Note (22) — Chapter XX

“There was a custom then, however indelicate and repulsive it may sound to modern ears, for ladies who were doubtful of the intentions of their lovers to demand of them the proof of their purity and honour, by requiring an appeal to their family, and a solemn union under the sanction of the church. Perhaps there was more genuine spirit of truth and chastity in this, than in all the ambiguous flirtation that is carried on with an ill-understood and mysterious dependence on principles that have never been defined, and fidelity that has never been removed. When the lady in the Italian tragedy(22) asks her lover, almost at their first interview, if his intentions are honourable, and requires, as the proof of their being so, that he shall espouse her immediately, does she not utter a language more unsophisticated, more intelligible, more heartedly pure, than all the romantic and incredible reliance that other females are supposed to place in the volatility of impulse,—in that wild and extemporaneous feeling,—that “house on the sands,”—which never has its foundation in the immoveable depths of the heart. Yielding to this feeling, Isidora, in a voice that faultered at its own accents, murmured, “If you love me, seek me no more clandestinely. My mother is good, though she is austere—my brother is kind, though he is passionate—my father—I have never seen him! I know not what to say, but if he be my father, he will love you. Meet me in their presence, and I will no longer feel pain and shame mingled with the delight of seeing you. Invoke the sanction of the church, and then, perhaps,”—— “Perhaps!” retorted Melmoth; “You have learned the European ‘perhaps!’—the art of suspending the meaning of an emphatic word—of affecting to draw the curtain of the heart at the moment you drop its folds closer and closer—of bidding us despair at the moment you intend we should feel hope!”—“Oh no!—no!” answered the innocent being; “I am truth. I am Immalee when I speak to you,—though to all others in this country, which they call Christian, I am Isidora. When I loved you first, I had only one heart to consult,—now there are many, and some who have not hearts like mine. But if you love me, you can bend to them as I have done—you can love their God, their home, their hopes, and their country. Even with you I could not be happy, unless you adored the cross to which your hand first pointed my wandering sight, and the religion which you reluctantly confessed was the most beautiful and beneficent on earth.”—“Did I confess that?” echoed Melmoth; “It must have been reluctantly indeed. Beautiful Immalee! I am a convert to you;” and he stifled a Satanic laugh as he spoke; “to your new religion, and your beauty, and your Spanish birth and nomenclature, and every thing that you would wish. I will incontinently wait on your pious mother, and angry brother, and all your relatives, testy, proud, and ridiculous as they may be. I will encounter the starched ruffs, and rustling manteaus, and whale-boned fardingales of the females, from your good mother down to the oldest duenna who sits spectacled, and armed with bobbin, on her inaccessible and untempted sopha; and the twirled whiskers, plumed hats, and shouldered capas of all your male relatives. And I will drink chocolate, and strut among them; and when they refer me to your mustachoed man of law, with his thread-bare cloke of black velvet over his shoulder, his long quill in his hand, and his soul in three sheets of wide-spread parchment, I will dower you in the most ample territory ever settled on a bride.”—“Oh let it be, then, in that land of music and sunshine where we first met! One spot where I might set my foot amid its flowers, is worth all the cultivated earth of Europe!” said Isidora.—“No!—it shall be in a territory with which your bearded men of law are far better acquainted, and which even your pious mother and proud family must acknowledge my claim to, when they shall hear it asserted and explained. Perchance they may be joint-tenants with me there; and yet (strange to say!) they will never litigate my exclusive title to possession.”—“I understand nothing of this,” said Isidora; “but I feel I am transgressing the decorums of a Spanish female and a Christian, in holding this conference with you any longer. If you think as you once thought,—if you feel as I must feel for ever,—there needs not this discussion, which only perplexes and terrifies. What have I to do with this territory of which you speak? That you are its possessor, is its only value in my eyes!”—“What have you to do with it?” repeated Melmoth; “Oh, you know not how much you may have to do with it and me yet! In other cases, the possession of the territory is the security for the man,—but here the man is the security for the everlasting possession of the territory. Mine heirs must inherit it for ever and ever, if they hold by my tenure. Listen to me, beautiful Immalee, or Christian, or whatever other name you choose to be called by! Nature, your first sponsor, baptized you with the dews of Indian roses—your Christian sponsors, of course, spared not water, salt, or oil, to wash away the stain of nature from your regenerated frame—and your last sponsor, if you will submit to the rite, will anoint you with a new chrism. But of that hereafter. Listen to me while I announce to you the wealth, the population, the magnificence of that region to which I will endower you. The rulers of the earth are there—all of them. There be the heroes, and the sovereigns, and the tyrants. There are their riches, and pomp, and power—Oh what a glorious accumulation!—and they have thrones, and crowns, and pedestals, and trophies of fire, that burn for ever and ever, and the light of their glory blazes eternally. There are all you read of in story, your Alexanders and Cæsars, your Ptolemies and Pharaohs. There be the princes of the East, the Nimrods, the Belshazzars, and the Holoferneses of their day. There are the princes of the North, the Odins, the Attilas, (named by your church the scourge of God), the Alarics, and all those nameless and name-undeserving barbarians, who, under various titles and claims, ravaged and ruined the earth they came to conquer. There be the sovereigns of the South, and East, and West, the Mahommedans, the Caliphs, the Saracens, the Moors, with all their gorgeous pretensions and ornaments—the crescent, the Koran, and the horse-tail—the trump, the gong, and the atabal, (or to suit it to your Christianised ear, lovely Neophyte!) ‘the noise of the captains, and the shoutings.’ There be also those triple-crowned chieftains of the West, who hide their shorn heads under a diadem, and for every hair they shave, demand the life of a sovereign—who, pretending to humility, trample on power—whose title is, Servant of servants—and whose claim and recognizance is, Lord of lords. Oh! you will not lack company in that bright region, for bright it will be!—and what matter whether its light be borrowed from the gleam of sulphur, or the trembling light of the moon, by which I see you look so pale?”—“I look pale!” said Isidora gasping; “I feel pale! I know not the meaning of your words, but I know it must be horrible. Speak no more of that region, with its pride, its wickedness, and its splendour! I am willing to follow you to deserts, to solitudes, which human step never trod but yours, and where mine shall trace, with sole fidelity, the print of yours. Amid loneliness I was born; amid loneliness I could die. Let me but, wherever I live, and whenever I die, be yours!—and for the place, it matters not, let it be even”—— and she shivered involuntarily as she spoke; “Let it be even”—— “Even—where?” asked Melmoth, while a wild feeling of triumph in the devotedness of this unfortunate female, and of horror at the destination which she was unconsciously imprecating on herself, mingled in the question. “Even where you are to be,” answered the devoted Isidora, “let me be there! and there I must be happy, as in the isle of flowers and sun-light, where I first beheld you. Oh! there are no flowers so balmy and roseate as those that once blew there! There are no waters so musical, or breezes so fragrant, as those that I listened to and inhaled, when I thought that they repeated to me the echo of your steps, or the melody of your voice—that human music the first I ever heard, and which, when I cease to hear”—— “You will hear much better!” interrupted Melmoth; “the voices of ten thousand—ten millions of spirits—beings whose tones are immortal, without cessation, without pause, without interval!”—“Oh that will be glorious!” said Isidora, clasping her hands; “the only language I have learned in this new world worth speaking, is the language of music. I caught some imperfect sounds from birds in my first world, but in my second world they taught me music; and the misery they have taught me, hardly makes a balance against that new and delicious language.”—“But think,” rejoined Melmoth, “if your taste for music be indeed so exquisite, how it will be indulged, how it will be enlarged, in hearing those voices accompanied and re-echoed by the thunders of ten thousand billows of fire, lashing against rocks which eternal despair has turned into adamant! They talk of the music of the spheres!—Dream of the music of those living orbs turning on their axis of fire for ever and ever, and ever singing as they shine, like your brethren the Christians, who had the honour to illuminate Nero’s garden in Rome on a rejoicing night.”—“You make me tremble!”—“Tremble!—a strange effect of fire. Fie! what a coyness is this! I have promised, on your arrival at your new territory, all that is mighty and magnificent,—all that is splendid and voluptuous—the sovereign and the sensualist—the inebriated monarch and the pampered slave—the bed of roses and the canopy of fire!”—“And is this the home to which you invite me?”—“It is—it is. Come, and be mine!—myriads of voices summon you—hear and obey them! Their voices thunder in the echoes of mine—their fires flash from my eyes, and blaze in my heart. Hear me, Isidora, my beloved, hear me! I woo you in earnest, and for ever! Oh how trivial are the ties by which mortal lovers are bound, compared to those in which you and I shall be bound to eternity! Fear not the want of a numerous and splendid society. I have enumerated sovereigns, and pontiffs, and heroes,—and if you should condescend to remember the trivial amusements of your present sejour, you will have enough to revive its associations. You love music, and doubtless you will have most of the musicians who have chromatized since the first essays of Tubal Cain to Lully, who beat himself to death at one of his own oratorios, or operas, I don’t know which. They will have a singular accompaniment—the eternal roar of a sea of fire makes a profound bass to the chorus of millions of singers in torture!”—“What is the meaning of this horrible description?” said the trembling Isidora; “your words are riddles to me. Do you jest with me for the sake of tormenting, or of laughing at me?”—“Laughing!” repeated her wild visitor; “that is an exquisite hint—vive la bagatelle! Let us laugh for ever!—we shall have enough to keep us in countenance. There will be all that ever have dared to laugh on earth—the singers, the dancers, the gay, the voluptuous, the brilliant, the beloved—all who have ever dared to mistake their destiny, so far as to imagine that enjoyment was not a crime, or that a smile was not an infringement of their duty as sufferers. All such must expiate their error under circumstances which will probably compel the most inveterate disciple of Democritus, the most inextinguishable laugher among them, to allow that there, at least, ‘laughter is madness.’”—“I do not understand you,” said Isidora, listening to him with that sinking of the heart which is produced by a combined and painful feeling of ignorance and terror. “Not understand me?” repeated Melmoth, with that sarcastic frigidity of countenance which frightfully contrasted the burning intelligence of his eyes, that seemed like the fires of a volcano bursting out amid masses of snow heaped up to its very edge; “not understand me!—are you not, then, fond of music?”—“I am.”—“Of dancing, too, my graceful, beautiful love?”—“I was.”—“What is the meaning of the different emphasis you give to those answers?”—“I love music—I must love it for ever—it is the language of recollection. A single strain of it wafts me back to the dreamy blessedness, the enchanted existence, of my own—own isle. Of dancing I cannot say so much. I have learnt dancing—but I felt music. I shall never forget the hour when I heard it for the first time, and imagined it was the language which Christians spoke to each other. I have heard them speak a different language since.”—“Doubtless their language is not always melody, particularly when they address each other on controverted points in religion. Indeed, I can conceive nothing less a-kin to harmony than the debate of a Dominican and Franciscan on the respective efficacy of the cowl of the order, to ascertain the salvation of him who happens to die in it. But have you no other reason for being fond of music, and for only having been fond of dancing? Nay, let me have ‘your most exquisite reason.’”