Isidora

“ The sufferers remember the terrors of the day, and the still darkness of the night feels to them like a shelter. Isidora gazed on her espoused with delight, when she saw no longer his withering frown, or more withering smile; and she felt the hope that the calm purity of female hearts always suggests, that its influence will one day float over the formless and the void, like the spirit that moved upon the face of the waters; and that the unbelieving husband may yet be saved by the believing wife. ”

“ As she spoke, there was a light in her eye,—a glow on her brow,—an expansive and irradiated sublimity around her figure,—that made it appear like the rare and glorious vision of the personified union of passion and purity,—as if those eternal rivals had agreed to reconcile their claims, to meet on the confines of their respective dominions, and had selected the form of Isidora as the temple in which their league might be hallowed, and their union consummated—and never were the opposite divinities so deliciously lodged. ”

“ Spanish etiquette made Donna Isidora rather silent and reserved; she somewhat uselessly addressed the old crone Donna Ximena from time to time, and that worthy matron only responded by mutterings, shaking her palsied head, or signing the cross beneath the table. At other times Isidora made an occasional remark to Trevino, by whom she was evidently greatly admired, for his keen stealthy eyes were seldom off her face, and a malevolent gleam shot from them whenever, in dispensing the courtesies of the table, she addressed Quentin Kennedy. ”

“ If you would wish to know what is love, inquire not at the tongue of man, but at the heart of woman.”—“What is love?” said Melmoth; “is that the question?”—“You doubt that I love,” said Isidora—“tell me, then, what is love?”—“You have imposed on me a task,” said Melmoth smiling, but not in mirth, “so congenial to my feelings and habits of thought, that the execution will doubtless be inimitable. To love, beautiful Isidora, is to live in a world of the heart’s own creation—all whose forms and colours are as brilliant as they are deceptive and unreal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Only let me know your future intentions,—when you know them yourself.”—“I shall not be here to tell you,” said Isidora, replying with profound conviction to this withering levity, like a cold winter day to the glow of a capricious summer one, that blends the sunshine and the lightning;—“Melmoth, I shall not be here then!” And this energy of despair in a creature so young, so inexperienced, except in the vicissitudes of the heart, formed a strong contrast to the stony apathy of one who had traversed life from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren, or—made it so. ”

“ Here it was that Donna Isidora had been, when, in a fit of petulance, she had before absented herself from Quentin. She set down the lamp, and taking up a book which she had been previously perusing, and which she had found lying upon the desk where the padre had left it open, for its pages were covered with dust, she muttered—
"Let me read it again, and let me be assured; but oh, if I should destroy him or myself! What matter, then? Better both die than that she should have him, whoever she is—wherever she is! ”

“ Arriving at a mountain river they hear foot-steps pursuing them, and a figure is indistinctly seen approaching. After a short struggle the pursuer, whom Isidora, by his voice, recognizes to be an ancient domestic of the family, is flung into the river. The lovers continue their way and Isidora is dragged up into the ruins, where a hand places hers into that of Melmoth. Almost unconscious as she is from terror, she feels the hand to be cold as death ”

“ That she who loves, must remember no longer her individual existence, her natural existence—that she must consider parents, country, nature, society, religion itself— (you tremble, Immalee—Isidora I would say) —only as grains of incense flung on the altar of the heart, to burn and exhale their sacrificed odours there.”—“Then I do love,” said Isidora ”

“ It would be difficult to trace the workings and describe the struggles of Donna Isidora's heart in the growing passion she felt for Quentin—the mere result of accidents which she could not control, and a propinquity which she could not avoid; or how rapidly the brief self-delusion of sisterhood and platonic affection melted away before the warm and impulsive nature of her character; how reason weakened as passion grew strong, and how she resolved to bend him to her will, for in mind and race, rather more than years, she was much his senior. ”

“ Isidora, in panic, besought the stranger to save her. He was unwilling. At last, in response to her tears, he consented. They were wedded, so Isidora believed, by a hermit in a ruined monastery. She returned home, and he renewed his visits, promising to reveal their marriage in the fullness of time.
"Meanwhile, tales had reached her father's ears of a malignant being who was permitted to wander over the earth and tempt men in dire extremity with release from their troubles as the result of their concluding an unspeakable bargain. ”

“ The duties of the bath had been performed, but with a parade of soaps, perfumes, and, above all, attendants, who, though of her own sex, gave Isidora an unspeakable degree of disgust at the operation. The sponges and odours sickened her unsophisticated senses, and the presence of another human being seemed to close up every pore.
“She had felt no refreshment from the bath, or from her prayers—she sought it at her casement, but there also in vain. The moon was as bright as the sun of colder climates, and the heavens were all in a blaze with her light. ”

“ Some such reflection occurred to Quentin, who stammered—
"But, Isidora, people require money to marry."
"Of course—sometimes."
"Well, I am not the heir of a shilling in the world."
"Nor am I the heiress of a pistole."
"Well, dearest Isidora——"
"Who should marry if we don't, whose circumstances are equal, and whose position in the world is so exactly similar? Ah, that we had the Padre Florez here!" ”

“ Loveland had parted with his watch, but there was a battered "one day Bee" clock in Mrs. Gernsbacher's untidy kitchen, and he had begun to tell himself gloomily, that it would soon be too late to draw money from any bank, when Isidora appeared in great splendour at the basement door. She had on a large picture hat of red velvet, nodding with cheap ostrich plumes which shaded from palest pink to deepest magenta; and in her "electric seal" coat she looked as little like a lady as a beautiful girl could possibly look. ”

“ The penitent was stretched on her bed of rest—the humane priest sat beside her; and if his presence gave no dignity to the scene, it at least softened it by the touches of humanity. * * * * * * * *
“My father,” said the dying Isidora, “you pronounced me forgiven.”—“Yes, my daughter,” said the priest, “you have assured me you are innocent of the death of your infant.”—“You never could have believed me guilty,” said Isidora, raising herself on her pallet at the appeal—“the consciousness of its existence alone would have kept me alive, even in my prison. ”

“ So it appeared likely to fare with Isidora. The retirement in which her family lived—the temper of Donna Clara, as slow to suspect from want of penetration, as she was eager in pursuing an object once discovered, from the natural cupidity of a vacant mind—these circumstances, combined with the dress of the day, the enormous and enveloping fardingale, gave safety to her secret, at least till the arrival of its crisis. ”

“ 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? ”

“ I was the last personage to present myself at the breakfast table. I found Isidora there, pale and agitated; for Mr. Hartley had just acquainted her with my narrow escape from assassination. To do him justice, he omitted every particular of my having undertaken to arrange Miss Julia Travers’ claims upon the government; and, as “good men blush at the record of a virtuous act,” I was delighted to find that my beneficent intentions regarding the soldier’s orphan were silently passed over. ”

“ Language is no longer necessary to those whose beating hearts converse audibly—whose eyes, even by moonlight, are more intelligible to each other’s stolen and shadowed glances, than the broad converse of face to face in the brightest sunshine—to whom, in the exquisite inversion of earthly feeling and habit, darkness is light, and silence eloquence.
“At their last interviews, Isidora sometimes spoke,—but it was only to remind her lover, in a soft and chastened tone, of a promise which it seems he had at one time made of disclosing himself to her parents, and demanding her at their hands. ”

“ These are the substitutes for all the distinctions of nature and society. The world to them contains but one individual,—and that individual is to them the world as well as its single inmate. The atmosphere of his presence is the only air they can breathe in,—and the light of his eye the only sun of their creation, in whose rays they bask and live.”—“Then I love,” said Isidora internally. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Immalee was rescued, her origin was discovered, and she became Isidora de Aliaga, the carefully nurtured daughter of prosperous and devout Spanish parents. The island and the stranger were memories of the past. Yet one day, in the streets of Madrid, she beheld once more the well-remembered eyes. Soon afterwards she was visited by the stranger. How he entered and left her home when he came to her--and again he came often--she could not tell. She feared him, and yet she loved him. ”

“ The personages themselves are depicted in rather a conventional fashion, and the stupidity and narrow-mindedness of Donna Clara, and the confessor’s excessive fondness for food and drink, can bear no comparison with the humorous passages in Women. Only the characterization of Isidora is carried out with the same unfailing power to the very last. ”

“ Here they discourse on the real nature of love. At length the gloomy lover persuades Isidora to marry him. Their midnight nuptials take place against a weird background. By a narrow, precipitous path they approach the ruined chapel, and are united by a hand "as cold as that of death." Meanwhile, Don Francisco, Isidora's father, on his way home, spends the night at an inn, where a stranger insists on telling him "The Tale of Guzman." In this tale the tempter visits a father whose family is starving, but who resists the lure of wealth. ”

“ Some time, however, after this disappearance of Melmoth, unexpected events again throw these ill-fated lovers together. Donna Clara receives a letter from her husband, who has landed in Spain and is slowly making his way homewards, to the effect that he intends to bring with him the destined bridegroom of Isidora, a Spanish nobleman called Montilla. Isidora learns this piece of news with great despair—but the same night Melmoth reappears beneath her balcony. Isidora assures him that she will be the bride of the grave rather than of Montilla, and that her love is unaltered ”

“ He has a wife and child, and if there be human elements in him, if there be any thing 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. ”

“ Poor Isidora! She will be quite inconsolable."
"Inconsolable? Mom ami, you forget in whose charming society she is! We fellows of the 24th Chasseurs are unrivalled in conversational powers and the general art of pleasing. She spoke of you very often—thought you a very nice fellow—but so quiet—so triste!"
Quentin was glad that Monkton, whom he did not wish to hear all this, had gradually gone beyond earshot.
"And she—she——" he was beginning with emotions of annoyance and mortification. ”

“ Is it surprising that in such a land women should be found, endowed with those qualities that have been ascribed to Isidora? If so, it is not the less true that they exist.
As a general thing the Mexican woman is a creature of the most amiable disposition; douce—if we may be allowed to borrow from a language that deals more frequently with feminine traits—to such an extent, as to have become a national characteristic. It is to the denizens of the great cities, secure from Indian incursion, that this character more especially applies. ”