“Oh you
will destroy my flowers!” cried she, while a reminiscence of her
former picturesque existence, when flowers were the companions alike
of her imagination and her pure heart, awoke her exclamation. “It is
my vocation--I pray you pardon me!” said Melmoth, as he basked on the
crushed flowers, and darted his withering sneer and scowling glance
at Isidora. “I am commissioned to trample on and bruise every flower
in the natural and moral world--hyacinths, hearts, and bagatelles
of that kind, just as they occur. And now, Donna Isidora, with as
long an _et cetera_ as you or your sponsors could wish, and with no
possible offence to the herald, here I am to-night--and where I shall
be to-morrow night, depends on your choice. I would as soon be on the
Indian seas, where your dreams send me rowing every night, or crashing
through the ice near the Poles, or ploughing with my naked corse, (if
corses have feeling), through the billows of that ocean where I must
one day (a day that has neither sun or moon, neither commencement or
termination), plough forever, and reap despair!”--“Hush!--hush!--Oh
forbear such horrid sounds! Are you indeed he whom I saw in the isle? Are you he, inwoven ever since that moment with my prayers, my hopes,
my heart? Are you that being upon whom hope subsisted, when life itself
was failing? On my passage to this Christian land, I suffered much. I
was so ill you would have pitied me--the clothes they put on me--the
language they made me speak--the religion they made me believe--the
country they brought me to--Oh _you_!--you alone!--the thought--the
image of you, could alone have supported me! I loved, and to love is
to live. Amid the disruption of every natural tie,--amid the loss
of that delicious existence which seems a dream, and which still
fills my dreams, and makes sleep a second existence,--I have thought
of you--have dreamt of you--have loved you!”--“Loved me?--no being
yet loved me but pledged me in tears.”--“And have I not wept?” said
Isidora--“believe these tears--they are not the first I have shed, nor
I fear will be the last, since I owe the first to you.” And she wept as
she spoke. “Well,” said the wanderer, with a bitter and self-satirizing
laugh, “I shall be persuaded at last that I am “a marvellous proper
man.” Well, if it must be so, happy man be his dole! And when shall
the auspicious day, beautiful Immalee, _still_ beautiful Isidora, in
spite of your Christian name, (to which I have a most anti-catholic
objection)--when shall that bright day dawn on your long slumbering
eye-lashes, and waken them with kisses, and beams, and light, and love,
and all the paraphernalia with which folly arrays misery previous to
their union--that glittering and empoisoned drapery that well resembles
what of old Dejanira sent to her husband--when shall the day of bliss
be?” And he laughed with that horrible convulsion that mingles the
expression of levity with that of despair, and leaves the listener no
doubt whether there is more despair in laughter, or more laughter in
despair. “I understand you not,” said the pure and timid Isidora; “and
if you would not terrify me to madness, laugh no more--no more, at
least, in that fearful way!”--“_I cannot weep_,” said Melmoth, fixing
on her his dry and burning eyes, strikingly visible in the moonlight;
“the fountain of tears has been long dried up within me, like that of
every other human blessing.”--“I can weep for both,” said Isidora, “if
that be all.” And her tears flowed fast, as much from memory as from
grief--and when those sources are united, God and the sufferer only
know how fast and bitterly they fall. “Reserve them for our nuptial
hour, my lovely bride,” said Melmoth to himself; “you will have
occasion for them then.”

“There was a custom then, however indelicate and repulsive it may sound
to modern ears, for ladies who were doubtful of the intentions of their
lovers to demand of them the proof of their purity and honour, by
requiring an appeal to their family, and a solemn union under the
sanction of the church. Perhaps there was more genuine spirit of truth
and chastity in this, than in all the ambiguous flirtation that is
carried on with an ill-understood and mysterious dependence on
principles that have never been defined, and fidelity that has never
been removed. When the lady in the Italian tragedy(22) asks her lover,
almost at their first interview, if his intentions are honourable, and
requires, as the proof of their being so, that he shall espouse her
immediately, does she not utter a language more unsophisticated, more
intelligible, more _heartedly_ pure, than all the romantic and
incredible reliance that other females are supposed to place in the
volatility of impulse,--in that wild and extemporaneous feeling,--that
“house on the sands,”--which never has its foundation in the immoveable
depths of the heart. Yielding to this feeling, Isidora, in a voice that
faultered at its own accents, murmured, “If you love me, seek me no more
clandestinely. My mother is good, though she is austere--my brother is
kind, though he is passionate--my father--I have never seen him! I know
not what to say, but if he be _my_ father, he will love you. Meet me in
their presence, and I will no longer feel pain and shame mingled with
the delight of seeing you. Invoke the sanction of the church, and then,
perhaps,”---- “Perhaps!” retorted Melmoth; “You have learned the
European ‘perhaps!’--the art of suspending the meaning of an emphatic
word--of affecting to draw the curtain of the heart at the moment you
drop its folds closer and closer--of bidding us despair at the moment
you intend we should feel hope!”--“Oh no!--no!” answered the innocent
being; “I am _truth_. I am Immalee when I speak to you,--though to all
others in this country, which they call Christian, I am Isidora. When I
loved you first, I had only one heart to consult,--now there are many,
and some who have not hearts like mine. But if you love me, you can bend
to them as I have done--you can love their God, their home, their hopes,
and their country. Even with _you_ I could not be happy, unless you
adored the cross to which your hand first pointed my wandering sight,
and the religion which you reluctantly confessed was the most beautiful
and beneficent on earth.”--“Did I confess that?” echoed Melmoth; “It
must have been _reluctantly_ indeed. Beautiful Immalee! I am a convert
to you;” and he stifled a Satanic laugh as he spoke; “to your new
religion, and your beauty, and your Spanish birth and nomenclature, and
every thing that you would wish. I will incontinently wait on your pious
mother, and angry brother, and all your relatives, testy, proud, and
ridiculous as they may be.