When at length she saw him—when she said to herself, He is there—she felt as if all the felicity of earth was comprised in that single sensation—at least she felt that all her own was. She no longer indulged the wish to attract or to subdue him—absorbed in his existence, she forgot her own—immersed in the consciousness of her own felicity, she lost the wish, or rather the pride, of bestowing it. In the impassioned revelry of the heart, she flung the pearl of existence into the draught in which she pledged her lover, and saw it melt away without a sigh. But now she was beginning to feel, that for this intensity of feeling, this profound devotedness, she was entitled at least to an honourable acknowledgement on the part of her lover; and that the mysterious delay in which her existence was wasted, might make that acknowledgement come perhaps too late. She expressed this to him; but to these appeals (not the least affecting of which had no language but that of looks), he replied only by a profound but uneasy silence, or by a levity whose wild and frightful sallies had something in them still more alarming.
At times he appeared even to insult the heart over which he had triumphed, and to affect to doubt his conquest with the air of one who is revelling in its certainty, and who mocks the captive by asking “if it is really in chains?”
“You do not love?” he would say;—“you cannot love me at least. Love, in your happy Christian country, must be the result of cultivated taste—of harmonized habits—of a felicitous congeniality of pursuits—of thought, and hopes, and feelings, that, in the sublime language of the Jewish poet (prophet I meant), ‘tell and certify to each other; and though they have neither speech or language, a voice is heard among them.’ You cannot love a being repulsive in his appearance—eccentric in his habits—wild and unsearchable in his feelings—and inaccessible in the settled purpose of his fearful and fearless existence. No,” he added in a melancholy and decided tone of voice, “you cannot love me under the circumstances of your new existence. Once—but that is past.—You are now a baptized daughter of the Catholic church—the member of a civilized community—the child of a family that knows not the stranger. What, then, is there between me and thee, Isidora, or, as your Fra Jose would phrase it (if he knows so much Greek), τι εμοι και σοι.”
“I loved you,” answered the Spanish maiden, speaking in the same pure, firm, and tender voice in which she had spoken when she first was the sole goddess of her fairy and flowery isle; “I loved you before I was a Christian. They have changed my creed—but they never can change my heart. I love you still—I will be yours forever! On the shore of the desolate isle—from the grated window of my Christian prison—I utter the same sounds. What can woman, what can man, in all the boasted superiority of his character and feeling (which I have learned only since I became a Christian, or a European), do more? You but insult me when you appear to doubt that feeling, which you may wish to have analysed, because you do not experience or cannot comprehend it. Tell me, then, what it is to love? I defy all your eloquence, all your sophistry, to answer the question as truly as I can. If you would wish to know what is love, inquire not at the tongue of man, but at the heart of woman.”
“What is love?” said Melmoth; “is that the question?”
“You doubt that I love,” said Isidora—“tell me, then, what is love?”
“You have imposed on me a task,” said Melmoth smiling, but not in mirth, “so congenial to my feelings and habits of thought, that the execution will doubtless be inimitable. To love, beautiful Isidora, is to live in a world of the heart’s own creation—all whose forms and colours are as brilliant as they are deceptive and unreal. To those who love there is neither day or night, summer or winter, society or solitude. They have but two eras in their delicious but visionary existence—and those are thus marked in the heart’s calendar—presence—absence. These are the substitutes for all the distinctions of nature and society. The world to them contains but one individual—and that individual is to them the world as well as its single inmate. The atmosphere of his presence is the only air they can breathe in—and the light of his eye the only sun of their creation, in whose rays they bask and live.”
“Then I love,” said Isidora internally.
“To love,” pursued Melmoth, “is to live in an existence of perpetual contradictions—to feel that absence is insupportable, and yet be doomed to experience the presence of the object as almost equally so—to be full of ten thousand thoughts while he is absent, the confession of which we dream will render our next meeting delicious, yet when the hour of meeting arrives, to feel ourselves, by a timidity alike oppressive and unaccountable, robbed of the power of expressing one—to be eloquent in his absence, and dumb in his presence—to watch for the hour of his return as for the dawn of a new existence, yet when it arrives, to feel all those powers suspended which we imagined it would restore to energy—to be the statue that meets the sun, but without the music his presence should draw from it—to watch for the light of his looks, as a traveller in the deserts looks for the rising of the sun; and when it bursts on our awakened world, to sink fainting under its overwhelming and intolerable glory, and almost wish it were night again—this is love!”
“Then I believe I love,” said Isidora half audibly.
“To feel,” added Melmoth with increasing energy, “that our existence is so absorbed in
