Melmoth the Wanderer

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by Charles Maturin


  ‘The Superior was terrified, I saw, as he entered my apartment. ‘My son, what means all this?’ ‘Nothing, my father – nothing but a sudden thought that has struck me.’ ‘We will discuss it another time, my son; at present –’ ‘At present,’ I repeated with a laugh that must have lacerated the Superior’s ears – ‘At present I have but one alternative to propose – let my father or my brother take my place – that is all. I will never be a monk.’ The Superior, at these words, ran in despair round the cell. I followed him, exclaiming, in a voice that must have filled him with horror, ‘I exclaim against the vows – let those who forced me to it, take the guilt on themselves – let my father, in his own person, expiate his guilt in bringing me into the world – let my brother sacrifice his pride – why must I be the only victim of the crime of the one, and the passions of the other?’ ‘My son, all this was arranged before.’ ‘Yes, I know that – I know that by a decree of the Almighty I was doomed to be cursed even in my mother’s womb, but I will never subscribe that decree with my own hand.’ ‘My son, what can I say to you – you have passed your noviciate.’ ‘Yes, in a state of stupefaction.’ ‘All Madrid is assembled to hear you take your vows.’ ‘Then all Madrid shall hear me renounce them, and disavow them.’ ‘This is the very day fixed on. The ministers of God are prepared to yield you to his arms. Heaven and earth, – all that is valuable in time, or precious in eternity, are summoned, are waiting for the irrevocable words that seal your salvation, and ensure that of those you love. What demon has taken possession of you, my child, and seized the moment you were coming to Christ, to cast you down, and tear you? How shall I – how shall the fraternity, and all the souls who are to escape from punishment by the merit of your prayers, answer to God for your horrible apostacy?’ ‘Let them answer for themselves – let every one of us answer for ourselves – that is the dictate of reason.’ ‘Of reason, my deluded child, – when had reason any thing to do with religion?’ I had sat down, folded my arms on my breast, and forbore to answer a word. The Superior stood with his arms crossed, his head declined, his whole figure in an air of profound and mortified contemplation. Any one else would have imagined him seeking God in the abysses of meditation, but I felt he was only seeking him where he is never to be found, – in the abyss of that heart which is ‘deceitful and desperately wicked.’30 He approached – I exclaimed, ‘Come not near me! – you will renew again the story of my submission – I tell you it was artificial; – of my regularity in devotional exercises – it was all mechanism or imposture; – of my conformity to discipline – it was all practised with the hope of escaping from it ultimately. Now, I feel my conscience discharged and my heart lightened. Do you hear, do you understand me? These are the first words of truth I ever uttered since I entered these walls – the only ones that will, perhaps, ever be uttered within them – aye, treasure them up, knit your brows, and cross yourself, and elevate your eyes as you will. Go on with your religious drama. What is there you see before you so horrible, that you recoil, that you cross yourself, that you lift your eyes and hands to heaven? – a creature whom despair has driven to utter desperate truth! Truth may be horrible to the inmates of a convent, whose whole life is artificial and perverted, – whose very hearts are sophisticated beyond the hand even of Heaven (which they alienate by their hypocrisy) to touch. But I feel I am at this moment an object of less horror in the sight of the Deity, than if I were standing at his altar, to (as you would urge me) insult him with vows, which my heart was bursting from my bosom to contradict, at the moment I uttered them.’

  ‘At these words, which I must have uttered with the most indecent and insulting violence, I almost expected the Superior would have struck me to the earth, – would have summoned the lay-brothers to bear me to confinement, – would have shut me up in the dungeon of the convent, for I knew there was such a place. Perhaps I wished for all this. Driven to extremity myself, I felt a kind of pride in driving others to it in return. Any thing of violent excitement, of rapid and giddy vicissitude, or even of intense suffering, I was prepared for, and equal to, at that moment. But these paroxysms soon exhaust themselves and us by their violence.

  ‘Astonished by the Superior’s silence, I raised my eyes to him. I said, in a tone of moderation that seemed unnatural to my own ears, ‘Well, let me hear my sentence.’ He was silent still. He had watched the crisis, and now skilfully seized the turn of the mental disease, to exhibit his applications. He was standing before me meek and motionless, his arms crossed, his eyes depressed, not the slightest indication of resentment to be traced in his whole figure. The folds of his habit, refusing to announce his internal agitation, seemed as they were cut out of stone. His silence imperceptibly softened me, – I blamed myself for my violence. Thus men of the world command us by their passions, and men of the other world by the apparent suppression of them. At last he said, ‘My son, you have revolted from God, resisted his Holy Spirit, profaned his sanctuary, and insulted his minister, – in his name and my own I forgive you all. Judge of the various characters of our systems, by their different results on us two. You revile, defame and accuse, – I bless and forgive; which of us is then under the influence of the gospel of Christ, and within the pale of the church’s benediction? But leaving this question, which you are not at present in a frame to decide, I shall urge but one topic more; if that fails, I shall no longer oppose your wishes, or urge you to prostitute a sacrifice which man would despise, and God must disdain. I add, I will even do my utmost to facilitate your wishes, which are now in fact my own.’ At these words, so full of truth and benignity, I was rushing to prostrate myself at his feet, but fear and experience checked me, and I only bowed. ‘Promise me merely that you will wait with patience till this last topic is urged; whether it succeeds or not I have now little interest, and less care.’ I promised, – he went out. A few moments after he returned. His air was a little more disturbed, but still struggling for a calmness of expression. There was agitation about him, but I knew not whether it was felt on his own account or mine. He held the door half open, and his first sentence astonished me. – ‘My son, you are well acquainted with the classical histories.’ ‘But what is that to the purpose, my father?’ ‘You remember a remarkable story of the Roman general, who spurned from the steps of his tribune, people, senators and priests, – trampled on all law, – outraged all religion, – but was at last moved by nature, for, when his mother prostrated herself before him, and exclaimed, ‘My son, before you tread the streets of Rome, you must first tread on the body of her who bore you!’ he relented.31 ‘I remember all, but to what does this tend?’ ‘To this,’ and he threw open the door; ‘now, prove yourself, if you can, more obdurate than a heathen.’ As the door opened, across the threshold lay my mother, prostrate on her face. She said in a stifled voice, ‘Advance, – break your vows, – but you must rush to perjury over the body of your mother.’ I attempted to raise her, but she clung to the ground, repeating the same words; and her magnificent dress, that overspread the floor of stone with gems and velvet, frightfully contrasted her posture of humiliation, and the despair that burned in her eyes, as she raised them to me for a moment. Convulsed with agony and horror, I reeled into the arms of the Superior, who seized that moment to bear me to the church. My mother followed, – the ceremony proceeded. I vowed chastity, poverty and obedience, and in a few moments my destiny was decided.

  *

  ‘Day followed day for many a month, of which I have no recollections, nor wish to have any. I must have experienced many emotions, but they all subsided like the waves of the sea under the darkness of a midnight sky, – their fluctuation continues, but there is no light to mark their motion, or trace when they rise and fall. A deep stupor pervaded my senses and soul; and perhaps, in this state, I was best fitted for the monotonous existence to which I was doomed. It is certain that I performed all the conventual functions with a regularity that left nothing to be blamed, and an apathy that left nothing for praise. My life was a sea without a tid
e.32 The bell did not toll for service with more mechanical punctuality than I obeyed the summons. No automaton, constructed on the most exquisite principles of mechanism, and obeying those principles with a punctuality almost miraculous, could leave the artist less room for complaint or disappointment, than I did the Superior and community. I was always first in my place in the choir. I received no visits in the parlour, – when I was permitted to go, I declined the permission. If penance was enjoined, I submitted; if relaxation was permitted, I never partook of it. I never asked a dispensation from morning prayers, or from vigils. I was silent in the refectory, – in the garden I walked alone. I neither thought, nor felt, nor lived, – if life depends on consciousness, and the motions of the will. I slept through my existence like the Simorgh in the Eastern fable,33 but this sleep was not to last long. My abstraction and calmness would not do for the Jesuits. My stupor, my noiseless tread, my fixed eyes, my ghastly silence, might indeed have impressed a superstitious community with the idea that it was no human creature who stalked through their cloisters, and haunted their choir. But they had quite different ideas. They considered all this as a tacit reproach to the struggles, the squabbles, the intrigues and the circumventions, in which they were immersed, body and soul, from morn till night. Perhaps they thought I was lying in reserve, only to watch them. Perhaps there might have been a dearth of some matter of curiosity or complaint in the convent just then, – a very little serves for either. However it was, they began to revive the old story of my being deranged, and resolved to make the most of it. They whispered in the refectory, consulted in the garden, – shook their heads, pointed at me in the cloister, and finally, I faithfully believe, worked themselves into the conviction that what they wished or imagined was actually true. Then they all felt their consciences interested in the investigation; and a select party, headed by an old monk of influence and reputation, waited on the Superior. They stated to him my abstraction, my mechanical movements, my automaton figure, my meaningless words, my stupified devotion, my total alienation from the spirit of the monastic life, while my scrupulous, wooden, jointless exactness in its forms was only a mockery. The Superior heard them with great indifference. He had held secret intelligence with my family, had communicated with the director, and pledged himself that I should be a monk. He had succeeded by dint of exertions, (the result of which has been seen), and now cared very little whether I was mad or not. With a grave air he forbid their further interference in the matter, and reserved its future cognizance to himself. They retired defeated, but not disappointed, and they all pledged themselves to each other to watch me; that is, to harass, persecute, and torment me into being the very character with which their malice, their curiosity, or their mere industry of idleness and wantonness of unoccupied invention, had invested me already. From that hour the whole convent was in a tumult of conspiracy and combination. Doors were clapped to wherever I was heard to approach; and three or four would stand whispering near where I walked, and clear their throats, and exchange signs, and pass audibly to the most trifling topics in my hearing, as if to intimate, while they affected to conceal it, that their last topic had been me. I laughed at this internally. I said to myself, ‘Poor perverted beings, with what affectation of dramatic bustle and contrivance you labour to diversify the misery of your hopeless vacancy; – you struggle, – I submit.’ Soon the toils34 they were preparing began to tighten round me. They would throw themselves in my way with an assiduity I could not avoid, and an appearance of kindness I did not willingly repel. They would say, in the blandest tones, ‘My dear brother, you are melancholy, – you are devoured with chagrin, – would to God our fraternal efforts could banish your regrets. But from what arises that melancholy that appears to consume you?’ At these words I could not help fixing on them eyes full of reproaches, and I believe of tears, – but I did not utter a word. The state in which they saw me, was a sufficient cause for the melancholy with which I was reproached.

  *

  ‘This attack having failed, another method was tried. They attempted to make me a party in the parties of the convent. They told me a thousand things of unjust partialities, – of unjust punishments, daily to be witnessed in the convent. They talked of a sickly brother being compelled to attend matins, while the physician pronounced his attendance on them must be his death, – and he died, – while a young favourite, in the bloom of health, had a dispensation from matins whenever he pleased to lie till nine in the morning; – of complaints that the confessional was not attended to as it ought, – and this might have made some impression on me, till another complainant added, and the turning-box35 is not attended as it ought to be. This union of dissonant sounds, – this startling transition from a complaint of neglecting the mysteries of the soul in its profoundest communion with God, to the lowest details of the abuses of conventual discipline, revolted me at once. I had with difficulty concealed my disgust till then, and it was now so obvious, that the party gave up their attempt for the moment, and beckoned to an experienced monk to join me in my solitary walk, as I broke from them. He approached, ‘My brother, you are alone.’ ‘I wish to be so.’ ‘But why?’ ‘I am not obliged to announce my reasons.’ ‘True, but you may confide them to me.’ ‘I have nothing to confide.’ ‘I know that, – I would not for the world intrude on your confidence; reserve that for friends more honoured.’ It struck me as rather odd, that he should, in the same breath, ask for my confidence, – declare that he was conscious I had nothing to intrust to him, – and, lastly, request a reserve of my confidence for some more favoured friend. I was silent, however, till he said, ‘But, my brother, you are devoured with ennui.’ I was silent still. ‘Would to God I could find the means to dissipate it.’ I said, looking on him calmly. ‘Are those means to be found within the walls of a convent?’ ‘Yes, my dear brother, – yes, certainly, – the debate in which the convent is now engaged about the proper hour for matins, which the Superior wants to have restored to the original hour.’ ‘What is the difference?’ ‘Full five minutes.’ ‘I confess the importance of the question.’ ‘Oh! if you once begin to feel it, there will be no end of your happiness in a convent. There is something every moment to inquire, to be anxious about, and to contend for. Interest yourself, my dear brother, in these questions, and you will not have a moment’s ennui to complain of ’, At these words I fixed my eyes on him. I said calmly, but I believe emphatically, ‘I have, then, only to excite in my own mind, spleen, malignity, curiosity, every passion that your retreat should have afforded me protection against, to render that retreat supportable. Pardon me, if I cannot, like you, beg of God permission to take his enemy into compact against the corruption which I promote, while I presume to pray against it.’ He was silent, lifted up his hands, and crossed himself; and I said to myself, ‘God forgive your hypocrisy,’ as he went into another walk, and repeated to his companions, ‘He is mad, irrecoverably mad.’ ‘But how, then?’ said several voices. There was a stifled whisper. I saw several heads bent together. I did not know what they were meditating, nor did I care. I was walking alone, – it was a delicious moon-light evening. I saw the moon-beams through the trees, but the trees all looked to me like walls. Their trunks were as adamant, and the interlaced branches seemed to twine themselves into folds that said, ‘Beyond us there is no passing.’ I sat down by the side of a fountain, – there was a tall poplar over it, – I remember their situation well. An elderly priest (who, I did not see, was detached by the party) sat down beside me. He began some common-place observations on the transiency of human existence. I shook my head, and he understood, by a kind of tact not uncommon among Jesuits, that it would not do. He shifted the subject, remarked on the beauty of the foliage, and the limpid purity of the fountain. I assented. He added, ‘Oh that life were pure as that stream!’ I sighed, ‘Oh that life were verdant and fertile to me as that tree!’ ‘But, my son, may not fountains be dried up, and trees be withered?’ ‘Yes, my father, – yes, – the fountain of my life has been dried up, and
the green branch of my life has been blasted for ever.’ As I uttered these words, I could not suppress some tears. The father seized on what he called the moment when God was breathing on my soul. Our conversation was very long, and I listened to him with a kind of reluctant and stubborn attention, because I had involuntarily been compelled to observe, that he was the only person in the whole community who had never harassed me by the slightest importunity either before my profession or after; and when the worst things were said of me, never seemed to attend; and when the worst things were predicted of me, shook his head and said nothing. His character was unimpeached, and his religious performances as exemplary and punctual as my own. With all this I felt no confidence in him, or in any human being; but I listened to him with patience, and my patience must have had no trivial trial, for, at the end of an hour, (I did not perceive that our conference was permitted quite beyond the usual hour of retirement), he continued repeating, ‘My dear son, you will become reconciled to the conventual life.’ ‘My father, never, never, – unless this fountain is dried up, and this tree withered, by to-morrow.’ ‘My son, God has often performed greater miracles for the salvation of a soul.’

  ‘We parted, and I retired to my cell. I know not how he and the others were employed, but, before matins, there was such a tumult in the convent, that one would have thought Madrid was on fire. Boarders, novices and monks, ran about from cell to cell, up and down the staircase, through all the corridors, unrestrained and unquestioned, – all order was at an end. No bell was rung, no commands for restoring tranquillity issued; the voice of authority seemed to have made peace for ever with the shouts of uproar. From my window I saw them running through the garden in every direction, embracing each other, ejaculating, praying, and counting their beads with hands tremulous, and eyes uplifted in extacy. The hilarity of a convent has something in it uncouth, unnatural and even alarming. I suspected some mischief immediately, but I said to myself, ‘The worst is over, they cannot make me more than a monk.’ – I was not long left in doubt. Many steps approached my cell, numerous voices were repeating, ‘Hasten, dear brother, hasten to the garden.’ I was left no choice; they surrounded and almost bore me to the garden.

 

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