Melmoth the Wanderer

by Charles Maturin

  ‘The groupe who had been conversing about the stranger, felt their attention irresistibly attracted by this object; and the low murmur of their fearful whispers was converted into broken exclamations of delight and 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 turned, they encountered him. His emphatic glance selected and centred in one alone. She saw him too, recognized him, and, uttering a wild shriek, fell on the earth senseless.

  ‘The tumult occasioned by this accident, which so many witnessed, and none knew the cause of, for some moments drew off the attention of all from the stranger – all were occupied either in assisting or inquiring after the lady who had fainted. She was borne to her carriage by more assistants 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 remained alone – twilight faded into darkness – 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 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 XX

  Oh what was love 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 heart,

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

  MOORE1

  ‘The next day, the young female who had excited so much interest the preceding evening, was to quit Madrid, to pass a few weeks at a villa belonging to her family, 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, 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 opulence and formerly high descent, piqued themselves upon travelling with no less ceremony and pompous tardiness than accompanied 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 with in it were placed Donna Clara and her daughter. The interior of this arrangement was the counterpart of its external appearance, – all announced 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 bigot. Don Fernan presented that union of fiery passion and saturnie2 manners not unusual among Spaniards. His dull and selfish pride was wounded by the recollection of his family having been in trade; and, looking on the unrivalled beauty of his sister as a possible means of his obtaining an alliance with a family of rank, he viewed her with that kind of selfish partiality 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 daughter of nature, ‘the gay creature of the elements,’3 was doomed to wither away the richly-coloured and exquisitely-scented flower of an existence so ungenially transplanted. Her singular destiny seemed to have removed her from a physical wilderness, to place her in a moral one. And, perhaps, her last state was worse than her first.

  ‘It is certain that the gloomiest prospect presents nothing so chilling as the aspect 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 fainted in the public walks last night – did you meet with any thing that surprised or terrified 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 extraordinary demeanour?’ – ‘Oh, I cannot, dare not tell!’ said Isidora, dropping her veil over her burning cheek. Then the irrepressible ingenuousness of her former nature, rushing over her heart and frame like a flood, she sunk from the cushion on which 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 is no occasion. I seek no confidence 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 unbroken silence, except when you are addressed by me, your brother, or Father Jose. Surely no duties were ever more easily performed – rise, then, and cease to weep. If your conscience disturbs you, accuse yourself to Father Jose, who will, no doubt, inflict a penance proportioned to the enormity of your offence. I trust only he will not err on the side of indulgence.’ And so saying, Donna Clara, who had never uttered so long a speech before, reclined back on her cushion, and began to tell her beads with much devotion, till the arrival of the carriage at its 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 confessor. 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 rather the result of physical conformation, than of any intellectual exercise. The channel was open, but the stream had not been directed there. However, though defective in education, and somewhat narrow 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 wine, the latter untasted 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 the priest, retired, as usual, 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, helping 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 Christian 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.’ – ‘I’ll give her a penance,’ said Father Jose, ‘that will save her the trouble of shedding tears on the score of memory at least – these grapes are delicious.’ – ‘But, Father,’ pursued Donna 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, I’– ‘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 crossing herself. ‘How then?’ – ‘Why, she speaks in a manner in which I never heard you, reverend Father, or any of the reverend brethren, whom my devotion to the holy church has led me to hear, speak before. It is in vain I tell her that true religion consists in hearing mass – in going to confession – in performing penance – in observing the fasts and vigils – in undergoing mortification and abstinence – in believing 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 anxious Donna Clara. ‘I were an infidel to doubt it,’ interposed the priest; ‘I might as well deny this fruit to be exquisite, 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 supposed or apprehended defalcations4 in Donna Isidora’s creed?’ – ‘Holy Father, I have already explained my own religious sentiments.’ – ‘Yes – yes – we have had enough of them; now for your daughter’s.’ – ‘She will sometimes say,’ said Donna 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 understand 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!’ – ‘Father,’ said Donna Clara, a little piqued at the apparent indifference with which Father Jose listened to her communications, and resolved to rouse him by some terrific evidence of the truth of her suspicions, ‘Father, I have heard her dare to express 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 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 – I shall consider of it. And now, daughter, when your son Don Fernan has finished his siesta, – as there is no reason to suspect him of retiring to think, – please to inform him I 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!’ repeated the priest, ‘Aye, and may continue much longer – we have never played more than three hours a-day on an average.’

  ‘He then retired to sleep, and the evening was passed by the priest and Don Fernan, in profound silence at their chess – by Donna Clara, in silence equally profound, 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 cereus.5 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. Below, 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.

  ‘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.

  Eνθα νησον μακαρων Aνραι περιπνεονσιν.6

  ‘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, – so subdued was she by constraint and 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 perpetual persecutions of teazing and imperious medicrity, and considered the appearance of the stranger as one of those visions that formed the trouble and joy of her dreamy and illusive existence.

  ‘I am surprised, sister,’ said 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 saint,7 born, like her, in a land of darkness, yet chosen to be a vessel – I have forgot his name, reverend Father.’ – ‘Check 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 eminent 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 horror, ‘I washed the feet of thirteen beggars, on my knees in my father’s hall, the week before my marriage with her honoured father, and I never could abide the sight of a beggar since.’ – ‘Associations are sometimes indelibly strong,’ said the 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 consolation 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 her mouth.’ – ‘It was I said it, Madonna,’ 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 perplexed, ‘I thought the usual phrase on such occasions was pax vobiscum,9 or’ – Before Father Jose could reply, a shriek from Isidora pierced the ears of every one. All gathered round her in a moment, reinforced 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 gr
oupe that encircled her, without 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 finger, or glanced with eye, towards the casement, where the cause of her alarm had presented itself. Pressed with a thousand questions, she appeared incapable of answering 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 favourite 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 beheld me first!’ – ‘He! – who, daughter?’ said the alarmed Donna Clara. ‘Speak, I charge you, sister,’ said the irritable Fernan, ‘to whom do you allude?’ – ‘She raves,’ said the priest, whose habitual penetration discovered there was a secret, – and whose professional jealousy decided that no one, not mother or brother, should share it with him; ‘she raves – ye are to blame – forbear to hang round and to question her. Madonna, retire to rest, and the saints watch round your bed!’ Isidora, bending thankfully for this permission, retired to her apartment; and Father Jose for an hour appeared to contend with the suspicious fears of Donna Clara, and the sullen irritability of Fernan, merely that he might induce them, in the heat of controversy, to betray all they knew or dreaded, that he might strengthen his own conjectures, and establish his own power by the discovery.