“Yes, I am yours; but you must solicit my family.”
“Oh, doubtless!—solicitation is so congenial to my habits.”
“And—”
“Well, what?—you hesitate.”
“I hesitate,” said the ingenuous and timid Isidora, “because—”
“Well?”
“Because,” she added, bursting into tears, “those with whom you speak will not utter to God language like mine. They will speak to you of wealth and dower; they will inquire about that region where you have told me your rich and wide possessions are held; and should they ask me of them, how shall I answer?”
At these words, Melmoth approached as close as possible to the casement, and uttered a certain word which Isidora did not at first appear to hear, or understand—trembling she repeated her request. In a still lower tone the answer was returned. Incredulous, and hoping that the answer had deceived her, she again repeated her petition. A withering monosyllable, not to be told, thundered in her ears—and she shrieked as she closed the casement. Alas! the casement only shut out the form of the stranger—not his image.
XXI
He saw the eternal fire that keeps,
In the unfathomable deeps,
Its power forever, and made a sign
To the morning prince divine;
Who came across the sulphurous flood,
Obedient to the master-call,
And in angel-beauty stood,
High on his starlit pedestal.
In this part of the manuscript, which I read in the vault of Adonijah the Jew, (said Monçada, continuing his narrative), there were several pages destroyed, and the contents of many following wholly obliterated—nor could Adonijah supply the deficiency. From the next pages that were legible, it appeared that Isidora imprudently continued to permit her mysterious visitor to frequent the garden at night, and to converse with him from the casement, though unable to prevail on him to declare himself to her family, and perhaps conscious that his declaration would not be too favourably received. Such, at least, appeared to be the meaning of the next lines I could decipher.
She had renewed, in these nightly conferences, her former visionary existence. Her whole day was but a long thought of the hour at which she expected to see him. In the daytime she was silent, pensive, abstracted, feeding on thought—with the evening her spirits perceptibly though softly rose, like those of one who has a secret and incommunicable store of delight; and her mind became like that flower that unfolds its leaves, and diffuses its odours, only on the approach of night.
The season favoured this fatal delusion. It was that rage of summer when we begin to respire only towards evening, and the balmy and brilliant night is our day. The day itself is passed in a languid and feverish doze. At night alone she existed—at her moonlit casement alone she breathed freely; and never did the moonlight fall on a lovelier form, or gild a more angelic brow, or gleam on eyes that returned more pure and congenial rays. The mutual and friendly light seemed like the correspondence of spirits who glided on the alternate beams, and, passing from the glow of the planet to the glory of a mortal eye, felt that to reside in either was heaven.
She lingered at that casement till she imagined that the clipped and artificially straightened treillage of the garden was the luxuriant and undulating foliage of the trees of her paradise isle—that the flowers had the same odour as that of the untrained and spontaneous roses that once showered their leaves under her naked feet—that the birds sung to her as they had once done when the vesper-hymn of her pure heart ascended along with their closing notes, and formed the holiest and most acceptable anthem that perhaps ever wooed the evening-breeze to waft it to heaven.
This delusion would soon cease. The stiff and stern monotony of the parterre, where even the productions of nature held their place as if under the constraint of duty, forced the conviction of its unnatural regularity on her eye and soul, and she turned to heaven for relief. Who does not, even in the first sweet agony of passion? Then we tell that tale to heaven which we would not trust to the ear of mortal—and in the withering hour that must come to all whose love is only mortal, we again call on that heaven which we have entrusted with our secret, to send us back one bright messenger of consolation on those thousand rays that its bright, and cold, and passionless orbs, are forever pouring on the earth as if in mockery. We ask, but is the petition heard or answered? We weep, but do not we feel that those tears are like rain falling on the sea? Mare infructuosum. No matter. Revelation assures us there is a period coming, when all petitions suited to our state shall be granted, and when “tears shall be wiped from all eyes.” In revelation, then, let us trust—in anything but our own hearts. But Isidora had not yet learned that theology of the skies, whose text is, “Let us go into the house of mourning.” To her still the night was day, and her sun was the “moon walking in its brightness.” When she beheld it, the recollections of the isle rushed on her heart like a flood; and a figure soon appeared to recall and to realize them.
That figure appeared to her every night without disturbance or interruption; and though her knowledge of the severe restraint and regularity of the household caused her some surprise at the facility with which Melmoth apparently defied both, and visited the garden every night, yet such was the influence of her former dreamlike and romantic existence, that his continued presence, under circumstances so extraordinary, never drew from her a question with regard to the means by which he was enabled to surmount difficulties insurmountable to all others.
There were, indeed, two extraordinary circumstances attendant on these meetings. Though seeing each other again in Spain, after an interval of three years elapsing since
