“By all that you deem holy!” cried Melmoth, humbling himself even to kneel before her as she stood—“my intentions are as pure as your own soul!—the hermitage is not an hundred paces off. Come, and do not, by a fantastic and causeless apprehension, frustrate all the magnanimity and tenderness you have hitherto showed, and which have raised you in my eyes not only above your sex, but above your whole species. Had you not been what you are, and what no other but you could be, you had never been the bride of Melmoth. With whom but you did he ever seek to unite his dark and inscrutable destiny? Isidora,” he added, in tones more potent and emphatic, perceiving she still hesitated, and clung to the tree—“Isidora, how weak, how unworthy of you is this! You are in my power—absolutely, hopelessly in my power. No human eye can see me—no human arm can aid you. You are as helpless as infancy in my grasp. This dark stream would tell no tales of deeds that stained its waters—and the blast that howls round you would never waft your groans to mortal ear! You are in my power, yet I seek not to abuse it. I offer you my hand to conduct you to a consecrated building, where we shall be united according to the fashion of your country—and will you still persevere in this fanciful and profitless waywardness?”
As he spoke, Isidora looked round her helplessly—every object was a confirmation of his arguments—she shuddered and submitted. But as they walked on in silence, she could not help interrupting it to give utterance to the thousand anxieties that oppressed her heart.
“But you speak,” said she, in a suppressed and pleading tone—“you speak of religion in words that make me tremble—you speak of it as the fashion of a country—as a thing of form, of accident, of habit. What faith do you profess?—what church do you frequent?—what holy rites do you perform?”
“I venerate all faiths—alike, I hold all religious rites—pretty much in the same respect,” said Melmoth, while his former wild and scoffing levity seemed to struggle vainly with a feeling of involuntary horror.
“And do you then, indeed, believe in holy things?” asked Isidora. “Do you indeed?” she repeated anxiously.
“I believe in a God,” answered Melmoth, in a voice that froze her blood; “you have heard of those who believe and tremble—such is he who speaks to you!”
Isidora’s acquaintance with the book from which he quoted, was too limited to permit her to understand the allusion. She knew, according to the religious education she had received, more of her breviary than her Bible; and though she pursued her inquiry in a timid and anxious tone, she felt no additional terror from words she did not understand.
“But,” she continued, “Christianity is something more than a belief in a God. Do you also believe in all that the Catholic church declares to be essential to salvation? Do you believe that—” And here she added a name too sacred, and accompanied with terms too awful, to be expressed in pages so light as these.51
“I believe it all—I know it all,” answered Melmoth, in a voice of stern and reluctant confession. “Infidel and scoffer as I may appear to you, there is no martyr of the Christian church, who in other times blazed for his God, that has borne or exhibited a more resplendent illustration of his faith, than I shall bear one day—and forever. There is a slight difference only between our testimonies in point of duration. They burned for the truths they loved for a few moments—not so many perchance. Some were suffocated before the flames could reach them—but I am doomed to bear my attestation to the truth of the gospel, amid fires that shall burn forever and ever. See with what a glorious destiny yours, my bride, is united! You, as a Christian, would doubtless exult to see your husband at the stake—and amid the faggots to prove his devotion. How it must ennoble the sacrifice to think that it is to last to eternity!”
Melmoth uttered these words in ears that heard no longer. Isidora had fainted; and hanging with one cold hand on his arm still, fell a helpless, senseless weight on the earth. Melmoth, at this sight, showed more feeling than he could have been suspected of. He disentangled her from the folds of her mantle, sprinkled water from the stream on her cold cheek, and supported her frame in every direction where a breath of air was to be caught. Isidora recovered; for her swoon was that of fatigue more than fear; and, with her recovery, her lover’s short-lived tenderness seemed to cease. The moment she was able to speak he urged her to proceed—and while she feebly attempted to obey him, he assured her, her strength was perfectly recovered, and that the place they had to reach was but a few paces distant. Isidora struggled on. Their path now lay up the ascent of a steep hill—they left the murmur of the stream, and the sighing of trees, behind them—the wind, too, had sunk, but the night continued intensely dark—and the absence of all sound seemed to Isidora to increase the desolateness of the scene. She wished for something to listen to beside her impeded and painful respiration, and the audible beatings
