This had been her hope during the earlier period of his visits; but innocent and flattering to its object as it was, she was disappointed. To Melmoth “nothing was new under the sun.” Talent was to him a burden. He knew more than man could tell him, or woman either. Accomplishments were a bauble—the rattle teased his ear, and he flung it away. Beauty was a flower he looked on only to scorn, and touched only to wither. Wealth and distinction he appreciated as they deserved, but not with the placid disdain of the philosopher, or the holy abstraction of the saint, but with that “fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation,” to which he believed their possessors irreversibly devoted, and to the infliction of which he looked forward with perhaps a feeling like that of those executioners who, at the command of Mithridates, poured the melted ore of his golden chains down the throat of the Roman ambassador.
With such feelings, and others that cannot be told, Melmoth experienced an indescribable relief from the eternal fire that was already kindled within him, in the perfect and unsullied freshness of what may be called the untrodden verdure of Immalee’s heart—for she was Immalee still to him. She was the oasis of his desert—the fountain at which he drank, and forgot his passage over the burning sands—and the burning sands to which his passage must conduct him. He sat under the shade of the gourd, and forgot the worm was working at its root;—perhaps the undying worm that gnawed, and coiled, and festered in his own heart, might have made him forget the corrosions of that he himself had sown in hers.
Isidora, before the second week of their interview, had lowered her pretensions. She had given up the hope to interest or to dazzle—that hope which is twin-born with love in the purest female heart. She now had concentrated all her hopes, and all her heart, no longer in the ambition to be beloved, but in the sole wish to love. She no longer alluded to the enlargement of her faculties, the acquisition of new powers, and the expansion and cultivation of her taste. She ceased to speak—she sought only to listen—then her wish subsided into that quiet listening for his form alone, which seemed to transfer the office of hearing into the eyes, or rather, to identify both. She saw him long before he appeared—and heard him though he did not speak. They have been in each other’s presence for the short hours of a Spanish summer’s night—Isidora’s eyes alternately fixed on the sun-like moon, and on her mysterious lover—while he, without uttering a word, leaned against the pillars of her balcony, or the trunk of the giant myrtle-tree, which cast the shade he loved, even by night, over his portentous expression—and they never uttered a word to each other, till the waving of Isidora’s hand, as the dawn appeared, was the tacit signal for their parting.
This is the marked graduation of profound feeling. Language is no longer necessary to those whose beating hearts converse audibly—whose eyes, even by moonlight, are more intelligible to each other’s stolen and shadowed glances, than the broad converse of face to face in the brightest sunshine—to whom, in the exquisite inversion of earthly feeling and habit, darkness is light, and silence eloquence.
At their last interviews, Isidora sometimes spoke—but it was only to remind her lover, in a soft and chastened tone, of a promise which it seems he had at one time made of disclosing himself to her parents, and demanding her at their hands. Something she murmured also of her declining health—her exhausted spirits—her breaking heart—the long delay—the hope deferred—the mysterious meeting; and while she spoke she wept, but hid her tears from him.
It is thus, oh God! we are doomed (and justly doomed when we fix our hearts on anything below thee) to feel those hearts repelled like the dove who hovered over the shoreless ocean, and found not a spot where her foot might rest—not a green leaf to bring back in her beak. Oh that the ark of mercy may open to such souls, and receive them from that stormy world of deluge and of wrath, with which they are unable to contend, and where they can find no resting-place!
Isidora now had arrived at the last stage of that painful pilgrimage through which she had been led by a stern and reluctant guide.
In its first, with the innocent and venial art of woman, she had tried to interest him by the display of her new acquirements, without the consciousness that they were not new to him. The harmony of civilized society, of which she was at once weary and proud, was discord to his ear. He had examined all the strings that formed this curious but ill-constructed instrument, and found them all false.
In the second, she was satisfied with merely beholding him. His presence formed the atmosphere of her existence—in it alone she breathed. She said to herself, as evening approached, “I shall see him!”—and the burden of life rolled from her heart as she internally uttered the words. The constraint, the gloom, the monotony of her existence, vanished like clouds at the sun, or rather like those clouds assuming such gorgeous and resplendent colours, that they seemed to have been painted by the finger of happiness itself. The brilliant hue diffused itself over every object of her eye and heart. Her mother appeared no longer a cold and gloomy bigot, and even her brother seemed kind. There was not a tree in the garden whose foliage was not illumined as by the light of a setting sun; and
