed to behold.
" The slender form that had clung to
 : — !

220 MELMOTH
him was, by this sudden movement, pro-
strated at his feet; and, with a voice choak-
ed with terror, yet with that perfect de-
votedness which never issued but from
the heart and lip of woman, she answered
his frightful questions with the simple de-
mand, " Will you be there?*' —" Yes!
THERE I rtiust be, and for ever And will
!

you, and da?^e you, be with me And a

?"

kind of wild and terrible energy nerved

his frame, and strengthened his voice, as he
spoke and cowered over pale and prostrate
loveliness, that seemed in profound and
reckless humiliation to court its own de-
struction, as it a dove exposed its breast,

without flight or struggle, to the beak of a

vulture. " Well, then," said the stranger,
while a brief convulsion crossed his pale
visage, " amid thunder I wed thee bride
I
—
of perdition mine shalt thou be for ever
!

Come, and let us attest our nuptials be-

fore the reeling altar of nature, with the
lightnings of heaven for our bed-lights,
and the curse of nature for our marriage-
 A TALE. / 221

benediction !"
The Indian shrieked in
terror, not at his words, which she did not
understand, but at the expression which
accompanied them. " Come," he repeat-
ed, *'
while the darkness yet is witness to
our ineffable and eternal union." Imma-
lee, pale, terrified, but resolute, retreated
from him."
" At this moment the storm, which had
obscured the heavens and ravaged the
earth, passed away- with the rapidity com-
mon in those climates, where the visita-
tion of an hour does its work of destruc-
tion unimpeded, and is instantly succeed-
ed by the smiling lights and brilliant skies
of which mortal curiosity in vain asks the
question. Whether they gleam in triumph
or in consolation over the mischief they
witness ?
" As the stranger spoke, the clouds
passed away, carrying their diminished
burden of wrath and terror where suffer-
ings were to be inflicted, and terrors to
be undergone, by the natives of other
 :

222 MELMOTH
climes —and the bright moon burst forth
with a glory unknown in European
climes. The heavens were as blue as
the waves of the ocean, which they seem-
ed to reflect and the stars burst forth
;

with a kind of indignant and aggra-

vated brilliancy, as if they resented the
usurpation of the storm, and asserted the
eternal predominance of nature over the
casual influences of the storms that ob-
scured her. Such, perhaps, will be the
developement of the moral world. We
shall be told why we suffered, and for
what; but a bright and blessed lustre
shall follow the storm, and all shall yet be
light.
" The young Indian caught from this
object an omen alike auspicious to her
imagination and her heart. She burst
from him — she rushed into the light of na-
ture, whose glory seemed like the promise
of redemption, gleaming amid the dark-
ness of the fall. She pointed to the moon,
that sun of the eastern nights, whose broad
 A TALE. 223

and brilliant light fell like a mantle of

glory over rock and ruin, over tree and
flower.
" Wed me by this light," cried Imma-
lee, " and I will be yours for ever !" And
her beautiful countenance reflected the
full light of the glorious planet that rode
bright through the cloudless heaven —and
her white and naked arms, extended to-
wards it, seemed like two pure attesting
pledges of the union, " Wed me by this
light," she repeated,sinking on her knees,
" and I will be yours for ever !"
" As she spoke, the stranger approach-
ed, moved with what feelings no mortal
thought can discover. At that mo-
ment a trifling phenomenon interfered to
alter her destiny. A
darkened cloud at
that moment covered the moon it seem- —
ed as if the departed storm collected in
wrathful haste the last dark fold of its
tremendous drapery, and was about to
pass away for ever.
" The eyes of the on
stranger flashed
Immalee the brightest rays of mingled
 : —
^24 MELMOTH
fondness and ferocity. He pointed to the
darkness, — " Wed me by this light !'"

he exclaimed, " and you shall he mine for

ever and ever !" Immalee, shuddering at
the grasp in which he held her, and try-
ing in vain to watch the expression of his
countenance, yet enough of her dan-
felt

ger to tear herself from him. " Farewell

for ever!" exclaimed the stranger, as he
rushed from her.
" Immalee, exhausted by emotion and
terror, had fallen senseless on the sands
that filled the path to the ruined pagoda.
He returned —he raised her in his arms
her long dark hair streamed over them
like the drooping banners of a defeated
army —her arms sunk down as if declining
the support they seemed to implore— her
cold and colourless cheek rested on his
shoulder.
" Is she dead ?" he murmured. " Well,
be it so — let her perish — let her be any
thing hut mine He flung his senseless
!"

burden on the sands, and departed nor —

did he ever revisit the island.
 CHAPTER XVII.

Que donne le monde aux siens plus souvent.

Echo Vent.
Que dois-je vaincre ici, sans jamais relacher.
Echo la chair.

Qui fit le cause des maux^ qui me sont survenus^

Echo Venus.
Que faut dire apres d'une telle infidelle.
Echo Fi d'elle.
Magdaleniade, by Father Pierre de St I^uis,

1 HKEE years had elapsed since the part-

ing of Immalee and the stranger, when
one evening the attention of some Spanish
gentlemen, who were walking in a public
place in Madrid, was arrested by a figure
that passed them, habited in the dress of
K 2
226 IMELMOTH:

the country, (only without a sword), and

walking very slowly. They stopt by a
kind of simultaneous movement, and seem-
ed to ask each other, with silent looks,
what had been the cause of the impression
this person's appearance had made on them.
There was nothing remarkable in his fi-
—
gure, his demeanour was quiet; it was
the singular expression of his countenance
which had struck them with a sensation
they could neither define or account for.

"As they paused, the person returned

alone, and walking slowly —and they again
encountered that singular expression of
the features, (the eyes particularly), which
no human glance could meet unappalled.
Accustomed to look on and converse with
all things revolting to nature and to man,

— for ever exploring the mad-house, the

jail, or the Inquisition, —the den of famine,
the dungeon of crime, or the death-bed of
—his eyes had acquired a light and
despair,
a language of their own —a light that none
 —

A TALE. 227

could gaze on, and a language that few

dare understand.
" As he passed slowly by them, they
observed two others whose attention was
apparently fixed on the same singular ob-
ject, for they stood pointing after him,
and speaking to each other with gestures
of strong and obvious emotion. The cu-
riosity of the groupe for once overcame
the restraint of Spanish reserve, and ap-
proaching the two cavaliers, they inquired
if the singular personage who had passed
was not the subject of their conversation,
and the cause of the emotion which ap-
peared to accompany it. The others re-
plied in the affirmative, and hinted at their
knowledge of circumstances in the charac*
ter and history of that extraordinary being
that might justify even stronger marks of
emotion at his presence. This hint opera-
ted still more strongly on their curiosity
the circle of listeners began to deepen.
Some of them, it appeared, had, or pre-
tended to have, some information relative
 —

228 melmoth:
to this extraordinary subject. And that-
kind of desultory conversation commenced,
whose principal ingredients are a plentiful
proportion of ignorance, curiosity, and
fear, mingled with some small allowance
of information and truth ;— that conversa-
tion, vague, unsatisfactory, but not uninter-
esting, to which every speaker is welcome
to contribute his share of baseless report,
wild conjecture, —anecdote the more incre-
dible the better credited, —and conclusion
the more falsely drawn the more likely to
carry home conviction.
" The conversation passed very much
in language incoherent as this '' But
:
—
why, if he be what he is described, what
—
he is known to be, why is he not seized
—
by order of government ? why is he not
—
immured in the Inquisition ?" " He has
been often in the prison of the holy office
— ^oftener, perhaps, than the holy fathers

wished," said another. " But it is a well-

known fact, that whatever transpired on
his examination, he was liberated almost
 A TALE. 229

immediately.'' Another added, " That the

stranger had been in almost every prison
in Europe, but had always contrived either
to defeat or defy the power in whose grasp
—
he appeared to be inclosed, and to be active
in his purposes of mischief in the remotest
parts of Europe at the moment he was
supposed to be expiating them in others."
Another demanded, " If it was known to
what country he belonged ?" and was an-
swered, " He is said to be a native of Ire-
land — (a country that no one knows, and
which the natives are particularly reluc
tant to dwell in from various causes) and —
his name is Melmoth." The Spaniard
had great difficulty in expressing the
thefa, unpronounceable by continental lips.
" Another, who had an appearance of more
intelligence than the rest, added the ex-
traordinary fact of the stranger's being
seen in various and distant parts of the
earth within a time in which no power
merely human could be supposed to tra-
verse them— that his marked and fearful
 :

230 MELMOTH
habit was every where to seek out the
most wretched, or the most profligate, of
the community among which he flung
himself—what was his object in seeking
—
them was unknown." " It is well known,"
said a deep-toned voice, falling on the ears
of the startled listeners like the toll of a
—
strong but muffled bell, " it is well known
both to him and them."
" It was now twilight, but the eyes of
all could distinguish the figure of the
stranger as he passed ; and some even a-

verred they could see the ominous lustre

of those eyes which never rose on human
destiny but as planets of woe. The groupe
paused for some time to watch the retreat
of the figure that had produced on them
the effect of the torpedo. It departed
—
slowly, no one offered it molestation.
" I have heard," said one of the com-
pany, " that a delicious music precedes
the approach of this person when his des-
^
tined victim, —the being whom
he is per-
mitted to tempt or to torture,— is about to
 — ;

A TALE. 231

appear or to approach him. I have heard

a strange tale of such music being heard
and—Holy Mary be our guide did you
ever hear such sounds?" —" Where
!

what — and the astonished hsteners took

? "

off their hats, unclasped their mantles,

" opened their lips, and drew in their
breath," in delicious ecstasy at the sounds
that floated round them. " No wonder,"
said a young gallant of the party, " no
wonder that such sounds harbinger the
approach of a being so heavenly. She
deals with the good spirits ; and the bless-
ed saints alone could send such music
from above to welcome her. As he spoke,
all eyes were turned to a figure, which,

though moving among a groupe of brilliant

and attractive females, appeared the only
one among them on whom the eye could
rest with pure and undivided light and
love. She did not catch observation-ob-
servation caught her, and was proud of
its prize.
At the approach of a large party of fe-
 : ——

:9S2 MELMOTH
males, there was all that anxious and flat-

tering preparation among the cavaliers,

all that eager arrangement of capas, and
hats, and plumes, —
that characterized the
manners of a nation still half-feudal, and
always gallant and chivalrous. These pre-
liminary movements were answered by
corresponding ones on the part of the fair
and fatal host approaching. The creaking
—
of their large fans the tremulous and
purposely-delayed adjustment of their float-
ing veils, whose partial concealment flat-

tered the imagination beyond the most

full and ostentatious disclosure of the
charms they seemed jealous of the folds —
of the mantilla, of whose graceful falls,
and complicated manoeuvres, and coquet-
tish undulations, the Spanish women
know how to avail themselves so well
all these announced an attack, which the
cavaliers, according to the modes of gal-
lantry in that day (1683), were well pre-
pared to meet and parry.
" But, amid the bright host that advan-

i
 <9,
A TALE. 23

ced against them, there was one whose

arms were not artificial, and the effect of
whose singular and simple attractions

made a strong contrast to the studied ar-

rangements of her associates. If her fan
moved, it was only to collect air if she —
arranged her veil, it was only to hide her
face—if she adjusted her mantilla, it was
but to hide that form, whose exquisite
symmetry defied the voluminous drapery
of even that day to conceal it. Men of
the loosest gallantry fell back as she ap-
proached, with involuntary awe the li- —
bertine who looked on her was half con-
verted— the susceptible beheld her as one
who realized that vision of imagination
that must never be embodied here— and
the unfortunate as one whose sight alone
was consolation—the old, as they gazed on
her, dreamt of their youth— and the young
for the first time dreamt of love— the only
love which deserves the name— that which
purity alone can inspire, and perfect purity
alone can reward.
 : —

234 MELMOTH
" As she mingled among the gay groupes
that filled the place, one might observe a
certain air that distinguished her from
every female there, —not by pretension to
superiority, (of that her unequalled loveli^
ness must have acquitted her, even to the
vainest of the groupe), but by an untainted,
unsophisticated character, diffusing itself
over look and motion, and even thought
—giving an em-
turning wildness into grace
phasis to a exclamation, that made
single
polished sentences sound — ever
trifling ^for

trespassing against etiquette with vivid and

fearless enthusiasm, and apologizing the
next moment with such timid and grace-
ful repentance, that one doubted whe-
ther the offence or the apology were most
delightful.
" She presented altogether a singular
contrast to the measured tones, the min-
cing gait, and the organized uniformity of
dress, and manner, and look, and feeling,
of the females about her. The harness of
art was upon every limb and feature from
 A TALE. 2S5

their birth, and its trappings concealed or

crippled every movement which nature
had designed graceful.
for But in the
movement of this young female, there was
a bounding elasticity, a springiness, a luxu-
riant and conscious vitality, that made eve-
ry action the expression of thought ; and
then, as she shrunk from the disclosure,
made it the more exquisite interpreter of
feeling. There was around her a mingled
light of innocence and majesty, never
united but in her sex. Men may long re-
tain,and even confirm, the character of
power which nature has stamped on their
frames, but they very soon forfeit their
claim to the expression of innocence.
" Amid the vivid and eccentric graces
of a form that seemed like a comet in the
world of beauty, bound by no laws, or by
laws that she alone understood and obeyed,
there was a shade of melancholy, that, to a
superficial observer, seemed transitory and
assumed, perhaps as a studied relief to the
glowing colours of a picture so brilliant.
 : —
N.

2S6 MELMOTH
but which, to other eyes, announced, that
with all the energies of intellect occupiedjj
—with all the instincts of sense excited,-
the heart had as yet no inmate, and want-
ed one.
" The groupe who had been conversing
about the stranger, felt their attention ir-
resistibly attracted by this object ; and the^
low murmur of their fearful whispers was
converted into broken exclamations of de-
lightand wonder, as the fair vision passed
them. She had not long done so, when
the stranger was seen slowly returning,
seeming, as before, known to all, but
knowing none. As the female party turn-
ed, they encountered him. His emphatic
glance selected and centered in one alone.
She saw him too, recognized him, and, ut-
tering a wild shriek, fell on the earth sense-
less.

The tumult occasioned by this acci-

i"

dent, which so many witnessed, and none

knew the cause of, for some moments drew
off the attention of all from the stranger
 —

A TALE. 237

all were occupied either in assisting or in-

quiring after the lady who had fainted.

She was borne to her carriage by more as-
sistants than she needed or wished for
and just as she was lifted into it, the voice
of some one near her uttered the word
" Immalee !" She recognized the voice,
and turned, with a look of anguish and
a feeble cry, towards the direction from
which it proceeded. Those around her
—
had heard the sound, but as they did not
understand its meaning, or know to whom
it was addressed, they ascribed the lady's
emotion to indisposition, and hastened to
place her in her carriage. It drove away,
but the stranger pursued its course with
his eyes —the company dispersed, he re-
mained alone —twilight faded into dark-
ness —he appeared not to notice the change
—a few still continued lingering at the
extremity of the walk to mark him —they
were wholly unmarked by him.
" One who remained the longest said,

that he saw him use the action of one who

 !

238 MELMOTH :

wipes away a tear hastily. To his eyes

the tear of penitence was denied for ever.
Could this have been the tear of passion ?
If so, how much woe did it announce to
its object
 !

CHAPTER XVIII.

Oh what was We made for, if 'tis not the same

Through joy and through torment^ through glory
and shame
I know not;, I ask not, what guilt's in thine hearty

I but know I must love thee, whatever thou art.

Moore,

L HE next day, the young female who

had excited so much interest the preced-
ing evening, was to quit Madrid, to pass
a few weeks at a villa belonging to her fa-
mily, at a short distance from the city.
That family, including all the company,
consisted of her mother Donna Clara di
Aliaga, the wife of a wealthy merchant,
 240 MELMOTH .

who was monthly expected to return from

the Indies; her brother Don Fernan di
Aliaga, and several servants ; for these
wealthy citizens, conscious of their opu-
lence and formerly high descent, piqued
themselves upon travelling with no less
ceremony and pompous tardiness than ac-
companied the progress of a grandee. So
the old square-built, lumbering carriage,
moved on like a hearse the coachman sat
;

fast asleep on the box and the six black

;

horses crawled at a pace like the progress

of time when he visits affliction. Beside
the carriage rode Fernan di Aliaga and
his servants,with umbrellas and huge
spectacles; and within it were placed
Donna Clara and her daughter. The in-
terior of this arrangement was the coui
terpart of its external appearance, all an^ —
nounced dullness, formality, and withering
monotony.
" Donna Clara was a woman of a cold

and grave temper, with all the solemnity

of a Spaniard, and all the austerity of a
 ;

A TALE. 241

bigot. Don Fernan presented that union

of fiery passion and saturnic manners not
unusual among His dull and
Spaniards.
selfish pride was wounded by the recollec-
tion of his family having been in trade
and, looking on the unrivalled beauty of
his sister as a possible means of his obtain-
ing an alliance with a family of rank, he
viewed her with that kind of selfish parti-
ality as little honourable to him who feels

it, as to her who was its object.

" And it was amid such beings that the

vivid and susceptible Immalee, the daugh-
ter of nature, " the gay creature of the
elements," was doomed to wither away
the richly-coloured and exquisitely-scented
flower of an existence so ungenially trans-
planted. Her singular destiny seemed to
have removed her from a physical wilder-
ness, to place her in a moral one. And,
perhaps, her last state was worse than her
first.

" It is certain that the gloomiest pro-

spect presents nothing so chilling as the as-
VOL. III. L
 —

M2 melmoth:

pect of human faces, in which we try in

vain to trace one corresponding expression;
and the sterility of nature itself is luxury
compared to the sterility of human hearts,
which communicate all the desolation they
feel.

They had been some time on their

^^

Way, when Donna Clara, who never spoke

till after a long preface of silence, perhaps
to give what she said a weight it might
otherwise have wanted, said, with oracular
deliberation, " Daughter, I hear you faint-
ed in the public walks last night did you —
meet with any thing that surprised or ter-
rified you ?"—" No, Madam."—" What>

then, could be the cause of the emotion

you betrayed at the sight, as I am told
I know nothing—of a personage of extra-
ordinary demeanour?'* — " Oh, I cannot,
dare not tell !" said Isidora, dropping her
veil over her burning cheek. Then the ir*

repressible ingenuousness of her former na-

ture, rushing over her heart and frame like a
flood, she sunk from the cushion on which
 ;•

A TALE. 243

she sat at Donna Clara's feet, exclaiming,

" Oh, mother, I will tell you all !"— " No!"
said Donna Clara, repelling her with a
cold feeling of offended pride ;
" no !—
there no occasion, I seek no confidence
is

withheld and bestowed in the same breath

nor do I like these violent emotions— they
are unmaidenly. Your duties as a child are
easily understood —they are merely perfect
obedience, profound submission, and un-
broken silence, except when you are ad-
dressed by me, your brother, or Father
Jose. Surely no duties were ever more
easily performed — rise, then, and cease to
tveep. If your conscience disturbs you,
iccuse yourself to Father Jose, who will,

10 doubt, inflict a penance proportioned

the enormity of your offence. I trust
)nly he will not err on the side of indul-
gence.'* And so saying, Donna Clara,
^^ho had never uttered so long a speech
>efore, reclined back on her cushion, and

egan to tell her beads with much devo-

ion, till the arrival of the carriage at its
244 MELMOTH :

destination awoke her from a profound and

peaceful sleep.
" It was near noon, and dinner in a cool
low apartment near the garden awaited
only the approach of Father Jose, the con-
fessor. He arrived at length. He was a
man of an imposing figure, mounted on a
stately mule. His features, at first view,
bore strong traces of thought; but, on
closer examination, those traces seemed ra-
ther the result of physical conformation,
than of any intellectual exercise. The
channel was open, but the stream had not
been directed However, though
there.
defective in education, and somewhat nar-
row in mind, Father Jose was a good
man, and meant well. He loved power,
and he was devoted to the interests of the
Catholic church; but he had frequently
doubts, (which he kept to himself), of

the absolute necessity of celibacy, and he

felt (strange effect!) a chill all over him
when he heard of the fires of an auto da
fe. Dinner was concluded ; the fruit and

•s Jl
 A TALE. 245

wine, the latter un tasted by the females,

were on the table, —the choicest of them
placed before Father Jose, —when Isidora,
after a profound reverence to her mother and
thepriest, retired, asusual, to her apartment.
Donna Clara turned to the confessor with
a look that demanded to be answered. " It
is her hour for siesta," said the priest, help-
ing himself to a bunch of grapes. " No,
Father, no!" said Donna Clara sadly ;
" her
maid informs me she does not retire to
sleep. She was, alas too well accustomed
!

to that burning climate where she was lost

in her infancy, to feel the heat as a Chris-
tian should. No, she retires neither to
pray or sleep, after the devout custom of
Spanish women, but, I fear, to" " To
do what ?" said the priest, with horror in
his voice —" To think, I fear," said Donna
Clara ;
" for often I observe, on her return,
the traces of tears on her face. I tremble.
Father, lest those tears be shed for that
heathen land, that region of Satan, where
her youth was past." —" 111 give her a pe«
 — !

246 melmoth:

nance," Father Jose, " that will save

iSaid

her the trouble of shedding tears on the

score of memory at —these grapes are
least
delicious."
—" But, Father," pursued Don-
na Clara, with all the weak but restless
anxiety of a superstitious mind, " though
you have made me easy on that subject, I
still am wretched. Oh, Father, how she
will talk sometimes —
like a creature self-
!

taught, that needed neither director or

confessor but her own heart.": '' How !" —
exclaimed Father Jose, " need neither
confessor or director she must be beside
!
—
herself." —
" Oh, Father," continued Donna
Clara, " she will say things in her mild
and unanswerable manner, that, armed
with all my authority, 1" > " How
how is that ?" said the priest, in a tone of
severity—" does she deny any of the tenets
of the holy Catholic church ?" —" No no !

no !" said the terrified Donna Clara cross-

ing herself. " How then ?" —" Why, she
speaks in a manner in which I never heard
you, reverend Father, or any of the reve-
 •

A TALE. 2!47

rend brethren, whom my devotion to the

holy church has led me to hear, speak be-
fore. It is in vain I tell her that true re-
ligion consists in hearing —in going mass
to confession —in —in
performing penance
observing the fasts and vigils —in under-
going mortification and abstinence — be- ^in

lieving all that the holy church teaches —

and hating, detesting, abhorring, and
execrating " " Enough, daughter —
enough," said Father Jose ;
" there can be
no doubt of the orthodoxy of your creed ?"

—" I trust
.
not, holy Father," said the an-
xious Donna Clara. " 1 were an infidel
to doubt it," interposed the priest ;
" I
might as well deny this fruit to be ex-
quisite, or this glass of Malaga to be
worthy the table of his Holiness the Pope,
if he feasted all the Cardinals. But
how, daughter, as touching the suppos-
ed or apprehended defalcations in Don-
—
na Isidora's creed ?" " Holy Father, I
have already explained my own religious
— —
sentiments."--" Yes yes we have had
 —

248 MELMOTH :

enough of them now for your daughter*s."

;

—" She will sometimes say," said Don-

na Clara, bursting into tears " she will —
say, but never till greatly urged, that
religion ought to be a system whose
spirit was universal love. Do you un-
derstand any thing of that. Father?"
*'
— —
Humph humph !" " That it must be
something that bound all who professed it
to habits of benevolence, gentleness, and
humility, under every difference of creed
—
and of form." " Humph— humph !"— Fa- **

ther," said Donna Clara, a little piqued iat

the apparent indifference with which Fa-

ther Jose listened to her communications,
and resolved to rouse him by some terri-

fic evidence of the truth of her suspicions,

" Father, I have heard her da^e to ex-
press a hope that the heretics in the train
of the English ambassador might not be
everlastingly" " Hush I must not !
—
hear such sounds, or it might be my duty
to take severer notice of these lapses.

However, daughter," continued Father

 —

A TALE. 249

Jose, " thus far I will venture for your

consolation. As sure as this fine peach is

in my hand — another, if you please— and

as sure as I shall finish this other glass of
Malaga"— here a long pause attested the
fulfilment of the pledge —" so sure"—and
Father Jose turned the inverted glass on
the table— "Madonna Isidora has has the —
elements of a Christian in her, however
improbable it may seem to you —I swear
it to you by the habit I wear —for the
;

rest, a little penance—a 1 shall consider

of it.And now, daughter, when your
son Don Fernan has finished his siesta,
as there is no reasonhim of re-
to suspect
tiring to thinki — him I
please to inform
am ready to continue the game of chess
which we commenced four months ago. I
have pushed my pawn to the last square
but one, and the next step gives me a
queen." — " Has the game continued so
long ?" said Donna Clara. " Long !" re-
peated the priest, " Aye, and may con-
tinue much longer—we have never played
250 MELMOTH :

more than three hours a-day on an av<

rage."
" He then retired to sleep, and the eve-
ning was passed by the priest and Don
Fernan, in profound silence at their chess
—by Donna Clara, in silence equally pro-
found, at her tapestry —and by Isidora at
the casement, which the intolerable heat
had compelled them to leave open, in gazing
at the lustre of the moon, and inhaling the
odour of the tube-rose, and watching the
expanding leaves of the night-blowing ce-
reus. The physical luxuries of her former
existence seemed renewed by these objects.
The intense blue of the heavens, and the
burning planet that stood in sole glory in
their centre, might have vied with all that
lavish and refulgent opulence of light in
which nature arrays an Indian night. Be-
low, too, there were flowers and fragrance;
colours, like veiled beauty, mellowed, not
hid and dews that hung on every leaf,
;

trembling and sparkling like the tears of

spirits, that wept to take leave of the
flowers. ,—

i
 —

A TALE. 251

" The breeze, indeed, though redolent

of the breath of the orange blossom, the
jasmine, and the rose, had not the rich and
balmy odour that scents the Indian air by
night.

" Except this, what was not there that

might not renew the delicious dream of

her former existence, and make her believe
herself again the queen of that fairy isle ?
—
One image was wanting an image whose
absence made that paradise of islands, and
all the odorous and flowery luxury of a

moonlight garden in Spain, alike deserts

to her. In her heart alone could she hope
to meet that image, —to herself alone did
she dare to repeat his name, and those
wild and sweet songs of his country *
which he had taught her in his happier
moods. And so strange was the contrast
between her former and present existence,

* Ireland.
252 •
melmoth:
— subdued was she by constraint and|
so
coldness, —
so often had she been told that
every thing she did, said, or thought, was
wrong,—that she began to yield up the
evidences of her senses, to avoid the per-
petual persecutions of teazing and impe-
rious mediocrity, and considered the ap-
pearance of the stranger as one of those vi-
sions that formed the trouble and joy of
her dreamy and illusive existence.
" I am surprised, sister," sai^ Fernan,
whom Father Jose's gaining his queen had
put in unusually bad humour " I am —
surprised that you never busy yourself, as
young maidens use, at your needle, or in
some quaint niceties of your sex." " Or —
in reading some devout book," said Donna
Clara, raising her eyes one moment from
her tapestry, and then dropping them
again; *•'
there is the legend of that * Polish

* I have read the legend of this Polish saint^ which

is circulated in Dublin, and find recorded among the
indisputable proofs of his vocation, that he infallibly
 A TALE. 25S

saint, born, like her^ in a land of darkness,

yet chosen to be a vessel 1 have forgot
his name, reverend Father." " Cheek to —
the king," said Father Jose in reply.
" You regard nothing but watching a
few flowers, or hanging over your lute, or
gazing at the moon," continued Fernan,
vexed alike at the success of his antagonist
and the silence of Isidora. ** She is emi-
nent in alms-deeds and works of charity,"
said the good-natured priest. " I was
summoned to a miserable hovel near your
villa. Madonna Clara, to a dying sinner, a

beggar rotting on rotten straw !" " Jesu !" —

cried Donna Clara with involuntary hor-
ror, " I washed the feet of thirteen beg-

gars, on my knees in my father's hall, the

week before my marriage with her honour-
ed father, and I never could abide the
sight of a beggar since." —" Associations
are sometimes indelibly strong," said the
— I .1 ^.-..1 -I ..I 1 .1. i.»» I. 1
1 — , ., , . < »i I
„

swooned if an indecent expression was uttered in hi«

presence—wA^w in his nurse's arms!

254i MELMOTH:

priest drily ;--then he added, " I went as

was my duty, but your daughter was there
before me. She had gone uncalled, and
was uttering the sweetest words of conso-
lation from a homily, which a certain poor
priest, who shall be nameless, had lent her
from his humble store."
" Isidora blushed at this anonymous
vanity, while she mildly smiled or wept at
the harassings of Don Fernan, and the
heartless austerity of her mother. " I heard
her as I entered the hovel; and, by the
habit I wear, I paused on the threshold
with delight. Her first words were
Check-mate !" he exclaimed, forgetting
his homily in his triumph, and pointing,
with appealing eye, and emphatic finger,'
to the desperate state of his adversary's
king. " That was a very extraordinary
exclamation !" said the literal Donna Clara,
who had never raised her eyes from her
work. —" I did not think my daughter was
so fond of chess as to burst into the house
of a dying beggar with such a phrase in
 A TALE. Q>55

her mouth."^" It was I said Madonna,"

it,

said the priest, reverting to his game, on

which he hung with soul and eye intent
on his recent victory. " Holy saints !" said
Donna Clara, still more and more perplex-
ed, " I thought the usual phrase on such
occasions was paa? vohiscum, or" Be-
fore Father Jose could reply, a shriek from
Isidora pierced the ears of every one. All
gathered round her in a moment, reinforc-
ed by four female attendants and two pages,
whom the unusual sound had summoned
from the antichamber. Isidora had not
fainted ; she still stood among them pale
as death, speechless, her eye wandering
round the groupe that encircled her, with-
out seeming to distinguish them. But she
retained that presence of mind which never
deserts woman where a secret is to be
guarded, and she neither pointed with fin-
ger, or glanced with eye, towards the case-
ment, where the cause of her alarm had
presented itself. Pressed with a thousand
questions, she appeared incapable of an-
 — —

9;56 MELMOTH:
swering them, and, declining assistance,
leaned against the casement for support.
" Donna Clara was now advancing with
measured step to proffer a bottle of curious
essences, which she drew from a pocket of
a depth beyond calculation, when one of
the female attendants, aware of her favour-
ite habits, proposed reviving her by the
scent of the flowers that clustered round
the frame of the casement ; and collecting
a handful of roses, offered them to Isidora.
The sight and scent of these beautiful
flowers, revived the former associations of
Isidora and, waving away her attendant,
;

she exclaimed, " There are no roses like

those which surrounded me when he be-
held me first !"
— " He !
—who, daughter ?"
said the alarmed Donna Clara. " Speak,
I charge you, sister,'* said the irritable Fer-
nan, " to whom do you allude ?" ^^ She
raves,'* whose habitual pe-
said the priest,
netration discovered there was a secret,
and whose professional jealousy decided
that no one, not mother or brother, should
 A TALE. 257

share it with him ;

" she raves — ^ye are to
blame —forbear to hang round and to ques-
tion her. Madonna, retire to rest, and the
saints watch round your bed !" Isidora,
bending thankfully for this permission, re-
tired to her apartment; and father Jose
for an hour appeared to contend with the
suspicious fears of Donna and the
Clara,
sullen irritability of Fernan, merely that
he might induce them, in the heat of con-
troversy, to betray all they knew or dread-
ed, that he might strengthen his own con
jectures, and establish his own power by
the discovery.

" Scire volunt secreta domusj et inde timeri."

And this desire is not only natural but

necessary, in a being from whose heart his
profession has torn every tie of nature and
of passion ; and if it generates malignity,
ambition, and the wish for mischief, it is

the system, not the individual, we must

blame.
 :

258 MELMOTH
" Madonna," said the Father, " you arei
always urging your zeal for the Catholic:
church —and you, Senhor, are always re-
minding me of the honour of your family
—I am anxious —and how can the
for both
interests of both be better secured than by
Donna Isidora taking the —" The veil ?"
wish of my soul !''
cried Donna Clara^
clasping her hands, and closing her eyes,
as if she witnessed her daughter's apotheo-
sis. " I will never hear of it, Father,"
said Fernan ; " my sister's beauty and
wealth entitle me to claim alliance with
the first families in Spain baboon —their
shapes and copper- coloured visages might
be redeemed for a century by such a graft
on the stock, and the blood of which they
boast would not be impoverished by a
transfusion of the aurum potabile of ours
into it."-—" You son," said the
forget,
priest, " the extraordinary circumstances
attendant on the early part of your sister's

life. There are many of our Catholic no-

bility who would rather see the black blood
 —

A TALE. 259

of the banished Moors, or the proscribed

Jews, flow in the veins of their descend-
ants, than that of one who" Here a
mysterious whisper drew from Donna
Clara a shudder of distress and consterna-
tion, and from her son an impatient mo-
tion of angry incredulity. " I do not credit
a word of it," said the latter " you wish
;

that my sister should take the veil, and

therefore you credit and circulate the mon-
strous invention." —" Take heed, son, I
conjure you," said the trembling Donna
Clara. " Take you heed. Madam, that
you do not sacrifice your daughter to an
unfounded and incredible fiction." " Fic- —
—
tion !" repeated Father Jose- " Senhor, I
forgive your illiberal reflections on me,
but let me remind you, that the same im«
m unity will not be extended to the insult
—
you offer to the Catholic faith." " Reve-
rend Father," said the terrified Fernan,
" the Catholic church has not a more de-
voted and unworthy professor on earth
than myself." — " I do believe the latter,"
 —

260 melmoth:
said the priest. " You admit all that the
holy church teaches to be irrefragably
true ?"—« To
be sure I do."—« Then you
must admit that the islands in the Indian
seas are particularly under the influence
of the devil?" —" I do, if the church re-
quires me so to believe." —" And that he
possessed a peculiar sway over that island
where your sister was lost in her infancy?'*
— " I do not see how that follows," said
Fernan, making a sudden stand at this
premise of the Sorites. " Not see how that
follows!" repeated Father Jose, crossing
himself;

" Excaecavit oculos eorum ne viderent."

But why waste I my Latin and logic on

thee, who art incapable of both ? Mark
me, I will use but one unanswerable argu-
ment, the which whoso gainsayeth is a
gainsayer — that's all. The Inquisition at
Goa knows the truth of what I have as-
serted, and who will dare deny it now ?'*
 A TALE. 261

—" Not 1 !
—
not I !'* exclaimed Donna
Clara ; " nor, I am sure, will this stub-
born boy. Son, I adjure you, make
haste to believe what the reverend Fa-
ther has told you." —" I am believing as
fast as 1 can," answered Don Fernan, in
the tone of one who is reluctantly swal-
lowing a distasteful mess; " but my
faith will be choaked if you don't allow it

time to swallow. As for digestion," he

muttered, " let that come when it pleases
God." —" Daughter," said the priest, who
well knew the mollia tempora fandi, and
saw that the sullen and angry Fernan
could not well bear more at present;
" daughter, it is enough we must lead —
with gentleness those whose steps find
stumbling-blocks in the paths of grace.
Pray with me, daughter, that your son's
eyes may yet be opened to the glory and
felicity of his sister's vocation to a state
where the exhaustless copiousness of divine
benignity places the happy inmates above
all those mean and mundane anxieties,
those petty and local wants, which
262 melmoth:

Ah! —^hem— ^verily I feel some of those

wants myself at this moment. lam hoarse
with speaking; and the intense heat of
this night hath so exhausted my strength,
that methinks the wing of a partridge
would be no unseasonable refreshment."
" At a sign from Donna Clara, a salver
with wine appeared, and a partridge that
might have provoked the French prelate
to renew his meal once more, spite of his
horror of toujours perdrix, " See, daugh-
ter, see how much I am exhausted in this
distressing controversy-—well may I say,
the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up."
—" Then you and the zeal of the house
will soon be quit^^^ muttered Fernan as
he retired. And drawing the folds of his
mantle over his shoulder, he threw a glance
of wonder at the happy facility with which
the priest discussed the wings and breast
of his favourite bird, —^whispering alter^

nately words of admonition to Donna Clara,

and muttering something about the omis-
sion of pimento and lemon.
" Father," said Don Fernan, stalking
 A TALE. ^63

back from the door, and fronting the priest

-— " Father, I have a favour to ask of you."
—" Glad, were it in my power to comply
vi^ith it," said Father Jose, turning over

the skeleton of the fowl " but you see ;

here is only the thigh, and that somewhat

bare." —"It is not of that I speak or think,
reverend Father," said Fernan, with a
smile " I have but to request, that you
;

will not renew the subject of my sister's vo-

cation till the return of my father." —" Cer-
tainly not, son, certainly not. Ah ! you
know the time to ask a favour — know
^you
I never could refuse you at a moment like
this, when my warmed, and sof-
heart is

tened, and expanded, by by by the evi- — —

dences of your contrition and humiliation,
and all that your devout mother, and your
zealous spiritual friend, could hope or wish
for. In truth, it overcomes me these —
tears —
I do not often weep but on occa-
sions like these, and then I weep abun-
dantly, and am compelled to recruit my
lack of moisture thus." —
" Fetch more
f^64 melmoth:
wine," said Donna Clara. —The order was
obeyed. — Good " night, Father," said Don
Fernan. — " The saints watch round you^
my son ! Oh I am exhausted !
—I sink ii

this struggle ! The night is hot, and re^

quires wine to slake my thirst —and win<

is a provocative, and requires food to tak<
away its deleterious and damnable quali^
ties—and food, especially partridge, whicl
is a hot and stimulative nutritive, requires

drink again to absorb or neutralize- its ex.

citing qualities. Observe me,. Donna Cla-
ra —I speak as to the learned. There it
stimulation, and there is absorption; th<

causes of which are manifold, and the ef^

fects such as 1 am not bound to tell
you at present." —" Reverend Father/^
said the admiring Donna Clara, not guess^
ing, in the least, from what source all thij
eloquence flowed, " I trespassed on youi
time merely to ask a favour also." " Ask —
and 'tis granted," said Father Jose, with a
protrusion of his foot as proud as that of
Hixtus himself. " It is merely to know,
 A TALE. ^65

will not all the inhabitants of those accurs-

ed Indian isles be damned everlastingly?"
—" Damned everlastingly, and without
doubt," returned the priest. " Now my
mind is easy," rejoined the lady, " and I
shall sleep inpeace to-night,"
" Sleep, however, did not visit her so
soon as she expected, for an hour after she
knocked at Father Jose's door, repeating,
" Damned to all eternity. Father, did you
not say ?" —" Be damned to all eternity !"

said the priest, tossing on his feverish bed,

and dreaming, in the intervals of his trou-
bled sleep, of Don Fernan coming to con-
fession with a drawn sword, and Donna
Clara with a bottle of Xeres in her hand,
which she swallowed at a draught, while
his parched lips were gaping for a drop
in vain, —
and of the Inquisition being
established in an island off the coast of
Bengal, and a huge partridge seated with a
cap on at the end of a table covered with
black, as chief Inquisitor, —
and various and
VOL. III. M
2l66 melmoth :

monstrous chimeras, the abortive births of

repletion and indigestion.
" Donna Clara, catching only the la$t
words, returned to her apartment with light
step and gladdened heart, and, full of pious
consolation, renewed her devotions before
the image of the virgin in her apartment,
at each side of whose niche two wax ta-
pers were burning, till the cool morning
breeze made it possible for her to retire
with some hope of rest.
" Isidora, in her apartment, was equally
sleepless ; and had prostrated her-
she, too,
self before the sacred image, but with dif-
ferent thoughts. Her feverish and dreamy
existence, composed of wild and irrecon-
cileable contrasts between the forms of the
present, and the visions of the past, the—
difference between all that she felt within,
—
and all that she saw around her, between
the impassioned life of recollection, and
the monotonous one of reality, was be- —
coming too much for a heart bursting with
 —

A TALE. 267

undirected sensibilities, and a head giddy

from vicissitudes that would have deeply
tried much firmer faculties.
" She remained for some time repeating
the usual number of which she
ave's, to
added the litany of the Virgin, without
any corresponding impulses of solace or
illumination, till at length, feeling that
her prayers were not the expressions of
her heart, and dreading this heterodoxy
of the heart more than the violation of the
ritual, she ventured to address the image
of the Virgin in language of her own.
" Mild and beautiful Spirit !" she cried,
prostrating herself before the figure
" you whose lips alone have smiled on
me since I reached your Christian land,
I—^ou whose countenance I have some-
itimes imagined to belong to those who
dwelt in the stars of my own Indian sky,
— ^hear me, and be not angry with me!
Let me lose all feeling of my present ex-
I istence, or all memory of the past ! Why
3o my former thoughts return? They
 : !

26s MELMOTH
once made me happy, now they are thorns
in my heart ! Why do they retain their
power since their nature is altered?
I cannot be what I was Oh, let me —
then no longer remember it Let me, !

if possible, see, feel, and think as those a-

round me do! Alas! I feel it is much

easier to descend to their level than to raise
them Time, constraint, and dull-
to mine.
ness, may do much for me, but what time
could ever operate such a change on them
It would be like looking for the pearls at
the bottom of the stagnant ponds which
art has dug in their gardens. No, mother
of the Deity divine and mysterious wo-
!

—
man, no! they never shall see another throb
of my burning heart. Let it consume in its
own fires before a drop of their cold com-s
passion extinguishes them ! Mother divine! J
are not burning hearts, then, worthiest of
thee ? —and does not the love of nature as-

similate itself to the love of God ! True,

we may love without religion, but can we
be religious without love ? Yet, mother

w
 .

A TALE. 269

divine ! dry up my heart, since there is no

longer a channel for its streams to flow
through ! — or turn all those streams into
the river, narrow and cold, that holds its

course on to eternity! Why should I

think or feel, since life requires only du-
ties that no feeling suggests, and apathy
that no reflection disturbs ? Here let me
rest ! —^it is indeed the end of enjoyment,
but it is also the end of suffering and a ;

thousand tears are a price too dear for the

single smile which is sold for them in the
commerce of life. Alas! it is better to
wander in perpetual sterility than to be
tortured with the remembrance of flowers
that have withered, and odours that have
died for ever." Then a gush of uncon-
troulable emotion overwhelming her, she
again bowed before the Virgin. " Yes,
help me image from my
to banish every
soul but his —
Let my heart be
his alone !

like this lonely apartment, consecrated by

the presence of one sole image, and illumi-
nated only by that light which affection
 : —

270 MELMOTH
kindles before the object of its adoration,
and worships it by for ever !'*

" In an agony of enthusiasm she conti-

nued to kneel before the image; and when
she rose, the silence of her apartment, and
the calm smile of the celestial figure, seem-
ed at once a contrast and a reproach to
this excess of morbid indulgence. That
smile appeared to her like a frown. It is

we can feel no so-

certain, that in agitation
lace from features that express only pro-
found tranquillity. We would rather wish
corresponding agitation, even hostility
any thing but a calm that neutralizes and
absorbs us. It is the answer of the rock
—
to the wave ^we collect, foam, dash, and
disperse ourselves against it, and retire
broken, shattered, and murmuring to the^
echoes of our disappointment.
" From the tranquil and hopeless aspect
of the divinity, smiling on the misery it

neither consoles or relieves, and intimating

in that smile the profound and pulseless
apathy of inaccessible elevation, coldly
 —

A TALE. 271

hinting that humanity must cease to be,

before it can cease to suffer —from this the
sufferer rushed for consolation to nature,
whose ceaseless agitation seems to corre-
spond with the vicissitudes of human des-
tiny and the emotions of the human heart
whose alternation of storms and calms, of —
—
clouds and sun-light, of terrors and de-
lights —
seems to keep a kind of myste-
rious measure of ineffable harmony with
that instrument whose chords are doomed
alternately to the thrill of agony and rap-
ture, till the hand of death sweeps over all

the strings, and silences them for ever.

With such a feeling, Isidora leaned against
her casement, gasped for a breath of air,

which the burning night did not grant, and

thought how, on such a night in her Indian
isle, she could plunge into the stream shaded
by her beloved tamarind, or even venture
amid the still and silvery waves of the
ocean, laughing at the broken beams of
the moonlight, as her light form dimpled
the waters —snatching with smiling de-
 :

272 MELMOTH
light the brilliant, tortuous, and enamelled
shells that seemed to woo her white foot-
steps as she turned to the shore. Now
all; was different. The duties of the
bath had been performed, but with a
parade of soaps, perfumes, and, above all,
attendants, who, though of her own sex,
gave Isidora an unspeakable degree of dis-
gust at the operation. The sponges and
odours sickened her unsophisticated senses,
and the presence of another human being
seemed to close up every pore.
" She had felt no refreshment from the
bath, or from her prayers —
she sought it
at her casement, but there also in vain.
The moon was as bright as the sun of
colder climates, and the heavens were all
in a blaze with her light. She seemed
like a gallant vessel ploughing the bright
and trackless ocean alone, while a thousand
stars burned in the wake of her quiet glo-
ry, like attendant vessels pursuing their
course to undiscovered worlds, and point-
ing them out to the mortal eye that lin-
 A TALE, 273

gered on their course, and loved their

light.
" Such was the scene above, but what
a contrast to the scene below ! The glo-
rious and unbounded on an in-
light fell

closure of stiff parterres, cropped myrtles

and orange-trees in tubs, and quadrangular
ponds, and bowers of trellis- work, and na-
ture tortured a thousand ways, and indig-
nant and repulsive under her tortures eve-
ry way.
" Isidora looked and wept. Tears had
now become her language when alone — it

was a language she dared not utter before

her family. Suddenly she saw one of the
moonlight alleys darkened by an approach-
—
ing figure. It advanced it uttered her
—
name the name she remembered and lov-
—
ed the name of Immalee " Ah !" she
!

exclaimed, leaning from the casement, " is

there then one who recognizes me by that
name ?" —" It is only by that name I can
address you," answered the voice of the
stranger —
•**
I have not yet the honour of
m2
274 MELMOTH :

being acquainted with the name your

Christian friends have given you." " They —
call me Isidora, but do you still call me
Immalee. But how is it," she added in a
—her
trembling voice, fears for his safety
overcoming her sudden and innocent
all

joy sight— " how

at his that you is it are
here? — where no human being
here, is

ever beheld but the inmates of the man-

sion ?—how did you cross the garden wall?
—how did you come from India? Oh!
retire for your own safety! I am among
those whom 1 cannot trust or love. My
mother is severe —my brother is violent.
Oh how ! did you obtain entrance into the
garden ? —How is it," she added in a bro-
ken voice, " that you risk so much to see
one whom you have forgotten so long ?"
—" Fair Neophyte, beautiful Christian,"
answered the stranger, with a diaboli-
cal sneer, " be it known to you that

I regard bolts, and bars, and walls, as

much as I did the breakers and rocks
of your Indian isle—that I can go
 —I

A TALE. 275

where, and retire when I please, with-

out leave asked or taken of your bro-
ther's mastiffs, or Toledos, or spring-guns,
and in utter defiance of your mother's ad-
vanced guard of duennas, armed in spec-
tacles, and flanked with a double ammuni-

tion of rosaries, with beads as large as "

" Hush! —hush!—do not utter such im-

pious sounds —I am taught to revere those
holy things. But you —and did
is it ? I
indeed see you last night, or was it a
thought such as visits me in dreams, and
wraps me again in visions of that beauti-
ful and blessed where first I
isle Oh
that I never had seen you !"- " Lovely —
Christian be reconciled to your horrible
!

destiny. You saw me last night I cross- —

ed your path twice when you were spark-
ling among the brightest and most beauti-
ful of all Madrid. It was me you saw —
rivetted your eye —
I transfixed your slen-
der frame as with a flash of lightning
you fell fainting and withered under my
burning glance. It was me you saw-—
 : —

2!76 MELMOTH
me, the disturber of your angelical exis-
tence in that isle of paradise-^the hunter
of your form and your steps, even amid the
complicated and artificial tracks in which
you have been concealed by the false forms
of the existence you have embraced!"
" Embraced !
—
Oh no they seized on me
!

—they dragged me here —they made me

a Christian. They toldwas for my
me all

salvation, for my happiness here and here-

after —
and I trust it will, for I have been
so miserable ever since, that I ought to be
—
happy somewhere." " Happy," repeated
the stranger with his withering sneer
" and are you not happy now ? The de-
licacy of your exquisite frame is no longer
exposed to the rage of the elements the —
fine and feminine luxury of your taste is
solicitedand indulged by a thousand in-
—
ventions of art your bed is of down your —
chamber hung with tapestry. Whether
the moon be bright or dark, six wax ta-

pers burn in your chamber all night.

Whether the skies be bright or cloudy,
 A TALE. 277

whether the earth be clothed with flowers,

—
or deformed with tempests, the art of the
limner has surrounded you with " a new
heaven and a new earth and you may
;"

bask in suns that never set, while the hea-

—
vens are dark to other eyes, and luxuriate
amid landscapes and flowers, while half
your fellow- creatures are perishing amid
snows and tempests !" (Such was the over-
flowing acrimony of this being, that he
could not speak of the beneficence of na-
ture, or the luxuries of art, without inter-
weaving something that seemed like a sa-
tire on, or a scorn of both.) " You also
have intellectual beings to converse with
instead of the chirpings of loxias, and the
chatterings of monkeys." —"
I have not
found the conversation I encounter much
more intelligible or significant," murmured
Isidora, but the stranger did not appear to
hear her. " You are surrounded by every
thing that can flatter the senses, intoxicate
the imagination, or expand the heart. All
these indulgences must make you forget
278 melmoth:
the voluptuous but unrefined liberty of
your former existence.'' —" The birds in
my mother's cages," said Isidora, " are for
ever pecking at their gilded bars, and
trampling on the clear seeds and limpid
water they are supplied with —would they
not rather rest in the mossy trunk of a
doddered oak, and drink of whatever,
stream they met, and be at liberty, at
all the risk of poorer food and fouler drink

•^would they not rather do any thing than

break their bills against gilded wires?"
—" Then you do not feel your new exis-
tence in this Christian land so likely to
surfeit you with delight as you once
thought? For shame, Immalee shame —
on your ingratitude and caprice Do you !

remember when from your Indian isle you

caught a glimpse of the Christian worship,
and were entranced at the sight?" " I —
remember all that ever passed in that
isle. My life formerly was all anticipa-
tion, —^now it is all retrospection. The life

of the happy is all hopes,— that of the tin-

 KL TALE. 279

fortunate all memory. Yes, I remember

catching a glimpse of that religion so beau-
tifuland pure; and when they brought
me to a Christian land, I thought I should
have found them all Christians." ** And —
what did you find them, then, Immalee ?"
— —
" Only Catholics." " Are you aware of
the danger of the words you utter ? Do
you know that in this country to hint a
doubt of Catholicism and Christianity be-
ing the same, would consign you to the
flames as a heretic incorrigible? Your
mother, so lately known
you as a mo-
to
'
ther, would bind your hands when the
covered litter came for its victim and ;

your though he has never yet be-

father,
held you, would buy with his last ducat
the faggots that were to consume you to
ashes and all your relations in their gala
;

robes would shout their hallelujahs to

your dying screams of torture. Do you
know that the Christianity of these coun-
tries is diametrically opposite to the Chris-

tianity of that world of which you caught

280 MELMOTH :

a gleam, and which you may see recorded

in the pages of your Bible, if you are per-
mitted to read it?"
" Isidora wept, and confessed she had
not found Christianity what she had at
first believed it ; but with her wild and
eccentric ingenuousness, she accused her-
self the next moment of her confession,
—and she added, " I am so ignorant in
new world, —
this I have so much to learn,
—my senses so often deceive me, —and
my habits and perceptions so different
from what they ought to be I mean from —
what those around me are that I should —
not speak or think but as I am taught.
Perhaps, after some years of instruction
and suffering, I may be able to discover
that happiness cannot exist in this new
world, and Christianity is not so remote
from Catholicism as it appears to me now."
—" And have you not found yourself hap-
py in this new world of intelligence and
luxury?" said Melmoth, in a tone of
involuntary softness. " 1 have at times."
 A TALE. 281

—" What times?" —"When the weary-

day was over, and my dreams bore me
back to that island of enchantment. Sleep
is to me like some bark rowed by vision-
ary pilots, that wafts me to shores of beau-
ty and blessedness, — and all night long I
revel in my
dreams with spirits. Again
I live among
flowers and odours a thou- —
sand voices sing to me from the brooks
—
and the breezes the air is all alive and
eloquent with invisible melodists — I walk
amid a breathing atmosphere, and living
and loving inanimation —blossoms that
shed themselves beneath my steps—and
streams that tremble to kiss my feet, and
then retire; and then return again, wast-
ing themselves in fondness before me, and
touching me, as my lips press the holy
images they have taught me to worship
here !" —"
Does no other image ever visit
your dreams, Immalee ?" " I need not —
tell you," said Isidora, with that singular
mixture of natural firmness, and partial
obscuration of intellect, —the combined re»
 —

282 MELMOTH :

and native character,

suit of her original
and extraordinary circumstances of her
early existence —
" I need not tell you
you know you are with me every night !"
— —
" Me ?" " Yes, you you are for ever
;

in that canoe that bears me to the Indian

isle —you gaze on me, but your expres-
sion is so changed, that I dare not speak
to you —we fly over the seas in a moment,
but you are for ever at the helm, though
—
you never land the moment the paradise
isle appears, you disappear and as we re^
;

turn, the ocean is all dark, and our course

is as dark and swift as the storm that

—
sweeps them ^you look at me, but never
speak —Oh yes! you are with me every
night!" —" But, Immalee, these are all

dreams—idle dreams. / row you over the

Indian seas from Spain !— this a vi- is all

sion of your imagination." —" Is a dream it

that I see you now ?" said Isidora — " is it

a dream that I talk with you —Tell me, ?

for my senses are bewildered ; and it ap-

pears to me no less strange, that you should
 A TALE. ^ 283

be here in Spain, than that I should be in

my native island. Alas in the life that
!

I now lead, dreams have become realities,

and realities seem only like dreams. How-
is it you you are here ?
are here, if indeed
— how is it that you have wandered so far
to see me ? How many oceans you must
have crossed, how many isles you must
have seen, and none like that where I first
beheld you But is it you indeed I be-
!

hold? I thought I saw you last night,

but I had rather trust even my dreams
than my senses. I believed you only a
, visitor of that isle of visions, and a haunt-
er of the visions that recall it —but are
you in truth a living being, and one whom
I may hope to behold in this land of cold
realitiesand Christian horrors ?" " Beauti- —
ful Imraalee, or Isidora, or whatever other
name your Indian worshippers, or Chris-
tian god-fathers and god-mothers, have
called you by, I pray you listen to me,
while I expound a few mysteries to you."
And Melmoth, as he spoke, flung himself
 —

284 MELMOTH :

on a bed of hyacinths and tuHps that dis-

played their glowing flowers, and sent up
their odorous breath right under Isidora's
casement. " Oh you will destroy my
flowers !" cried she, while a reminiscence
of her former picturesque existence, when
flowers were the companions alike of her
imagination and her pure heart, awoke
her exclamation. " It is my vocation
I pray you pardon me !" Melmoth, as
said
he basked on the crushed flowers, and
darted his withering sneer and scowl-
ing glance at Isidora. " I am com-
missioned to trample on and bruise eve-
ry flower in the natural and moral world
'—hyacinths, hearts, and bagatelles of
that kind, just as they occur. And now.
Donna Isidora, with as long an et cetera
as you or your sponsors cquld wish, and
with no possible offence to the herald, here
I am to-night —and where I shall be to-
morrow night, depends on your choice.
I would as soon be on the Indian seas,
where your dreams send me rowing every
night, or crashing through the ice near
 —
!

A TALE. 2S5

the Poles, or ploughing with my naked

corse, (if corses have feeling), through
the billows of that ocean where I must
one day (a day that has neither sun or
moon, neither commencement or termina-
tion), plough forever, and reap despair !"
" Hush ! —
hush !— Oh forbear such horrid
sounds Are you indeed he whom 1 saw in
I

the isle ? Are you he, inwoven ever since

that moment with my prayers, my hopes,
my heart ? Are you that being upon whom
hope subsisted, when life itself was failing?
On my passsage to this Christian land, I
suffered much. I was so ill you would
—
have pitied me the clothes they put on
me— the language they made me speak
the religion they made me believe the —
country they brought me to—Oh you —
you alone —
the thought the image of you,
! —
could alone have supported me I loved, !

and to love is to live. Amid the disrup-

tion of every natural tie, —amid the loss of
that delicious existence which seems a
dream, and which still fills my dreams.
^86 MELMOTH :

—
and makes sleep a second existence, I have
— —
thought of you have dreamt of you have
—
loved you !" " Loved me ?— no being yet
loved me but pledged me in tears." —" And
have I not wept ?" said Isidora— " believe
these tears—theyarenotthefirstlhave shed,
nor I fear will be the last, since I owe the
to you." And she wept as she spoke.
first
" Well," said the wanderer, with a bitter
and self-satirizing laugh, " I shall be per-
suaded at last that I am ** a marvellous pro-
per man." Well, if it must be so, happy
man be his dole ! And when shall the au-
Immalee, still beau-
spicious day, beautiful
tiful Isidora, your Christian
in spite of
name, (to which I have a most anti-catho-
lic objection) —
when shall that bright day
dawn on your long slumbering eye-lashes,
and waken them with kisses, and beams,
and light, and love, and all the parapher-
nalia with which folly arrays misery pre-
—
vious to their union that glittering and
empoisoned drapery that well resembles
what of old Dejanira sent to her husband
 A TALE. 287

—when
'
shall the day of bliss be ?" And
he laughed with that horrible convulsion
that'mingles the expression of levity with
that of despair, and leaves the listener no
doubt whether there is more despair in
laughter, ormore laughter in despair. " I
understand you not," said the pure and ti-
mid Isidora ** and if you would not ter-
;

rify me to madness, laugh no more no —

more, at least, in that fearful way !"— " /
cannot weep,'' said Melmoth, fixing on her
his dry and burning eyes, strikingly visi-
ble in the moonlight ;
" the fountain of
tears has been long dried up within me,
like that of every other human blessing."
—" I can weep for both," said Isidora, " if
that be all." And her tears flowed fast, as

much from memory as from grief—and

when those sources are united, God and
the sufferer only know how fast and bit-
terly they fall. " Reserve them for our
nuptial hour, my lovely bride," said Mel-
moth to himself; " you will have occasion
for them then."
288 MELMOTH :

" There was a custom then, however

indelicate and repulsive it may sound to
modern ears, for ladies who were doubtful
of the intentions of their lovers to demand
of them the proof of their purity and ho-
nour, by requiring an appeal to their fa-
mily, and a solemn union under the sanc-
tion of the church. Perhaps there was
more genuine spirit of truth and chastity
in this, than in all the ambiguous flirta-
tion that is carried on with an ill-under-
stood and mysterious dependence on prin-
ciples that have never been defined, and
fidelity that has never been
removed.
When the lady in the Italian tragedy *
asks^ her lover, almost at their first inter-
view, if his intentions are honourable, and
requires, as the proof of their being so,
that he shall espouse her immediately,
does she not utter a language more unso-
phisticated, more intelligible, more hearU
edly pure, than all the romantic and in-

* Alluding possibly to '^ Romeo and JuHet.'*

 —

A TALE. 289

credible reliance that other females are

supposed to place in the volatility of im-
pulse,—in that wild and extemporaneous
feeling, — that " house on the sands,"
which never has its foundation in the im-
moveable depths of the heart. Yielding
to this feeling, Isidora, in a voice that faul-
tered at its own murmured, " If
accents,
you love me, seek me no more clandes-
tinely. My mother is good, though she is
austere —
my brother is kind, though he
is passionate—my father — I have never
seen him ! I know not what to say, but
if he be my father, he will love you. IMeet
me in their presence,and I will no longer
feel pain and shame mingled with the de-
light of seeing you. Invoke the sanction
of the church, and then, perhaps,"
" Perhaps !" retorted Melmoth " You ;

have learned the European perhaps * !'

the art of suspending the meaning of an

—
emphatic word of affecting to draw the
curtain of the heart at the moment you
drop its folds closer and closer of bidding —
VOL. III. N
 —

290 MELMOTH :

US despair at the moment you intend we

should feel hope!"— "Oh no! no!" an- —
swered the innocent being " I am truth, ;

I am Immalee when I speak to you,

though to all others in this country,
which they call Christian, 1 ani Isidora.
When I loved you first, had only one
I
heart to consult, —now there are many,
and some who have not hearts like mine.
But if you love me, you can bend to them
—
as I have done ^you can love their God,
their home, their hopes, and their country.
Even with you I could not be happy, un-
less you adored the cross to which your

hand first pointed my wandering sight,

and the religion which you reluctantly
confessed was the most beautiful and bene-
—
ficent on earth." " Did I confess that ?'*
echoed Melmoth; " It must have been
reluctantly indeed. Beautiful Immalee!
I am a convert to you ;" and he stifled a
Satanic laugh as he spoke " to your new
;

religion, and your beauty, and your Spa-

nish birth and nomenclature, and every

m
 —

»A TALE. 291

thing that you would wish. I will incon-

tinently wait on your pious mother, and
angry brother, and all your relatives, testy,
proud, and ridiculous as they may be. I
will encounter the starched ruffs, and rust-
ling manteaus, and whale-boned fardin-
gales of the females,from your good mo-
ther down duenna who sits
to the oldest
spectacled, and armed with bobbin, on her
inaccessible and untempted sopha; and the
twirled whiskers, plumed hats, and shoul-
dered capas of all your male relatives.
And I will drink chocolate, and strut
among them and when they refer me to
;

your mustachoed man of law, with his

thread-bare cloke of black velvet over his
.shoulder, his long quill in his hand, and
his soul in three sheets of wide-spread
parchment, I will dower you in the most
ample territory ever settled on a bride."
**
Oh let it be, then, in that land of music
and sunshine where we first m^t! One
spot where I might set my foot amid its
flowers, is worth all the cultivated earth
 I

^92 MELMOTH:

of Europe!" said Isidora. —" 'No — it shall

be in a territory with which your bearded
men of law are far better acquainted, and
which even your pious mother and proud
family must acknowledge my claim to,

when they shall hear it asserted and ex-

plained. Perchance they may be joint-
tenants with me there; and yet (strange
to say !) they will never litigate my exclu-
sive title to possession." —" I understand
nothing of this," said Isidora ;
" but I
feel I am transgressing the decorums of
a Spanish female and a Christian, in hold-
ing this conference with you any longer. If
you think as you once thought, if you —
feel as / must feel for ever, —there needs
not this discussion, which only perplexes
and terrifies. What have I to do with
this territory of which you speak ? That
yoii are its possessor, is its only va-
lue in my eyes !" —" What have you
to do with it ?" repeated Melmoth ;
*'
Oh,
you know not how much you may have
to do with it and me yet.' In other
 A TALE. 29S

cases, the possession of the territory is the

vsecurity for the man, —but here the man
is the security for the everlasting posses-
sion of the territory. Mine heirs must in-
herit it for ever and ever, if they hold by
my tenure. Listen to me, beautiful Im-
malee, or Christian, or whatever other
name you choose to be called by ! Nature,
your first sponsor, baptized you with the
—
dews of Indian roses your Christian spon-
sors, of course, spared not water, salt, or
oil, to wash away the stain of nature from
your and your last
regenerated frame —
you will submit to the rite, will
sponsor, if
anoint you with a new chrism. But of
that hereafter. Listen to me while I an-
nounce to you the wealth, the population,
the magnificence of that region to which
1 will endower you. The rulers of the
—
earth are there all of them. There be
the heroes, and the sovereigns, and the ty-
rants. There are their riches, and pomp^
—
and power Oh what a glorious accu-
mulation ! —
and they have thrones, and
2!94 MELMOTH:
crowns, and pedestals, and trophies of
fire, that burn for ever and ever, and
the light of their glory blazes eternal-
ly. There are all you read of in story,
your Alexanders and Caesars, your Pto-
lemies and Pharaohs. There be the prin-
ces of the East, the Nimrods, the Belshaz-
zars, and the Holoferneses of their day.
There are the princes of the North, the
Odins, the Attilas, (named by your church
the scourge of God), the Alarics, and all
those nameless and name-undeserving bar-
barians, who, under various titles and
claims, ravaged and ruined the earth they
came to conquer. There be the sove-
reigns of the South, and East, and West,
the Mahommedans, the Caliphs, the Sara-
cens, the Moors, with all their gorgeous
—
pretensions and ornaments the crescent,
the Koran, and the horse-tail— the trump,
the gong, and the atabal, (or to suit it to
your Christianised ear, Neophyte !)
lovely
* the noise of the captains, and the shout-
ings.' There be also those triple-crowned
 —

A TALE. . SI95

chieftains of the West, who hide their

heads under a diadem, and for every
I shorn
hair they shave, demand the Hfe of a sove-
reign —who, pretending to humiUty, tram-
ple on power— whose Servant of
title is. ser-

vants —and whose claim and recognizance

is.Lord of lords. Oh you will not lack
!

company in that bright region, for bright

it will be !
—and
what matter whether its
light be borrowed from the gleam of sul-
phur, or the trembling light of the moon,
by which I see you look so pale ?" " I —
look pale !" said Isidora gasping ;
" I feel
pale ! I know not the meaning of your
words, but 1 know it must be horrible.
Speak no more of that region, with its
pride, its wickedness, and its splendour 1

I am willing to follow you to deserts, to

solitudes, which human step never trod
but yours, and where mine shall trace,
with sole fidelity, the print of yours. A-
mid loneliness I was born amid loneli- ;

ness I could die. Let me but, wherever

I live, and whenever I die, be yours !
 — ; -

^96 MEL MOTH:

and for the place, it matters not, let it be
even and she shivered involuntarily
as she spoke " Let it be even"-
" Even where?" asked Melmoth, while
a wild feeling of triumph in the devoted-
ness of this unfortunate female, and of
horror at the destination which she was
unconsciously imprecating on herself, min-
gled in the question. " Even where you
are to be," answered the devoted Isidora,
" let me be there! and there I must be
happy, as in the isle of flowers and sun-
light, where I first beheld you. Oh there !

are no flowers so balmy and roseate as

those that once blew there There are!

no waters so musical, or breezes so fra-

grant, as those that I listened to and in-
haled, when I thought that they repeated
to me the echo of your steps, or the me-
lody of your voice—that human music the
first I ever heard, and which, when I cease
to hear' " You will hear fhuch bet-
ter !" interrupted Melmoth ;
" the voices
of ten thousand —ten millions of spirits —
 .

A TALE. 2d7

beings whose tones are immortal, without

cessation, without pause, without inter-
val !" —" Oh that will be glorious !" said
Isidora, clasping her hands; " the only
language I have learned in this new world
worth speaking, is the language of music.
I caught some imperfect sounds from birds
in my first world, but in my second world
they taught me musics and the misery
they have taught me, hardly makes a ba-
lance against that new and delicious Ian-
—
guage." " But think," rejoined Melmoth,
" if your taste for music be indeed so ex-

quisite, how it will be indulged, how it

will be enlarged, in hearing those voices

accompanied and re-echoed by the thun-

ders of ten thousand billows of fire, lashing
against which eternal despair has
rocks
turned into adamant They talk of the
!

music of the spheres ! —

Dream of the mu-
sic of those living orbs turning on their
axis of fire for ever and ever, and ever
singing as they shine, like your brethren
the Christians, who had the honour to il-
N 2
 — !

^98 MELMOTH:

luminate Kero's garden in Rome on a re-

joicing night." — " You make me tremble!"

—" —
Tremble! a strange effect of fire.
Fie what a coyness is this
! I have pro- !

mised, on your arrival at your new terri-

tory, all that is mighty and magnificent,
all that is splendid and voluptuous—rthe

sovereign and the sensualist— the inebri-

ated monarch and the pampered slave
the bed of roses and the canopy of fire !"
**
And is this the home to which you in-
vite me ?" —
" It is it is. —
Come, and be
mine ! —
myriads of voices summon you
hear and obey them Their voices thun-
!

der in the echoes of mine— their fires flash

from my eyes, and blaze in my heart.

Hear me, Isidora, my beloved, hear me
I woo you in earnest, and for ever Oh !

how trivial are by which mortal

the ties

lovers are bound, compared to those in

which you and I shall be bound to eter-
nity Fear not the want of a numerous
!

and splendid society. 1 have enumerated

sovereigns, and pontiffs, and heroes, and —
 — ;

A TALE. 299

if you should condescend to remember the

trivial amusements of your present sejour,

you will have enough to revive its associa-

tions. You love music, and doubtless you
will have most of the musicians who have
chromatized since the first essays of Tubal
Cain to Lully, who beat himself to death
at one of his own oratorios, or operas, 1
don't know which. They will have a sin-
—
gular accompaniment the eternal roar of
a sea of fire makes a profound bass to the
chorus of millions of singers in torture !"-—
*^
What is the meaning of this horrible de-
scription ?"
said the trembling Isidora
" your words are riddles to me. Do you
jest with me for the sake of tormenting,
or of laughing at me?"
Laughing!" —"
repeated her wild visitor; " that is an ex-

quisite hint vive la bagatelle! Let us

laugh for ever !
—
we shall have enough to
keep us in countenance. There will be
all that ever have dared to laugh on earth

—the singers, the dancers, the gay, the

voluptuous, the brilliant, the beloved — all

who have ever dared to mistake their des-

300 :melmoth :

tin}', enjoyment
so far as to imagine that
was not a crime, or that a smile was not
an infringement of their duty as sufferers.
All sluch must expiate their error under
circumstances which will probably compel
the most inveterate disciple of Democri-
tus, the most ineoctinguishahle laugher
among them, to allow that there^ at least,
'
laughter is madness.' " —" I do not un-
derstand you," said Isidora, listening to
him with that sinking of the heart which
is produced by a combined and painful
feeling of ignorance and terror. " Not

understand me ?" repeated Melmoth, with

that sarcastic frigidity of countenance
which frightfully contrasted the burning
intelligence of his eyes, that seemed like
the fires of a volcano bursting out amid
masses of snow heaped up to its very edge;
" not understand me !— are you not, then,
fond of music?" — " I am." — " Of dancing,
too, my graceful, beautiful love
—" I ?"

xvasr — " What the meaning of the dif-

is

ferent emphasis you give to those answers?"

 A TALE. 301

— " I love —
music I must love it for
ever — it is the language of recollection.
A single strain of it wafts me back to
the dreamy blessedness, the enchanted
existence, of my own — own isle. Of
dancing I cannot say so much. I have
learnt dancmg— hut 1 Jelt music. I shall
never forget the hour when I heard it for
the first time, and imagined it was the
language which Christians spoke to each
other. I have heard them speak a diffe-
rent language since."—" Doubtless their
language is not always melody, particu-
larly when they address each other on
controverted points in religion. Indeed,
I can conceive nothing less a-kin to har-
mony than the debate of a Dominican and
Franciscan on the respective efficacy of the
cowl of the order, to ascertain the salva-
tion ofhim who happens to die in it. But
[
have you no other reason for being fond of
music, and for only having been fond of
dancing ? Nay, let me have '
your most
5 5J
exquisite reason.'
 :

302 MELMOTH
" It seemed as if this unhappy be-
ing was impelled by his ineffable des-
tiny to deride the misery he inflicted,
in proportion to its bitterness. His sar-
castic levity bore a direct and fearful pro-
portion to his despair. Perhaps this is
also the case in circumstances and charac-
ters 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, no keen-
too, as if
no menace of por-
ness of ironical insult,
tentous darkness, had power to revolt the
feelings, or alarm the apprehensions, of
the devoted being to whom they were ad-
dressed. 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
 —

A TALE. 303

been Ibrmed,— 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 in-
articulate murmurs that I produce on my
guitar (for 1 am very ignorant) are like a
spell of melody that raises a form indescri-
bable —not you,
but my idea of you. In
your presence, though that seems neces-
sary to my existence, I have never felt
that exquisite delight that I have expe-
rienced in that of your image, when music
has calledit 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,
 ——
S04 MELMOTH:
" and one that, of course, has but one fail-

ure, —
that of not being sufficiently flatter*
ing 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, grin-
ning at you between the brilliant move-
ment of your fandangoes, 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 Isidore, with maiden
pride and tender grief blended in her
 A TALE. 305

voice ;
" and if you do, believe that I will
try to suppose it too ; the effort v\^ill not
cost much, —nothing but —my life
!"

*'
As Melmoth beheld this blessed and
beautiful being, once so refined amid na-
ture, 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 unin-

haled, 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 murmurs, and ex-
its

pire ; —As he and gazed on her,

felt this,

he cursed himself; and then, with the

selfishness of hopeless misery, he felt that
the curse might, by dividing it, be dimi-
nished.
" 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 Isido-
306 MSLMOTH :

ra ;
" 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 hu-
man pride at this moment." — " Pride ! at
what ? Since I have known you, I have
felt no pride but that of supreme devoted-
ness, —
that self-annihilating pride which
renders the victim prouder of its wreath,
than the sacrificer of his office."
—" But I
feel answered Melmoth,
another pride,"
and in a proud tone he spoke it, " a —
pride, which, like that of the storm that
visited the ancient cities, whose destruc-
tion you may have read of, while it
blasts,withers, and encrusts paintings,
gems, music, and festivity, grasping them
in its talons of annihilation, exclaims.
 —

A TALE. 307

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 modulationof your forms!

all the indestructible brilliancy of your co-

louring ! —
but preserve it for me alone !

me, the single, pulseless, eyeless, heartless

embracer of an unfertile bride, —the brood-
er over the dark and unproductive nest of
eternal sterility ,-^the mountain whose la-
va of internal fire has stifled, and indurat-
ed, and inclosed for ever, all that was the
joy of earth, the felicity of life, and the
hope of futurity 1"
" As he spoke, his expression was at
once so convulsed and so derisive, so indi-
cative 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
unappeaseable solicitude, she demanded,
" Will you th^n be mine? Or what am
 —

308 MELMOIH:
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 f — will you, Isidora ?" —" Yes !

yes !
—I have said so. But the sun is a-

bout to rise, I feel the increasing perfume

of the orange blossoms, and the coolness
of the morning Begone — I have staid
air.

— the domestics may be about,

too long here
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
 A TALE. 309

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, " be-
cause" " 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 in-
quire 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
310 MELMOTH :

petition. A withering monosyllable, nol

to be told, —
thundered in her ears, ^and she^
shrieked as slie closed the casement. A-
las ! the casement only shut out the fori

of the .stranger —not his image.

 ;

€HAPTER XIX.

He saw the eternal fire that keepS;,

In the unfathomable deeps^
power for ever^ and made a sign
Its

Tothe 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.

AN this part of the manuscript, which

I read in the vault of Adonijah the Jew,"
said ]Mon9ada, continuing his narrative,
" there were several pages destroyed, and
the contents of many following wholly
obliterated—nor could Adonijah supply
 ;

3125 melmoth:

the deficiency. From the next pages that

were legible, it appeared that Isidora im-
prudently continued to permit her myste-
rious visitor to frequent the garden at
night, and to converse with him from the
easement, though unable to prevail on him
to declare himself to her family, and per-
haps 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 con-
ferences, 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 thoseof one who has a se-
cretand 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 delu-
 A TALE. 313

sion. 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 lan-
guid 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 amore angelic brow, or gleam on eyes

that returned more pure and congenial
rays. The mutual and friendly light seem-
ed 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. * * *
« * « # iit

" 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
VOt, III. o
 1
314 MELMOTH
their leavesunder 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 ac-
ceptable anthem that perhaps ever wooed
the evening-breeze to waft it to heaven.
" This delusion would soon cease. The
stiffand 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 unnatu-
ral regularity on her eye and soul, and she
turned to heaven for relief. Who does
not, even in the first sweet agony of pas-
sion ? 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 tliat its bright, and
cold, and passionless orbs, are for ever
 A TALE. 315

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. Reve-
lation 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 bright-
ness." When she beheld it, the recollec-
tions 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
Si6 ,
MELMOTH:

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 circumstan-
ces so extraordinary, never drew from her
a question with regard to the means by
which he was enabled to surmount diffi-
culties 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 in-

quired what circumstances could have led

to a meeting so unexpected and extraor-
dinary. On Isidora's part this incurious
feeling was easily accounted for. Her for-
mer existence had been one of such a fa-
bulous and fantastic character, that the im-
probable had become familiar to her, —and
the familiar only, improbable. Wonders
were her natural element; and she felt.
 A TALE. 317

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 des-
tiny forbid alike curiosity or surprise.
The world could show him no greater
marvel than his own existence and the ;

facilitywith which he himself passed from

region to region, mingling with, yet dis-
tinct 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 astonish-
ment, 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 win-
dow being nearly fourteen feet above the
318 MELMOTH:

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 attrac-
tions 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 con-
queror. It decorates him with all its spoils,

and feels prouder to behold him arrayed

in them, than when she wore them in tri-

umph herself That is the first bright

hour of excitement, of trembling, but
hopeful and felicitous anxiety. Then we
 A TALE. 319

think we never can display enough of ta-

lent, of imagination, of all that can inter-

est, of all that can dazzle. We pride our-
selves in the homage we receive from so-
ciety, from the hope of sacrificing that ho/"
mage to our beloved —we feel a pure andit
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 de-
serve 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 back with that rich and accumu-
it

lated interest of theheart, of which we would

pay the uttermost farthing, if the payment
exacted the last vibration of its fibres, —the
lastdrop of its blood. No saint who ever
viewed a miracle performed by himself
with a holy and self-annihilating abstrac-
tion from seity, has perhaps felt a purer
sentiment of perfect devotedness, than the
I female who, in her first hours of love.
 :

320 MELMOTH
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 be-
!

ing (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 play-
ed, —and whose single sigh is heard, and
heard alone, amid the plaudits of thou-
sands Yet how delicious to her to whis-
!

per 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 ac-
customed 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.
 A TALE. 321

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 image to which love had given
fair

life, and who luxuriated in the vivid and

newly- tried enjoyment of that animation

which the passion of her lover had breath-
ed into her frame. And when the splen-
did portfolio is displayed, or the richly-
wrought tapestry expanded by outstretch-
ed arms, and cavaliers gaze, and ladies en-
vy, 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 judg-
ment, all taste, all feeling — for that lip
whose very censure would be dearer than
the applause of a world !—To hear, with
il«oft and submissive tranquillity, censure
2
322 MELMOTH:

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 saw her in
first

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 be-
lieve, that to behold her admired as she
was and her
for her loveliness, her talents,
wealth, would compel this proudest and
most eccentric of beings to prostrate him-
self 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 intro-
duction into European society.
" This had been her hope during the
 A TALE. S2S

earlier period of his visits ; but innocent

and flattering to its object as it was, she
was disappointed. To Mel moth " no-
thing 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 rat- —
tle 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 for-
ward 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
 :

SM MELMOTH
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 ver-
dure of Immalee's heart, —
for she was Im-
malee still She was the Oasis of
to him.
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 per-;
—
haps 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.
^^^lUsidora, before the second week of
their interview, had lowered her preten-
sions. She bad given up the hope to in-
terest 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
 —

A TALE. 325

ambition to he beloved, but in the sole

wish to love. She no longer alluded to
the enlargement of her faculties, the ac-
quisition 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 trans-
fer 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, — Isi-

dora'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 wav-
ing of Isidora's hand, as the dawn appear-
ed, was the tacit signal for their parting.
 :

32S6 MELMOTH
*'
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 ex-
quisite inversion of earthly feeling and
habit, darkness is light, and silence elo-
quence.
" At their last interviews, Isidora some-
times 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 pa-
rents,and demanding her at their hands.
Something she murmured also of her de-
clining health —her exhausted —her spirits

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
 !

A TALE. 327

(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 re-
luctant guide.
" In its first, with the innocent and ve-
nial art of woman, she had tried to inte-
rest him by the display of her new ac-
quirements, without the consciousness that
they were not new to him. The har-
mony of civilized society, of which she
was at once weary and proud, was dis-
cord to his ear. He had examined all the
strings that formed this curious but ill-
 —

S^8 MELMOTH:

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 her-
self, as evening approached, " I shall see

him I^T—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 re-
splendent colours, that they seemed to
have been painted by the finger of happi-
ness itself. The brilliant hue diffused it-

self over every object of her eye and heart.

Her mother appeared no longer a cold and
gloomy bigot, and even her brother seem-
ed kind. There was not a tree in the gar-
den 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.

-U^yV
 ;

A TALE. 329

" 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 inr

that single sensation, — at least she felt that
all her own was. She no longer indulged
the wish to attract or to subdue him ab- —
sorbed 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 impas-
sioned 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 inten-
sity 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
 : —

330 MELMOTH
only by a profound but uneasy silence, or
by a levity whose wild and frightful sal-
lies 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 cer-
tainty, and who mocks the captive by ask-
ing " 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 harmo- —
nized 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, —eccen-
tric in his habits, —wild and unsearchable
in his feelings, —and inaccessible in the
settled purpose of his fearful and fearless
 —

A TALE. 331

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 civi-
lized —
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), t/ s^w »«< ^o*." —" I
loved you," answered the Spanish maiden,
speaking in the same pure, firm, and ten-
der 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, —1 utter the same sounds.
What can woman, what can man, in all

the boasted superiority of his character and

S32 MELMOTH :

(which I have learned only since I

feeling,
became a Christian, or an European), do
more ? You but insult me when you ap-
pear 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, in-
quire not at the tongue of man, but at the
heart of woman." —" What is love?" said
Melmoth " is that the question?" —" You
—" me,
;

doubt that I love," said Isidora tell

then, what is
—
love?" " You have imposed
on me a task," said Melmoth smiling, but
not in mirth, " so congenial to my feel-

ings and habits of thought, that the exe-

cution 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
Jove there is neither day or night, summer
 —

A TALE. 33^

or winter, society or solitude. They have

but two eras in their delicious but vision-
ary existence, —and those are thus marked
in the heart's calendar presence— absence.
These are the substitutes for all the dis-
tinctions of nature and society. The
world to them contains but one indivi-
dual,— 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," pur-
sued Melmoth, " is to live in an existence
of perpetual contradictions — to feel that
absence is insupportable, and yet be doom-
ed to experience the presence of the ob-
ject as almost equally so —
to be full of ten
thousand thoughts while he is absent, the
confession of whichwe dream will render
our next meeting delicious, yet when the
hour of meeting arrives, to feel ourselves,
by a timidity alike oppressive and unac-
 — ——

334 MELMOTH :

countable, robbed of the power of expres-

—
sing 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 ima-
gined it would restore to energy to be
the statue that meets the sun, hut 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 w^orld, to sink fainting un-
der itsoverwhelming and intolerable glo-
ry, and almost wish it were night again
this is love !" —" Then I believe I love," said

Isidora half audibly. « To feel," added Mel-

moth 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 suifers to

he only because he is — and to have no

other use of being but to devote it to him,
 A TALE. 335

while our humiliation increases in pro-

portion 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
<6nly his, when you are not yourself To —
feel that to the sacrifice of yourself, all

and in it,
other sacrifices are inferior;
must be in-
therefore, all other sacrifices
cluded. That she who loves, must re-
member no longer her individual exis-
tence, her natural existence —that she
must consider parents, country, nature,
society, religion itself —
(you tremble, Im-
malee —Isidora would say) only as
I —
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 in-
deed 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
 S36 MELMOTH :

*
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 wall never rt>
nounce you ^you ! — will not forsake me in
the hour of death !

— you will not desert

me in themoment of trial —^you !
will not
forsake
*
me at this moment !"
" By the wax-lights that burned in her
apartment, Melmoth could see her pros-
trate 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 rebel-
lious 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
 —

A TALE. 337

Oil that symbol, —his eyes were imme-

diately averted ;
—yet now he looked long
and intently at her as she knelt before it.
He seemed to suspend the diabolical in-
stinct that governed his existence, and to
view her for the pure pleasure of sight. Her
prostrate figure, —her rich robes that float-
ed round her like drapery round an invio-
late shrine, —
her locks of light streaming
—
over her naked shoulders, her small white
hands locked in agony of prayer, the pu- —
rity of expression that seemed to identify
the agent with the employment, and made
one believe they saw not a suppHant, 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
;

he could never participate, he turned

in this
away his head in stern and bitter agony,
— and the moon-beam that met his burn-
ing eye saw no tear there.
" Had he looked a moment longer, he
might have beheld a change in the expres-
VOL. III. p
 —

SSS HELMOTH :

sion of Isidora too flattering to his pride,

ifnot to his heart. He might have mark-
ed all that profound and perilous absorp-
tion of the soul, when it is determined to
penetrate the mysteries of love or of reli-
gion, 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 com-
posure, more elevation in her air. There
was also that air of decision which an un-
reserved appeal to the Searcher of hearts
never failscommunicate even to the
to
weakest of those he has made.
" Melmoth, returning to his station be-
.

I
neath 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

 A TALE. 3S9

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 a-
—
mid 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 ri-

vals 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 con-
—
summated 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
 : —

340 MELMOTH
slender form, that seemed to announce that
pride of purity, —that confidence in exter-
nal 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, throb-
in his veins, and thrilled in his heart.
bed
He —
saw her in her beauty, her devoted-
—
ness, her pure and perfect innocence,
her sole feeling for one who could not, by
the fearful power of his unnatural exis-
tence, feel for mortal being. He turned
aside, and did not weep; or if he did.
 —

A TALE. 3U
wiped away his tears, as a fiend might do,
with his burning talons, when he sees a
new victim arrive for torture ; and, re-
penting 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," answer-
ed 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 in-
 a

S42 melmoth:

spire — of that love which, under happier

circumstances, I might- But no mat-
ter — it is not my business to analyse the
feeling, but to give the proof.'* He ex-
tended arm toward the casement at
his
which she stood " Would you then con-
sent to unite your destiny with mine?
Would you indeed be mine amid mys-
tery and sorrow ? Would you follow me
from land to sea, and from —
sea to land,
restless, homeless, devoted being, —with
the brand on your brow, and the curse on
your name? Would you indeed be minef
— —
my own my only Immalee?" "I —
would— I will !"— " Then," answered Mel-
moth, '* on this spot receive the proof of
my eternal gratitude. On this spot 1 re-
nounce your sight —
I disannul your en-
!

—
gagement! I fly from you for everT
And as he spoke, he disappeared.
 ;

CHAPTER XX.

I'll not wed Paris, —Romeo is my husband.

Shakespeare.

cc
XsiDORA was so accustomed to the wild
exclamations and (to her) unintelligible al-

lusions of her mysterious lover, that she

feltno unwonted alarm at his singular
language, and abrupt departure. There
was nothing in either more menacing or
formidable than she had often witnessed
and she recollected, that after these pa-
roxysms, he often re-appeared in a mood
comparatively tranquil. She felt sustain-
344 MELMOTH :

ed, therefore, by this reflection, —and per-

haps by that mysterious conviction impres-
sed on the hearts of those who love pro-
foundly —that passion must always be unit-
ed with suffering and she seemed to hear,
;

with a kind of melancholy submission to

the fatality of love, that her lot was to
suffer from lips that were sure to verify the
oracle. The disappearance, therefore, of
Melmoth, gave her less surprise than a sum-
mons from her mother a few hours after,
which was delivered in these words:
" Madonna Isidora, your lady-mother de-
sires your presence in the tapestried cham-

—
ber having received intelligence by a cer-
tain express, which she deems fitting you
should be acquainted withal."
" Isidora had been in some degree pre-
pared for extraordinary intelligence by an
extraordinary bustle in this grave and
quiet household. She had heard steps
passing, and voices resounding, but

tt
She wist not what they were^*
 A TALE. 34(5

and thought not of what they meant. She

imagined that her mother might have
some communication to make about some
intricate point of conscience which Fra Jose
had not discussed to her satisfaction, from
which she would make an instant transi-
tion to the levity visible in the mode in
which one attendant damsel arranged her
and the suspected sound of a ghitarra
hair,
under the window of another, and then
fly off at a tangent to inquire how the ca-
pons were fed, and why the eggs and Mus-
cadine had not been duly prepared for Fra
Jose's supper. Then would she fret about
the family clock not chiming synchroni-
cally with the bells of the neighbouring
church where she performed her devotions.
And finally, she fretted about every thing,
from the fattening of the " pullen," and
the preparation for the olio, up to the in-
creasing feuds between the Molinists and
which had already visited Spain,
Jausenists,
and the deadly dispute between the Do-
p2
346 MELMOTH:

mini can and Franciscan orders, relative to

the habit in which was most effective to
it

salvation for, the dying body of the sinner

to be wrapped. So between her kitchen
—
and her oratory, her prayers to the saints,
—
and her scoldings to her servants, her de-
—
votion and her anger, Donna Clara con-
tinued to keep herself and domestics in a
perpetual state of interesting occupation
and gentle excitement.
" Something of this Isidora expected
on the summons, and she was, therefore,
surprised to see Donna Clara seated at
her writing desk, —a large and fairly writ^

ten manuscript of a letter extended before

her, —and to hear words thereafter uttered
thus " Daughter, I have sent for you,
:

that you might with me partake of the

pleasure these lines should afford both;
and that you may do so, I desire you to
sit and hear while they are read to you."
" Donna Clara, as she uttered these
words, was seated in a monstrous high-
backed chair, of which she actually seem-
 A TALE. 347

ed a part, so wooden was her figure, so

moveless her features, so lack-lustre her
eyes.
" Isidora curtsied low, and sat on one
of the cushions with which the room was
heaped, —
while a spectacled duenna, en-
throned on another cushion at the right
hand of Donna Clara, read, with sundry-
pauses and some difficulty, the following
letter, which Donna Clara had just receiv-

ed from her husband, who had landed, not

at Ossuna *, but at a real sea-port town
in Spain, and was now on his way to join
his family,

" Donna Clara,

" It is about a year since I received
your letter advising me of the recovery of
our daughter, whom we believed lost with
her nurse on her voyage to India when an
infant^ to which I would sooner have re-

^ Vide Don Quixote, Vol. IL SmoUet's Translatior*.

348 MELMOTH.

plied, were I not otherwise hindered by

concerns of business.
" I would have you understand, that
I rejoice not so much that I have re-
covered a daughter, as that heaven hath
regained a soul and a subject, as it were,
e faucibus —
Draconis e profundis Bar-
—
athri the which terms Fra Jose will
make plain to your weaker comprehen-
sion.
" I trust that, through the ministry of
that devout servant of God and thie church,
she is now become as complete a Catholic
in all points necessary, absolute, doubtful,
or incomprehensible, — ^formal, essential,
venial, and becomes the
indispensible, as
daughter of an old Christian such as I
(though unworthy of that honour) boast
myself tobe. Moreover, I expect to find
her, as a Spanish maiden should be, equip-
ped and accomplished with all the virtues
pertaining to that character, especially
those of discretion and reserve. The
which qualities, as I have always perceived
 A TALE. 349

to reside in you, so I hope you have la-

boured to transfer to her, a transfer by —

which the receiver is enriched, and the
giver not impoverished.
" Finally, as maidens should be rewarded
for their chastity and reserve by being
joined in wedlock with a worthy husband,
so it is the duty of a careful father to pro-
vide such a one for his daughter, that she
do not pass her marriageable age, and sit in
discontent and squalidness at home, as one
overlooked of the other sex. My fatherly
care, therefore, moving me, I shall bring
with me one who is to be her husband,
Don Gregorio Montilla, of whose qualifi-
cations I have not now leisure to speak,
but whom I expect she will receive as be-
comes the dutiful daughter, and you as the
obedient wife, of
Francisco di Aliaga."

" You have heard your father's letter,

daughter," said Donna Clara, placing her-
self as in act to speak, " and doubtless sit
 :

350 MELMOTH
silent in expectation of hearing from me a
rehearsal of the duties pertaining to the
state on which you are so soon to enter,
and which, I take it, are three; that is to
say, obedience, silence, and thriftiness.
And first of the first, which, as I conceive,
divides itself into- thirteen heads,"
" Holy saints !" said the duenna under her
breath, " how pale Madonna Isidora grows!"
—" First of the first," continued Donna
Glara, clearing her throat, elevating her
spectacles with one hand, and fixing three
demonstrative fingers of the other on a
huge clasped volume, containing the life

of St Francis Xavier, that lay on the desk

before her, —" as touching the thirteen
heads into which the first divides itself,

the eleven first, I take it, are the most

profitable —the two last I shall leave you
to be instructed in by your husband.
First, then," Here she was inter-
rupted by a slight noise, which did not,
however, draw her attention, till she was
startled by a scream from the duenna.
 —

A TALE. 351

who exclaimed, " The Virgin be my pro-

tection Madonna Isidora has fainted !"
!

" Donna Clara lowered her spectacles,

glanced at the figure of her daughter, who
had fallen from her cushion, and lay breath-
less on the floor, and, after a short pause>

replied, " She has fainted. Kaise her.

Call for assistance, and apply some cold
water, or bear her into the open air. I
fear I have lost the mark in the life of this
holy saint," muttered Donna Clara when
alone ;
" this comes of this foolish business
of love and marriage. I never loved in
my life, thank the saints !— and as to mar-
riage, that is according to the will of God
and of our parents."
" The unfortunate was lifted
Isidora
from the floor, conveyed into the open air,
whose breath had the same effect on her
still elementary existence, that water was

said to have on that of the ombre pez,

(man-fish), of whom the popular traditions
of Barcelona were at that time, and still

have been, rife.

 : —

352 MELMOTH
** She recovered
and sending an apolo-
;

gy to Donna Clara for her sudden indispo-

sition, intreated her attendants to leave
her, as she wished to be alone. Alone !

that is a word to which those who love

—
annex but one idea, that of being in so-
ciety with one who is their all. She wish-
ed in this (to her) terrible emergency, to
ask counsel of him whose image was ever
present to her, and whose voice she heard
with the mind*s ear distinctly even in ab-
sence.
" The was indeed one calculated
crisis

to try a female heart and Isidora's, with

;

its potency of opposed to utter

feeling,
destitution of judgment and of experience,
— its native habits of resolution and self-

direction, and its acquired ones of ti^

midity and diffidence almost to despon-

—
dency, ^became the victim of emotions,
whose struggle seemed at first to threaten
her reason.
" Her former independent and instinc-
tive existence revived in her heart at some
 ;

A TALE. 353

moments, and suggested to her resolutions

wild and desperate, but such as the most
timid females have been known, under the
pressure of a fearful exigency, to purpose,
and even to execute. Then the constraint
of her new habits,— the severity of her fac-
titious existence, —and the solemn power
of her newly-learned but deeply-felt reli-

gion, —made her renounce all thoughts of

resistance or opposition, as offences against
heaven.
" Her former feelings, her new duties,
beat in terrible conflict against her heart
and, trembling at the isthmus on which
she stood, she felt it, under the influence
of opposing tides, narrowing every mo-
ment under her feet.
" This was a dreadful day to her. She
had sufficient time for reflection, but she
had within her the conviction that reflec-
—
tion could be of no use, that the circum-
stances in which she was placed, not her
own thoughts, m.ust decide for her,— and
 :

354 MELMOTH
that, situated as she was, mental power was
no match for physical.
" There is not, perhaps, a more painful
exercise of the mind than that of treading,
with weary and impatient pace, the entire
round of thought, and arriving at the same
conclusion for ever; then setting out a-
gain with increased speed and diminished
strength, and again returning to the very
—
same spot^ of sending out all our faculties
on a voyage of discovery, and seeing them
all return empty, and watch the wrecks as

they drift helplessly along, and sink before

the eye that hailed their outward expe-
dition with joy and confidence.
" All that day she thought how it was
possible to liberate herself from her situa-
tion, while the feeling that liberation was
impossible clung to the bottom of her
heart ; and this sensation of the energies
of the soul in all their strength, being in
vain opposed to imbecillity and mediocri-
ty, when aided by circumstances, is one
 A TALE. 355

productive alike of melancholy and of irri-

tation. We
feel, like prisoners in romance,

bound by threads to which the power of

magic has given the force of adamant.
" To those whose minds incline them ra-
ther to observe, than to sympathize with the
varieties of human feeling, it would have
been interesting to watch the restless ago-
ny of Isidora, contrasted with the cold and
serene satisfaction of her mother, who em-
ployed the whole of the day in composing,
with the assistance of Fra Jose, what Ju-
venal calls " verbosa et grandis epistola^^
in answer to that of her husband ; and to
conceive how two human beings, appa-
rently of similarly-constructed organs, and
destined apparently to sympathize with
each other, could draw from the same
fountain w^aters sweet and bitter.
" On her plea of continued indisposi-
tion, Isidora was excused from appearing
before her mother during the remainder
of the day. The night came on, the —
night, w^hich, by concealing the artificial
 :

356 MELMOTH
objects and manners which surrounded
her, restored to her, in some degree, the
consciousness of her fprmer existence, and
gave her a sense of independence she
never felt by day. The absence of Mel-
moth increased her anxiety. She began
to apprehend that his departure was in-
tended to be final, and her heart sunk at
the thought.
" To the mere reader of romance, it

may seem incredible that a female of Isi-

dora's energy and devotedness should feel

anxietv or terror in a situation so common

to a heroine. She has only to stand proof
against all the importunities and authority
of her family, and announce her desperate
resolution to share the destiny of a mys-
terious and unacknowledged lover. All
this sounds very plausible and interesting.
Romances have been written and read,
whose interest arose from the noble and
impossible defiance of the heroine to all

powers human and superhuman ahke.

But neither the writers or readers seem
 A TALE. 357

ever to have taken into account the thou-

sand petty external causes that operate on
human agency with a force, if not more
powerful, far more effective than the grand
internal motive which makes so grand a
figure in romance, and so rare and trivial
a one in common life.

" Isidora would have died for him she

loved. At the stake or the scaffold she
would have avowed her passion, and tri-

umphed in perishing as its victim. The

mind can collect itself for one great effort,

but it is exhausted by the eternally- re-

curring necessity of domestic conflicts,—
victoriesby which she must lose, and de-
feats by which she might gain the praise
of perseverance, and feel such gain w^as
loss. The last single and terrible effort of
the Jewish champion, in which he and his
enemies perished together, must have been
a luxury compared to his blind drudgery
in his mill.
" Before Isidora lay that painful and
perpetual struggle of fettered strength
 :

358 MELMOTH
with persecuting weakness, which, if the
truth were told, would divest half the he-
roines of romance of the power or wish to
contend against the difficulties that beset
—
them. Her mansion was a prison she had
no power (and if she possessed the power,
would never have exercised it) of obtain-
ing an unpermitted or unobserved egress
from the doors of the house for one mo-
ment. Thus her escape was completely
barred and had every door in the house
;

been thrown open, she would have felt

like a bird on its first flight from the cage,
without a spray that she dared to rest on.
Such was her prospect, even if she could
effect her escape — at home it was worse.
" The stern and cold tone of authority
in which her father's letter was written,
gave her but little hope that in her father
she would find a friend. Then the fee-
ble and yet imperious mediocrity of her
—
mother the selfish and arrogant temper
—
of Fernan the powerful influence and in-
cessant documentising of Fra Jose, whose
 — !

A TALE. S59

good-nature was no match for his lo=ve of

authority — the daily domestic persecution
—that vinegar that would wear out any
rock — the being compelled day to listen
after day to the same exhausting repeti-
tion of exhortation, chiding, reproach, and
menace, or seek refuge in her chamber, to
waste the weary hours in loneliness and
tears — this strife maintained by one strong
indeed in purpose, but feeble in power, a-
gainst so niany all sworn to work their
will, and have their way — this perpetual
conflict with evils so trivial in the items,
but so heavy in the amount, to those who
have the debt to pay daily and hourly,
was too much for the resolution of Isidora,
and she wept in hopeless despondency, as
she felt that already her courage shrunk
from the encounter, and knew not what
concessions might be extorted from her
increasing inability of resistance.
" Oh !" she cried, clasping her hands in
the extremity of her distress, " Oh that
he were but here to direct, to counsel me
 —

360 MELMOTH :

— that lie were here even no longer as my

lover, but only as my adviser
!"

" It is said that a certain power is al-

ways at hand to facilitate the wishes that

the individual forms for his own injury;
and so it should seem in the present in-
stance, — had scarce uttered these
for she
words, when the shadow of Melmoth was
seen darkening the garden walk, and the —
next moment he was beneath the case-
ment. As she saw him approach, she ut-
tered a cry of mingled joy and fear, which
he hushed by making a signal of silence
with his hand, and then whispered, " I
know it all!"
" Isidora was silent.She had nothing
but her recent distress to communicate,
and of that, it appeared, he was already
apprized. She waited, therefore, in mute
anxiety for some words of counsel or
of comfort. " I know all !" continued
Melmoth; " your father has landed in
Spain — ^he brings with him your destined
husband. The fixed purpose of your
 — ;

A TALE. 361

whole family, as obstinate as they are

weak, it will be bootless in you to resist
and this day fortnight will see yoii the
bride of Montilla."— " I will first be the
bride of the grave," said Isidora, with per-
fect and fearful calmness.
" At Melmoth advanced
these words,
and gazed on her more closely. Any
thing of intense and terrible resolution,
of feeling or action in extremity, made —
harmony with the powerful but disordered
chords of his soul. He required her to
repeat the words — she did so, with quiver-
ing lip, but unfaultering voice. He advan-
ced still nearer to gaze on her as she
spoke. It was a beautiful and fearful sight
"to see —her marble
her as she stood ;
face
—her moveless — her eyes which
features in
burned the fixed and of
livid light despair,
like a lamp a sepulchral vault — the
in
lips that and remaining un-
half opened,
closed, appeared as if the speaker was un-
conscious of the words that had escaped
VOL. in. Q
 : —

362 MELMOTH
them, or rather, as if they had burst
forth by involuntary and incontroulable
impulse; —so she stood, like a statue, at
her easement, the moonlight giving her
white drapery the appearance of stone,
and her wrought-up and determined
mind lending the same rigidity to her
expression. Melmoth himself felt con-
—
founded appalled he could not feel. He
retreated, and then returning, demand-
ed, " Is this your resolution, Isidora?—
and have you indeed resolution to"
*'
To die !" answered Isidora, with the
—
same unaltered accent, the same calm
expression, —
and seeming, as she spake,
capable of all she expressed; and this union,
in the same slight and tender form, of those
eternal competitors, energy and fragility,
beauty and death, made every human pulse
in Melmoth's frame beat with a throb-
bing unknown before. " Can you, then,"
he said, with averted head, and in a tone
that seemed ashamed of its own softness
" Can you, then, die for him you will not
 A TALE. 363

live for ?"

—" I have said I will die sooner
than be the bride of Montilla," answered
Jsidora. Of death
" I know nothing, nor
do 1 know much of life —but I would ra-
ther perish, than be the perjured wife of
the man I cannot love." —" And why can
you not love him ?" said Melmoth, toying
with the heart he held in his hand, like a
mischievous boy with a bird, around whose
leg he has fastened a string. —" Because I
can love but one. You were the first hu-
man 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 soft-
er 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. you not for comeliness,
I loved
— I loved you not for gay deportment, or
fond language, or all that is said to be
lovely in the eye of woman, —I loved you
 364 MELMOTH :

because you were my first, —the sole con-

necting link between the human world and
my heart, —the being who brought me ac*
quainted with that wondrous instrument
that lay unknown and untouched within
and me, whose chords, as long as they vi^
brate, will disdain to obey any touch but that
—
of their first mover because your image is
mixed in my imagination with all the glo-
ries of nature—because your voice, when
I heard was something in accord-
it first,

ance with the murmur of the ocean, and

the music of the stars. And still its tones
recal the unimaginable blessedness of those
scenes where first I heard it, —and still I
listen to it like an exile who hears the
music of his native country in a land that
is very far off, —because nature and passion^
memory and hope, alike cling round your
image and amid the light of my former
;

existence, and the gloom of my present,

there is but one form that retains its reali-
ty and its power through light and shade.
1 am like one who has traversed many
 !

A TALE. 365

climates, and looks but to one sun as the

light of all, whether bright or obscure. I
—
have loved once and for ever!" Then,
trembling at the words she uttered, she
added, with that sweet mixture of maiden
pride and purity that redeems while it
pledges the hostage of the heart, *'
The
feelings I have entrusted you with may
be abused, but never alienated." " And —
these are your 7*eal feelings?" said Mel-
moth, pausing long, and moving his frame
like one agitated by deep and uneasy
thoughts. " Heal !" repeated Isidora, with
some transient glow on her cheek " real—
Can 1 utter anything but what is real?
Can I so soon forget my existence?" Mel-
moth looked up once more as she spoke-^
^ " If such is your resolution, — if such be

I
your feelings indeed," " And they
are! —they are!" exclaimed Isidora, her
tears bursting through the slender fingers,
which, after extending towards him, she
clasped over her burning eyes. " Then
!"
look to the alternative that awaits you
 —
;

366 MELMOTH:
said Melmoth slowly, bringing out the
words with difficulty, and, as it appeared,
with some feeling for his victim; " a
union with the man you cannot love,—or
the perpetual hostility, the wearying, wast-
ing, almost annihilating persecution of your
family ! Think of days that" " Oh
let me not think !" cried Isidora, wringing
her white and slender hands ; " tell me
tell me what may be done to escape them !"
—" Now, in good troth," answered Mel-
moth, knitting his brows with a most co-
gitative wrinkle, while it was impossible
to discover whether his predominant ex-
pressionwas that of irony or profound and
sincere feeling—** I know not what re-
source you have unless you wed me."
**
Wed you !" cried Isidora, retreating
—
from the window " Wed you !" and she
clasped her hands over her pale forehead
—and at this moment, when the hope
of her heart, the thread on which her ex-
istence was suspended, was within her
reach, she trembled to touch it. " Wed
 —

A TALE. 367

you !
but how is that possible ?" —" All
things are possible to those who love,"
said Melmoth, with his sardonic smile,
which was hid by the shades of the night.
" And you will wed me, then, by the
rites of the church of which 1 am a mem-

ber ?"— " Aye or of any other !" " Oh

!
—
speak not so wildly !
—
say not aye in that
horrible voice! Will you wed me as a
Christian maiden should be wed? Will —
you love me as a Christian wife should be
loved? My former existence was like a
—
dream, but now I am awake. If I unite
my destiny to yours, if I abandon my —
family, my country, my" " If you
do, how will you be the loser? your fa- —
mily harasses and confines you your —
country would shout to see you at the
stake, for you have some heretical feelings
about you, Isidora. And for the rest"
" God !" said the poor victim, clasping her
hands, and looking upwards, " God, aid
me in this extremity !" —" If I am to wait
here only as a witness to your devotions,"
 —

# S&S MELMOTH:

said Melmoth with sullen asperity, " my

stay will not be -long." —" You cannot
leave me, then, to struggle with fear and
perplexity alone ! How is it possible for
^
me to escape, even if" " By what-
ever means I possess of entering this place
—
and retiring unobserved, ^by the same
,
you may effect your escape. If you have
resolution, the effort will cost you little,
if love, — nothing.
Speak, shall I be here
at thishour to-morrow night, to conduct
you to liberty and" Safety he would
have added, but his voice faultered. " To-
7norroxv night" said Isidora, after a long
pause, and in accents almost inarticulate.
She closed the casement as she spoke, and
Melmoth slowly departed.

END OF THIRD VOLUME.

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