Melmoth the Wanderer 1820

by Charles Robert Maturin

  I believe the Director felt his situation rather critical; his interest in the family depended on it, and he attempted to cover his retreat with all the expertness and fertility of manoeuvre which belong to an ecclesiastical tactician. “My dear child, we have been both wrong, I from zeal, and you from – no matter what; our business is to exchange forgiveness with each other, and to implore it of God, whom we have both offended. My dear child, let us prostrate ourselves before him, and even while our hearts are glowing with human passion, God may seize that moment to impress the seal of his grace on both, and fix it there for ever. Often the earthquake and the whirlwind are succeeded by the still, small voice, and God is there. – Let us pray.” I fell on my knees, resolved to pray in my heart; but in a short time, the fervour of his language, the eloquence and energy of his prayers, dragged me along with him, and I felt myself compelled to pray against every dictate of my own heart. He had reserved this display for the last, and he had judged well. I never heard any thing so like inspiration; as I listened, and involuntarily, to effusions that seemed to issue from no mortal lips, I began to doubt my own motives, and search my heart. I had disdained his taunts, I had defied and conquered his passion, but as he prayed, I wept. This going over the same ground with the heart, is one of the most painful and humiliating of all exercises; the virtue of yesterday becomes the vice of to-day; we ask with the desponding and restless scepticism of Pilate, “What is truth?” but the oracle that was so eloquent one moment, is dumb the next, or if it answers, it is with that ambiguity that makes us dread we have to consult again – again – and for ever – in vain.

  ‘I was now in a state quite fit for the Director’s purpose; but he was fatigued with the part he had played with so little success, and took his leave, imploring me to continue my importunities to Heaven to direct and enlighten me, while he himself would supplicate all the saints in heaven to touch the hearts of my parents, and reveal to them some means of saving me from the crime and perjury of a forced vocation, without involving themselves in a crime, if possible, of blacker dye and greater magnitude. Saying so he left me, to urge my parents, with all his influence, to pursue the most rigorous measures to enforce my adoption of the conventual life. His motives for doing so were sufficiently strong when he visited me, but their strength was increased tenfold before his departure. He had reckoned confidently on the power of his remonstrances; he had been repulsed; the disgrace of such a defeat rankled in the core of his heart. He had been only a partizan in the cause, but he was now a party. What was a matter of conscience before, was now a matter of honour with him; and I rather believe that the Director laid a greater stress on the latter, or made a great havock of confusion between both in his mind. Be that as it may, I passed a few days after his visit in a state of indescribable excitement. I had something to hope, and that is often better than something to enjoy. The cup of hope always excites thirst, that of fruition disappoints or quenches it. I took long walks in the garden alone. I framed imaginary conversations to myself. The boarders observed me, and said to each other, according to their instructions, “He is meditating on his vocation, he is supplicating for illuminating grace, let us not disturb him.” I did not undeceive them; but I reflected with increasing horror on a system that forced hypocrisy to a precocity unparalleled, and made the last vice of life the earliest of conventual youth. But I soon forgot reflection, to plunge into reverie. I imagined myself at the palace of my father; I saw him, my mother, and the Director, engaged in debate. I spoke for each, and felt for all. I supplied the passionate eloquence of the Director, his strong representations of my aversion to the habit, his declaration that further importunity on their part would be as impious as it was fruitless. I saw all the impression I once flattered myself I had made on my father revived. I saw my mother yield. I heard the murmur of doubtful acquiescence, – the decision, the congratulations. I saw the carriage approaching, – I heard the convent doors fly open. Liberty, – liberty, – I was in their arms; no, I was at their feet. Let those who smile at me, ask themselves whether they have been indebted most to imagination or reality for all they have enjoyed in life, if indeed they have ever enjoyed any thing. In these internal dramas, however, I always felt that the persons did not speak with the interest I wished; and the speeches I put into their mouths would have been spoken with ten thousand times more animation by myself. Still I felt the most exquisite enjoyment in these reveries, and perhaps it was not diminished by the thought how I was deceiving my companions the whole time. But dissimulation always teaches dissimulation; and the only question is, whether we shall be the masters of the art or its victims? a question soon decided by our self-love.

  ‘It was on the sixth day that I heard, with a beating heart, a carriage stop. I could have sworn to the sound of its wheels. I was in the hall before I was summoned. I felt I could not be in the wrong, nor was I. I drove to my father’s palace in a delirium, – a vision of repulse and of reconciliation, of gratitude and of despair. I was ushered into a room, where were assembled my father, my mother, and the Director, all seated, and silent as statues. I approached, I kissed their hands, and then stood at a small distance breathless. My father was the first to break silence, but he spoke very much with the air of a man who was repeating a part dictated to him; and the tone of his voice contradicted every word he prepared to utter. “My son, I have sent for you, no longer to contend with your weak and wicked obstinacy, but to announce to you my own resolution. The will of Heaven and of your parents has devoted you to its service, and your resistance can only make us miserable, without in the least frustrating that resolution.” At these words, gasping for breath, my lips involuntarily unclosed; my father imagined this was an attempt to reply, though in fact I was not capable of uttering a syllable, and hastened to prevent it. “My son, all opposition is unavailing, all discussion fruitless. Your destiny is decided, and though your struggles may render it wretched, they cannot reverse it. Be reconciled, my child, to the will of Heaven and your parents, which you may insult, but cannot violate. This reverend person can better explain to you the necessity of your obedience than I can.” And my father, evidently weary of a task which he had reluctantly undertaken, was rising to go away, when the Director detained him. “Stay, Senhor, and assure your son before you depart, that, since I last saw him, I have fulfilled my promise, and urged every topic on your mind, and that of the duchess, that I thought might operate for his best interests.” I was aware of the hypocritical ambiguity of this expression; and, collecting my breath, I said, “Reverend father, as a son I seek not to employ an intercessor with my own parents. I stand before them, and if I have not an intercessor in their hearts, your mediation must be ineffectual altogether. I implored you merely to state to them my invincible reluctance.” They all interrupted me with exclamations, as they repeated my last words, – “Reluctance! invincible! Is it for this you have been admitted to our presence? Is it for this we have borne so long with your contumacy, only to hear it repeated with aggravations?” “Yes, my father, – yes, for this or nothing. If I am not permitted to speak, why am I suffered in your presence?” “Because we hoped to witness your submission.” “Allow me to give the proofs of it on my knees;” – and I fell on my knees, hoping that my posture might soften the effect of the words I could not help uttering. I kissed my father’s hand, – he did not withdraw it, and I felt it tremble. I kissed the skirt of my mother’s robe, – she attempted to withdraw it with one hand, but with the other she hid her face, and I thought I saw tears bursting through her fingers. I knelt to the Director too, and besought his benediction, and struggled, though with revolting lips, to kiss his hand; but he snatched his habit from my hand, elevated his eyes, spread out his fingers, and assumed the attitude of a man who recoils in horror from a being who merits the extreme of malediction and reprobation. Then I felt my only chance was with my parents. I turned to them, but they shrunk from me, and appeared willing to devolve the remainder of the task on the Director. He approached me.
“My child, you have pronounced your reluctance to the life of God invincible, but may there not be things more invincible even to your resolution? The curses of that God, confirmed by those of your parents, and deepened by all the fulminations of the church, whose embraces you have rejected, and whose holiness you have desecrated by that rejection.” “Father, these are terrible words, but I have no time now but for meanings.” “Besotted wretch, I do not understand you, – you do not understand yourself.” “Oh! I do, – I do!” I exclaimed. And turning to my father, still on my knees, I cried, “My dear father, is life, – human life, all shut up from me?” “It is,” said the Director, answering for my father. “Have I no resource?” “None.” “No profession?” “Profession! degenerate wretch!” “Let me embrace the meanest, but do not make me a monk.” “Profligate as weak.” “Oh! my father,” still calling on my father, “let not this man answer for you. Give me a sword, – send me into the armies of Spain to seek death, – death is all I ask, in preference to that life you doom me to.” “It is impossible,” said my father, gloomily returning from the window against which he had been leaning; “the honour of an illustrious family, – the dignity of a Spanish grandee –” “Oh! my father, of how little value will that be, when I am consuming in my early grave, and you die broken-hearted on it, over the flower your own voice has doomed to wither there.” My father trembled. “Senhor, I entreated, – I command you to retire; this scene will unfit you for the devotional duties you must perform this evening.” “And you leave me then?” I cried as they departed. “Yes, – yes,” – repeated the Director; “leave you burdened with the curse of your father.” “Oh no!” exclaimed my father; but the Director had hold of his hand, and pressed it strongly. “Of your mother,” he repeated. I heard my mother weep aloud, and felt it like a repeal of that curse; but she dared not speak, and I could not. The Director had now two victims in his hands, and the third at his feet. He could not avoid showing his triumph. He paused, collected the full power of his sonorous voice, and thundered forth, “And of God!” And as he rushed from the room, accompanied by my father and mother, whose hands he grasped, I felt as if struck by a thunderbolt. The rushing of their robes, as he dragged them out, seemed like the whirlwind that attends the presence of the destroying angel. I cried out, in my hopeless agony of destitution, “Oh! That my brother were here to intercede for me,” – and, as I uttered these words, I fell. My head struck against a marble table, and I sunk on the floor covered with blood.

  ‘The domestics (of whom, according to the custom of the Spanish nobility, there were about two hundred in the palace) found me in this situation. They uttered outcries, – assistance was procured, – it was believed that I had attempted to kill myself; but the surgeon who attended me happened to be a man both of science and humanity, and having cut away the long hair clotted with blood, and surveyed the wound, he pronounced it trifling. My mother was of his opinion, for within three days I was summoned to her apartment. I obeyed the summons. A black bandage, severe head-ache, and an unnatural paleness, were the only testimonies of my accident, as it was called; and the Director had suggested to her that this was the time to FIX THE IMPRESSION. How well religious persons understand the secret of making every event of the present world operate on the future, while they pretend to make the future predominate over the present. Were I to outlive the age of man, I should never forget my interview with my mother. She was alone when I entered, and seated with her back to me. I knelt and kissed her hand. My paleness and my submission seemed to affect her, – but she struggled with her emotions, overcame them, and said in a cold dictated tone, “To what purpose are those marks of exterior reverence, when your heart disowns them?” “Madam, I am not conscious of that.” “Not conscious! How then are you here? How is it that you have not, long before this, spared your father the shame of supplicating his own child, – the shame, still more humiliating, of supplicating him in vain; spared the Father Director the scandal of seeing the authority of the church violated in the person of its minister, and the remonstrances of duty as ineffectual as the calls of nature? And me, – oh! why have you not spared me this hour of agony and shame?” and she burst into a flood of tears, that drowned my soul as she shed them. “Madam, what have I done that deserves the reproach of your tears? My disinclination to a monastic life is no crime?” “In you it is a crime.” “But how then, dear mother, were a similar choice offered to my brother, would his rejection of it be deemed a crime?” I said this almost involuntarily, and merely by way of comparison. I had no ulterior meaning, nor the least idea that one could be developed by my mother, except a reference to an unjustifiable partiality. I was undeceived, when she added, in a voice that chilled my blood, “There is a great difference between you.” “Yes, Madam, he is your favourite.” “No, I take Heaven to witness, – no;” and she, who had appeared so severe, so decisive, and so impenetrable before, uttered these words with a sincerity that penetrated to the bottom of my heart; – she appeared to be appealing to Heaven against the prejudices of her child. I was affected – I said, “But, Madam, this difference of circumstances is inexplicable.” “And would you have it explained by me?” “By any one, Madam.” “By me!” she repeated, not hearing me; then kissing a crucifix that hung on her bosom, “My God! the chastisement is just, and I submit to it, though inflicted by my own child. You are illegitimate,” she added, turning suddenly towards me; “you are illegitimate, – your brother is not: and your intrusion into your father’s house is not only its disgrace, but a perpetual monitor of that crime which it aggravates without absolving.” I stood speechless. “Oh! my child,” she continued, “have mercy on your mother. Has not this confession, extorted from her by her own son, been sufficient to expiate her offence?” “Go on, Madam, I can bear any thing now.” “You must bear it, for you have forced me to this disclosure. I am of rank far inferior to your father, – you were our first child. He loved me, and forgiving my weakness as a proof of my devotion to him, we were married, and your brother is our lawful child. Your father, anxious for my reputation, since I was united to him, agreed with me, as our marriage was private, and its date uncertain, that you should be announced as our legitimate offspring. For years your grandfather, incensed at our marriage, refused to see us, and we lived in retirement, – would that I had died there. A few days before his death he relented, and sent for us; it was no time to acknowledge the imposition practised on him, and you were introduced as the child of his son, and the heir of his honours. But from that hour I have never known a moment’s peace. The lie I had dared to utter before God and the world, and to a dying parent, – the injustice done to your brother, – the violation of natural duties and of legal claims, – the convulsions of my conscience, that heavily upbraided me, not only with vice and perjury, but with sacrilege.” “Sacrilege!” “Yes; every hour you delay the assumption of the habit is a robbery of God. Before you were born, I devoted you to him, as the only expiation of my crime. While I yet bore you in my bosom without life, I dared to implore his forgiveness only on the condition of your future intercession for me as a minister of religion. I relied on your prayers before you could speak. I proposed to intrust my penitence to one, who, in becoming the child of God, had atoned for my offence in making him the child of sin. In imagination I knelt already at your confessional, – heard you, by the authority of the church, and the commission of Heaven, pronounce me forgiven. I saw you stand beside my dying bed, – I felt you press the cross to my cold lips, and point to that heaven where I hoped my vow had already secured a seat for you. Before your birth I had laboured to lift you to heaven, and my recompence is, that your obstinacy threatens to drag us both into the gulph of perdition. Oh! my child, if our prayers and intercessions are available to the delivery of the souls of our departed relatives from punishment, hear the adjuration of a living parent, who implores you not to seal her everlasting condemnation!” I was unable to answer, my mother saw it, and redoubled her efforts. “My son, if I thought that my
kneeling at your feet would soften your obduracy, I would prostrate myself before them this moment.” “Oh! Madam, the sight of such unnatural humiliation ought to kill me.” “And yet you will not yield – the agony of this confession, the interests of my salvation and your own, nay, the preservation of my life, are of no weight with you.” She perceived that these words made me tremble, and repeated, “Yes, my life; beyond the day that your inflexibility exposes me to infamy, I will not live. If you have resolution, I have resolution too; nor do I dread the result, for God will charge on your soul, not on mine, the crime an unnatural child has forced me to – and yet you will not yield. – Well, then, the prostration of my body is nothing to that prostration of soul you have already driven me to. I kneel to my own child for life and for salvation,” and she knelt to me. I attempted to raise her; she repelled me, and exclaimed, in a voice hoarse with despair, “And you will not yield?” “I do not say so.” “And what, then, do you say? – raise me not, approach me not, till you answer me.” “That I will think.” “Think! you must decide.” “I do, then, I do.” “But how?” “To be whatever you would have me.” As I uttered these words, my mother fell in a swoon at my feet. As I attempted to lift her up, scarce knowing if it was not a corse I held in my arms, I felt I never could have forgiven myself if she had been reduced to that situation by my refusing to comply with her last request.