Melmoth the Wanderer 1820

by Charles Robert Maturin

  ‘“The cavalcade was magnificent and numerous – the dignity and consequence of the Mortimer family had assembled all who had aspired to the distinction of their acquaintance, and such was then the feudal grandeur attendant on the nuptials of a high-descended family, that relatives, however remote in blood or in local distance, collected for sixty miles in every direction around the Castle, and presented a ‘host of friends, gorgeously arrayed and attended on that eventful morning.’

  ‘“Most of the company, even including the females, were mounted on horseback, and this, by apparently increasing the number of the procession, added to its tumultuous magnificence. There were some cumbrous vehicles, misnamed carriages of a fashion indescribably inconvenient, but gorgeously gilded and painted, – and the Cupids on the pannels had been re-touched for the occasion. The bride was lifted on her palfrey by two peers, – Margaret rode beside her gallantly attended, – and Mrs Ann, who once more saw nobles contending for her withered hand, and adjusting her silken rein, felt the long-faded glories of her family revive, and led the van of the pompous procession with as much dignity of demeanour, and as much glow of faded beauty, once eminent and resistless, as if she still followed the gorgeous nuptial progress of the princess palatine. They arrived at the church, – the bride, the relatives, the splendid company, the minister – all but the bridegroom, were there. There was a long painful silence. Several gentlemen of the bridal party rode rapidly out in every direction in which it was thought probable to meet him, – the clergyman stood at the altar, till, weary of standing, he retired. The crowd from the neighbouring villages, combined with the numerous attendants, filled the church-yard. Their acclamations were incessant, – the heat and distraction became intolerable, and Elinor begged for a few moments to be allowed to retire to the vestry.

  ‘“There was a casement window which opened on the road, and Mrs Ann supported the bride as she tottered towards it, attempting to loose her wimple, and veil of costly lace. As Elinor approached the casement, the thundering hoofs of a horse at full speed shook the road. Elinor looked up mechanically, – the rider was John Sandal, – he cast a look of horror at the pale bride, and plunging his desperate spurs deeper, disappeared in a moment.

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  ‘“A year after this event, two figures were seen to walk, or rather wander, almost every evening, in the neighbourhood of a small hamlet in a remote part of Yorkshire. The vicinage was picturesque and attractive, but these figures seemed to move amid the scenery like beings, who, if they still retained eyes for nature, had lost all heart for it. That wan and attenuated form, so young, yet so withered, whose dark eyes emit a fearful light amid features chill and white as those of a statue, and the young graces of whose form seem to have been nipt like those of a lily that bloomed too soon in spring, and was destroyed by the frost of the treacherous season, whose whispers had first invited it to bud, – that is Elinor Mortimer, – and that figure that walks beside her, so stiff and rectangular, that it seems as its motion was regulated by mechanism, whose sharp eyes are directed so straight forward, that they see neither tree on the right hand, or glade on the left, or heaven above, or earth beneath, or any thing but a dim vision of mystic theology for ever before them, which is aptly reflected in their cold contemplative light, that is the Puritan maiden sister of her mother, with whom Elinor had fixed her residence. Her dress is arranged with as much precision as if a mathematician had calculated the angles of every fold, – every pin’s point knows its place, and does its duty – the plaits of her round-eared cap do not permit one hair to appear on her narrow forehead, and her large hood, adjusted after the fashion in which it was worn by the godly sisters, who rode out to meet Prynne on his return from the pillory, lends a deeper shade to her rigid features, – a wretched-looking lacquey is carrying a huge clasped bible after her, in the mode in which she remembered to have seen Lady Lambert and Lady Desborough march to prayer, attended by their pages, while she proudly followed in their train, distinguished as the sister of that godly man and powerful preacher of the world, Sandal. From the day of her disappointed nuptials, Elinor, with that insulted feeling of maiden pride, which not even the anguish of her broken heart could suppress, had felt an unappeasable anxiety to quit the scene of her disgrace and her misfortune. It was vainly opposed by her aunt and Margaret, who, horror-struck at the event of those disastrous nuptials, and wholly unconscious of the cause, had implored her, with all the energy of affection, to fix her residence at the Castle, within whose walls they pledged themselves he who had abandoned her should never be permitted to place his foot. Elinor answered the impassioned importunities, only by eager and clinging pressures of her cold hands, and by tears which trembled on her eyelids, without the power to fall. – ‘Nay, stay with us,’ said the kind and noble-hearted Margaret, ‘you shall not leave us!’ And she pressed the hands of her kinswoman, with that cordial touch that gives a welcome as much to the heart as to the home of the inviter. – ‘Dearest cousin,’ said Elinor, answering, for the first time, this affectionate appeal with a faint and ghastly smile – ‘I have so many enemies within these walls, that I can no longer encounter them with safety to my life.’ – ‘Enemies!’ repeated Margaret. – ‘Yes, dearest cousin – there is not a spot where he trod – not a prospect on which he has gazed – not an echo which has repeated the sound of his voice, – that does not send daggers through my heart, which those who wish me to live would not willingly see infixed any longer.’ To the emphatic agony with which these words were uttered, Margaret had nothing to reply but with tears; and Elinor set out on her journey to the relative of her mother, a rigid Puritan, who resided in Yorkshire.

  ‘“As the carriage was ordered for her departure, Mrs Ann, supported by her female attendants, stood on the drawbridge to take leave of her niece, with solemn and affectionate courtesy. Margaret wept bitterly, and aloud, as she stood at a casement, and waved her hand to Elinor. Her aunt never shed a tear, till out of the presence of the domestics, – but when all was over, – ‘she entered into her chamber, and wept there.’

  ‘“When her carriage had driven some miles from the Castle, a servant on a fleet horse followed it at full speed with Elinor’s lute, which had been forgotten, – it was offered to her, and after viewing it for some moments with a look in which memory struggled with grief, she ordered its strings to be broken on the spot, and proceeded on her journey.

  ‘“The retreat to which Elinor had retired, did not afford her the tranquillity she expected. Thus, change of place always deceives us with the tantalizing hope of relief, as we toss on the feverish bed of life.

  ‘“She went in a faint expectation of the revival of her religious feelings – she went to wed, amid the solitude and desert where she had first known him, the immortal bridegroom, who would never desert her as the mortal one had done, – but she did not find him there – the voice of God was no longer heard in the garden – either her religious sensibility had abated, or those from whom she first received the impression, had no longer power to renew it, or perhaps the heart which has exhausted itself on a mortal object, does not find its powers soon recruited to meet the image of celestial beneficence, and exchange at once the visible for the invisible, – the felt and present, for the future and the unknown.

  ‘“Elinor returned to the residence of her mother’s family in the hope of renewing former images, but she found only the words that had conveyed those ideas, and she looked around in vain for the impressions they had once suggested. When we thus come to feel that all has been illusion, even on the most solemn subjects, – that the future world seems to be deserting us along with the present, and that our own hearts, with all their treachery, have done us no more wrong than the false impressions which we have received from our religious instructors, we are like the deity in the painting of the great Italian artist, extending one hand to the sun, and the other to the moon, but touching neither. Elinor had imagined or hoped, that the language of her aunt would have revived her habitual associations
– she was disappointed. It is true no pains were spared – when Elinor wished to read, she was furnished amply with the Westminster Confession, or Prynne’s Histriomastrix, or if she wished for lighter pages, for the Belles Lettres of Puritanism, there were John Bunyan’s Holy War, or the life of Mr Badman. If she closed the book in despair at the insensibility of her untouched heart, she was invited to a godly conference, where the non-conformist ministers, who had been, in the language of the day, extinguished under the Bartholomew bushel*, met to give the precious word in season to the scattered fold of the Lord. Elinor knelt and wept too at these meetings; but, while her form was prostrated before the Deity, her tears fell for one whom she dared not name. When, in incontroulable agony, she sought, like Joseph, where she might weep unobserved and unrestrained, and rushed into the narrow garden that skirted the cottage of her aunt, and wept there, she was followed by the quiet, sedate figure, moving at the rate of an inch in a minute, who offered her for her consolation, the newly published and difficultly obtained work of Marshall on Sanctification.

  ‘“Elinor, accustomed too much to that fatal excitement of the heart, which renders all other excitement as faint and feeble as the air of heaven to one who has been inhaling the potent inebriation of the strongest perfumes, wondered how this being, so abstracted, cold, and unearthly, could tolerate her motionless existence. She rose at a fixed hour, – at a fixed hour she prayed, – at a fixed hour received the godly friends who visited her, and whose existence was as monotonous and apathetic as her own, – at a fixed hour she dined, – and at a fixed hour she prayed again, and then retired, – yet she prayed without unction, and fed without appetite, and retired to rest without the least inclination to sleep. Her life was mere mechanism; but the machine was so well wound up, that it appeared to have some quiet consciousness and sullen satisfaction in its movements.

  ‘“Elinor struggled in vain for the renewal of this life of cold mediocrity, – she thirsted for it as one who, in the deserts of Africa, expiring for want of water, would wish for the moment to be an inmate of Lapland, to drink of their eternal snows, – yet at that moment wonders how its inhabitants can live among SNOW. She saw a being far inferior to herself in mental power, – of feelings that hardly deserved the name – tranquil, and wondered that she herself was wretched. – Alas! she did not know, that the heartless and unimaginative are those alone who entitle themselves to the comforts of life, and who can alone enjoy them. A cold and sluggish mediocrity in their occupations or their amusements, is all they require – pleasure has with them no meaning but the exemption from actual suffering, nor do they annex any idea to pain but the immediate infliction of corporeal suffering, or of external calamity – the source of pain or pleasure is never found in their hearts – while those who have profound feelings scarce ever look elsewhere for either. So much the worse for them, – the being reduced to providing for the necessities of human life, and being satisfied when that provision is made, is perhaps the best condition of human life – beyond that, all is the dream of insanity, or the agony of disappointment. Far better the dull and dusky winter’s day, whose gloom, if it never abates, never increases, – (and to which we lift up an eye of listlessness, in which there is no apprehension of future and added terrors), – to the glorious fierceness of the summer’s day, whose sun sets amid purple and gold, – while, panting under its parting beams, we see the clouds collecting in the darkening East, and view the armies of heaven on their march, whose thunders are to break our rest, and whose lightnings may crumble us to ashes.

  ‘“Elinor strove hard with her fate, – the strength of her intellect had been much developed since her residence at Mortimer Castle, and there also the energies of her heart had been developed fatally. How dreadful is the conflict of superior intellect and a burning heart, with the perfect mediocrity of the characters and circumstances they are generally doomed to live with! The battering-rams play against wool-bags, – the lightnings glance on ice, hiss, and are extinguished. The greater strength we exhibit, we feel we are more and more paralyzed by the weakness of our enemies, – our very energy becomes our bitterest enemy, as it fights in vain against the impregnable fortress of total vacuity! It is in vain we assail a foe who neither knows our language or uses our weapons. Elinor gave it up, – yet still she struggled with her own feelings; and perhaps the conflict which she now undertook was the hardest of all. She had received her first religious impressions under the roof of her Puritanic aunt, and, true or false, they had been so vivid, that she was anxious to revive them. When the heart is robbed of its first-born, there is nothing it will not try to adopt. Elinor remembered a very affecting scene that had occurred in her childhood, beneath the roof where she now resided.

  ‘“An old non-conformist minister, a very Saint John for sanctity of life, and simplicity of manners, had been seized by a magistrate while giving the word of consolation to a few of his flock who had met at the cottage of her aunt.

  ‘“The old man had supplicated for a moment’s delay on the part of the civil power, and its officers, by an unusual effort of toleration or of humanity, complied. Turning to his congregation, who, amid the tumult of the arrest, had never risen from their knees, and only changed the voice of supplication from praying with their pastor, to praying for him, – he quoted to them that beautiful passage from the prophet Malachi, which appears to give such delightful encouragement to the spiritual intercourse of Christians, – ‘Then they that feared the Lord, spoke often to one another, and the Lord heard it,’ &c. As he spoke, the old man was dragged away by some rougher hands, and died soon after in confinement.

  ‘“On the young imagination of Elinor, this scene was indelibly written. Amid the magnificence of Mortimer Castle, it had never been effaced or obscured, and now she tried to make herself in love with the sounds and the scene that had so deeply touched her infant heart.

  ‘“Resolute in her purposes, she spared no pains to excite this reminiscence of religion, – it was her last resource. Like the wife of Phineas, she struggled to bear an heir of the soul, even while she named him Ichabod, – and felt the glory was departed. She went to the narrow apartment, – she seated herself in the very chair that venerable man occupied when he was torn from it, and his departure appeared to her like that of an ascending prophet. She would then have caught the folds of his mantle, and mounted with him, even though his flight had led to prison and to death. She tried, by repeating his last words, to produce the same effect they had once had on her heart, and wept in indescribable agony at feeling those words had no meaning now for her. When life and passion have thus rejected us, the backward steps we are compelled to tread towards the path we have wandered from, are ten thousand times more torturing and arduous than those we have exhausted in their pursuit. Hope then supported our hands every step we took. Remorse and disappointment scourge us back, and every step is tinged with tears or with blood; and well it is for the pilgrim if that blood is drained from his heart, for then – his pilgrimage will be sooner terminated.

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  ‘“At times Elinor, who had forgotten neither the language or habits of her former existence, would speak in a manner that gave her Puritanic relative hopes that, according to the language of the times, ‘the root of the matter was in her,’ and when the old lady, in confidence of her returning orthodoxy, discussed long and learnedly on the election and perseverance of the saints, the listener would startle her by a burst of feeling, that seemed to her aunt more like the ravings of a demoniac, than the language of a human being, – especially one who had from her youth known the Scriptures, She would say, ‘Dearest aunt, I am not insensible of what you say; from a child, (thanks to your care), I have known the holy scriptures. I have felt the power of religion. At a latter period I have experienced all the enjoyments of an intellectual existence. Surrounded by splendour, I have conversed with enlarged minds, – I have seen all that life can shew me, – I have lived with the mean and the rich, – the spiritual in their poverty, and the wo
rldly-minded in their grandeur, – I have deeply drank of the cup which both modes of existence held to my lip, – and at this moment I swear to you, – one moment of heart, – one dream such as once I dreamed, (and though I should never awake from), is worth all the existence that the earthly-minded lavish on this world, and those who mystify expend on the next!’ – ‘Unfortunate wretch! and undone for everlasting!’ cried the terrified Calvinist, lifting up her hands. – ‘Cease, cease,’ said Elinor with that dignity which grief alone can give, – ‘If I have indeed devoted to an earthly love that which is due to God alone, is not my punishment certain in a future state? Has it not already commenced here? May not then all reproaches be spared when we are suffering more than human enmity can wish us, – when our very existence is a bitterer reproach to us than malignity can utter?’ – As she spoke, she added, wiping a cold tear from her wasted cheek, ‘My stroke is heavier than my groaning!’

  ‘“At other times she appeared to listen to the language of the Puritan preachers (for all were preachers who frequented the house) with some appearance of attention, and then, rushing from them without any conviction but that of despair, exclaimed in her haste, ‘All men are liars!’ Thus it fares with those who wish to make an instant transition from one world to another, – it is impossible, – the cold wave interposes – for ever interposes, between the wilderness and the land of promise – and we may as soon expect to tread the threshold which parts life and death without pain, as to cross the interval which separates two modes of existence so distinct as those of passion and religion, without struggles of the soul inexpressible – without groanings which cannot be uttered.