“Hush!—hush!—Oh forbear such horrid sounds! Are you indeed he whom I saw in the isle? Are you he, inwoven ever since that moment with my prayers, my hopes, my heart? Are you that being upon whom hope subsisted, when life itself was failing? On my passage to this Christian land, I suffered much. I was so ill you would have pitied me—the clothes they put on me—the language they made me speak—the religion they made me believe—the country they brought me to—Oh you!—you alone!—the thought—the image of you, could alone have supported me! I loved, and to love is to live. Amid the disruption of every natural tie—amid the loss of that delicious existence which seems a dream, and which still fills my dreams, and makes sleep a second existence—I have thought of you—have dreamt of you—have loved you!”
“Loved me?—no being yet loved me but pledged me in tears.”
“And have I not wept?” said Isidora—“believe these tears—they are not the first I have shed, nor I fear will be the last, since I owe the first to you.” And she wept as she spoke.
“Well,” said the wanderer, with a bitter and self-satirizing laugh, “I shall be persuaded at last that I am ‘a marvellous proper man.’ Well, if it must be so, happy man be his dole! And when shall the auspicious day, beautiful Immalee, still beautiful Isidora, in spite of your Christian name (to which I have a most anti-catholic objection)—when shall that bright day dawn on your long slumbering eyelashes, and waken them with kisses, and beams, and light, and love, and all the paraphernalia with which folly arrays misery previous to their union—that glittering and empoisoned drapery that well resembles what of old Dejanira sent to her husband—when shall the day of bliss be?” And he laughed with that horrible convulsion that mingles the expression of levity with that of despair, and leaves the listener no doubt whether there is more despair in laughter, or more laughter in despair.
“I understand you not,” said the pure and timid Isidora; “and if you would not terrify me to madness, laugh no more—no more, at least, in that fearful way!”
“I cannot weep,” said Melmoth, fixing on her his dry and burning eyes, strikingly visible in the moonlight; “the fountain of tears has been long dried up within me, like that of every other human blessing.”
“I can weep for both,” said Isidora, “if that be all.” And her tears flowed fast, as much from memory as from grief—and when those sources are united, God and the sufferer only know how fast and bitterly they fall.
“Reserve them for our nuptial hour, my lovely bride,” said Melmoth to himself; “you will have occasion for them then.”
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 tragedy49 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 faltered 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
