As Doña Clara and the priest (on their tenth perusal of the letter) arrived at these words, the clock in the hall below struck three.
“That is a singular coincidence,” said Fra Jose.
“Do you think it nothing more, Father?” said Doña Clara, turning very pale.
“I know not,” said the priest; “many have told credible stories of warnings permitted by our guardian saints, to be given even by the ministry of inanimate things. But to what purpose are we warned, when we know not the evil we are to shun?”
“Hush!—hark!” said Doña Clara, “did you hear no noise?”
“None,” said Fra Jose listening, not without some appearance of perturbation—“None,” he added, in a more tranquil and assured voice, after a pause; “and the noise which I did hear about two hours ago, was of short continuance, and has not been renewed.”
“What a flickering light these tapers give!” said Doña Clara, viewing them with eyes glassy and fixed with fear.
“The casements are open,” answered the priest.
“So they have been since we sat here,” returned Doña Clara; “yet now see what a stream of air comes rushing against them! Holy God! they flare as if they would go out!”
The priest, looking up at the tapers, observed the truth of what she said—and at the same time perceived the tapestry near the door to be considerably agitated. “There is a door open in some other direction,” said he, rising.
“You are not going to leave me, Father?” said Doña Clara, who sat in her chair paralyzed with terror, and unable to follow him but with her eyes.
The Father Jose made no answer. He was now in the passage, where a circumstance which he observed had arrested all his attention—the door of Isidora’s apartment was open, and lights were burning in it. He entered it slowly at first, and gazed around, but its inmate was not there. He glanced his eye on the bed, but no human form had pressed it that night—it lay untouched and undisturbed. The casement next caught his eye, now glancing with the quickness of fear on every object. He approached it—it was wide open—the casement that looked towards the garden. In his horror at this discovery, the good Father could not avoid uttering a cry that pierced the ears of Doña Clara, who, trembling and scarce able to make her way to the room, attempted to follow him in vain, and fell down in the passage. The priest raised and tried to assist her back to her own apartment. The wretched mother, when at last placed in her chair, neither fainted or wept; but with white and speechless lips, and a paralytic motion of her hand, tried to point towards her daughter’s apartment, as if she wished to be conveyed there.
“It is too late,” said the priest, unconsciously using the ominous words quoted in the letter of Don Francisco.
XXIV
Responde meum argumentum—nomen est nomen—ergo, quod tibi est nomen—responde argumentum.
Beaumont and Fletcher’s Wit at Several Weapons
That night was the one fixed on for the union of Isidora and Melmoth. She had retired early to her chamber, and sat at the casement watching for his approach for hours before she could probably expect it. It might be supposed that at this terrible crisis of her fate, she felt agitated by a thousand emotions—that a soul susceptible like hers felt itself almost torn in pieces by the struggle—but it was not so. When a mind strong by nature, but weakened by fettering circumstances, is driven to make one strong spring to free itself, it has no leisure to calculate the weight of its hindrances, or the width of its leap—it sits with its chains heaped about it, thinking only of the bound that is to be its liberation—or—
During the many hours that Isidora awaited the approach of this mysterious bridegroom, she felt nothing but the awful sense of that approach, and of the event that was to follow. So she sat at her casement, pale but resolute, and trusting in the extraordinary promise of Melmoth, that by whatever means he was enabled to visit her, by those she would be enabled to effect her escape, in spite of her well-guarded mansion, and vigilant household.
It was near one (the hour at which Fra Jose, who was sitting in consultation with her mother over that melancholy letter, heard the noise alluded to in the preceding chapter) when Melmoth appeared in the garden, and, without uttering a word, threw up a ladder of ropes, which, in short and sullen whispers, he instructed her to fasten, and assisted her to descend. They hurried through the garden—and Isidora, amid all the novelty of her feelings and situation, could not avoid testifying her surprise at the facility with which they passed through the well-secured garden gate.
They were now in the open country—a region far wilder to Isidora than the flowery paths of that untrodden isle, where she had no enemy. Now in every breeze she heard a menacing voice—in the echoes of her own light steps she heard the sound of steps pursuing her.
The night was very dark—unlike the midsummer nights in that delicious climate. A blast sometimes cold, sometimes stifling from heat, indicated some extraordinary vicissitude in the atmosphere. There is something very fearful in this kind of wintry feeling in a summer night. The cold, the darkness, followed by intense heat, and a pale, meteoric lightning, seemed to unite the mingled evils of the various seasons, and to trace their sad analogy to life—whose stormy summer allows youth little to enjoy, and whose chilling winter leaves age nothing to hope.
To Isidora, whose sensibilities were still so acutely physical, that she could feel the state of the elements as if they were the
