Do they hang
them on baskets to perish, or leave them on the banks of rivers to be
devoured by fierce and hideous animals?”--“The religion they profess
forbids that,” said the stranger, with reluctant truth; “it requires
them to honour their parents, and to cherish their children.”--“But why
do they not spurn from the entrance to their church those who do not
think as they do?”--“Because their religion enjoins them to be mild,
benevolent, and tolerant; and neither to reject or disdain those who
have not attained its purer light.”--“But why is there no splendour or
magnificence in their worship; nothing grand or attractive?”--“Because
they know that God cannot be acceptably worshipped but by pure hearts
and crimeless hands; and though their religion gives every hope to the
penitent guilty, it flatters none with false promises of external
devotion supplying the homage of the heart; or artificial and
picturesque religion standing in the place of that single devotion to
God, before whose throne, though the proudest temples erected to his
honour crumble into dust, the heart burns on the altar still, an
inextinguishable and acceptable victim.”

  (14) I trust the absurdity of this quotation here will be forgiven for
  its beauty. It is borrowed from Miss Baillie, the first dramatic poet
  of the age. “As he spoke, (perhaps constrained by a higher power), Immalee bowed her
glowing face to the earth, and then raising it with the look of a
new-born angel, exclaimed, “Christ shall be my God, and I will be a
Christian!” Again she bowed in the deep prostration which indicates the
united submission of soul and body, and remained in this attitude of
absorption so long, that, when she rose, she did not perceive the
absence of her companion.--“He fled murmuring, and with him fled the
shades of night.”




CHAPTER XVII. “Why, I did say something about getting a licence from the Cadi.”

    BLUE BEARD. “The visits of the stranger were interrupted for some time, and when he
returned, it seemed as if their purpose was no longer the same. He no
longer attempted to corrupt her principles, or sophisticate her
understanding, or mystify her views of religion. On the latter subject
he was quite silent, seemed to regret he had ever touched on it, and not
all her restless avidity of knowledge, or caressing importunity of
manner, could extract from him another syllable on the subject. He
repayed her amply, however, by the rich, varied, and copious stores of a
mind, furnished with matter apparently beyond the power of human
experience to have collected, confined, as it is, within the limits of
threescore years and ten. But this never struck Immalee; she took “no
note of time;” and the tale of yesterday, or the record of past
centuries, were synchronized in a mind to which facts and dates were
alike unknown; and which was alike unacquainted with the graduating
shades of manner, and the linked progress of events. “They often sat on the shore of the isle in the evening, where Immalee
always prepared a seat of moss for her visitor, and gazed together on
the blue deep in silence; for Immalee’s newly-awaked intellect and heart
felt that bankruptcy of language, which profound feeling will impress on
the most cultivated intellect, and which, in her case, was increased
alike by her innocence and her ignorance; and her visitor had perhaps
reasons still stronger for his silence. This silence, however, was often
broken. There was not a vessel that sailed in the distance which did not
suggest an eager question from Immalee, and did not draw a slow and
extorted reply from the stranger. His knowledge was immense, various,
and profound, (but this was rather a subject of delight than of
curiosity to his beautiful pupil); and from the Indian canoe, rowed by
naked natives, to the splendid, and clumsy, and ill-managed vessels of
the Rajahs, that floated like huge and gilded fish tumbling in uncouth
and shapeless mirth on the wave, to the gallant and well-manned vessels
of Europe, that came on like the gods of ocean bringing fertility and
knowledge, the discoveries of art, and the blessings of civilization,
wherever their sails were unfurled and their anchors dropt,--he could
tell her all,--describe the destination of every vessel,--the feelings,
characters, and national habits of the many-minded inmates,--and enlarge
her knowledge to a degree which books never could have done; for
colloquial communication is always the most vivid and impressive medium,
and lips have a prescriptive right to be the first intelligencers in
instruction and in love. “Perhaps this extraordinary being, with regard to whom the laws of
mortality and the feelings of nature seemed to be alike suspended, felt
a kind of sad and wild repose from the destiny that immitigably pursued
him, in the society of Immalee. We know not, and can never tell, what
sensations her innocent and helpless beauty inspired him with, but the
result was, that he ceased to regard her as his victim; and, when seated
beside her listening to her questions, or answering them, seemed to
enjoy the few lucid intervals of his insane and morbid existence. Absent
from her, he returned to the world to torture and to tempt in the
mad-house where the Englishman Stanton was tossing on his straw----”

“Hold!” said Melmoth; “what name have you mentioned?”--“Have patience
with me, Senhor,” said Monçada, who did not like interruption; “have
patience, and you will find we are all beads strung on the same string. Why should we jar against each other? our union is indissoluble.” He
proceeded with the story of the unhappy Indian, as recorded in the
parchments of Adonijah, which he had been compelled to copy, and of
which he was anxious to impress every line and letter on his listener,
to substantiate his own extraordinary story. “When absent from her, his purpose was what I have described; but while
present, that purpose seemed suspended; he gazed often on her with eyes
whose wild and fierce lustre was quenched in a dew that he hastily wiped
away, and gazed on her again. While he sat near her on the flowers she
had collected for him,--while he looked on those timid and rosy lips
that waited his signal to speak, like buds that did not dare to blow
till the sun shone on them,--while he heard accents issue from those
lips which he felt it would be as impossible to pervert as it would be
to teach the nightingale blasphemy,--he sunk down beside her, passed his
hand over his livid brow, and, wiping off some cold drops, thought for a
moment he was not the Cain of the moral world, and that the brand was
effaced,--at least for a moment. The habitual and impervious gloom of
his soul soon returned. He felt again the gnawings of the worm that
never dies, and the scorchings of the fire that is never to be quenched. He turned the fatal light of his dark eyes on the only being who never
shrunk from their expression, for her innocence made her fearless.