At these words, Melmoth advanced and gazed on her more closely. Anything of intense and terrible resolution—of feeling or action in extremity—made harmony with the powerful but disordered chords of his soul. He required her to repeat the words—she did so, with quivering lip, but unfaltering voice. He advanced still nearer to gaze on her as she spoke. It was a beautiful and fearful sight to see her as she stood;—her marble face—her moveless features—her eyes in which burned the fixed and livid light of despair, like a lamp in a sepulchral vault—the lips that half opened, and remaining unclosed, appeared as if the speaker was unconscious of the words that had escaped them, or rather, as if they had burst forth by involuntary and incontrollable impulse;—so she stood, like a statue, at her casement, the moonlight giving her white drapery the appearance of stone, and her wrought-up and determined mind lending the same rigidity to her expression. Melmoth himself felt confounded—appalled he could not feel. He retreated, and then returning, demanded, “Is this your resolution, Isidora?—and have you indeed resolution to—”
“To die!” answered Isidora, with the same unaltered accent—the same calm expression—and seeming, as she spake, capable of all she expressed; and this union, in the same slight and tender form, of those eternal competitors, energy and fragility, beauty and death, made every human pulse in Melmoth’s frame beat with a throbbing unknown before.
“Can you, then,” he said, with averted head, and in a tone that seemed ashamed of its own softness—“Can you, then, die for him you will not live for?”
“I have said I will die sooner than be the bride of Montilla,” answered Isidora. “Of death I know nothing, nor do I know much of life—but I would rather perish, than be the perjured wife of the man I cannot love.”
“And why can you not love him?” said Melmoth, toying with the heart he held in his hand, like a mischievous boy with a bird, around whose leg he has fastened a string.
“Because I can love but one. You were the first human being I ever saw who could teach me language, and who taught me feeling. Your image is forever before me, present or absent, sleeping or waking. I have seen fairer forms—I have listened to softer voices—I might have met gentler hearts—but the first, the indelible image, is written on mine, and its characters will never be effaced till that heart is a clod of the valley. I loved you not for comeliness—I loved you not for gay deportment, or fond language, or all that is said to be lovely in the eye of woman—I loved you because you were my first—the sole connecting link between the human world and my heart—the being who brought me acquainted with that wondrous instrument that lay unknown and untouched within and me, whose chords, as long as they vibrate, will disdain to obey any touch but that of their first mover—because your image is mixed in my imagination with all the glories of nature—because your voice, when I heard it first, was something in accordance with the murmur of the ocean, and the music of the stars. And still its tones recall the unimaginable blessedness of those scenes where first I heard it—and still I listen to it like an exile who hears the music of his native country in a land that is very far off—because nature and passion, memory and hope, alike cling round your image; and amid the light of my former existence, and the gloom of my present, there is but one form that retains its reality and its power through light and shade. I am like one who has traversed many climates, and looks but to one sun as the light of all, whether bright or obscure. I have loved once—and forever!” Then, trembling at the words she uttered, she added, with that sweet mixture of maiden pride and purity that redeems while it pledges the hostage of the heart, “The feelings I have entrusted you with may be abused, but never alienated.”
“And these are your real feelings?” said Melmoth, pausing long, and moving his frame like one agitated by deep and uneasy thoughts.
“Real!” repeated Isidora, with some transient glow on her cheek—“real! Can I utter anything but what is real? Can I so soon forget my existence?”
Melmoth looked up once more as she spoke—“If such is your resolution—if such be your feelings indeed—”
“And they are!—they are!” exclaimed Isidora, her tears bursting through the slender fingers, which, after extending towards him, she clasped over her burning eyes.
“Then look to the alternative that awaits you!” said Melmoth slowly, bringing out the words with difficulty, and, as it appeared, with some feeling for his victim; “a union with the man you cannot love—or the perpetual hostility, the wearying, wasting, almost annihilating persecution of your family! Think of days that—”
“Oh let me not think!” cried Isidora, wringing her white and slender hands; “tell me—tell me what may be done to escape them!”
“Now, in good troth,” answered Melmoth, knitting his brows with a most cogitative wrinkle, while it was impossible to discover whether his predominant expression was that of irony or profound and sincere feeling—“I know not what resource you have unless you wed me.”
“Wed you!” cried Isidora, retreating from the window—“Wed you!” and she clasped her hands over her pale forehead;—and at this moment, when the hope of her heart, the thread on which her existence was suspended, was within her reach, she trembled to touch it. “Wed you!—but how is that possible?”
“All things are possible to those who love,” said Melmoth, with his sardonic smile, which was hid by the shades of the night.
“And you will wed me, then, by the rites of the church of which I am a member?”
“Aye! or of any other!”
“Oh speak not so wildly!—say not aye in that horrible voice! Will you wed me as a Christian maiden should be wed?—Will you love me as a Christian wife should be
