She began to apprehend that his departure was intended to be
final, and her heart sunk at the thought. “To the mere reader of romance, it may seem incredible that a female of
Isidora’s energy and devotedness should feel anxiety or terror in a
situation so common to a heroine. She has only to stand proof against
all the importunities and authority of her family, and announce her
desperate resolution to share the destiny of a mysterious and
unacknowledged lover. All this sounds very plausible and interesting. Romances have been written and read, whose interest arose from the noble
and impossible defiance of the heroine to all powers human and
superhuman alike. But neither the writers or readers seem ever to have
taken into account the thousand petty external causes that operate on
human agency with a force, if not more powerful, far more effective than
the grand internal motive which makes so grand a figure in romance, and
so rare and trivial a one in common life. “Isidora would have died for him she loved. At the stake or the scaffold
she would have avowed her passion, and triumphed in perishing as its
victim. The mind can collect itself for one great effort, but it is
exhausted by the eternally-recurring necessity of domestic
conflicts,--victories by which she must lose, and defeats by which she
might gain the praise of perseverance, and feel such gain was loss. The
last single and terrible effort of the Jewish champion, in which he and
his enemies perished together, must have been a luxury compared to his
blind drudgery in his mill. “Before Isidora lay that painful and perpetual struggle of fettered
strength with persecuting weakness, which, if the truth were told, would
divest half the heroines of romance of the power or wish to contend
against the difficulties that beset them. Her mansion was a prison--she
had no power (and if she possessed the power, would never have exercised
it) of obtaining an unpermitted or unobserved egress from the doors of
the house for one moment. Thus her escape was completely barred; and had
every door in the house been thrown open, she would have felt like a
bird on its first flight from the cage, without a spray that she dared
to rest on. Such was her prospect, even if she could effect her
escape--at home it was worse. “The stern and cold tone of authority in which her father’s letter was
written, gave her but little hope that in her father she would find a
friend. Then the feeble and yet imperious mediocrity of her mother--the
selfish and arrogant temper of Fernan--the powerful influence and
incessant documentising of Fra Jose, whose good-nature was no match for
his love of authority--the daily domestic persecution--that vinegar that
would wear out any rock--the being compelled to listen day after day to
the same exhausting repetition of exhortation, chiding, reproach, and
menace, or seek refuge in her chamber, to waste the weary hours in
loneliness and tears--this strife maintained by one strong indeed in
purpose, but feeble in power, against so many all sworn to work their
will, and have their way--this perpetual conflict with evils so trivial
in the items, but so heavy in the amount, to those who have the debt to
pay daily and hourly,--was too much for the resolution of Isidora, and
she wept in hopeless despondency, as she felt that already her courage
shrunk from the encounter, and knew not what concessions might be
extorted from her increasing inability of resistance. “Oh!” she cried, clasping her hands in the extremity of her distress,
“Oh that he were but here to direct, to counsel me!--that he were here
even no longer as my lover, but only as my adviser!”

“It is said that a certain power is always at hand to facilitate the
wishes that the individual forms for his own injury; and so it should
seem in the present instance,--for she had scarce uttered these words,
when the shadow of Melmoth was seen darkening the garden walk,--and the
next moment he was beneath the casement. As she saw him approach, she
uttered a cry of mingled joy and fear, which he hushed by making a
signal of silence with his hand, and then whispered, “I know it all!”

“Isidora was silent. She had nothing but her recent distress to
communicate,--and of that, it appeared, he was already apprized. She
waited, therefore, in mute anxiety for some words of counsel or of
comfort. “I know all!” continued Melmoth; “your father has landed in
Spain--he brings with him your destined husband. The fixed purpose of
your whole family, as obstinate as they are weak, it will be bootless in
you to resist; and this day fortnight will see you the bride of
Montilla.”--“I will first be the bride of the grave,” said Isidora, with
perfect and fearful calmness. “At these words, Melmoth advanced and gazed on her more closely. Any
thing of intense and terrible resolution,--of feeling or action in
extremity,--made harmony with the powerful but disordered chords of his
soul. He required her to repeat the words--she did so, with quivering
lip, but unfaultering voice. He advanced still nearer to gaze on her as
she spoke. It was a beautiful and fearful sight to see her as she
stood;--her marble face--her moveless features--her eyes in which burned
the fixed and livid light of despair, like a lamp in a sepulchral
vault--the lips that half opened, and remaining unclosed, appeared as if
the speaker was unconscious of the words that had escaped them, or
rather, as if they had burst forth by involuntary and incontroulable
impulse;--so she stood, like a statue, at her casement, the moonlight
giving her white drapery the appearance of stone, and her wrought-up and
determined mind lending the same rigidity to her expression. Melmoth
himself felt confounded--appalled he could not feel. He retreated, and
then returning, demanded, “Is this your resolution, Isidora?--and have
you indeed resolution to”---- “To die!” answered Isidora, with the same
unaltered accent,--the same calm expression,--and seeming, as she spake,
capable of all she expressed; and this union, in the same slight and
tender form, of those eternal competitors, energy and fragility, beauty
and death, made every human pulse in Melmoth’s frame beat with a
throbbing unknown before. “Can you, then,” he said, with averted head,
and in a tone that seemed ashamed of its own softness--“Can you, then,
die for him you will not live for?”--“I have said I will die sooner than
be the bride of Montilla,” answered Isidora. “Of death I know nothing,
nor do I know much of life--but I would rather perish, than be the
perjured wife of the man I cannot love.”--“And why can you not love
him?” said Melmoth, toying with the heart he held in his hand, like a
mischievous boy with a bird, around whose leg he has fastened a
string.--“Because I can love but one. You were the first human being I
ever saw who could teach me language, and who taught me feeling. Your
image is for ever before me, present or absent, sleeping or waking.