“I am married!” answered the victim, rising from beside the corse of her brother. “I am married!” she added, glancing a look at her splendid habit, and displaying it with a frantic laugh. A loud knocking at the garden gate was heard at this moment. “I am married!” shrieked Isidora, “and here comes the witness of my nuptials!”
As she spoke, some peasants from the neighbourhood, assisted by the domestics of Don Aliaga, brought in a corse, so altered from the fearful change that passes on the mortal frame, that the nearest relative could not have known it. Isidora recognized it in a moment for the body of the old domestic who had disappeared so mysteriously on the night of her frightful nuptials. The body had been discovered but that evening by the peasants; it was lacerated as by a fall from rocks, and so disfigured and decayed as to retain no resemblance to humanity. It was recognizable only by the livery of Aliaga, which, though much defaced, was still distinguishable by some peculiarities in the dress, that announced that those defaced garments covered the mortal remains of the old domestic. “There!” cried Isidora with delirious energy—“There is the witness of my fatal marriage!”
Fra Jose hung over the illegible fragments of that whereon nature had once written—“This is a human being,” and, turning his eyes on Isidora, with involuntary horror he exclaimed, “Your witness is dumb!”
As the wretched Isidora was dragged away by those who surrounded her, she felt the first throes of maternal suffering, and exclaimed, “Oh! there will be a living witness—if you permit it to live!” Her words were soon realized; she was conveyed to her apartment, and in a few hours after, scarcely assisted and wholly unpitied by her attendants, gave birth to a daughter.
This event excited a sentiment in the family at once ludicrous and horrible. Aliaga, who had remained in a state of stupefaction since his son’s death, uttered but one exclamation—“Let the wife of the sorcerer, and their accursed offspring, be delivered into the hands of the merciful and holy tribunal, the Inquisition.” He afterwards muttered something about his property being confiscated, but to this nobody paid attention. Doña Clara was almost distracted between compassion for her wretched daughter, and being grandmother to an infant demon, for such she deemed the child of “Melmoth the Wanderer” must be—and Fra Jose, while he baptized the infant with trembling hands, almost expected a fearful sponsor to appear and blast the rite with his horrible negative to the appeal made in the name of all that is holy among Christians. The baptismal ceremony was performed, however, with an omission which the good-natured priest overlooked—there was no sponsor—the lowest domestic in the house declined with horror the proposal of being sponsor for the child of that terrible union. The wretched mother heard them from her bed of pain, and loved her infant better for its utter destitution.
A few hours put an end to the consternation of the family, on the score of religion at least. The officers of the Inquisition arrived, armed with all the powers of their tribunal, and strongly excited by the report, that the Wanderer of whom they had been long in search, had lately perpetrated an act that brought him within the sphere of their jurisdiction, by involving the life of the only being his solitary existence held alliance with. “We hold him by the cords of a man,” said the chief inquisitor, speaking more from what he read than what he felt—“if he burst these cords he is more than man. He has a wife and child, and if there be human elements in him, if there be anything mortal clinging to his heart, we shall wind round the roots of it, and extract it.”
It was not till after some weeks, that Isidora recovered her perfect recollection. When she did, she was in a prison, a pallet of straw was her bed, a crucifix and a death’s head the only furniture of her cell; the light struggled through a narrow grate, and struggled in vain, to cast one gleam on the squalid apartment that it visited and shrunk from. Isidora looked round her—she had light enough to see her child—she clasped it to her bosom, from which it had unconsciously drawn its feverish nourishment, and wept in ecstasy. “It is my own,” she sobbed, “and only mine! It has no father—he is at the ends of the earth—he has left me alone—but I am not alone while you are left to me!”
She was left in solitary confinement for many days, undisturbed and unvisited. The persons in whose hands she was had strong reasons for this mode of treatment. They were desirous that she should recover perfect sanity of intellect previous to her examination, and they also wished to give her time to form that profound attachment to the innocent companion of her solitude, that might be a powerful engine in their hands in discovering those circumstances relative to Melmoth that had hitherto baffled all the power and penetration of the Inquisition itself. All reports agreed that the Wanderer had never before been known to make a woman the object of his temptation, or to entrust her with the terrible secret of his destiny;66 and the Inquisitors were heard to say to each
