Melmoth the Wanderer

by Charles Maturin

  *

  ‘Miserable wretch that I am! At this moment, a voice from the bottom of my heart asks me ‘Whom hast thou loved so much? Was it man or God, that thou darest to compare thyself with her who knelt and wept – not before a mortal idol, but at the feet of an incarnate divinity?’

  *

  ‘It may yet befall, that the ark which has floated through the waste of waters may find its resting-place, and the trembling inmate debark on the shores of an unknown but purer world.’

  CHAPTER XXXI

  There is an oak beside the froth-clad pool,

  Where in old time, as I have often heard,

  A woman desperate, a wretch like me!

  Ended her woes! – Her woes were not like mine!

  *

  – Ronan will know;

  When he beholds me floating on the stream,

  His heart will tell him why Rivine died!

  HOME ‘ S FATAL DISCOVERY1

  ‘The increasing decline of Elinor’s health was marked by all the family; the very servant who stood behind her chair looked sadder every day – even Margaret began to repent of the invitation she had given her to the Castle.

  ‘Elinor felt this, and would have spared her what pain she could; but it was not possible for herself to be insensible of the fast-fading remains of her withering youth and blighted beauty. The place – the place itself, was the principal cause of that mortal disease that was consuming her; yet from that place she felt she had less resolution to tear herself every day. So she lived, like those sufferers in eastern prisons, who are not allowed to taste food unless mixed with poison, and who must perish alike whether they eat or forbear.

  ‘Once, urged by intolerable pain of heart, (tortured by living in the placid light of John Sandal’s sunny smile), she confessed this to Margaret. She said, ‘It is impossible for me to support this existence – impossible! To tread the floor which those steps have trod – to listen for their approach, and when they come, feel they do not bear him we seek – to see every object around me reflect his image, but never – never to see the reality – to see the door open which once disclosed his figure, and when it opens, not to see him, and when he does appear, to see him not what he saw – to feel he is the same and not the same, – the same to the eye, but not to the heart – to struggle thus between the dream of imagination and the cruel awaking of reality – Oh! Margaret – that undeception plants a dagger in the heart, whose point no human hand can extract, and whose venom no human hand can heal!’ Margaret wept as Elinor spoke thus, and slowly, very slowly, expressed her consent that Elinor should quit the Castle, if it was necessary for her peace.

  ‘It was the very evening after this conversation, that Elinor, whose habit was to wander among the woods that surrounded the Castle unattended, met with John Sandal. It was a glorious autumnal evening, just like that on which they had first met, – the associations of nature were the same, those of the heart alone had suffered change. There is that light in an autumnal sky, – that shade in autumnal woods, – that dim and hallowed glory in the evening of the year, which is indefinably combined with recollections. Sandal, as they met, had spoken to her in the same voice of melody, and with the same heart-thrilling tenderness of manner, that had never ceased to visit her ear since their first meeting, like music in dreams. She imagined there was more than usual feeling in his manner; and the spot where they were, and which memory made populous and eloquent with the imagery and speech of other days, flattered this illusion. A vague hope trembled at the bottom of her heart, – she thought of what she dared not to utter, and yet dared to believe. They walked on together, – together they watched the last light on the purple hills, the deep repose of the woods, whose summits were still like ‘feathers of gold,’2 – together they once more tasted the confidence of nature, and, amid the most perfect silence, there was a mutual and unutterable eloquence in their hearts. The thoughts of other days rushed on Elinor, – she ventured to raise her eyes to that countenance which she once more saw ‘as it had been that of an angel.’ 3 The glow and the smile, that made it appear like a reflection of heaven, were there still, – but that glow was borrowed from the bright flush of the glorious west, and that smile was for nature, – not for her. She lingered till she felt it fade with the fading light, – and a last conviction striking her heart, she burst into an agony of tears. To his words of affectionate surprise, and gentle consolation, she answered only by fixing her appealing eyes on him, and agonizingly invoking his name. She had trusted to nature, and to this scene of their first meeting, to act as an interpreter between them, – and still even in despair she trusted to it.

  ‘Perhaps there is not a more agonizing moment than that in which we feel the aspect of nature give a perfect vitality to the association of our hearts, while they lie buried in those in which we try in vain to revive them.

  ‘She was soon undeceived. With that benignity which, while it speaks of consolation, forbids hope – with that smile which angels may be supposed to give on the last conflict of a sufferer who is casting off the garments of mortality in pain and hope – with such an expression he whom she loved regarded her. From another world he might have cast such a glance on her, – and it sealed her doom in this for ever.

  *

  ‘As, unable to witness the agony of the wound he had inflicted but could not heal, he turned from her, the last light of day faded from the hills – the sun of both worlds set on her eye and soul – she sunk on the earth, and notes of faint music that seemed designed to echo the words – ‘No – no – no – never – never more!’ trembled in her ears. They were as simple and monotonous as the words themselves, and were played accidentally by a peasant boy who was wandering in the woods. But to the unfortunate, every thing seems prophetic; and amid the shades of evening, and accompanied by the sound of his departing footsteps, the breaking heart of Elinor accepted the augury of these melancholy notes.*

  ‘A few days after this final meeting, Elinor wrote to her aunt in York to announce, that if she still lived, and was not unwilling to admit her, she would reside with her for life; and she could not help intimating, that her life would probably not outlast that of her hostess. She did not tell what the widow Sandal had a whispered to her at her first arrival at the Castle, and what she now ventured to repeat with a tone that struggled between the imperative and the persuasive, – the conciliating and the intimidative. Elinor yielded, – and the indelicacy of this representation, had only the effect to make her shrink from its repetition.

  ‘On her departure, Margaret wept, and Sandal shewed as much tender officiousness about her journey, as if it were to terminate in their renewed bridal. To escape from this, Elinor hastened her preparations for departure.

  ‘When she arrived at a certain distance from the Castle, she dismissed the family carriage, and said she would go on foot with her female servant to the farmhouse where horses were awaiting her. She went there, but remained concealed, for the report of the approaching bridal resounded in her ears.

  *

  ‘The day arrived – Elinor rose very early – the bells rung out a merry peal – (as she had once heard them do on another occasion) – the troops of friends arrived in greater numbers, and with equal gaiety as they had once assembled to escort her – she saw their equipages gleaming along – she heard the joyous shouts of half the county – she imagined to herself the timid smile of Margaret, and the irradiated countenance of him who had been her bridegroom.

  ‘Suddenly there was a pause. She felt that the ceremony was going on – was finished – that the irrevocable words were spoken – the indissoluble tie was knit! Again the shout and wild joyance burst forth as the sumptuous cavalcade returned to the Castle. The glare of the equipages, – the splendid habits of the riders, – the cheerful groupe of shouting tenantry, – she saw it all!

  *

  ‘When all was over, Elinor glanced accidentally at her dress – it was white like her bridal habit; – shuddering she exchanged it for a
mourning habit, and set out, as she hoped, on her last journey.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  Fuimus, non sumus.1

  ‘When Elinor arrived in Yorkshire, she found her aunt was dead. Elinor went to visit her grave. It was, in compliance with her last request, placed near the window of the independent meeting-house, and bore for inscription her favourite text, ‘Those whom he foreknew, he also predestinated,’2 &c. &c. Elinor stood by the grave some time, but could not shed a tear. This contrast of a life so rigid, and a death so hopeful, – this silence of humanity, and eloquence of the grave, – pierced through her heart, as it will through every heart that has indulged in the inebriation of human passion, and feels that the draught has been drawn from broken cisterns.

  ‘Her aunt’s death made Elinor’s life, if possible, more secluded, and her habits more monotonous than they would otherwise have been. She was very charitable to the cottagers in her neighbourhood; but except to visit their habitations, she never quitted her own.

  *

  ‘Often she contemplated a small stream that flowed at the end of her garden. As she had lost all her sensibility of nature, another motive was assigned for this mute and dark contemplation; and her servant, much attached to her, watched her close.

  *

  ‘She was roused from this fearful state of stupefaction and despair, which those who have felt shudder at the attempt to describe, by a letter from Margaret. She had received several from her which lay unanswered, (no unusual thing in those days), but this she tore open, read with interest inconceivable, and prepared instantly to answer by action.

  ‘Margaret’s high spirits seemed to have sunk in her hour of danger. She hinted that that hour was rapidly approaching, and that she earnestly implored the presence of her affectionate kinswoman to soothe and sustain in the moment of her approaching peril. She added, that the manly and affectionate tenderness of John Sandal at this period, had touched her heart more deeply, if possible, than all the former testimonies of his affection – but that she could not bear his resignation of all his usual habits of rural amusement, and of the neighbouring society – that she in vain had chided him from her couch, where she lingered in pain and hope, and hoped that Elinor’s presence might induce him to yield to her request, as he must feel, on her arrival, the dearest companion of her youth was present – and that, at such a moment, a female companion was more suitable than even the gentlest and most affectionate of the other sex.

  *

  ‘Elinor set out directly. The purity of her feelings had formed an impenetrable barrier between her heart and its object, – and she apprehended no more danger from the presence of one who was wedded, and wedded to her relative, than from that of her own brother.

  ‘She arrived at the Castle – Margaret’s hour of danger had begun – she had been very ill during the preceding period. The natural consequences of her situation had been aggravated by a feeling of dignified responsibility of the birth of an heir to the house of Mortimer – and this feeling had not contributed to render that situation more supportable.

  ‘Elinor bent over the bed of pain – pressed her cold lips to the burning lips of the sufferer – and prayed for her.

  ‘The first medical assistance in the country (then very rarely employed on such occasions) had been obtained at a vast expence. The widow Sandal, declining all attendance on the sufferer, paced through the adjacent apartments in agony unutterable and unuttered.

  ‘Two days and nights went on in hope and terror – the bell-ringers sat up in every church within ten miles round – the tenantry crowded round the Castle with honest heartfelt solicitude – the neighbouring nobility sent their messages of inquiry every hour. An accouchement in a noble family was then an event of importance.

  ‘The hour came – twins were born dead – and the young mother was fated to follow them within a few hours! While life yet remained, Margaret shewed the remains of the lofty spirit of the Mortimers. She sought with her cold hand that of her wretched husband and of the weeping Elinor. She joined them in an embrace which one of them at least understood, and prayed that their union might be eternal. She then begged to see the bodies of her infant sons – they were produced; and it was said that she uttered expressions, intimating that, had they not been the heirs of the Mortimer family – had not expectation been wound so high, and supported by all the hopes that life and youth could flatter her with, – she and they might yet have existed.

  ‘As she spoke, her voice grew feebler, and her eyes dim – their last light was turned on him she loved, and when sight was gone, she still felt his arms enfold her. The next moment they enfolded – nothing!

  ‘In the terrible spasms of masculine agony – the more intensely felt as they are more rarely indulged – the young widower dashed himself on the bed, which shook with his convulsive grief; and Elinor, losing all sense but that of a calamity so sudden and so terrible, echoed his deep and suffocating sobs, as if she whom they deplored3 had not been the only obstacle to her happiness.

  *

  ‘Amid the voice of mourning that rung through the Castle from vault to tower in that day of trouble, none was loud like that of the widow Sandal – her wailings were shrieks, her grief was despair. Rushing through the rooms like one distracted, she tore her hair out by the roots, and imprecated the most fearful curses on her head. At length she approached the apartment where the corse lay. The servants, shocked at her distraction, would have withheld her from entering it, but could not. She burst into the room, cast one wild look on its inmates – the still corse and the dumb mourners – and then, flinging herself on her knees before her son, confessed the secret of her guilt, and developed to its foul base the foundation of that pile of iniquity and sorrow which had now reached its summit.

  ‘Her son listened to this horrible confession with fixed eye and features unmoved; and at its conclusion, when the wretched penitent implored the assistance of her son to raise her from her knees, he repelled her outstretched hands, and with a weak wild laugh, sunk back on the bed. He never could be removed from it till the corse to which he clung was borne away, and then the mourners hardly knew which to deplore – her who was deprived of the light of life, or him in whom the light of reason was extinguished for ever!

  *

  ‘The wretched, guilty mother, (but for her fate no one can be solicitous), a few months after, on her dying bed, declared the secret of her crime to a minister of an independent congregation, who was induced, by the report of her despair, to visit her. She confessed that, being instigated by avarice, and still more by the desire of regaining her lost consequence in the family, and knowing the wealth and dignity her son would acquire, and in which she must participate, by his marriage with Margaret, she had, after using all the means of persuasion and intreaty, been driven, in despair at her disappointment, to fabricate a tale as false as it was horrible, which she related to her deluded son on the evening before his intended nuptials with Elinor. She had assured him he was not her son, but the offspring of the illicit commerce of her husband the preacher with the puritan mother of Elinor, who had formerly been one of his congregation, and whose well-known and strongly-expressed admiration of his preaching had been once supposed extended to his person, – had caused her much jealous anxiety in the early years of their marriage, and was now made the basis of this horrible fiction. She added, that Margaret’s obvious attachment to her cousin had, in some degree, palliated her guilt to herself; but that, when she saw him quit her house in despair on the morning of his intended marriage and rush he knew not whither, she was half tempted to recall him, and confess the truth. Her mind again became hardened, and she reflected that her secret was safe, as she had bound him by an oath, from respect to his father’s memory, and compassion to the guilty mother of Elinor, never to disclose the truth to her daughter.

  ‘The event had succeeded to her guilty wishes. – Sandal beheld Elinor with the eyes of a brother, and the image of Margaret easily found a place in his unoccupied affectio
ns. But, as often befals to the dealers in falsehood and obliquity, the apparent accomplishment of her hopes proved her ruin. In the event of the marriage of John and Margaret proving issueless, the estates and title went to the distant relative named in the will; and her son, deprived of reason by the calamities in which her arts had involved him, was by them also deprived of the wealth and rank to which they were meant to raise him, and reduced to the small pension obtained by his former services. – the poverty of the King, then himself a pensioner of Lewis XIV., forbidding the possibility of added remuneration. When the minister heard to the last the terrible confession of the dying penitent, in the awful language ascribed to Bishop Burnet4 when consulted by another criminal, – he bid her ‘almost despair,’ and departed.

  *

  ‘Elinor has retired, with the helpless object of her unfading love and unceasing care, to her cottage in Yorkshire. There, in the language of that divine and blind old man, the fame of whose poetry has not yet reached this country, it is

  ‘Her delight to see him sitting in the house,’5

  and watch, like the father of the Jewish champion, the growth of that ‘God-given strength,’ that intellectual power, which, unlike Samson’s, will never return.

  ‘After an interval of two years, during which she had expended a large part of the capital of her fortune in obtaining the first medical advice for the patient, and ‘suffered many things of many physicians,’6 she gave up all hope, – and, reflecting that the interest of her fortune thus diminished would be but sufficient to procure the comforts of life for herself and him whom she has resolved never to forsake, she sat down in patient misery with her melancholy companion, and added one more to the many proofs of woman’s heart, ‘unwearied in well-doing,’7 without the intoxication of passion, the excitement of applause, or even the gratitude of the unconscious object.