Charles Maturin - Melmoth the Wanderer (Charles Robert Maturin) - the complete collection, comprehensive, unabridged and illustrated - (Literary Thoughts Edition)

“And may I live to see

Old Noll upon a tree,

And many such as he;

Confound him, confound him,

Diseases all around him.”

“Ye are honest gentlemen, I can play many tunes,” squeaked a poor mad loyalist fiddler, who had been accustomed to play in the taverns to the cavalier party, and just remembered the words of a similar minstrel playing for Colonel Blunt in the committee. “Then play me the air to “Rebellion is breaking up house,” exclaimed the tailor, dancing wildly about his cell (as far as his chains allowed him) to an imaginary measure. The weaver could contain no longer. “How long, Lord, how long,” he exclaimed, “shall thine enemies insult thy sanctuary, in which I have been placed an anointed teacher? even here, where I am placed to preach to the souls in prison?—Open the flood-gates of thy power, and though thy waves and storms go over me, let me testify in the midst of them, even as he who spreadeth forth his hands to swim may raise one of them to warn his companion that he is about to sink.—Sister Ruth, why dost thou uncover thy bosom to discover my frailty?—Lord, let thine arm of power be with us as it was when thou brakest the shield, the sword, and the battle,—when thy foot was dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs was red through the same.—Dip all thy garments in blood, and let me weave thee fresh when thou art stained.—When shall thy saints tread the wine-press of thy wrath? Blood! blood! the saints call for it, earth gapes to swallow it, hell thirsts for it!—Sister Ruth, I pray thee, conceal thy bosom, and be not as the vain women of this generation.—Oh for a day like that, a day of the Lord of hosts, when the towers fell!—Spare me in the battle, for I am not a mighty man of war; leave me in the rear of the host, to curse, with the curse of Meroz, those who come not to the help of the Lord against the mighty,—even to curse this malignant tailor,—yea, curse him bitterly.—Lord, I am in the tents of Kedar, my feet stumble on the dark mountains,—I fall,—I fall!”—And the poor wretch, exhausted by his delirious agonies, fell, and grovelled for some time in his straw. “Oh! I have had a grievous fall,—Sister Ruth,—Oh Sister Ruth!—Rejoice not against me, Oh mine enemy! though I fall, I shall rise again.” Whatever satisfaction Sister Ruth might have derived from this assurance, if she could have heard it, was enjoyed tenfold by the weaver, whose amorous reminiscences were in a moment exchanged for war-like ones, borrowed from a wretched and disarranged mass of intellectual rubbish. “The Lord is a man of war,” he shouted.—“Look to Marston Moor!—Look to the city, the proud city, full of pride and sin!—Look to the waves of the Severn, as red with blood as the waves of the Red Sea!—There were the hoofs broken by means of the prancings, the prancings of the mighty ones.—Then, Lord, was thy triumph, and the triumph of thy saints, to bind their kings in chains, and their nobles in links of iron.” The malignant tailor burst out in his turn: “Thank the false Scots, and their solemn league and covenant, and Carisbrook Castle, for that, ye crop-eared Puritan,” he yelled. “If it had not been for them, I would have taken measure of the king for a velvet cloak as high as the Tower of London, and one flirt of its folds would have knocked the “copper nose” into the Thames, and sent it a-drift to Hell.” “Ye lie, in your teeth,” echoed the weaver; “and I will prove it unarmed, with my shuttle against your needle, and smite you to the earth thereafter, as David smote Goliath. It was the man’s (such was the indecent language in which Charles the First was spoken of by the Puritans)—it was the man’s carnal, self-seeking, world-loving, prelatical hierarchy, that drove the godly to seek the sweet word in season from their own pastors, who righteously abominated the Popish garniture of lawn-sleeves, lewd organs, and steeple houses. Sister Ruth, tempt me not with that calf’s head, it is all streaming with blood;—drop it, I beseech thee, sister, it is unmeet in a woman’s hand, though the brethren drink of it.—Woe be unto thee, gainsayer, dost thou not see how flames envelope the accursed city under his Arminian and Popish son?—London is on fire!—on fire!” he yelled; “and the brands are lit by the half-papist, whole-arminian, all-damned people thereof.—Fire!—fire!” The voice in which he shrieked out the last words was powerfully horrible, but it was like the moan of an infant, compared to the voice which took up and re-echoed the cry, in a tone that made the building shake. It was the voice of a maniac, who had lost her husband, children, subsistence, and finally her reason, in the dreadful fire of London. The cry of fire never failed to operate with terrible punctuality on her associations. She had been in a disturbed sleep, and now started from it as suddenly as on that dreadful night. It was Saturday night, too, and she was always observed to be particularly violent on that night,—it was the terrible weekly festival of insanity with her. She was awake, and busy in a moment escaping from the flames; and she dramatized the whole scene with such hideous fidelity, that Stanton’s resolution was far more in danger from her than from the battle between his neighbours Testimony and Hothead. She began exclaiming she was suffocated by the smoke; then she sprung from her bed, calling for a light, and appeared to be struck by the sudden glare that burst through her casement.—“The last day,” she shrieked, “The last day! The very heavens are on fire!”—“That will not come till the Man of Sin be first destroyed,” cried the weaver; “thou ravest of light and fire, and yet thou art in utter darkness.—I pity thee, poor mad soul, I pity thee!” The maniac never heeded him; she appeared to be scrambling up a stair-case to her children’s room. She exclaimed she was scorched, singed, suffocated; her courage appeared to fail, and she retreated. “But my children are there!” she cried in a voice of unspeakable agony, as she seemed to make another effort; “here I am—here I am come to save you.—Oh God! They are all blazing!—Take this arm—no, not that, it is scorched and disabled—well, any arm—take hold of my clothes—no, they are blazing too!—Well, take me all on fire as I am!—And their hair, how it hisses!—Water, one drop of water for my youngest—he is but an infant—for my youngest, and let me burn!” She paused in horrid silence, to watch the fall of a blazing rafter that was about to shatter the stair-case on which she stood.—“The roof has fallen on my head!” she exclaimed. “The earth is weak, and all the inhabitants thereof,” chaunted the weaver; “I bear up the pillars of it.”

The maniac marked the destruction of the spot where she thought she stood by one desperate bound, accompanied by a wild shriek, and then calmly gazed on her infants as they rolled over the scorching fragments, and sunk into the abyss of fire below. “There they go,—one—two—three—all!” and her voice sunk into low mutterings, and her convulsions into faint, cold shudderings, like the sobbings of a spent storm, as she imagined herself to “stand in safety and despair,” amid the thousand houseless wretches assembled in the suburbs of London on the dreadful nights after the fire, without food, roof, or raiment, all gazing on the burning ruins of their dwellings and their property. She seemed to listen to their complaints, and even repeated some of them very affectingly, but invariably answered them with the same words, “But I have lost all my children—all!” It was remarkable, that when this sufferer began to rave, all the others became silent. The cry of nature hushed every other cry,—she was the only patient in the house who was not mad from politics, religion, ebriety, or some perverted passion; and terrifying as the out-break of her frenzy always was, Stanton used to await it as a kind of relief from the dissonant, melancholy, and ludicrous ravings of the others.