Melmoth the Wanderer

had taken the precaution of dismissing the servants to sleep in the adjacent offices, began to fear that those sounds might reach them, and, restless himself from insupportable inquietude, rose and walked up and down the passage that led to that room of horror. As he was thus occupied, he thought he saw a figure at the lower end of the passage. So disturbed was his vision, that he did not at first recognize Monçada. Neither asked the other the reason of his being there⁠—they walked up and down together silently.

In a short time the sounds became so terrible, that scarcely had the awful warning of the Wanderer power to withhold them from attempting to burst into the room. These noises were of the most mixed and indescribable kind. They could not distinguish whether they were the shrieks of supplication, or the yell of blasphemy⁠—they hoped inwardly they might be the former.

Towards morning the sounds suddenly ceased⁠—they were stilled as in a moment. The silence that succeeded seemed to them for a few moments more terrible than all that preceded. After consulting each other by a glance, they hastened together to the apartment. They entered⁠—it was empty⁠—not a vestige of its last inhabitant was to be traced within.

After looking around in fruitless amazement, they perceived a small door opposite to that by which they had entered. It communicated with a back staircase, and was open. As they approached it, they discovered the traces of footsteps that appeared to be those of a person who had been walking in damp sand or clay. These traces were exceedingly plain⁠—they followed them to a door that opened on the garden⁠—that door was open also. They traced the footmarks distinctly through the narrow gravel walk, which was terminated by a broken fence, and opened on a heathy field which spread halfway up a rock whose summit overlooked the sea. The weather had been rainy, and they could trace the steps distinctly through that heathy field. They ascended the rock together.

Early as it was, the cottagers, who were poor fishermen residing on the shore, were all up, and assuring Melmoth and his companion that they had been disturbed and terrified the preceding night by sounds which they could not describe. It was singular that these men, accustomed by nature and habit alike to exaggeration and superstition, used not the language of either on this occasion.

There is an overwhelming mass of conviction that falls on the mind, that annihilates idiom and peculiarities, and crushes out truth from the heart. Melmoth waved back all who offered to accompany him to the precipice which overhung the sea. Monçada alone followed him.

Through the furze that clothed this rock, almost to its summit, there was a kind of tract as if a person had dragged, or been dragged, his way through it⁠—a downtrodden track, over which no footsteps but those of one impelled by force had ever passed. Melmoth and Monçada gained at last the summit of the rock. The ocean was beneath⁠—the wide, waste, engulfing ocean! On a crag beneath them, something hung as floating to the blast. Melmoth clambered down and caught it. It was the handkerchief which the Wanderer had worn about his neck the preceding night⁠—that was the last trace of the Wanderer!

Melmoth and Monçada exchanged looks of silent and unutterable horror, and returned slowly home.

Endnotes

1. Mrs. Marshall, the original Roxana in Lee’s Alexander, and the only virtuous woman then on the stage. She was carried off in the manner described, by Lord Orrery, who, finding all his solicitations repelled, had recourse to a sham marriage performed by a servant in the habit of a clergyman. ↩

2. Vide Pope (copying from Donne).

   “Peace, fools, or Gonson will for Papists seize you,
   If once he catch you at your Jesu, Jesu.”

   ↩

3. Vide the Old Bachelor, whose Araminta, wearied by the repetition of these phrases, forbids her lover to address her in any sentence commencing with them. ↩

4. Vide any old play you may have the patience to peruse; or, instar omnium, read the courtly loves of Rodolphil and Melantha, Palamede and Doratice, in Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode. ↩

5. Vide Southern’s Oroonoko⁠—I mean the comic part. ↩

6. “A charm, a song, a murder, and a ghost.”

   Prologue to Oedipus

   ↩

7. Vide Le Blanc’s Letters. ↩

8. Vide Betterton’s History of the Stage. ↩

9. Rochefoucault. ↩

10. Vide Cutter of Coleman Street. ↩

11. A fact, related to me by a person who was near committing suicide in a similar situation, to escape what he called “the excruciating torture of giddiness.” ↩

12. See Henry IV Second Part. ↩

13. “Fire for the cigars, and iced-water for drink.”⁠—A cry often heard in Madrid. ↩

14. Vide Buffa⁠—Anachronism prepense. ↩

15. Vide Madame Genlis’s Julien Delmour. ↩

16. Vide Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History for the truth of this part of the narrative. I have suppressed circumstances in the original too horrible for modern ears. ↩

17. This expression is not exaggerated. In the dreams of sorcery, or of imposture, the evil spirit was supposed to perform a mass in derision; and in Beaumont and Fletcher there is mention of “howling a black Santis,” i.e. Satan’s mass. ↩

18. We do not venture to guess at the horrors of this whisper, but everyone conversant with ecclesiastical history knows, that Tetzel offered indulgences in Germany, even on the condition that the sinner had been guilty of the impossible crime of violating the mother of God. ↩

19. Something between a bully and a rake. ↩

20. Vide Moore’s View of France and Italy. ↩

21. Fact⁠—