THE SPIRITS’ MOUNTAIN
ON All Souls’ Night I was awakened, I knew not at what hour, by the tolling of bells; their monotonous, unceasing sound brought to mind this tradition which I heard a short time ago in Soria.
I tried to sleep again. Impossible! The imagination, once roused, is a horse that runs wild and cannot be reined in. To pass the time, I decided to write the story out, and so in fact I did.
I had heard it in the very place where it originated and, as I wrote, I sometimes glanced behind me with sudden fear, when, smitten by the cold night air, the glass of my balcony crackled.
Make of it what you will,—here it goes loose, like the mounted horseman in a Spanish pack of cards.
I.
“Leash the dogs! Blow the horns to call the hunters together, and let us return to the city. Night is at hand,—the Night of All Souls, and we are on the Spirits’ Mountain.”
“So soon!”
“Were it any day but this, I would not give up till I had made an end of that pack of wolves which the snows of the Moncayo have driven from their dens; but to-day it is impossible. Very soon the Angelus will sound in the monastery of the Knights Templars, and the souls of the dead will commence to toll their bell in the chapel on the mountain.”
“In that ruined chapel! Bah! Would you frighten me?{180}”
“No, fair cousin; but you are not aware of all that happens hereabout, for it is not yet a year since you came hither from a distant part of Spain. Rein in your mare; I will keep mine at the same pace and tell you this story on the way.”
The pages gathered together in merry, boisterous groups; the Counts of Bórges and Alcudiel mounted their noble steeds, and the whole company followed after the son and daughter of those great houses, Alonso and Beatriz, who rode at some little distance in advance of the company.
As they went, Alonso related in these words the promised tradition:
“This mountain, which is now called the Spirits’ Mountain, belonged to the Knights Templars, whose monastery you see yonder on the river bank. The Templars were both monks and warriors. After Soria had been wrested from the Moors, the King summoned the Templars here from foreign lands to defend the city on the side next to the bridge, thus giving deep offense to his Castilian nobles, who, as they had won Soria alone, would alone have been able to defend it.
“Between the knights of the new and powerful Order and the nobles of the city there fermented for some years an animosity which finally developed into a deadly hatred. The Templars claimed for their own this mountain, where they reserved an abundance of game to satisfy their needs and contribute to their pleasures; the nobles determined to organize a great hunt within the bounds notwithstanding the rigorous prohibitions of the clergy with spurs, as their enemies called them.
“The news of the projected invasion spread fast, and nothing availed to check the rage for the hunt on the one side, and the determination to break it up on the other. The proposed expedition came off. The wild beasts did{181} not remember it; but it was never to be forgotten by the many mothers mourning for their sons. That was not a hunting-trip, but a frightful battle; the mountain was strewn with corpses, and the wolves, whose extermination was the end in view, had a bloody feast. Finally the authority of the King was brought to bear; the mountain, the accursed cause of so many bereavements, was declared abandoned, and the chapel of the Templars, situated on this same wild steep, friends and enemies buried together in its cloister, began to fall into ruins.
“They say that ever since, on All Souls’ Night, the chapel bell is heard tolling all alone, and the spirits of the dead, wrapt in the tatters of their shrouds, run as in a fantastic chase through the bushes and brambles. The deer trumpet in terror, wolves howl, snakes hiss horribly, and on the following morning there have been seen clearly marked in the snow the prints of the fleshless feet of the skeletons. This is why we call it in Soria the Spirits’ Mountain, and this is why I wished to leave it before nightfall.”
Alonso’s story was finished just as the two young people arrived at the end of the bridge which admits to the city from that side. There they waited for the rest of the company to join them, and then the whole cavalcade was lost to sight in the dim and narrow streets of Soria.
II.
The servants had just cleared the tables; the high Gothic fireplace of the palace of the Counts of Alcudiel was shedding a vivid glow over the groups of lords and ladies who were chatting in friendly fashion, gathered about the blaze; and the wind shook the leaded glass of the ogive windows.
Two persons only seemed to hold aloof from the general conversation,—Beatriz and Alonso. Beatriz, absorbed in a vague revery, followed with her eyes the capricious dance{182} of the flames. Alonso watched the reflection of the fire sparkling in the blue eyes of Beatriz.
Both maintained for some time an unbroken silence.
The duennas were telling gruesome stories, appropriate to the Night of All Souls,—stories in which ghosts and spectres played the principal rôles, and the church bells of Soria were tolling in the distance with a monotonous and mournful sound.
“Fair cousin,” finally exclaimed Alonso, breaking the long silence between them. “Soon we are to separate, perhaps forever. I know you do not like the arid plains of Castile, its rough, soldier customs, its simple, patriarchal ways. At various times I have heard you sigh, perhaps for some lover in your far-away demesne.”
Beatriz made a gesture of cold indifference; the whole character of the woman was revealed in that disdainful contraction of her delicate lips.
“Or perhaps for the grandeur and gaiety of the French capital, where you have lived hitherto,” the young man hastened to add. “In one way or another, I foresee that I shall lose you before long. When we part, I would like to have you carry hence a remembrance of me. Do you recollect the time when we went to church to give thanks to God for having granted you that restoration to health which was your object in coming to this region? The jewel that fastened the plume of my cap attracted your attention. How well it would look clasping a veil over your dark hair! It has already been the adornment of a bride. My father gave it to my mother, and she wore it to the altar. Would you like it?”
“I do not know how it may be in your part of the country,” replied the beauty, “but in mine to accept a gift is to incur an obligation. Only on a holy day may one receive a present
A MOUNTAIN PASS
from a kinsman,—though he may go to Rome without returning empty-handed.”
The frigid tone in which Beatriz spoke these words troubled the youth for a moment, but, clearing his brow, he replied sadly:
“I know it, cousin, but to-day is the festival of All Saints, and yours among them,—a holiday on which gifts are fitting. Will you accept mine?”
Beatriz slightly bit her lip and put out her hand for the jewel, without a word.
The two again fell silent and again heard the quavering voices of the old women telling of witches and hobgoblins, the whistling wind which shook the ogive windows, and the mournful, monotonous tolling of the bells.
After the lapse of some little time, the interrupted dialogue was thus renewed:
“And before All Saints’ Day ends, which is holy to my saint as well as to yours, so that you can, without compromising yourself, give me a keepsake, will you not do so?” pleaded Alonso, fixing his eyes on his cousin’s, which flashed like lightning, gleaming with a diabolical thought.
“Why not?” she exclaimed, raising her hand to her right shoulder as though seeking for something amid the folds of her wide velvet sleeve embroidered with gold. Then, with an innocent air of disappointment, she added:
“Do you recollect the blue scarf I wore to-day to the hunt,—the scarf which you said, because of something about the meaning of its color, was the emblem of your soul?”
“Yes.”
“Well! it is lost! it is lost, and I was thinking of letting you have it for a souvenir.”
“Lost! where?” asked Alonso, rising from his seat with an indescribable expression of mingled fear and hope.
“I do not know,—perhaps on the mountain.{184}”
“On the Spirits’ Mountain!” he murmured, paling and sinking back into his seat. “On the Spirits’ Mountain!”
Then he went on in a voice choked and broken:
“You know, for you have heard it a thousand times, that I am called in the city, in all Castile, the king of the hunters. Not having yet had a chance to try, like my ancestors, my strength in battle, I have brought to bear on this pastime, the image of war, all the energy of my youth, all the hereditary ardor of my race. The rugs your feet tread on are the spoils of the chase, the hides of the wild beasts I have killed with my own hand. I know their haunts and their habits; I have fought them by day and by night, on foot and on horseback, alone and with hunting-parties, and there is not a man will say that he has ever seen me shrink from danger. On any other night I would fly for that scarf,—fly as joyously as to a festival; but to-night, this one night—why disguise it?—I am afraid. Do you hear? The bells are tolling, the Angelus has sounded in San Juan del Duero, the ghosts of the mountain are now beginning to lift their yellowing skulls from amid the brambles that cover their graves—the ghosts! the mere sight of them is enough to curdle with horror the blood of the bravest, turn his hair white, or sweep him away in the stormy whirl of their fantastic chase as a leaf, unwitting whither, is carried by the wind.”
While the young man was speaking, an almost imperceptible smile curled the lips of Beatriz, who, when he had ceased, exclaimed in an indifferent tone, while she was stirring the fire on the hearth, where the wood blazed and snapped, throwing off sparks of a thousand colors:
“Oh, by no means! What folly! To go to the mountain at this hour for such a trifle! On so dark a night, too, with ghosts abroad, and the road beset by wolves!”
As she spoke this closing phrase, she emphasized it with{185} so peculiar an intonation that Alonso could not fail to understand all her bitter irony. As moved by a spring, he leapt to his feet, passed his hand over his brow as if to dispel the fear which was in his brain, not in his breast, and with firm voice he said, addressing his beautiful cousin, who was still leaning over the hearth, amusing herself by stirring the fire:
“Farewell, Beatriz, farewell. If I return, it will be soon.”
“Alonso, Alonso!” she called, turning quickly, but now that she wished—or made show of wishing—to detain him, the youth had gone.
In a few moments she heard the beat of a horse’s hoofs departing at a gallop. The beauty, with a radiant expression of satisfied pride flushing her cheeks, listened attentively to the sound which grew fainter and fainter until it died away.
The old dames, meanwhile, were continuing their tales of ghostly apparitions; the wind was shrilling against the balcony glass, and far away the bells of the city tolled on.
III
An hour had passed, two, three; midnight would soon be striking, and Beatriz withdrew to her chamber. Alonso had not returned; he had not returned, though less than an hour would have sufficed for his errand.
“He must have been afraid!” exclaimed the girl, closing her prayer-book and turning toward her bed after a vain attempt to murmur some of the prayers that the church offers for the dead on the Day of All Souls.
After putting out her light and drawing the double silken curtains, she fell asleep; but her sleep was restless, light, uneasy.
The Postigo clock struck midnight. Beatriz heard through{186} her dreams the slow, dull, melancholy strokes, and half opened her eyes. She thought she had heard, at the same time, her name spoken, but far, far away, and in a faint, suffering voice. The wind groaned outside her window.
“It must have been the wind,” she said, and pressing her hand above her heart, she strove to calm herself. But her heart beat ever more wildly. The larchwood doors of the chamber grated on their hinges with a sharp creak, prolonged and strident.
First these doors, then the more distant ones,—all the doors which led to her room opened, one after another, some with a heavy, groaning sound, some with a long wail that set the nerves on edge. Then silence, a silence full of strange noises, the silence of midnight, with a monotonous murmur of far-off water, the distant barking of dogs, confused voices, unintelligible words, echoes of footsteps going and coming, the rustle of trailing garments, half-suppressed sighs, labored breathing almost felt upon the face, involuntary shudders that announce the presence of something not seen, though its approach is felt in the darkness.
Beatriz, stiffening with fear, yet trembling, thrust her head out from the bed-curtains and listened a moment. She heard a thousand diverse noises; she passed her hand across her brow and listened again; nothing, silence.
She saw, with that dilation of the pupils common in nervous crises, dim shapes moving hither and thither all about the room, but when she fixed her gaze on any one point, there was nothing but darkness and impenetrable shadows.
“Bah!” she exclaimed, again resting her beautiful head upon her blue satin pillow, “am I as timid as these poor kinsfolk of mine, whose hearts thump with terror under their armor when they hear a ghost-story?”
And closing her eyes she tried to sleep,—but her effort to compose herself was in vain. Soon she started up again,{187} paler, more uneasy, more terrified. This time it was no illusion; the brocade hangings of the door had rustled as they were pushed to either side, and slow footsteps were heard upon the carpet; the sound of those footsteps was muffled, almost imperceptible, but continuous, and she heard, keeping measure with them, a creaking as of dry wood or bones. And the footfalls came nearer, nearer; the prayer-stool by the side of her bed moved. Beatriz uttered a sharp cry, and burying herself under the bedclothes, hid her head and held her breath.
The wind beat against the balcony glass; the water of the far-off fountain was falling, falling, with a monotonous, unceasing sound; the barking of the dogs was borne upon the gusts, and the church bells in the city of Soria, some near, some remote, tolled sadly for the souls of the dead.
So passed an hour, two, the night, a century, for that night seemed to Beatrix eternal. At last the day began to break; putting fear from her, she half opened her eyes to the first silver rays. How beautiful, after a night of wakefulness and terrors, is the clear white light of dawn! She parted the silken curtains of her bed and was ready to laugh at her past alarms, when suddenly a cold sweat covered her body, her eyes seemed starting from their sockets, and a deadly pallor overspread her cheeks; for on her prayer-stool she had seen, torn and blood-stained, the blue scarf she lost on the mountain, the blue scarf Alonso went to seek.
When her attendants rushed in, aghast, to tell her of the death of the heir of Alcudiel, whose body, partly devoured by wolves, had been found that morning among the brambles on the Spirits’ Mountain, they discovered her motionless, convulsed, clinging with both hands to one of the ebony bedposts, her eyes staring, her mouth open, the lips white, her limbs rigid,—dead, dead of fright!{188}
IV.
They say that, some time after this event, a hunter who, having lost his way, had been obliged to pass the Night of the Dead on the Spirits’ Mountain, and who in the morning, before he died, was able to relate what he had seen, told a tale of horror. Among other awful sights, he avowed he beheld the skeletons of the ancient Knights Templars and of the nobles of Soria, buried in the cloister of the chapel, rise at the hour of the Angelus with a horrible rattle and, mounted on their bony steeds, chase, as a wild beast, a beautiful woman, pallid, with streaming hair, who, uttering cries of terror and anguish, had been wandering, with bare and bloody feet, about the tomb of Alonso.
THE PROMISE
I.
Margarita, her face hidden in her hands, was weeping; she did not sob, but the tears ran silently down her cheeks, slipping between her fingers to fall to the earth toward which her brow was bent.
Near Margarita was Pedro, who from time to time lifted his eyes to steal a glance at her and, seeing that she still wept, dropped them again, maintaining for his part utter silence.
All was hushed about them, as if respecting her grief. The murmurs of the field were stilled, the breeze of evening slept, and darkness was beginning to envelop the dense growth of the wood.
Thus some moments passed, during which the trace of light that the dying sun had left on the horizon faded quite away; the moon began to be faintly sketched against the violet background of the twilight sky, and one after another shone out the brighter stars.
Pedro broke at last that distressful silence, exclaiming in a hoarse and gasping voice and as if he were communing with himself:
“ ‘Tis impossible—impossible!”
Then, coming close to the inconsolable maiden and taking one of her hands, he continued in a softer, more caressing tone:
“Margarita, for thee love is all, and thou seest naught be{152}yond love. Yet there is one thing as binding as our love, and that is my duty. Our lord the Count of Gômara goes forth to-morrow from his castle to join his force to the army of King Fernando, who is on his way to deliver Seville out of the power of the Infidels, and it is my duty to depart with the Count.
“An obscure orphan, without name or family, I owe to him all that I am. I have served him in the idle days of peace, I have slept beneath his roof, I have been warmed at his hearth and eaten at his board. If I forsake him now, to-morrow his men-at-arms, as they sally forth in marching array from his castle gates, will ask, wondering at my absence: ‘Where is the favorite squire of the Count of Gômara?’ And my lord will be silent for shame, and his pages and his fools will say in mocking tone: ‘The Count’s squire is only a gallant of the jousts, a warrior in the game of courtesy.’ ”
When he had spoken thus far, Margarita lifted her eyes full of tears to meet those of her lover and moved her lips as if to answer him; but her voice was choked in a sob.
Pedro, with still tenderer and more persuasive tone, went on:
“Weep not, for God’s sake, Margarita; weep not, for thy tears hurt me. I must go from thee, but I will return as soon as I shall have gained a little glory for my obscure name.
“Heaven will aid us in our holy enterprise; we shall conquer Seville, and to us conquerors the King will give fiefs along the banks of the Guadalquivir. Then I will come back for thee, and we will go together to dwell in that paradise of the Arabs, where they say the sky is clearer and more blue than the sky above Castile.
“I will come back, I swear to thee I will; I will return to keep the troth solemnly pledged thee that day when I placed on thy finger this ring, symbol of a promise.{153}”
“Pedro!” here exclaimed Margarita, controlling her emotion and speaking in a firm, determined tone:
“Go, go to uphold thine honor,” and on pronouncing these words, she threw herself for the last time into the embrace of her lover. Then she added in a tone lower and more shaken: “Go to uphold thine honor, but come back—come back—to save mine.”
Pedro kissed the brow of Margarita, loosed his horse, that was tied to one of the trees of the grove, and rode off at a gallop through the depths of the poplar-wood.
Margarita followed Pedro with her eyes until his dim form was swallowed up in the shades of night. When he could no longer be discerned, she went back slowly to the village where her brothers were awaiting her.
“Put on thy gala dress,” one of them said to her as she entered, “for in the morning we go to Gômara with all the neighborhood to see the Count marching to Andalusia.”
“For my part, it saddens rather than gladdens me to see those go forth who perchance shall not return,” replied Margarita with a sigh.
“Yet come with us thou must,” insisted the other brother, “and thou must come with mien composed and glad; so that the gossiping folk shall have no cause to say thou hast a lover in the castle, and thy lover goeth to the war.”
II.
Hardly was the first light of dawn streaming up the sky when there began to sound throughout all the camp of Gômara the shrill trumpeting of the Count’s soldiers; and the peasants who were arriving in numerous groups from the villages round about saw the seigniorial banner flung to the winds from the highest tower of the fortress.
The peasants were everywhere,—seated on the edge of the moat, ensconced in the tops of trees, strolling over the plain,{154} crowning the crests of the hills, forming a line far along the highway, and it must have been already for nearly an hour that their curiosity had awaited the show, not without some signs of impatience, when the ringing bugle-call sounded again, the chains of the drawbridge creaked as it fell slowly across the moat, and the portcullis was raised, while little by little, groaning upon their hinges, the massive doors of the arched passage which led to the Court of Arms swung wide.
The multitude ran to press for places on the sloping banks beside the road in order to see their fill of the brilliant armor and sumptuous trappings of the following of the Count of Gômara, famed through all the countryside for his splendor and his lavish pomp.
The march was opened by the heralds who, halting at fixed intervals, proclaimed in loud voice, to the beat of the drum, the commands of the King, summoning his feudatories to the Moorish war and requiring the villages and free towns to give passage and aid to his armies.
After the heralds followed the kings-at-arms, proud of their silken vestments, their shields bordered with gold and bright colors, and their caps decked with graceful plumes.
Then came the chief retainer of the castle armed cap-à-pie, a knight mounted on a young black horse, bearing in his hands the pennon of a grandee with his motto and device; at his left hand rode the executioner of the seigniory, clad in black and red.
The seneschal was preceded by fully a score of those famous trumpeters of Castile celebrated in the chronicles of our kings for the incredible power of their lungs.
When the shrill clamor of their mighty trumpeting ceased to wound the wind, a dull sound, steady and monotonous, began to reach the ear,—the tramp of the foot-soldiers, armed with long pikes and provided with a leather shield apiece. Behind these soon came in view the soldiers who managed the en{155}gines of war, with their crude machines and their wooden towers, the bands of wall-scalers and the rabble of stable-boys in charge of the mules.
Then, enveloped in the cloud of dust raised by the hoofs of their horses, flashing sparks from their iron breastplates, passed the men-at-arms of the castle, formed in thick platoons, looking from a distance like a forest of spears.
Last of all, preceded by the drummers who were mounted on strong mules tricked out in housings and plumes, surrounded by pages in rich raiment of silk and gold and followed by the squires of the castle, appeared the Count.
As the multitude caught sight of him, a great shout of greeting went up and in the tumult of acclamation was stifled the cry of a woman, who at that moment, as if struck by a thunderbolt, fell fainting into the arms of those who sprang to her aid. It was Margarita, Margarita who had recognized her mysterious lover in that great and dreadful lord, the Count of Gômara, one of the most exalted and powerful feudatories of the Crown of Castile.
III.
The host of Don Fernando, after going forth from Cordova, had marched to Seville, not without having to fight its way at Écija, Carmona, and Alcalá del Rio del Guadaira, whose famous castle, once taken by storm, put the army in sight of the stronghold of the Infidels.
The Count of Gômara was in his tent seated on a bench of larchwood, motionless, pale, terrible, his hands crossed upon the hilt of his broadsword, his eyes fixed on space with that vague regard which appears to behold a definite object and yet takes cognizance of naught in the encompassing scene.
Standing by his side, the squire who had been longest in the castle, the only one who in those moods of black de{156}spondency could have ventured to intrude without drawing down upon his head an explosion of wrath, was speaking to him. “What is your ail, my lord?” he was saying. “What trouble wears and wastes you? Sad you go to battle, and sad return, even though returning victorious. When all the warriors sleep, surrendered to the weariness of the day, I hear your anguished sighs; and if I run to your bed, I see you struggling there against some invisible torment. You open your eyes, but your terror does not vanish. What is it, my lord? Tell me. If it be a secret, I will guard it in the depths of my memory as in a grave.”
The Count seemed not to hear his squire, but after a long pause, as if the words had taken all that time to make slow way from his ears to his understanding, he emerged little by little from his trance and, drawing the squire affectionately toward him, said to him with grave and quiet tone:
“I have suffered much in silence. Believing myself the sport of a vain fantasy, I have until now held my peace for shame,—but nay, what is happening to me is no illusion.
“It must be that I am under the power of some awful curse. Heaven or hell must wish something of me, and tell me so by supernatural events. Recallest thou the day of our encounter with the Moors of Nebriza in the Aljarafe de Triana? We were few, the combat was stern, and I was face to face with death. Thou sawest, in the most critical moment of the fight, my horse, wounded and blind with rage, dash toward the main body of the Moorish host. I strove in vain to check him; the reins had escaped from my hands, and the fiery animal galloped on, bearing me to certain death.
“Already the Moors, closing up their ranks, were grounding their long pikes to receive me on the points; a cloud of arrows hissed about my ears; the horse was but a few bounds from the serried spears on which we were about to fling
AN ANCIENT CASTLE
ourselves, when—believe me, it was not an illusion—I saw a hand that, grasping the bridle, stopped him with an unearthly force and, turning him in the direction of my own troops, saved me by a miracle.
“In vain I asked of one and another who my deliverer was; no one knew him, no one had seen him.
“ ‘When you were rushing to throw yourself upon the wall of pikes,’ they said, ‘you went alone, absolutely alone; this is why we marvelled to see you turn, knowing that the steed no longer obeyed his rider.’
“That night I entered my tent distraught; I strove in vain to extirpate from my imagination the memory of the strange adventure; but on advancing toward my bed, again I saw the same hand, a beautiful hand, white to the point of pallor, which drew the curtains, vanishing after it had drawn them. Ever since, at all hours, in all places, I see that mysterious hand which anticipates my desires and forestalls my actions. I saw it, when we were storming the castle of Triana, catch between its fingers and break in the air an arrow which was about to strike me; I have seen it at banquets where I was trying to drown my trouble in the tumultuous revelry, pour the wine into my cup; and always it flickers before my eyes, and wherever I go it follows me; in the tent, in the battle, by day, by night,—even now, see it, see it here, resting gently on my shoulder!”
On speaking these last words, the Count sprang to his feet, striding back and forth as if beside himself, overwhelmed by utter terror.
The squire dashed away a tear. Believing his lord mad, he did not try to combat his ideas, but confined himself to saying in a voice of deep emotion:
“Come; let us go out from the tent a moment; perhaps the evening air will cool your temples, calming this incomprehensible grief, for which I find no words of consolation.{158}”
IV.
The camp of the Christians extended over all the plain of Guadaira, even to the left bank of the Guadalquivir. In front of the camp and clearly defined against the bright horizon, rose the walls of Seville flanked by massive, menacing towers. Above the crown of battlements showed in its rich profusion the green leafage of the thousand gardens enclosed in the Moorish stronghold, and amid the dim clusters of foliage gleamed the observation turrets, white as snow, the minarets of the mosques, and the gigantic watch-tower, over whose aerial parapet the four great balls of gold, which from the Christian camp looked like four flames, threw out, when smitten by the sun, sparks of living light.
The enterprise of Don Fernando, one of the most heroic and intrepid of that epoch, had drawn to his banners the greatest warriors of the various kingdoms in the Peninsula, with others who, called by fame, had come from foreign, far-off lands to add their forces to those of the Royal Saint. Stretching along the plain might be seen, therefore, army-tents of all forms and colors, above whose peaks waved in the wind the various ensigns with their quartered escutcheons,—stars, griffins, lions, chains, bars and caldrons, with hundreds of other heraldic figures or symbols which proclaimed the name and quality of their owners. Through the streets of that improvised city were circulating in all directions a multitude of soldiers who, speaking diverse dialects, dressed each in the fashion of his own locality and armed according to his fancy, formed a scene of strange and picturesque contrasts.
Here a group of nobles were resting from the fatigues of combat, seated on benches of larchwood at the door of their tents and playing at chess, while their pages poured them wine in metal cups; there some foot-soldiers were taking{159} advantage of a moment of leisure to clean and mend their armor, the worse for their last skirmish; further on, the most expert archers of the army were covering the mark with arrows, amidst the applause of the crowd marvelling at their dexterity; and the beating of the drums, the shrilling of the trumpets, the cries of pedlars hawking their wares, the clang of iron striking on iron, the ballad-singing of the minstrels who entertained their hearers with the relation of prodigious exploits, and the shouts of the heralds who published the orders of the camp-masters, all these, filling the air with thousands of discordant noises, contributed to that picture of soldier life a vivacity and animation impossible to portray in words.
The Count of Gômara, attended by his faithful squire, passed among the lively groups without raising his eyes from the ground, silent, sad, as if not a sight disturbed his gaze nor the least sound reached his hearing. He moved mechanically, as a sleepwalker, whose spirit is busy in the world of dreams, steps and takes his course without consciousness of his actions, as if impelled by a will not his own.
Close by the royal tent and in the middle of a ring of soldiers, little pages and camp-servants, who were listening to him open-mouthed, making haste to buy some of the tawdry knickknacks which he was enumerating in a loud voice, with extravagant praises, was an odd personage, half pilgrim, half minstrel, who, at one moment reciting a kind of litany in barbarous Latin, and the next giving vent to some buffoonery or scurrility, was mingling in his interminable tale devout prayers with jests broad enough to make a common soldier blush, romances of illicit love with legends of saints. In the huge pack that hung from his shoulders were a thousand different objects all tossed and tumbled together,—ribbons touched to the sepulchre of Santiago, scrolls with words which he averred were Hebrew, the very same that King{160} Solomon spoke when he founded the temple, and the only words able to keep you free of every contagious disease; marvellous balsams capable of sticking together men who were cut in two; secret charms to make all women in love with you; Gospels sewed into little silk bags; relics of the patron saints of all the towns in Spain; tinsel jewels, chains, sword-belts, medals and many other gewgaws of brass, glass and lead.
When the Count approached the group formed by the pilgrim and his admirers, the fellow began to tune a kind of mandolin or Arab guitar with which he accompanied himself in the singsong recital of his romances. When he had thoroughly tested the strings, one after another, very coolly, while his companion made the round of the circle coaxing out the last coppers from the flaccid pouches of the audience, the pilgrim began to sing in nasal voice, to a monotonous and plaintive air, a ballad whose stanzas always ended in the same refrain.
The Count drew near the group and gave attention. By an apparently strange coincidence, the title of this tale was entirely at one with the melancholy thoughts that burdened his mind. As the singer had announced before beginning, the lay was called the Ballad of the Dead Hand.
The squire, on hearing so strange an announcement, had striven to draw his lord away; but the Count, with his eyes fixed on the minstrel, remained motionless, listening to this song.
Who said he was a squire;
The war-drums called him far away;
Not tears could quench his fire.
“Thou goest to return no more.”
“Nay, by all oaths that bind{161}”—
But even while the lover swore,
A voice was on the wind:
Ill fares the soul that sets its trust
On faith of dust.
With all his glittering train,
But never will his battle-sword
Inflict so keen a pain.
“His soldier-honor well he keeps;
Mine honor—blind! oh, blind!”
While the forsaken woman weeps,
A voice is on the wind:
Ill fares the soul that sets its trust
On faith of dust.
His fatal angers burn.
“Thou hast us shamed.” Her terror pleads,—
“He swore he would return.”
“But not to find thee, if he tries,
Where he was wont to find.”
Beneath her brother’s blow she dies;
A voice is on the wind:
Ill fares the soul that sets its trust
On faith of dust.
They have buried her deep,—but lo!
However high they heap the earth,
A hand as white as snow
Comes stealing up, a hand whose ring
A noble’s troth doth bind.
Above her grave no maidens sing,
But a voice is on the wind:
Ill fares the soul that sets its trust
On faith of dust.
{162}
Hardly had the singer finished the last stanza, when, breaking through the wall of eager listeners who respectfully gave way on recognizing him, the Count fronted the pilgrim and, clutching his arm, demanded in a low, convulsive voice:
“From what part of Spain art thou?”
“From Soria,” was the unmoved response.
“And where hast thou learned this ballad? Who is that maiden of whom the story tells?” again exclaimed the Count, with ever more profound emotion.
“My lord,” said the pilgrim, fixing his eyes upon the Count with imperturbable steadiness, “this ballad is passed from mouth to mouth among the peasants in the fief of Gômara, and it refers to an unhappy village-girl cruelly wronged by a great lord. The high justice of God has permitted that, in her burial, there shall still remain above the earth the hand on which her lover placed a ring in plighting her his troth. Perchance you know whom it behooves to keep that pledge.”
V.
In a wretched village which may be found at one side of the highway leading to Gômara, I saw not long since the spot where the strange ceremony of the Count’s marriage is said to have taken place.
After he, kneeling upon the humble grave, had pressed the hand of Margarita in his own, and a priest, authorized by the Pope, had blessed the mournful union, the story goes that the miracle ceased, and the dead hand buried itself forever.
At the foot of some great old trees there is a bit of meadow which, every spring, covers itself spontaneously with flowers.
The country-folk say that this is the burial place of Margarita.{163}
THE RAY OF MOONSHINE
I DO not know whether this is history which seems like a tale, or a tale which seems like history; what I can affirm is that in its core it contains a truth, a truth supremely sad, which in all likelihood I, with my imaginative tendencies, will be one of the last to take to heart.
Another with this idea would perhaps have made a book of melancholy philosophy. I have written this legend that those who see nothing of its deep meaning may at least derive from it a moment of entertainment.
I.
He was noble, he had been born amid the clash of arms, and yet the sudden blare of a war trumpet would not have caused him to lift his head an instant or turn his eyes an inch away from the dim parchment in which he was reading the last song of a troubadour.
Those who desired to see him had no need to look for him in the spacious court of his castle, where the grooms were breaking in the colts, the pages teaching the falcons to fly, and the soldiers employing their leisure days in sharpening on stones the iron points of their lances.
“Where is Manrico? Where is your lord?” his mother would sometimes ask.
“We do not know,” the servants would reply. “Perchance he is in the cloister of the monastery of the Peña, seated on the edge of a tomb, listening to see if he may
THE BRIDGE OF TOLEDO
surprise some word of the conversation of the dead; or on the bridge watching the river-waves chasing one another under its arches, or curled up in the fissure of some rock counting the stars in the sky, following with his eyes a cloud, or contemplating the will-o’-the-wisps that flit like exhalations over the surface of the marshes. Wherever he is, it is where he has least company.”
In truth, Manrico was a lover of solitude, and so extreme a lover that sometimes he would have wished to be a body without a shadow, because then his shadow would not follow him everywhere he went.
He loved solitude, because in its bosom he would invent, giving free rein to his imagination, a phantasmal world, inhabited by wonderful beings, daughters of his weird fancies and his poetic dreams; for Manrico was a poet,—so true a poet that never had he found adequate forms in which to utter his thoughts nor had he ever imprisoned them in words.
He believed that among the red coals of the hearth there dwelt fire-spirits of a thousand hues which ran like golden insects along the enkindled logs or danced in a luminous whirl of sparks on the pointed flames, and he passed long hours of inaction seated on a low stool by the high Gothic chimney-place, motionless, his eyes fixed on the fire.
He believed that in the depths of the waves of the river, among the mosses of the fountain and above the mists of the lake there lived mysterious women, sibyls, nymphs, undines, who breathed forth laments and sighs, or sang and laughed in the monotonous murmur of the water, a murmur to which he listened in silence, striving to translate it.
In the clouds, in the air, in the depths of the groves, in the clefts of the rocks, he imagined that he perceived forms, or heard mysterious sounds, forms of supernatural beings, indistinct words which he could not comprehend.{42}
Love! He had been born to dream love, not to feel it. He loved all women an instant, this one because she was golden-haired, that one because she had red lips, another because in walking she swayed as a river-reed.
Sometimes his delirium reached the point of his spending an entire night gazing at the moon, which floated in heaven in a silvery mist, or at the stars, which twinkled afar off like the changing lights of precious stones. In those long nights of poetic wakefulness, he would exclaim: “If it is true, as the Prior of the Peña has told me, that it is possible those points of light may be worlds, if it is true that people live on that pearly orb which rides above the clouds, how beautiful must the women of those luminous regions be! and I shall not be able to see them, and I shall not be able to love them! What must their beauty be! And what their love!”
Manrico was not yet so demented that the boys would run after him, but he was sufficiently so to talk and gesticulate to himself, which is where madness begins.
II.
Over the Douro, which ran lapping the weatherworn and darkened stones of the walls of Soria, there is a bridge leading from the city to the old convent of the Templars, whose estates extended along the opposite bank of the river.
At the time to which we refer, the knights of the Order had already abandoned their historic fortresses, but there still remained standing the ruins of the large round towers of their walls,—there still might be seen, as in part may be seen to-day, covered with ivy and white morning-glories the massive arches of their cloister and the long ogive galleries of their courts of arms through which the wind would breathe soft sighs, stirring the deep foliage.
In the orchards and in the gardens, whose paths the feet of the monks had not trodden for many years, vegetation,{43} left to itself, made holiday, without fear that the hand of man should mutilate it in the effort to embellish. Climbing plants crept upward twining about the aged trunks of the trees; the shady paths through aisles of poplars, whose leafy tops met and mingled, were overgrown with turf; spear-plumed thistles and nettles had shot up in the sandy roads, and in the parts of the building which were bulging out, ready to fall; the yellow crucifera, floating in the wind like the crested feathers of a helmet, and bell-flowers, white and blue, balancing themselves, as in a swing, on their long and flexible stems, proclaimed the conquest of decay and ruin.
It was night, a summer night, mild, full of perfumes and peaceful sounds, and with a moon, white and serene, high in the blue, luminous, transparent heavens.
Manrico, his imagination seized by a poetic frenzy, after crossing the bridge from which he contemplated for a moment the dark silhouette of the city outlined against the background of some pale, soft clouds massed on the horizon, plunged into the deserted ruins of the Templars.
It was midnight. The moon, which had been slowly rising, was now at the zenith, when, on entering a dusky avenue that led from the demolished cloister to the bank of the Douro, Manrico uttered a low, stifled cry, strangely compounded of surprise, fear and joy.
In the depths of the dusky avenue he had seen moving something white, which shimmered a moment and then vanished in the darkness, the trailing robe of a woman, of a woman who had crossed the path and disappeared amid the foliage at the very instant when the mad dreamer of absurd, impossible dreams penetrated into the gardens.
An unknown woman!—In this place!—At this hour! “This, this is the woman of my quest,” exclaimed Manrico, and he darted forward in pursuit, swift as an arrow.{44}
III.
He reached the spot where he had seen the mysterious woman disappear in the thick tangle of the branches. She had gone. Whither? Afar, very far, he thought he descried, among the crowding trunks of the trees, something like a shining, or a white, moving form. “It is she, it is she, who has wings on her feet and flees like a shadow!” he said, and rushed on in his search, parting with his hands the network of ivy which was spread like a tapestry from poplar to poplar. By breaking through brambles and parasitical growths, he made his way to a sort of platform on which the moonlight dazzled.—Nobody!—“Ah, but by this path, but by this she slips away!” he then exclaimed. “I hear her footsteps on the dry leaves, and the rustle of her dress as it sweeps over the ground and brushes against the shrubs.” And he ran,—ran like a madman, hither and thither, and did not find her. “But still comes the sound of her footfalls,” he murmured again. “I think she spoke; beyond a doubt, she spoke. The wind which sighs among the branches, the leaves which seem to be praying in low voices, prevented my hearing what she said, but beyond a doubt she fleets by yonder path; she spoke, she spoke. In what language? I know not, but it is a foreign speech.” And again he ran onward in pursuit, sometimes thinking he saw her, sometimes that he heard her; now noticing that the branches, among which she had disappeared, were still in motion; now imagining that he distinguished in the sand the prints of her little feet; again firmly persuaded that a special fragrance which crossed the air from time to time was an aroma belonging to that woman who was making sport of him, taking pleasure in eluding him among these intricate growths of briers and brambles. Vain attempt!
He wandered some hours from one spot to another, beside{45} himself, now pausing to listen, now gliding with the utmost precaution over the herbage, now in frantic and desperate race.
Pushing on, pushing on through the immense gardens which bordered the river, he came at last to the foot of the cliff on which rises the hermitage of San Saturio. “Perhaps from this height I can get my bearings for pursuing my search across this confused labyrinth,” he exclaimed, climbing from rock to rock with the aid of his dagger.
He reached the summit whence may be seen the city in the distance and, curving at his feet, a great part of the Douro, compelling its dark, impetuous stream onward through the winding banks that imprison it.
Manrico, once on the top of the cliff, turned his gaze in every direction, till, bending and fixing it at last on a certain point, he could not restrain an oath.
The sparkling moonlight glistened on the wake left behind by a boat, which, rowed at full speed, was making for the opposite shore.
In that boat he thought he had distinguished a white and slender figure, a woman without doubt, the woman whom he had seen in the grounds of the Templars, the woman of his dreams, the realization of his wildest hopes. He sped down the cliff with the agility of a deer, threw his cap, whose tall, full plume might hinder him in running, to the ground, and freeing himself from his heavy velvet cloak, shot like a meteor toward the bridge.
He believed he could cross it and reach the city before the boat would touch the further bank. Folly! When Manrico, panting and covered with sweat, reached the city gate, already they who had crossed the Douro over against San Saturio were entering Soria by one of the posterns in the wall, which, at that time, extended to the bank of the river whose waters mirrored its gray battlements.{46}
IV.
Although his hope of overtaking those who had entered by the postern gate of San Saturio was dissipated, that of tracing out the house which sheltered them in the city was not therefore abandoned by our hero. With his mind fixed upon this idea, he entered the town and, taking his way toward the ward of San Juan, began roaming its streets at hazard.
The streets of Soria were then, and they are to-day, narrow, dark and crooked. A profound silence reigned in them, a silence broken only by the distant barking of a dog, the barring of a gate or the neighing of a charger, whose pawing made the chain which fastened him to the manger rattle in the subterranean stables.
Manrico, with ear attent to these vague noises of the night, which at times seemed to be the footsteps of some person who had just turned the last corner of a deserted street, at others, the confused voices of people who were talking behind him and whom every moment he expected to see at his side, spent several hours running at random from one place to another.
At last he stopped beneath a great stone mansion, dark and very old, and, standing there, his eyes shone with an indescribable expression of joy. In one of the high ogive windows of what we might call a palace, he saw a ray of soft and mellow light which, passing through some thin draperies of rose-colored silk, was reflected on the time-blackened, weather-cracked wall of the house across the way.
“There is no doubt about it; here dwells my unknown lady,” murmured the youth in a low voice, without removing his eyes for a second from the Gothic window. “Here she dwells! She entered by the postern gate of San Saturio,—by the postern gate of San Saturio is the way to this ward—in this ward there is a house where, after midnight, there{47} is some one awake—awake? Who can it be at this hour if not she, just returned from her nocturnal excursions? There is no more room for doubt; this is her home.”
In this firm persuasion and revolving in his head the maddest and most capricious fantasies, he awaited dawn opposite the Gothic window where there was a light all night and from which he did not withdraw his gaze a moment.
When daybreak came, the massive gates of the arched entrance to the mansion, on whose keystone was sculptured the owner’s coat of arms, turned ponderously on their hinges with a sharp and prolonged creaking. A servitor appeared on the threshold with a bunch of keys in his hand, rubbing his eyes, and showing as he yawned a set of great teeth which might well rouse envy in a crocodile.
For Manrico to see him and to rush to the gate was the work of an instant.
“Who lives in this house? What is her name? Her country? Why has she come to Soria? Has she a husband? Answer, answer, animal!” This was the salutation which, shaking him violently by the shoulder, Manrico hurled at the poor servitor, who, after staring at him a long while with frightened, stupefied eyes, replied in a voice broken with amazement:
“In this house lives the right honorable Señor don Alonso de Valdecuellos, Master of the Horse to our lord, the King. He has been wounded in the war with the Moors and is now in this city recovering from his injuries.”
“Well! well! His daughter?” broke in the impatient youth. “His daughter, or his sister, or his wife, or whoever she may be?”
“He has no woman in his family.”
“No woman! Then who sleeps in that chamber there, where all night long I have seen a light burning?{48}”
“There? There sleeps my lord Don Alonso, who, as he is ill, keeps his lamp burning till dawn.”
A thunderbolt, suddenly falling at his feet, would not have given Manrico a greater shock than these words.
V.
“I must find her, I must find her; and if I find her, I am almost certain I shall recognize her. How?—I cannot tell—but recognize her I must. The echo of her footstep, or a single word of hers which I may hear again; the hem of her robe, only the hem which I may see again would be enough to make me sure of her. Night and day I see floating before my eyes those folds of a fabric diaphanous and whiter than snow, night and day there is sounding here within, within my head, the soft rustle of her raiment, the vague murmur of her unintelligible words.—What said she?—What said she? Ah, if I might only know what she said, perchance—but yet without knowing it, I shall find her—I shall find her—my heart tells me so, and my heart deceives me never.—It is true that I have unavailingly traversed all the streets of Soria, that I have passed nights upon nights in the open air, a corner-post; that I have spent more than twenty golden coins in persuading duennas and servants to gossip; that I gave holy water in St. Nicholas to an old crone muffled up so artfully in her woollen mantle that she seemed to me a goddess; and on coming out, after matins, from the collegiate church, in the dusk before the dawn, I followed like a fool the litter of the archdeacon, believing that the hem of his vestment was that of the robe of my unknown lady—but it matters not—I must find her, and the rapture of possessing her will assuredly surpass the labors of the quest.
“What will her eyes be? They should be azure, azure and liquid as the sky of night. How I delight in eyes of that color! They are so expressive, so dreamy, so—yes,{49}—no doubt of it; azure her eyes should be, azure they are, assuredly;—and her tresses black, jet black and so long that they wave upon the air—it seems to me I saw them waving that night, like her robe, and they were black—I do not deceive myself, no; they were black.
“And how well azure eyes, very large and slumbrous, and loose tresses, waving and dark, become a tall woman—for—she is tall, tall and slender, like those angels above the portals of our basilicas, angels whose oval faces the shadows of their granite canopies veil in mystic twilight.
“Her voice!—her voice I have heard—her voice is soft as the breathing of the wind in the leaves of the poplars, and her walk measured and stately like the cadences of a musical instrument.
“And this woman, who is lovely as the loveliest of my youthful dreams, who thinks as I think, who enjoys what I enjoy, who hates what I hate, who is a twin spirit of my spirit, who is the complement of my being, must she not feel moved on meeting me? Must she not love me as I shall love her, as I love her already, with all the strength of my life, with every faculty of my soul?
“Back, back to the place where I saw her for the first and only time that I have seen her. Who knows but that, capricious as myself, a lover of solitude and mystery like all dreamy souls, she may take pleasure in wandering among the ruins in the silence of the night?”
Two months had passed since the servitor of Don Alonso de Valdecuellos had disillusionized the infatuated Manrico, two months in every hour of which he had built a castle in the air only for reality to shatter with a breath; two months during which he had sought in vain that unknown woman for whom an absurd love had been growing in his soul, thanks to his still more absurd imaginations; two months had flown since his first adventure when now, after crossing,{50} absorbed in these ideas, the bridge which leads to the convent of the Templars, the enamored youth plunged again into the intricate pathways of the gardens.
VI.
The night was calm and beautiful, the full moon shone high in the heavens, and the wind sighed with the sweetest of murmurs among the leaves of the trees.
Manrico arrived at the cloister, swept his glance over the enclosed green and peered through the massive arches of the arcades. It was deserted.
He went forth, turned his steps toward the dim avenue that leads to the Douro, and had not yet entered it when there escaped from his lips a cry of joy.
He had seen floating for an instant, and then disappearing, the hem of the white robe, of the white robe of the woman of his dreams, of the woman whom now he loved like a madman.
He runs, he runs in his pursuit, he reaches the spot where he had seen her vanish; but there he stops, fixes his terrified eyes upon the ground, remains a moment motionless, a slight nervous tremor agitates his limbs, a tremor which increases, which increases, and shows symptoms of an actual convulsion—and he breaks out at last into a peal of laughter, laughter loud, strident, horrible.
That white object, light, floating, had again shone before his eyes, it had even glittered at his feet for an instant, only for an instant.
It was a moonbeam, a moonbeam which pierced from time to time the green vaulted roof of trees when the wind moved their boughs.
Several years had passed. Manrico, crouched on a settle by the deep Gothic chimney of his castle, almost motionless and with a vague, uneasy gaze like that of an idiot, would{51} scarcely take notice either of the endearments of his mother or of the attentions of his servants.
“You are young, you are comely,” she would say to him, “why do you languish in solitude? Why do you not seek a woman whom you may love, and whose love may make you happy?”
“Love! Love is a ray of moonshine,” murmured the youth.
“Why do you not throw off this lethargy?” one of his squires would ask. “Arm yourself in iron from head to foot, bid us unfurl to the winds your illustrious banner, and let us march to the war. In war is glory.”
“Glory!—Glory is a ray of moonshine.”
“Would you like to have me recite you a ballad, the latest that Sir Arnaldo, the Provençal troubadour, has composed?”
“No! no!” exclaimed the youth, straightening himself angrily on his seat, “I want nothing—that is—yes, I want—I want you should leave me alone. Ballads—women—glory—happiness—lies are they all—vain fantasies which we shape in our imagination and clothe according to our whim, and we love them and run after them—for what? for what? To find a ray of moonshine.”
Manrico was mad; at least, all the world thought so. For myself, on the contrary, I think what he had done was to regain his senses.
THE EMERALD EYES
FOR a long time I have desired to write something with this title. Now that the opportunity has come, I have inscribed it in capital letters at the top of the page and have let my pen run at will.
I believe that I have seen eyes like those I have painted in this legend. It may have been in my dreams, but I have seen them. Too true it is that I shall not be able to describe them as they were, luminous, transparent as drops of rain slipping over the leaves of the trees after a summer shower. At all events, I count upon the imagination of my readers to understand me in what we might call a sketch for a picture which I will paint some day.
I.
“The stag is wounded—he is wounded; no doubt of it. There are traces of his blood on the mountain shrubs, and in trying to leap one of those mastic trees his legs failed him. Our young lord begins where others end. In my forty years as huntsman I have not seen a better shot. But by Saint Saturio, patron of Soria, cut him off at these hollies, urge on the dogs, blow the horns till your lungs are empty, and bury your spurs in the flanks of the horses. Do you not see that he is going toward the fountain of the Poplars, and if he lives to reach it we must give him up for lost?”
The glens of the Moncayo flung from echo to echo the braying of the horns and barking of the unleashed pack of hounds; the shouts of the pages resounded with new vigor, while the confused throng of men, dogs and horses rushed{24} toward the point which Iñigo, the head huntsman of the Marquises of Almenar, indicated as the one most favorable for intercepting the quarry.
But all was of no avail. When the fleetest of the greyhounds reached the hollies, panting, its jaws covered with foam, already the deer, swift as an arrow, had cleared them at a single bound, disappearing among the thickets of a narrow path which led to the fountain.
“Draw rein! draw rein, every man!” then cried Iñigo. “It was the will of God that he should escape.”
And the troop halted, the horns fell silent and the hounds, at the call of the hunters, abandoned, snarling, the trail.
At that moment, the lord of the festival, Fernando de Argensola, the heir of Almenar, came up with the company.
“What are you doing?” he exclaimed, addressing his huntsman, astonishment depicted on his features, anger burning in his eyes. “What are you doing, idiot? Do you see that the creature is wounded, that it is the first to fall by my hand, and yet you abandon the pursuit and let it give you the slip to die in the depths of the forest? Do you think perchance that I have come to kill deer for the banquets of wolves?”
“Señor,” murmured Iñigo between his teeth, “it is impossible to pass this point.”
“Impossible! And why?”
“Because this path,” continued the huntsman, “leads to the fountain of the Poplars, the fountain of the Poplars in whose waters dwells an evil spirit. He who dares trouble its flow pays dear for his rashness. Already the deer will have reached its borders; how will you take it without drawing on your head some fearful calamity? We hunters are kings of the Moncayo, but kings that pay a tribute. A quarry which takes refuge at this mysterious fountain is a quarry lost.{25}”
“Lost! Sooner will I lose the seigniory of my fathers, sooner will I lose my soul into the hands of Satan than permit this stag to escape me, the only one my spear has wounded, the first fruits of my hunting. Do you see him? Do you see him? He can still at intervals be made out from here. His legs falter, his speed slackens; let me go, let me go! Drop this bridle or I roll you in the dust! Who knows if I will not run him down before he reaches the fountain? And if he should reach it, to the devil with it, its untroubled waters and its inhabitants! On, Lightning! on, my steed! If you overtake him, I will have the diamonds of my coronet set in a headstall all of gold for you.”
Horse and rider departed like a hurricane.
Iñigo followed them with his eyes till they disappeared in the brush. Then he looked about him: all like himself remained motionless, in consternation.
The huntsman exclaimed at last:
“Señores, you are my witnesses. I exposed myself to death under his horse’s hoofs to hold him back. I have fulfilled my duty. Against the devil heroism does not avail. To this point comes the huntsman with his crossbow; beyond this, it is for the chaplain with his holy water to attempt to pass.”
II.
“You are pale; you go about sad and gloomy. What afflicts you? From the day, which I shall ever hold in hate, on which you went to the fountain of the Poplars in chase of the wounded deer, I should say an evil sorceress had bewitched you with her enchantments.
“You do not go to the mountains now preceded by the clamorous pack of hounds, nor does the blare of your horns awake the echoes. Alone with these brooding fancies which beset you, every morning you take your crossbow only to{26} plunge into the thickets and remain there until the sun goes down. And when night darkens and you return to the castle, white and weary, in vain I seek in the game-bag the spoils of the chase. What detains you so long far from those who love you most?”
While Iñigo was speaking, Fernando, absorbed in his thoughts, mechanically cut splinters from the ebony bench with his hunting knife.
After a long silence, which was interrupted only by the click of the blade as it slipped over the polished wood, the young man, addressing his servant as if he had not heard a single word, exclaimed:
“Iñigo, you who are an old man, you who know all the haunts of the Moncayo, who have lived on its slopes pursuing wild beasts and in your wandering hunting trips have more than once stood on its summit, tell me, have you ever by chance met a woman who dwells among its rocks?”
“A woman!” exclaimed the huntsman with astonishment, looking closely at him.
“Yes,” said the youth. “It is a strange thing that has happened to me, very strange. I thought I could keep this secret always; but it is no longer possible. It overflows my heart and begins to reveal itself in my face. Therefore I am going to tell it to you. You will help me solve the mystery which enfolds this being who seems to exist only for me, since no one knows her or has seen her, or can give me any account of her.”
The huntsman, without opening his lips, drew forward his stool to place it near the ebony bench of his lord from whom he did not once remove his affrighted eyes. The youth, after arranging his thoughts, continued thus:
“From the day on which, notwithstanding your gloomy predictions, I went to the fountain of the Poplars, and crossing its waters recovered the stag which your superstition{27} would have let escape, my soul has been filled with a desire for solitude.
“You do not know that place. See, the fountain springs from a hidden source in the cavity of a rock, and falls in trickling drops through the green, floating leaves of the plants that grow on the border of its cradle. These drops, which on falling glisten like points of gold and sound like the notes of a musical instrument, unite on the turf and murmuring, murmuring with a sound like that of bees humming about the flowers, glide on through the gravel, and form a rill and contend with the obstacles in their way, and gather volume and leap and flee and run, sometimes with a laugh, sometimes with sighs, until they fall into a lake. Into the lake they fall with an indescribable sound. Laments, words, names, songs, I know not what I have heard in that sound when I have sat, alone and fevered, upon the huge rock at whose feet the waters of that mysterious fountain leap to bury themselves in a deep pool whose still surface is scarcely rippled by the evening wind.
“Everything there is grand. Solitude with its thousand vague murmurs dwells in those places and transports the mind with a profound melancholy. In the silvered leaves of the poplars, in the hollows of the rocks, in the waves of the water it seems that the invisible spirits of nature talk with us, that they recognize a brother in the immortal soul of man.
“When at break of dawn you would see me take my crossbow and go toward the mountain, it was never to lose myself among the thickets in pursuit of game. No, I went to sit on the rim of the fountain, to seek in its waves—I know not what—an absurdity! The day I leaped over it on my Lightning, I believed I saw glittering in its depths a marvel—truly a marvel—the eyes of a woman!
“Perhaps it may have been a fugitive ray of sunshine{28} that wound, serpent like, through the foam; perhaps one of those flowers which float among the weeds of its bosom, flowers whose calyxes seem to be emeralds—I do not know. I thought I saw a gaze which fixed itself on mine, a look which kindled in my breast a desire absurd, impossible of realization, that of meeting a person with eyes like those.
“In my search, I went to that place day after day.
“At last, one afternoon—I thought myself the plaything of a dream—but no, it is the truth; I have spoken with her many times as I am now speaking with you—one afternoon I found, sitting where I had sat, clothed in a robe which reached to the waters and floated on their surface, a woman beautiful beyond all exaggeration. Her hair was like gold; her eyelashes shone like threads of light, and between the lashes flashed the restless eyes that I had seen—yes; for the eyes of that woman were the eyes which I bore stamped upon my mind, eyes of an impossible color, the color——”
“Green!” exclaimed Iñigo, in accents of profound terror, starting with a bound from his seat.
Fernando, in turn, looked at him as if astonished that Iñigo should supply what he was about to say, and asked him with mingled anxiety and joy:
“Do you know her?”
“Oh, no!” said the huntsman. “God save me from knowing her! But my parents, on forbidding me to go toward those places, told me a thousand times that the spirit, goblin, demon or woman, who dwells in those waters, has eyes of that color. I conjure you by that which you love most on earth not to return to the fountain of the Poplars. One day or another her vengeance will overtake you, and you will expiate in death the crime of having stained her waters.”
“By what I love most!” murmured the young man with a sad smile.{29}
“Yes,” continued the elder. “By your parents, by your kindred, by the tears of her whom heaven destines for your wife, by those of a servant who watched beside your cradle.”
“Do you know what I love most in this world? Do you know for what I would give the love of my father, the kisses of her who gave me life, and all the affection which all the women on earth can hold in store? For one look, for only one look of those eyes! How can I leave off seeking them?”
Fernando said these words in such a tone that the tear which trembled on the eyelids of Iñigo fell silently down his cheek, while he exclaimed with a mournful accent: “The will of Heaven be done!”
III.
“Who art thou? What is thy fatherland? Where dost thou dwell? Day after day I come seeking thee, and see neither the palfrey that brings thee hither, nor the servants who bear thy litter. Rend once for all the veil of mystery in which thou dost enfold thyself as in the heart of night. I love thee and, highborn or lowly, I will be thine, thine forever.”
The sun had crossed the crest of the mountain. The shadows were descending its slope with giant strides. The breeze sighed amid the poplars of the fountain. The mist, rising little by little from the surface of the lake, began to envelop the rocks of its margin.
Upon one of these rocks, on one which seemed ready to topple over into the depths of the waters on whose surface was pictured its wavering image, the heir of Almenar, on his knees at the feet of his mysterious beloved, sought in vain to draw from her the secret of her existence.
She was beautiful, beautiful and pallid as an alabaster statue. One of her tresses fell over her shoulders, entan{30}gling itself in the folds of her veil like a ray of sunlight passing through clouds; and her eyes, within the circle of her amber-colored lashes, gleamed like emeralds set in fretted gold.
When the youth ceased speaking, her lips moved as for utterance, but only exhaled a sigh, a sigh soft and sorrowful like that of the gentle wave which a dying breeze drives among the rushes.
“Thou answerest not,” exclaimed Fernando, seeing his hope mocked. “Wouldst thou have me credit what they have told me of thee? Oh, no! Speak to me. I long to know if thou lovest me; I long to know if I may love thee, if thou art a woman——”
—“Or a demon. And if I were?”
The youth hesitated a moment; a cold sweat ran through his limbs; the pupils of his eyes dilated, fixing themselves with more intensity upon those of that woman and, fascinated by their phosphoric brilliance, as though demented he exclaimed in a burst of passion:
“If thou wert, I should love thee. I should love thee as I love thee now, as it is my destiny to love thee even beyond this life, if there be any life beyond.”
“Fernando,” said the beautiful being then, in a voice like music: “I love thee even more than thou lovest me; in that I, who am pure spirit, stoop to a mortal. I am not a woman like those that live on earth. I am a woman worthy of thee who art superior to the rest of humankind. I dwell in the depths of these waters, incorporeal like them, fugitive and transparent; I speak with their murmurs and move with their undulations. I do not punish him who dares disturb the fountain where I live; rather I reward him with my love, as a mortal superior to the superstitions of the common herd, as a lover capable of responding to my strange and mysterious embrace.{31}”
While she was speaking, the youth, absorbed in the contemplation of her fantastic beauty, drawn on as by an unknown force, approached nearer and nearer the edge of the rock. The woman of the emerald eyes continued thus:
“Dost thou behold, behold the limpid depths of this lake, behold these plants with large, green leaves which wave in its bosom? They will give us a couch of emeralds and corals and I—I will give thee a bliss unnamable, that bliss which thou hast dreamed of in thine hours of delirium, and which no other can bestow.—Come! the mists of the lake float over our brows like a pavilion of lawn, the waves call us with their incomprehensible voices, the wind sings among the poplars hymns of love; come—come!”
Night began to cast her shadows, the moon shimmered on the surface of the pool, the mist was driven before the rising breeze, the green eyes glittered in the dusk like the will-o’-the-wisps that run over the surface of impure waters. “Come, come!” these words were murmuring in the ears of Fernando like an incantation,—“Come!” and the mysterious woman called him to the brink of the abyss where she was poised, and seemed to offer him a kiss—a kiss——
Fernando took one step toward her—another—and felt arms slender and flexible twining about his neck and a cold sensation on his burning lips, a kiss of snow—wavered, lost his footing and fell, striking the water with a dull and mournful sound.
The waves leaped in sparks of light, and closed over his body, and their silvery circles went widening, widening until they died away on the banks.
THE WHITE DOE
IN a small town of Aragon, about the end of the thirteenth century or a little later, there lived retired in his seigniorial castle a renowned knight named Don Dionís, who, having served his king in the war against the infidels, was then taking his ease, giving himself up to the merry exercise of hunting, after the wearisome hardships of war.
It chanced once to this cavalier, engaged in his favorite diversion, accompanied by his daughter whose singular beauty, of the blond type extraordinary in Spain, had won her the name of White Lily, that as the increasing heat of the day began to tell upon them, absorbed in pursuing a quarry in the mountainous part of his estate, he took for his resting-place during the hours of the siesta a glen through which ran a rivulet leaping from rock to rock with a soft and pleasant sound.
It might have been a matter of some two hours that Don Dionís had lingered in that delectable retreat, reclining on the delicate grass in the shade of a black-poplar grove, talking affably with his huntsmen about the incidents of the day, while they related one to another more or less curious adventures that had befallen them in their hunting experiences, when along the top of the highest ridge and between alternating murmurs of the wind which stirred the leaves on the trees, he began to perceive, each time more near, the sound of a little bell like that of the leader of a flock.
In truth, it was really that, for very soon after the first hearing of the bell, there came leaping over the thick under{106}growth of lavender and thyme, descending to the opposite bank of the rivulet, nearly a hundred lambs white as snow, and behind them appeared their shepherd with his pointed hood drawn over his brows to protect him from the vertical rays of the sun and with his shoulder-bag swung from the end of a stick.
“Speaking of remarkable adventures,” exclaimed on seeing him one of the huntsmen of Don Dionís, addressing his lord, “here is Esteban, the shepherd-lad, who has been now for some time more of a fool than God made him, which was fool enough. He can give us an amusing half-hour by relating the cause of his continual frights.”
“But what is it that happens to this poor devil?” exclaimed Don Dionís with an air of piqued curiosity.
“A mere trifle,” continued the huntsman in a jesting tone. “The case is this—that without having been born on Good Friday, or bearing a birthmark of the cross, or, so far as one can infer from his regular Christian habits, binding himself to the Devil, he finds himself, not knowing why or whence, endowed with the most marvellous faculty that any man ever possessed, unless it be Solomon, who, they say, understood even the language of birds.”
“And with what does this remarkable faculty have to do?”
“It has to do,” pursued the huntsman, “as he affirms, and he swears and forswears it by all that is most sacred, with a conspiracy among the deer which course through these mountains not to leave him in peace, the drollest thing about it being that on more than one occasion he has surprised them in the act of contriving the pranks they were going to play on him and after those tricks had been carried through he has overheard the noisy bursts of laughter with which they applaud them.”
While the huntsman was thus speaking, Constanza, as the{107} beautiful daughter of Don Dionís was named, had drawn near the group of sportsmen and, as she appeared curious to hear the strange experience of Esteban, one of them ran on to the place where the young shepherd was watering his flock and brought him into the presence of his lord, who, to dispel the perturbation and evident embarrassment of the poor peasant, hastened to greet him by name, accompanying the salutation with a benevolent smile.
Esteban was a boy of nineteen or twenty years, robust in build, with a small head sunken between his shoulders, little blue eyes, a wavering, stupid glance like that of albinos, a flat nose, thick, half open lips, low forehead, complexion fair but tanned by the sun, and hair which fell partly over his eyes and partly around his face, in rough red locks like the mane of a sorrel nag.
Such, more or less exactly, was Esteban in point of physique. In respect to his character, it could be asserted without fear of denial on his own part or on that of any one who knew him, that he was an entirely honest, simple-hearted lad, though, like a true peasant, a little suspicious and malicious.
As soon as the shepherd had recovered from his confusion, Don Dionís again addressed him and, in the most serious tone in the world, feigning an extraordinary interest in learning the details of the event to which his huntsman had referred, put to him a multitude of questions to which Esteban began to reply evasively, as if desirous of escaping any discussion of the subject.
Constrained, nevertheless, by the demands of his lord and the entreaties of Constanza, who seemed most curious and eager that the shepherd should relate his astounding adventures, he decided to talk freely, but not without casting a distrustful glance about him as though fearing to be overheard by others than those present, and scratching his head{108} three or four times in the effort to connect his recollections or find the thread of his narrative, before at last he thus began:
“The fact is, my lord, that as a priest of Tarazona to whom, not long ago, I went for help in my troubles, told me, wits don’t serve against the Devil, but mum! finger on lip, many good prayers to Saint Bartholomew—who, none better, knows his knaveries—and let him have his sport; for God, who is just, and sits up thereon high, will see that all comes right in the end.
“Resolved on this course I had decided never again to say a word to any one about it,—no, not for anything; but I will do it to-day to satisfy your curiosity, and in good sooth, if, after all, the Devil calls me to account and goes to troubling me in punishment for my indiscretion, I carry the Holy Gospels sewed inside my sheepskin coat, and with their help, I think that, as at other times, I may make telling use of a cudgel.”
“But, come!” exclaimed Don Dionís, out of patience with the digressions of the shepherd, which it seemed would never end, “let the whys and wherefores go, and come directly to the subject.”
“I am coming to it,” calmly replied Esteban, and after calling together, by dint of a shout and a whistle, the lambs of which he had not lost sight and which were now beginning to scatter over the mountain-side, he scratched his head again and proceeded thus:
“On the one hand, your own continual hunting trips, and on the other, the persistency of those trespassers who, what with snare and what with crossbow, hardly leave a deer alive in twenty days’ journey round about, had, a little time ago, so thinned out the game in these mountains that you could not find a stag in them, not though you would give one of your eyes.{109}
“I was speaking of this in the town, seated in the porch of the church, where after mass on Sunday I was in the habit of joining some laborers who till the soil in Veratón, when some of them said to me:
“ ‘Well, man, I don’t know why it is you fail to run across them, since, as for us, we can give you our word that we don’t once go down to the ploughed land without coming upon their tracks, and it is only three or four days since, without going further back, a herd, which, to judge by their hoof-prints, must have numbered more than twenty, cut down before its time a crop of wheat belonging to the care-taker of the Virgen del Romeral.’
“ ‘And in what direction did the track lead?’ I asked the laborers, with a mind to see if I could fall in with the herd.
“ ‘Toward the Lavender Glen,’ they replied.
“This information did not enter one ear to go out at the other; that very night I posted myself among the poplars. During all its hours I kept hearing here and there, far off as well as near by, the trumpeting of the deer as they called one to another, and from time to time I felt the boughs stirring behind me; but however sharply I looked, the truth is, I could distinguish nothing.
“Nevertheless, at break of day, when I took the lambs to water, at the bank of the stream, about two throws of the sling from the place where we now are, and in so dense a shade of poplars that not even at mid-day is it pierced by a ray of sunshine, I found fresh deer-tracks, broken branches, the stream a little roiled and, what is more peculiar, among the deer-tracks the short prints of tiny feet no larger than the half of the palm of my hand, without any exaggeration.”
On saying this, the boy, instinctively seeming to seek a point of comparison, directed his glance to the foot of Constanza, which peeped from beneath her petticoat shod in a dainty sandal of yellow morocco, but as the eyes of Don{110} Dionís and of some of the huntsmen who were about him followed Esteban’s, the beautiful girl hastened to conceal it, exclaiming in the most natural voice in the world:
“Oh, no! unluckily mine are not so tiny, for feet of this size are found only among the fairies of whom the troubadours sing.”
“But I did not give up with this,” continued the shepherd, when Constanza had finished. “Another time, having concealed myself in another hiding-place by which, undoubtedly, the deer would have to pass in going to the glen, at just about midnight sleep overcame me for a little, although not so much but that I opened my eyes at the very moment when I perceived the branches were stirring around me. I opened my eyes, as I have said; I rose with the utmost caution and, listening intently to the confused murmur, which every moment sounded nearer, I heard in the gusts of wind something like cries and strange songs, bursts of laughter, and three or four distinct voices which talked together with a chatter and gay confusion like that of the young girls at the village when, laughing and jesting on the way, they return in groups from the fountain with their water-jars on their heads.
“As I gathered from the nearness of the voices and close-by crackle of twigs which broke noisily in giving way to that throng of merry maids, they were just about to come out of the thicket on to a little platform formed by a jut of the mountain there where I was hid when, right at my back, as near or nearer than I am to you, I heard a new voice, fresh, fine and vibrant, which said—believe it, señores, it is as true as that I have to die—it said, clearly and distinctly, these very words:
That dolt of an Esteban is here!’ ”
On reaching this point in the shepherd’s story, the bystanders could no longer repress the merriment which for{111} many minutes had been dancing in their eyes and, giving free rein to their mirth, they broke into clamorous laughter. Among the first to begin to laugh, and the last to leave off, were Don Dionís, who, notwithstanding his air of dignity, could not but take part in the general hilarity, and his daughter Constanza, who, every time she looked at Esteban, all in suspense and embarrassment as he was, fell to laughing again like mad till the tears sprang from her eyes.
The shepherd-lad, for his part, although without heeding the effect his story had produced, seemed disturbed and restless, and while the great folk laughed to their hearts’ content at his simple tale, he turned his face from one side to the other with visible signs of fear and as if trying to descry something beyond the intertwined trunks of the trees.
“What is it, Esteban, what is the matter?” asked one of the huntsmen, noting the growing disquietude of the poor boy, who now was fixing his frightened eyes on the laughing daughter of Don Dionís, and again gazing all around him with an expression of astonishment and dull dismay:
“A very strange thing is happening to me,” exclaimed Esteban. “When, after hearing the words which I have just repeated, I quickly sat upright to surprise the person who had spoken them, a doe white as snow leaped from the very copse in which I was hidden and, taking a few prodigious bounds over the tops of the evergreen oaks and mastic trees, sped away, followed by a herd of deer of the natural color; and these, like the white one who was guiding them, did not utter the cries of deer in flight, but laughed with great peals of laughter, whose echo, I could swear, is sounding in my ears at this moment.”
“Bah, bah, Esteban!” exclaimed Don Dionís, with a jesting air, “follow the counsels of the priest of Tarazona; do not talk of your adventures with the joke-loving deer, lest{112} the Devil bring it to pass that in the end you lose the little sense you have, and since now you are provided with the gospels and know the prayer of Saint Bartholomew, return to your lambs which are beginning to scatter through the glen. If the evil spirits tease you again, you know the remedy—Pater Noster and a big stick.”
The shepherd, after putting away in his pouch a half loaf of white bread and a piece of boar’s meat, and in his stomach a mighty draught of wine, which, by order of his lord, one of the grooms gave him, took leave of Don Dionís and his daughter and had scarcely gone four steps when he began whirling his sling, casting stones from it to gather the lambs together.
As, by this time, Don Dionís observed that, what with one diversion and another, the hours of heat were now passed and the light afternoon breeze was beginning to stir the leaves of the poplars and to freshen the fields, he gave orders to his retinue to make ready the horses which were grazing loose in the grove hard by; and when everything was prepared, he signalled to some to slip the leashes, and to others to blow the horns and, sallying forth in a troop from the poplar-grove, took up the interrupted chase.
II.
Among the huntsmen of Don Dionís was one named Garcés, the son of an old servitor of the house and therefore held in high regard by the family.
Garcés was of about the age of Constanza, and from early boyhood had been accustomed to anticipate the least of her wishes and to divine and gratify the lightest of her whims.
He amused himself in his moments of leisure in sharpening with his own hand the pointed arrows of her ivory crossbow; he broke in the colts for her mounts; he trained her{113} favorite hounds in the arts of the chase and tamed her falcons for which he bought at the fairs of Castile red hoods embroidered with gold.
But as for the other huntsmen, the pages and the common folk in the service of Don Dionís, the delicate attentions of Garcés and the marks of esteem with which his superiors distinguished him had caused them to hold him in a sort of general dislike, even to the point of saying, in their envy, that all his assiduous efforts to anticipate the caprices of his mistress revealed the character of a flatterer and a sycophant. Yet there were not wanting those who, more keen-sighted or malicious than the rest, believed that they detected in the young retainer’s devotion signs of an ill-dissembled passion.
If this were really so, the secret love of Garcés had more than abundant excuse in the incomparable charms of Constanza. He must needs have had a breast of stone, and a heart of ice, who could remain unmoved day after day at the side of that woman, peerless in her beauty and her bewitching graces.
The Lily of the Moncayo they called her for twenty leagues around, and well she merited this soubriquet, for she was so exquisite, so white and so delicately flushed that it would seem that God had made her, like the lilies, of snow and gold.
Nevertheless, among the neighboring gentry it was whispered that the beautiful Lady of Veratón was not so pure of blood as she was fair, and that despite her bright tresses and her alabaster complexion, she had had a gipsy mother. How much truth there was in these rumors no one could say, for, in fact, Don Dionís had in his youth led an adventurous life, and after fighting long under the banner of the King of Aragon, from whom he received among other rewards the fief of the Moncayo, had gone to Palestine, where he wandered for some years, finally returning to establish himself in his{114} castle of Veratón with a little daughter born, doubtless, on foreign soil. The only person who could have told anything about the mysterious origin of Constanza, having attended Don Dionís in his travels abroad, was the father of Garcés, and he had died some time since without saying a single word on the subject, not even to his own son who, at various times and with manifestations of great interest, had questioned him.
The temperament of Constanza, with its swift alternations from reserve and melancholy to mirth and glee; the singular vividness of her imagination; her wild moods; her extraordinary ways; even the peculiarity of having eyes and eyebrows black as night while her complexion was white and rosy and her hair as bright as gold, had contributed to furnish food for the gossip of the countryside; and even Garcés himself, who knew her so intimately, had come to the conclusion that his liege lady was something apart and did not resemble the rest of womankind.
Present, as the other huntsmen were, at the narration of Esteban, Garcés was perhaps the only one who listened with genuine curiosity to the details of the shepherd’s incredible adventure; and though he could not help smiling when the lad repeated the words of the white doe, no sooner had he left the grove in which they had taken their siesta, than he began to revolve in his mind the most ridiculous fancies.
“Without doubt this tale of the talking of the deer is a sheer delusion of Esteban’s, who is a perfect simpleton,” the young huntsman said to himself as, mounted on a powerful sorrel, he followed step by step the palfrey of Constanza, who seemed also somewhat preoccupied and was so silent and so withdrawn from the group of hunters as scarcely to take any part in the sport. “Yet who can say that in the story which this poor fool tells there may not be a grain of truth?” thought on the young retainer. “We have seen{115} stranger things in the world, and a white doe may indeed exist, since if we can credit the folk-songs, Saint Hubert, the patron of huntsmen, had one. Oh, if I could take a white doe alive for an offering to my lady!”
Thus thinking and dreaming, Garcés passed the afternoon; and when the sun began to descend behind the neighboring hills, and Don Dionís gave the order to his retinue for the return to the castle, he slipped away from the company unnoticed and went in search of the shepherd through the densest and most entangled coverts of the mountain.
Night had almost completely closed in when Don Dionís arrived at the gates of his castle. Immediately there was placed before him a frugal collation and he sat down with his daughter at the table.
“And Garcés, where is he?” asked Constanza, noticing that her huntsman was not there to serve her as usual.
“We do not know,” the other attendants hastened to reply. “He disappeared from among us near the glen and we have not seen him since.”
At that instant Garcés arrived, all breathless, his forehead still covered with perspiration, but with the most happy and satisfied expression imaginable.
“Pardon me, my lady,” he exclaimed, addressing Constanza, “pardon me if I have been wanting a moment in my duty, but there whence I came at my horse’s best speed, there, as here, I was busied only in your service.”
“In my service?” repeated Constanza. “I do not understand what you mean.”
“Yes, my lady, in your service,” repeated the youth, “for I have ascertained that the white doe really does exist. Besides Esteban, it is vouched for by various other shepherds, who swear they have seen it more than once; and with their aid I hope in God and in my patron Saint Hubert to bring it, living or dead, within three days to you at the castle.{116}”
“Bah! Bah!” exclaimed Constanza with a jesting air, while the derisive laughter, more or less dissimulated, of the bystanders chorused her words. “Have done with midnight hunts and with white does. Bear in mind that the Devil loves to tempt the simple; and if you persist in following at his heels, he will make you a laughing-stock like poor Esteban.”
“My lady,” interrupted Garcés with a broken voice, concealing as far as possible the anger which the merry scoffs of his companions stirred in him, “I have never yet had to do with the Devil and consequently I am not acquainted with his practices; but, for myself, I swear to you that, do all he can, he will not make me an object of laughter, for that is a privilege I know how to tolerate in yourself alone.”
Constanza saw the effect which her mocking had produced on the enamoured youth, but desiring to test his patience to the uttermost, she continued in the same tone:
“And what if, on aiming at the doe, she salutes you with another laugh like that which Esteban heard, or flings it into your very face, and you, hearing those supernatural peals of merriment, let fall your bow from your hands, and before you recover from the fright, the white doe has vanished swifter than lightning—what then?”
“Oh, as for that!” exclaimed Garcés, “be sure that if I can speed a shaft before she is out of bowshot, although she play me more tricks than a juggler; although she speak to me, not in the language of the country, but in Latin like the Abbot of Munilla, she will not get off without an arrow-head in her body.”
At this stage in the conversation, Don Dionís joined in with a forced gravity through which might be detected the entire irony of his words, and began to give the now persecuted boy the most original counsels in the world, in case he{117} should suddenly meet with the demon changed into a white doe.
At each new suggestion of her father, Constanza fixed her eyes on the distressed Garcés, and broke into extravagant laughter, while his fellow-servitors encouraged the jesting with glances of intelligence and ill-disguised delight.
Only with the close of the supper ceased this scene, in which the credulity of the young hunter was, so to speak, the theme on which the general mirth played variations, so that when the cloth was removed and Don Dionís and Constanza had withdrawn to their apartments, and all the inmates of the castle had gone to rest, Garcés remained for a long time irresolute, debating whether, notwithstanding the jeers of his liege lord and lady, he would stand firm to his purpose, or absolutely abandon the enterprise.
“What the devil,” he exclaimed, rousing himself from the state of uncertainty into which he had fallen. “Greater harm than that which has overtaken me cannot come to pass and if, on the other hand, what Esteban has told us is true, oh, then, how sweet will be the taste of my triumph!”
Thus speaking, he fitted a shaft to his crossbow—not without having made the sign of the cross on the point of the arrow—and swinging it over his shoulder, he directed his steps toward the postern gate of the castle to take the mountain path.
When Garcés reached the glen and the point where, according to the instructions of Esteban, he was to lie in wait for the appearance of the deer, the moon was slowly rising behind the neighboring mountains.
Like a good hunter, well-practised in his craft, he spent a considerable time, before selecting a suitable place for an ambush, in going to and fro, scanning the byways and paths thereabouts, the grouping of the trees, the irregularities of the ground, the curves of the river and the depth of its waters.{118}
At last, after completing this minute examination of the locality, he hid himself upon a sloping bank near some black poplars whose high and interlacing tops cast a dark shadow, and at whose feet grew a clump of mastic shrubs high enough to conceal a man lying prone on the ground.
The river, which, from the mossy rocks where it rose, came following the windings of the rugged fief of the Moncayo to enter the glen by a cascade, thence went gliding on, bathing the roots of the willows that shaded its bank, or playing with a murmurous ripple among the stones rolled down from the mountain, until it fell into a pool very near the point which served the hunter for a hiding-place.
The poplars, whose silvered leaves the wind stirred with the sweetest rustle, the willows which, leaning over the limpid current, bedewed in it the tips of their pale branches, and the crowded groups of evergreen oaks about whose trunks honeysuckles and blue morning-glories clambered and twined, formed a thick wall of foliage around this quiet river-pool.
The wind, stirring the leafy curtains of living green which spread round about their floating shadow, let penetrate at intervals a stealthy ray of light that gleamed like a flash of silver over the surface of the motionless, deep waters.
Hidden among the bushes, his ear attent to the slightest sound, and his gaze fixed upon the spot where, according to his calculations, the deer should come, Garcés waited a long time in vain.
Everything about him remained buried in a deep calm.
Little by little, and it might well be that the lateness of the hour—for it was past midnight—began to weigh upon his lids—might well be that far-off murmurs of the water, the penetrating scent of the wild flowers and the caresses of the wind affected his senses with the soft drowsiness in which all nature seemed to be steeped—the enamoured boy, who until now had been occupied in revolving in his mind the{119} most alluring fancies, began to find that his ideas took shape more slowly and his thoughts drifted into vague and indecisive forms.
After lingering a little in this dim border-land between waking and sleeping, at last he closed his eyes, let his crossbow slip from his hands, and sank into a profound slumber.
. . . . . . . . . .
It must have been for two or three hours now that the young hunter had been snoring at his ease, enjoying to the full one of the serenest dreams of his life, when suddenly he opened his eyes, with a stare, and half raised himself to a sitting posture, full yet of that stupor with which one wakes suddenly from profound sleep.
In the breathings of the wind and blended with the light noises of the night, he thought he detected a strange hum of delicate voices, sweet and mysterious, which were talking with one another, laughing or singing, each in its own individual strain, making a twitter as clamorous and confused as that of the birds awakening at the first ray of the sun amid the leaves of a poplar grove.
This extraordinary sound was heard for an instant only, and then all was still again.
“Without doubt, I was dreaming of the absurdities of which the shepherd told us,” exclaimed Garcés, rubbing his eyes in all tranquillity, and firmly persuaded that what he had thought he heard was no more than that vague impression of slumber which, on awaking, lingers in the imagination, as the closing cadence of a melody dwells in the ear after the last trembling note has ceased. And overcome by the unconquerable languor weighing down his limbs, he was about to lay his head again upon the turf, when he heard anew the distant echo of those mystic voices, which to the accompaniment of{120} the soft stir of the air, the water and the leaves were singing thus:
CHORUS.
The stealthy hunter who was expecting to surprise the deer has been surprised by sleep.
The shepherd who awaited the day, consulting the stars, sleeps now, and will sleep till dawn.
Queen of the water-sprites, follow our steps.
Come to swing in the branches of the willows over the surface of the water.
“Come to intoxicate thyself with the perfume of the violets which open at dusk.
“Come to enjoy the night, which is the day of the spirits.”
While the sweet notes of that delicious music floated on the air, Garcés remained motionless. After it had melted away, with much caution he slightly parted the branches and, not without experiencing a certain shock, saw come into sight the deer, which, moving in a confused group and sometimes bounding over the bushes with incredible lightness, stopping as though listening for others, frolicking together, now hiding in the thicket, now sallying out again into the path, were descending the mountain in the direction of the river-pool.
In advance of her companions, more agile, more graceful, more sportive, more joyous than all of them, leaping, running, pausing and running again so lightly that she seemed not to touch the ground with her feet, went the white doe, whose wonderful color stood out like a fantastic light against the dark background of the trees.
Although the young man was inclined to see in his surroundings something of the supernatural and miraculous, the fact of the case was that, apart from the momentary hallucination which disturbed his senses for an instant, suggesting{121} to him music, murmurs and words, there was nothing either in the form of the deer, nor in their movements, nor in their short cries with which they seemed to call one to another, that ought not to be entirely familiar to a huntsman experienced in this sort of night expeditions.
In proportion as he put away the first impression, Garcés began to take the practical view of the situation and, smiling inwardly at his credulity and fright, from that instant was intent only on determining, in view of the route they were following, the point where the deer would take the water.
Having made his calculation, he gripped his crossbow between his teeth and, twisting along like a snake behind the mastic shrubs, located himself about forty paces from his former situation. Once ensconced in his new ambush, he waited long enough for the deer to be within the river, that his aim might be the surer. Scarcely had he begun to hear that peculiar sound which is produced by the violent disturbance of water, when Garcés commenced to lift himself little by little, with the greatest precaution, resting first on the tips of his fingers, and afterwards on one knee.
Erect at last, and assuring himself by touch that his weapon was ready, he took a step forward, craned his neck above the shrubs to command a view of the pool and aimed the shaft, but at the very moment when he strained his eyes, together with the cord, in search of the victim whom he must wound, there escaped from his lips a faint, involuntary cry of amazement.
The moon, which had been slowly climbing up the broad horizon, was motionless, and hung as if suspended in the height of heaven. Her clear radiance flooded the forest, shimmered on the unquiet surface of the river, and caused objects to be seen as through an azure gauze.
The deer had disappeared.
In their place, Garcés, filled with consternation and almost{122} with terror, saw a throng of most beautiful women, some of whom were sportively entering the water, while others were just freeing themselves from the light garments which as yet concealed from the covetous view the treasure of their forms.
In those thin, brief dreams of dawn, rich in joyous and luxurious images,—dreams as diaphanous and celestial as the light which then begins to shine through the white bed-curtains, never had the imagination of twenty years sketched with fanciful coloring a scene equal to that which now presented itself to the eyes of the astonished Garcés.
Having now cast off their robes and their veils of a thousand colors which, suspended from the trees or thrown carelessly down on the carpet of turf, stood out against the dim background, the maidens ran hither and thither through the grove, forming picturesque groups, going in and out of the water and splashing it in glistening sparks over the flowers of the margin, like a little shower of dewdrops.
Here, one of them, white as the fleece of a lamb, lifted her fair head among the green floating leaves of an aquatic plant of which she seemed the half-opened blossom whose flexible stem, one might imagine, could be seen to tremble beneath the endless gleaming circles of the waves.
Another, with her hair loose on her shoulders, swung from the branch of a willow over the river, and her little rose-colored feet made a ray of silvery light as they grazed the smooth surface. While some remained couched on the bank, with their blue eyes drowsy, breathing voluptuously the perfume of the flowers and shivering slightly at the touch of the fresh breeze, others were dancing in a giddy round, interlacing their hands capriciously, letting their heads droop back with delicious abandon, and striking the ground with their feet in harmonious cadence.
It was impossible to follow them in their agile movements, impossible to take in with a glance the infinite details of the{123} picture they formed, some running, some gambolling and chasing one another with merry laughter in and out the labyrinth of trees; others skimming the water swanlike and cutting the current with uplifted breast; others, diving into the depths where they remained long before rising to the surface, bringing one of those wonderful flowers that spring unseen in the bed of the deep waters.
The gaze of the astonished hunter wandered spellbound from one side to another, without knowing where to fix itself, until he believed he saw, seated under swaying boughs which seemed to serve her as a canopy and surrounded by a group of women, each more beautiful than the rest, who were aiding her in freeing herself from her delicate vestments, the object of his secret worship, the daughter of the noble Don Dionís, the incomparable Constanza.
Passing from one surprise to another, the enamoured youth dared not credit the testimony of his senses, and thought he was under the influence of a fascinating, delusive dream.
Still, he struggled in vain to convince himself that all he had seen was the effect of disordered imagination, for the longer and more attentively he looked, the more convinced he became that this woman was Constanza.
He could not doubt; hers were those dusky eyes shaded by the long lashes that scarcely sufficed to soften the brilliancy of their glance; hers that wealth of shining hair, which, after crowning her brow, fell over her white bosom and soft shoulders like a cascade of gold; hers, too, that graceful neck which supported her languid head, lightly drooping like a flower weary with its weight of dewdrops; and that fair figure of which, perchance, he had dreamed, and those hands like clusters of jasmine, and those tiny feet, comparable only to two morsels of snow which the sun has not been able to melt and which in the morning lie white on the greensward.{124}
At the moment when Constanza emerged from the little thicket, all her beauty unveiled to her lover’s eyes, her companions, beginning anew to sing, carolled these words to the sweetest of melodies.
CHORUS.
“Invisible sylphs, leave the cups of the half-opened lilies and come in your mother-of-pearl chariots drawn through the air by harnessed butterflies.
“Nymphs of the fountains, forsake your mossy beds and fall upon us in little, diamond showers.
“Emerald beetles, fiery glow-worms, sable butterflies, come!
“And come, all ye spirits of night, come humming like a swarm of lustrous, golden insects.
“Come, for now the moon, protector of mysteries, sparkles in the fulness of splendor.
“Come, for the moment of marvellous transformation is at hand.
“Come, for those who love you, await you with impatience.”
Garcés, who remained motionless, felt on hearing those mysterious songs the asp of jealousy stinging his heart, and yielding to an impulse stronger than his will, bent on breaking once for all the spell that was fascinating his senses, thrust apart with a tremulous, convulsive hand the boughs which concealed him, and with a single bound gained the river-bank. The charm was broken, everything vanished like a vapor and, looking about him, he neither saw nor heard more than the noisy confusion with which the timid deer, surprised at the height of their nocturnal gambols, were fleeing in fright from his presence, hither and thither, one clearing the thickets with a bound, another gaining at full speed the mountain path.
“Oh, well did I say that all these things were only delusions of the Devil,” exclaimed the hunter, “but this time, by good luck, he blundered, leaving the chief prize in my hands.{125}”
And so, in fact, it was. The white doe, trying to escape through the grove, had rushed into the labyrinth of its trees and, entangled in a network of honeysuckles, was striving in vain to free herself. Garcés aimed his shaft, but at the very instant in which he was going to wound her, the doe turned toward the hunter and arrested his action with a cry, saying in a voice clear and sharp: “Garcés, what wouldst thou do?” The young man hesitated and, after a moment’s doubt, let his bow fall to the ground, aghast at the mere idea of having been in danger of harming his beloved. A loud, mocking laugh roused him finally from his stupor. The white doe had taken advantage of those brief instants to extricate herself and to flee swift as a flash of lightning, laughing at the trick played on the hunter.
“Ah, damned offspring of Satan!” he shouted in a terrible voice, catching up his bow with unspeakable swiftness, “too soon hast thou sung thy victory; too soon hast thou thought thyself beyond my reach.” And so saying, he sped the arrow, that went hissing on its way and was lost in the darkness of the wood, from whose depths there simultaneously came a shriek followed by choking groans.
“My God!” exclaimed Garcés on hearing those sobs of anguish. “My God! if it should be true!” And beside himself, hardly aware of what he did, he ran like a madman in the direction in which he had shot the arrow, the same direction from which sounded the groans. He reached the place at last, but on arriving there, his hair stood erect with horror, the words throbbed vainly in his throat and he had to clutch the trunk of a tree to save himself from falling to the ground.
Constanza, wounded by his hand, was dying there before his eyes, writhing in her own blood, among the sharp brambles of the mountain.{126}
THE DEVIL’S CROSS
Whether you believe it or not matters little. My grandfather told it to my father; my father related it to me, and I now recount it to you, although it may serve for nothing more than to pass an idle hour.
I.
Twilight was beginning to spread its soft, dim wings over the picturesque banks of the Segre, when after a fatiguing day’s travel we reached Bellver, the end of our journey.
Bellver is a small town situated on the slope of a hill, beyond which may be seen, rising like the steps of a colossal granite amphitheatre, the lofty, enclouded crests of the Pyrenees.
The white villages that encircle the town, sprinkled here and there over an undulating plain of verdure, appear from a distance like a flock of doves which have lowered their flight to quench their thirst in the waters of the river.
A naked crag, at whose foot the river makes a bend and on whose summit may still be seen ancient architectural remains, marks the old boundary line between the earldom of Urgel and the most important of its fiefs.
At the right of the winding path which leads to this point, going up the river and following its curves and luxuriant banks, one comes upon a cross.
The stem and the arms are of iron; the circular base on which it rests is of marble, and the stairway that leads to it of dark and ill-fitted fragments of hewn stone.
The destructive action of time, which has covered the metal with rust, has broken and worn away the stone of{53} this monument in whose crevices grow certain climbing plants, mounting in their interwoven growth until they crown it, while an old, wide-spreading oak serves it as canopy.
I was some moments in advance of my travelling companions, and halting my poor beast, I contemplated in silence that cross, mute and simple expression of the faith and piety of other ages.
At that instant a world of ideas thronged my imagination,—ideas faint and fugitive, without definite form, which were yet bound together, as by an invisible thread of light, by the profound solitude of those places, the deep silence of the gathering night and the vague melancholy of my soul.
Impelled by a religious impulse, spontaneous and indefinable, I dismounted mechanically, uncovered, commenced to search my memory for one of those prayers which I was taught when a child,—one of those prayers that, later in life, involuntarily escaping from our lips, seem to lighten the burdened heart and, like tears, relieve sorrow, which takes these natural outlets.
I had begun to murmur such a prayer, when suddenly I felt myself violently seized by the shoulders.
I turned my head. A man was standing at my side.
He was one of our guides, a native of the region, who, with an indescribable expression of terror depicted on his face, strove to drag me away with him and to cover my head with the hat which I still held in my hands.
My first glance, half astonishment, half anger, was equivalent to a sharp, though silent, interrogation.
The poor fellow, without ceasing his efforts to withdraw me from that place, replied to it with these words which then I could not comprehend but which had in them an accent of sincerity that impressed me:—“By the memory of your mother! by that which you hold most sacred in the world, señorito, cover your head and flee faster than flight itself{54} from that cross. Are you so desperate that, the help of God not being enough, you call on that of the Devil?”
I stood a moment looking at him in silence. Frankly, I thought he was a madman; but he went on with equal vehemence:
“You seek the frontier; well, then, if before this cross you ask that heaven will give you aid, the tops of the neighboring mountains will rise, in a single night, to the invisible stars, so that we shall not find the boundary in all our life.”
I could not help smiling.
“You take it in jest?—You think perhaps that this is a holy cross like the one in the porch of our church?”
“Who doubts it?”
“Then you are mistaken out and out, for this cross—saving its divine association—is accursed; this cross belongs to a demon and for that reason is called The Devil’s Cross.”
“The Devil’s Cross!” I repeated, yielding to his insistence without accounting to myself for the involuntary fear which began to oppress my spirit, and which repelled me as an unknown force from that place. “The Devil’s Cross! Never has my imagination been wounded with a more inconsistent union of two ideas so absolutely at variance. A cross! and—the Devil’s! Come, come! When we reach the town you must explain to me this monstrous incongruity.”
During this short dialogue our comrades, who had spurred their sorry nags, joined us at the foot of the cross. I told them briefly what had taken place: I remounted my hack, and the bells of the parish were slowly calling to prayer when we alighted at the most out-of-the-way and obscure of the inns of Bellver.
II.
Rosy and azure flames were curling and crackling all along the huge oak log which burned in the wide fire-place; our{55} shadows, thrown in wavering grotesques on the blackened walls, dwindled or grew gigantic according as the blaze emitted more or less brilliancy; the alderwood cup, now empty, now full (and not with water), like the buckets of an irrigating wheel, had been thrice passed round the circle that we formed about the fire, and all were awaiting impatiently the story of The Devil’s Cross, promised us by way of dessert after the frugal supper which we had just eaten, when our guide coughed twice, tossed down a last draught of wine, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and began thus:
“It was a long, long time ago, how long I cannot say, but the Moors were occupying yet the greater part of Spain, our kings were called counts, and the towns and villages were held in fief by certain lords, who in turn rendered homage to others more powerful, when that event which I am about to relate took place.”
After this brief historical introduction, the hero of the occasion remained silent some few moments, as if to arrange his thoughts, and proceeded thus:
“Well! the story goes that in that remote time this town and some others formed part of the patrimony of a noble baron whose seigniorial castle stood for many centuries upon the crest of a crag bathed by the Segre, from which it takes its name.
“Some shapeless ruins that, overgrown with wild mustard and moss, may still be seen upon the summit from the road which leads to this town, testify to the truth of my story.
“I do not know whether by chance or through some deed of shame it came to pass that this lord, who was detested by his vassals for his cruelty, and for his evil disposition refused admission to court by the king and to their homes by his neighbors, grew weary of living alone with his bad temper{56} and his cross-bowmen on the top of the rock where his forefathers had hung their nest of stone.
“Night and day he taxed his wits to find some amusement consonant with his character, which was no easy matter, since he had grown tired of making war on his neighbors, beating his servants and hanging his subjects.
“At this time, the chronicles relate, there occurred to him, though without precedent, a happy idea.
“Knowing that the Christians of other nations were preparing to go forth, united in a formidable fleet, to a marvellous country in order to reconquer the sepulchre of our Lord Jesus Christ which was in possession of the Moors, he determined to join their following.
“Whether he entertained this idea with intent of atoning for his sins, which were not few, by shedding blood in so righteous a cause; or whether his object was to remove to a place where his vicious deeds were not known, cannot be said; but it is true that to the great satisfaction of old and young, of vassals and equals, he gathered together what money he could, released his towns, at a heavy price, from their allegiance, and reserving of his estates no more than the crag of the Segre and the four towers of the castle, his ancestral seat, disappeared between the night and the morning.
“The whole district drew a long breath, as if awakened from a nightmare.
“Now no longer clusters of men, instead of fruits, hung from the trees of their orchards; the young peasant girls no longer feared to go, their jars upon their heads, to draw water from the wells by the wayside; nor did the shepherds lead their flocks to the Segre by the roughest secret paths, fearing at every turn of the steep track to encounter the cross-bowmen of their dearly beloved lord.
“Thus three years elapsed. The story of the Wicked{57} Count, for by that name only was he known, had come to be the exclusive possession of the old women, who in the long, long winter evenings would relate his atrocities with hollow and fearful voice to the terrified children, while mothers would affright their naughty toddlers and crying babies by saying: ‘Here comes the Count of the Segre!’ When behold! I know not whether by day or by night, whether fallen from heaven or cast forth by hell, the dreaded Count appeared indeed, and, as we say, in flesh and bone, in the midst of his former vassals.
“I forbear to describe the effect of this agreeable surprise. You can imagine it better than I can depict it, merely from my telling you that he returned claiming his forfeited rights; that if he went away evil, he came back worse; and that if he was poor and without credit before going to the war, now he could count on no other resources than his desperation, his lance and a half dozen adventurers as profligate and impious as their chieftain.
“As was natural, the towns refused to pay tribute, from which at so great cost they had bought exemption, but the Count fired their orchards, their farm-houses and their crops.
“Then they appealed to the royal justice of the realm, but the Count ridiculed the letters mandatory of his sovereign lords; he nailed them over the sally-port of his castle and hung the bearers from an oak.
“Exasperated, and seeing no other way of salvation, at last they made a league with one another, commended themselves to Providence and took up arms; but the Count gathered his followers, called the Devil to his aid, mounted his rock and made ready for the struggle.
“It began, terrible and bloody. There was fighting with all sorts of weapons, in all places and at all hours, with sword and fire, on the mountain and in the plain, by day and by night.{58}
“This was not fighting to live; it was living to fight.
“In the end the cause of justice triumphed. You shall hear how.
“One dark, intensely dark night, when no sound was heard on earth nor a single star shone in heaven, the lords of the fortress, elated by a recent victory, divided the booty and, drunk with the fume of the liquors, in the midst of their mad and boisterous revel intoned sacrilegious songs in praise of their infernal patron.
“As I have said, nothing was heard around the castle save the echo of the blasphemies which throbbed out into the black bosom of the night like the throbbing of lost souls wrapped in the hurricane folds of hell.
“Now the careless sentinels had several times fixed their eyes on the hamlet which rested in silence and, without fear of a surprise, had fallen asleep leaning on the thick staves of their lances, when, lo and behold! a few villagers, resolved to die and protected by the darkness, began to scale the crag of the Segre whose crest they reached at the very moment of midnight.
“Once on the summit, that which remained for them to do required little time. The sentinels passed with a single bound the barrier which separates sleep from death. Fire, applied with resinous torches to drawbridge and portcullis, leaped with lightning rapidity to the walls, and the scaling-party, favored by the confusion and making their way through the flames, put an end to the occupants of that fortress in the twinkling of an eye.
“All perished.
“When the next day began to whiten the lofty tops of the junipers, the charred remains of the fallen towers were still smoking, and through their gaping breaches it was easy to discern, glittering as the light struck it, where it hung suspended from one of the blackened pillars of the banquet hall,{59} the armor of the dreaded chieftain whose dead body, covered with blood and dust, lay between the torn tapestries and the hot ashes, confounded with the corpses of his obscure companions.
“Time passed. Briers began to creep through the deserted courts, ivy to climb the dark heaps of masonry, and the blue morning-glory to sway and swing from the very turrets. The changeful sighs of the breeze, the croaking of the birds of night, and the soft stir of reptiles gliding through the tall weeds alone disturbed from time to time the deathly silence of that accursed place. The unburied bones of its former inhabitants lay white in the moonlight and still there could be seen the bundled armor of the Count of the Segre hanging from the blackened pillar of the banquet hall.
“No one dared touch it, but a thousand fables were current concerning it. It was a constant source of foolish reports and terrors among those who saw it flashing in the sunlight by day, or thought they heard in the depths of the night the metallic sound of its pieces as they struck one another when the wind moved them, with a prolonged and doleful groan.
“Notwithstanding all the stories which were set afloat concerning the armor and which the people of the surrounding region repeated in hushed tones one to another, they were no more than stories, and the only positive result was a constant state of fear that every one tried for his own part to dissimulate, putting, as we say, a brave face on it.
“If the matter had gone no further, no harm would have been done. But the Devil, who apparently was not satisfied with his work, began, no doubt with the permission of God, that so the country might expiate its sins, to take a hand in the game.
“From that moment the tales, which until then had been nothing more than vague rumors without any show of truth,{60} began to assume consistency and to grow from day to day more probable.
“Finally there came nights in which all the village-folk were able to see a strange phenomenon.
“Amid the shadows in the distance, now climbing the steep, twisting paths of the crag of the Segre, now wandering among the ruins of the castle, now seeming to oscillate in the air, mysterious and fantastic lights were seen gliding, crossing, vanishing and reappearing to recede in different directions,—lights whose source no one could explain.
“This was repeated for three or four nights during the space of a month and the perplexed villagers looked in disquietude for the result of those conventicles, for which certainly they were not kept waiting long. Soon three or four homesteads in flames, a number of missing cattle, and the dead bodies of a few travellers, thrown from precipices, alarmed all the region for ten leagues about.
“Now no doubt remained. A band of evildoers were harboring in the dungeons of the castle.
“These desperadoes, who showed themselves at first only very rarely and at definite points of the forest which even to this day extends along the river, finally came to hold almost all the passes of the mountains, to lie in ambush by the roads, to plunder the valleys and to descend like a torrent on the plain where, slaughtering indiscriminately, they did not leave a doll with its head on.
“Assassinations multiplied; young girls disappeared and children were snatched from their cradles despite the lamentations of their mothers to furnish those diabolical feasts at which, it was generally believed, the sacramental vessels stolen from the profaned churches were used as goblets.
“Terror took such possession of men’s souls that, when the bell rang for the Angelus, nobody dared to leave his{61} house, though even there was no certain security against the banditti of the crag.
“But who were they? Whence had they come? What was the name of their mysterious chief? This was the enigma which all sought to explain, but which thus far no one could solve, although it was noticed that from this time on the armor of the feudal lord had disappeared from the place it had previously occupied, and afterwards various peasants had affirmed that the captain of this inhuman crew marched at its head clad in a suit of mail which, if not the same, was its exact counterpart.
“But in the essential fact, when stripped of that fantastic quality with which fear augments and embellishes its cherished creations, there was nothing necessarily supernatural nor strange.
“What was more common in outlaws than the barbarities for which this band was distinguished or more natural than that their chief should avail himself of the abandoned armor of the Count of the Segre?
“But the dying revelations of one of his followers, taken prisoner in the latest affray, heaped up the measure of evidence, convincing the most incredulous. Less or more in words, the substance of his confession was this:
“ ‘I belong,’ he said, ‘to a noble family. My youthful irregularities, my mad extravagances, and finally my crimes drew upon my head the wrath of my kindred and the curse of my father, who, at his death, disinherited me. Finding myself alone and without any resources whatever, it was the Devil, without doubt, who must needs suggest to me the idea of gathering together some youths in a situation similar to my own. These, seduced by the promise of a future of dissipation, liberty and abundance, did not hesitate an instant to subscribe to my designs.
“ ‘These designs consisted in forming a band of young{62} men of gay temper, unscrupulous and reckless, who thenceforward would live joyously on the product of their valor and at the cost of the country, until God should please to dispose of each according to His will, as happens to me this day.
“ ‘With this object we chose this district as the theatre of our future expeditions, and selected as the point most suitable for our gatherings the abandoned castle of the Segre, a place peculiarly secure, not only because of its strong and advantageous position, but as defended against the peasantry by their superstitions and dread.
“ ‘Gathered one night under its ruined arcades, around a bonfire that illumined with its ruddy glow the deserted galleries, a heated dispute arose as to which of us should be chosen chief.
“ ‘Each one alleged his merits; I advanced my claims; already some were muttering together with threatening looks, and others, whose voices were loud in drunken quarrel, had their hands on the hilts of their poniards to settle the question, when we suddenly heard a strange rattling of armor, accompanied by hollow, resounding footsteps which became more and more distinct. We all cast around uneasy, suspicious glances. We rose and bared our blades, determined to sell our lives dear, but we could only stand motionless on seeing advance, with firm and even tread, a man of lofty stature, completely armed from head to foot, his face covered with the visor of his helmet. Drawing his broad-sword, which two men could scarcely wield, and placing it upon one of the charred fragments of the fallen arcades, he exclaimed in a voice hollow and deep like the murmurous fall of subterranean waters:
“ ‘If any one of you dare to be first, while I dwell in the castle of the Segre, let him take up this sword, emblem of power.
“ ‘All were silent until, the first moment of astonishment passed, with loud voices we proclaimed him our captain,{63} offering him a glass of our wine. This he declined by signs, perchance that he need not reveal his face, which in vain we strove to distinguish across the iron bars hiding it from our eyes.
“ ‘Nevertheless we swore that night the most terrible oaths, and on the following began our nocturnal raids. In these, our mysterious chief went always at our head. Fire does not stop him, nor dangers intimidate him, nor tears move him. He never speaks, but when blood smokes on our hands, when churches fall devoured by the flames, when women flee affrighted amid the ruins, and children utter screams of pain, and the old men perish under our blows, he answers the groans, the imprecations and the lamentations with a loud laugh of savage joy.
“ ‘Never does he lay aside his arms nor lift the visor of his helmet after victory nor take part in the feast nor yield himself to slumber. The swords that strike him pierce his armor without causing death or drawing blood; fire reddens his coat of mail and yet he pushes on undaunted amid the flames, seeking new victims; he scorns gold, despises beauty, and is not moved by ambition.
“ ‘Among ourselves, some think him a madman, others a ruined noble who from a remnant of shame conceals his face, and there are not wanting those who are persuaded that it is the very Devil in person.’
“The author of these revelations died with a mocking smile on his lips and without repenting of his sins; divers of his comrades followed him at different times to meet their punishment, but the dreaded chief, to whom continually gathered new proselytes, did not cease his ravages.
“The unhappy inhabitants of the region, more and more harassed and desperate, had not yet achieved that pitch of resolution necessary to put an end, once for all, to this order of things, every day more insupportable and grievous.{64}
“Adjoining the hamlet and hidden in the depths of a dense forest, there dwelt at this time, in a little hermitage dedicated to Saint Bartholomew, a holy man of godly and exemplary life, whom the peasants always held in an odor of sanctity, thanks to his wholesome counsels and sure predictions.
“This venerable hermit, to whose prudence and proverbial wisdom the people of Bellver committed the solution of their difficult problem, after seeking divine aid through his patron saint, who, as you know, is well acquainted with the Devil, and on more than one occasion has put him in a tight place, advised that they should lie in ambush during the night at the foot of the stony road which winds up to the rock on whose summit stands the castle. He charged them at the same time that, once there, they should use no other weapons to apprehend the Enemy than a wonderful prayer which he had them commit to memory, and with which the chronicles assert that Saint Bartholomew had made the Devil his prisoner.
“The plan was put into immediate execution, and its success exceeded all hopes, for the morrow’s sun had not lit the high tower of Bellver when its inhabitants gathered in groups in the central square, telling one another with an air of mystery how, that night, the famous captain of the banditti of the Segre had come into the town bound hand and foot and securely tied to the back of a strong mule.
“By what art the actors in this enterprise had brought it to such fortunate issue no one succeeded in finding out nor were they themselves able to tell; but the fact remained that, thanks to the prayer of the Saint or to the daring of his devotees, the attempt had resulted as narrated.
“As soon as the news began to spread from mouth to mouth and from house to house, throngs rushed into the streets with loud huzzas and were soon massed before the doors of the prison. The parish bell called together the{65} civic body, the most substantial citizens met in council, and all awaited in suspense the hour when the criminal should appear before his improvised judges.
“These judges, who were authorized by the sovereign power of Urgel to administer themselves justice prompt and stern to those malefactors, deliberated but a moment, after which they commanded that the culprit be brought before them to receive his sentence.
“As I have said, as in the central square, so in the streets through which the prisoner must pass to the place where he should meet his judges, the impatient multitude thronged like a clustered swarm of bees. Especially at the gateway of the prison the popular excitement mounted from moment to moment, and already animated dialogues, sullen mutterings and threatening shouts had begun to give the warders anxiety, when fortunately the order came to bring forth the criminal.
“As he appeared below the massive arch of the prison portal, in complete armor, his face covered with the visor, a low, prolonged murmur of admiration and surprise rose from the compact multitude which with difficulty opened to let him pass.
“All had recognized in that coat of mail the well-known armor of the Count of the Segre, that armor which had been the object of the most gloomy traditions while it had been hanging from the ruined walls of the accursed stronghold.
“This was that armor; there was left no room for doubt. All had seen the black plume waving from his helmet’s crest in the battles which formerly they had fought against their lord; all had seen it, blowing in the morning breeze, like the ivy of the flame-gnawed pillar on which the armor had hung since the death of its owner. But who could be the unknown personage who was wearing it now? Soon it would be known; at least, so they thought. Events will show how this expectation, like many another, was frustrated{66} and how out of this solemn act of justice, from which might have been expected a complete revelation of the truth, there resulted new and more inexplicable confusions.
“The mysterious bandit arrived finally at the Council Hall and a profound silence followed the murmurs which had arisen among the bystanders on hearing resound beneath the lofty arches of that chamber the click of his golden spurs. One of the members of the tribunal in a slow and uncertain voice asked his name, and all anxiously listened that they might not lose one word of his response, but the warrior only shrugged his shoulders lightly with an air of contempt and insult, which could but irritate his judges, who exchanged glances of surprise.
“Three times the question was repeated, and as often received the same or a similar reply.
“ ‘Have him lift his visor! Have him show his face! Have him show his face!’ the citizens present at the trial began to shout. ‘Have him show his face! We will see if then he dare insult us with his contempt, as he does now hidden in his mail.’
“ ‘Show your face,’ demanded the same member of the tribunal who had before addressed him.
“The warrior remained motionless.
“ ‘I command you by the authority of this council.’
“The same answer.
“ ‘By the authority of this realm.’
“Nor for that.
“Indignation rose to its height, even to the point where one of the guards, throwing himself upon the criminal, whose pertinacious silence was enough to exhaust the patience of a saint, violently opened his visor. A general cry of surprise escaped from those within the hall, who remained for an instant smitten with an inconceivable amazement.
“The cause was adequate.{67}
“The helmet, whose iron visor, as all could see, was partly lifted toward the forehead, partly fallen over the shining steel gorget, was empty,—entirely empty.
“When, the first moment of terror passed, they would have touched it, the armor shivered slightly and, breaking asunder into its various pieces, fell to the floor with a dull, strange clang.
“The greater part of the spectators, at the sight of the new prodigy, forsook the room tumultuously and rushed in terror to the square.
“The news spread with the speed of thought among the multitude who were awaiting impatiently the result of the trial; and such was the alarm, the excitement and the clamor, that no one longer doubted what the popular voice had asserted from the first—that the Devil, on the death of the Count of the Segre, had inherited the fiefs of Bellver.
“At last the tumult subsided, and it was decided to return the miraculous armor to the dungeon.
“When this was so bestowed, they despatched four envoys, who, as representing the perplexed town, should present the case to the royal Count of Urgel and the archbishop. In a few days these envoys returned with the decision of those dignitaries, a decision brief and comprehensive.
“ ‘Let the armor be hanged,’ they said, ‘in the central square of the town; if the Devil occupies it, he will find it necessary to abandon it or to be strangled with it.’
“The people of Bellver, enchanted with so ingenious a solution, again assembled in council, ordered a very high gallows to be erected in the square, and when once more the multitude filled the approaches to the prison, went thither for the armor in a body with all the civic dignity which the importance of the case demanded.
“When this honorable delegation arrived at the massive arch giving entrance to the building, a pallid and distracted{68} man threw himself to the ground in the presence of the astonished bystanders, exclaiming with tears in his eyes:
“ ‘Pardon, señores, pardon!’
“ ‘Pardon! For whom?’ said some, ‘for the Devil, who dwells in the armor of the Count of the Segre?’
“ ‘For me,’ continued with shaking voice the unhappy man in whom all recognized the chief warden of the prison, ‘for me—because the armor—has disappeared.’
“On hearing these words, amazement was painted on the faces of as many as were in the portico; silent and motionless, so they would have remained God knows how long if the following narrative of the terrified keeper had not caused them to gather in groups around him, greedy for every word.
“ ‘Pardon me, señores,’ said the poor warden, ‘and I will conceal nothing from you, however much it may be against me.’
“All maintained silence and he went on as follows:
“ ‘I shall never succeed in giving the reason, but the fact is that the story of the empty armor always seemed to me a fable manufactured in favor of some noble personage whom perhaps grave reasons of public policy did not permit the judges to make known or to punish.
“ ‘I was ever of this belief—a belief in which I could not but be confirmed by the immobility in which the armor remained from the hour when, by the order of the tribunal, it was brought a second time to the prison. In vain, night after night, desiring to surprise its secret, if secret there were, I crept up little by little and listened at the cracks of the iron door of its dungeon. Not a sound was perceptible.
“ ‘In vain I managed to observe it through a small hole made in the wall; thrown upon a little straw in one of the darkest corners, it remained day after day disordered and motionless.
“ ‘One night, at last, pricked by curiosity and wishing to{69} convince myself that this object of terror had nothing mysterious about it, I lighted a lantern, went down to the dungeons, drew their double bolts and, not taking the precaution to shut the doors behind me, so firm was my belief that all this was no more than an old wives’ tale, entered the cell. Would I had never done it! Scarcely had I taken a few steps when the light of my lantern went out of itself and my teeth began to chatter and my hair to rise. Breaking the profound silence that encompassed me, I had heard something like a sound of metal pieces which stirred and clanked in fitting themselves together in the gloom.
“ ‘My first movement was to throw myself toward the door to bar the passage, but on grasping its panels I felt upon my shoulders a formidable hand, gauntleted, which, after jerking me violently aside, flung me upon the threshold. There I remained until the next morning when my subordinates found me unconscious and, on reviving, only able to recollect that after my fall I had seemed to hear, confusedly, a sounding tread accompanied by the clatter of spurs, which little by little grew more distant until it died away.’
“When the warden had finished, profound silence reigned, on which there followed an infernal outbreak of lamentations, shouts and threats.
“It was with difficulty that the more temperate could control the populace, who, infuriated at this last turn of affairs, demanded with fierce outcry the death of the inquisitive author of their new disappointment.
“At last the tumult was quieted and the people began to lay plans for a fresh capture. This attempt, too, had a satisfactory outcome.
“At the end of a few days, the armor was again in the power of its foes. Now that the formula was known and the help of Saint Bartholomew secured, the thing was no longer very difficult.{70}
“But yet something remained to be done; in vain, after conquering it, they hanged it from a gallows; in vain they exercised the utmost vigilance for the purpose of giving it no opportunity to escape by way of the upper world. But as soon as two fingers’ breadth of light fell on the scattered pieces of armor, they fitted themselves together and, clinkity clank, made off again to resume their raids over mountain and plain, which was a blessing indeed.
“This was a story without an end.
“In so critical a state of affairs, the people divided among themselves the pieces of the armor that, perchance for the hundredth time, had come into their possession, and prayed the pious hermit, who had once before enlightened them with his counsel, to decide what they should do with it.
“The holy man ordained a general fast. He buried himself for three days in the depths of a cavern that served him as a retreat and at their end bade them melt the diabolical armor and with this and some hewn stones from the castle of the Segre, erect a cross.
“The work was carried through, although not without new and fearful prodigies which filled with terror the souls of the dismayed inhabitants of Bellver.
“As soon as the pieces thrown into the flames began to redden, long and deep groans seemed to come out of the great blaze, within whose circle of fuel the armor leapt as if it were alive and felt the action of the fire. A whirl of sparks red, green and blue danced on the points of the spiring flames and twisted about hissing, as if a legion of devils, mounted on these, would fight to free their lord from that torment.
“Strange, horrible, was the process by which the incandescent armor lost its form to take that of a cross.
“The hammers fell clanging with a frightful uproar upon the anvil, where twenty sturdy smiths beat into shape the{71} bars of boiling metal that quivered and groaned beneath the blows.
“Already the arms of the sign of our redemption were outspread, already the upper end was beginning to take form, when the fiendish, glowing mass writhed anew, as if in frightful convulsion, and enfolding the unfortunate workmen, who struggled to free themselves from its deadly embrace, glittered in rings like a serpent or contracted itself in zigzag like lightning.
“Incessant labor, faith, prayers and holy water succeeded, at last, in overcoming the infernal spirit, and the armor was converted into a cross.
“This cross it is you have seen to-day, the cross in which the Devil who gives it its name is bound. Before it the young people in the month of May place no clusters of lilies, nor do the shepherds uncover as they pass by, nor the old folk kneel; the strict admonitions of the priest scarcely prevent the boys from stoning it.
“God has closed His ears to all supplications offered Him in its presence. In the winter, packs of wolves gather about the juniper which overshadows it to rush upon the herds; banditti wait in its shade for travellers whose slain bodies they bury at its foot, and when the tempest rages, the lightnings deviate from their course to meet, hissing, at the head of this cross and to rend the stones of its pedestal.{72}”
มิเซอเร่
หลายเดือนต่อมา ในระหว่างที่ไปเยี่ยมชมวัดฟิเทโรที่มีชื่อเสียง และกำลังสนุกสนานกับการพลิกหนังสือสองสามเล่มในห้องสมุดร้างของวัดนั้น ฉันได้ค้นพบหนังสือเพลงต้นฉบับเก่าๆ สองหรือสามเล่ม ซึ่งถูกเก็บซ่อนไว้ในมุมมืดแห่งหนึ่ง โดยหนังสือทั้งสองเล่มมีฝุ่นเกาะและถูกหนูแทะตามขอบ
มันเป็นมิเซเรเร
ฉันไม่ได้อ่านโน้ตดนตรี แต่ฉันรู้สึกสนใจมันมาก แม้ว่าฉันจะไม่เข้าใจมันเลยก็ตาม แต่บางครั้งฉันก็หยิบโน้ตของโอเปร่าขึ้นมาอ่านอย่างพินิจพิเคราะห์เป็นชั่วโมงๆ มองดูโน้ตที่เรียงกันอย่างไม่มากก็น้อย เช่น เส้นประ ครึ่งวงกลม สามเหลี่ยม และสิ่งที่ เรียกว่าคีย์ และทั้งหมดนี้โดยไม่เข้าใจแม้แต่น้อยหรือได้รับประโยชน์ใดๆ เลย
หลังจากนิสัยโง่ๆ นี้ของฉัน ฉันก็พลิกหน้าหนังสือเพลง และสิ่งแรกที่ดึงดูดความสนใจของฉันก็คือข้อเท็จจริงที่ว่าถึงแม้ในหน้าสุดท้ายจะมีคำละตินที่ใช้กันทั่วไปในผลงานทุกชิ้น คือfinis ยืนอยู่ แต่ Miserereยังไม่จบลง เพราะดนตรีไม่ได้ดำเนินไปไกลกว่าบทที่สิบของสดุดี
ไม่ต้องสงสัยเลยว่านี่คือสิ่งที่ดึงดูดความสนใจของฉันเป็นอันดับแรก แต่ทันทีที่ฉันอ่านหน้าต่างๆ อย่างละเอียด ฉันก็ยิ่งประหลาดใจมากขึ้นเมื่อสังเกตเห็นว่าแทนที่จะใช้คำภาษาอิตาลีที่ใช้กันทั่วไป เช่นmaestoso , allegro , ritardando , piu vivo , à piacereกลับมีบรรทัดหนึ่งที่เขียนด้วยอักษรภาษาเยอรมันขนาดเล็กมาก ซึ่งบางบรรทัดต้องใช้ความพยายามอย่างมาก เช่น “ กระดูกจะหัก—หักกระดูก เสียงร้องจะออกมาจากไขกระดูก ” หรืออย่างอื่น เช่น “ เสียงประสานกันดังสนั่น แต่ยังคงดังกังวาน เสียงฟ้าร้องดังกึกก้อง แต่ไม่ดังจนหูหนวก ”{215}ทุกสิ่งที่ได้ยินเสียงก็ฟังดูดี และไม่มีความสับสนวุ่นวาย และทุกสิ่งที่สะอื้นไห้และคร่ำครวญ ” หรือสิ่งที่แน่นอนว่าเป็นสิ่งที่สร้างสรรค์ที่สุดจากทั้งหมด ซึ่งได้สั่งไว้ใต้บทสุดท้าย: “ โน้ตต่างๆ เหมือนกระดูกที่ปกคลุมด้วยเนื้อ แสงสว่างไม่อาจดับได้ สวรรค์และความกลมกลืนของพวกมัน—พลัง!—พลังและความไพเราะ ”
“คุณรู้ไหมว่านี่คืออะไร” ฉันถามภิกษุชราที่เดินทางมากับฉันหลังจากที่ฉันแปลข้อความเหล่านี้ไปได้ครึ่งหนึ่งแล้ว ซึ่งดูเหมือนเป็นวลีที่คนบ้าเขียนขึ้น
ไกด์ผู้ชราของฉันจึงได้เล่าตำนานนี้ให้ฉันฟัง และตอนนี้ฉันก็เล่าต่อให้คุณฟังแล้ว
ฉัน.
หลายปีก่อน ในคืนที่มืดมิดและฝนตก ผู้แสวงบุญคนหนึ่งได้มาที่ประตูอารามของวัดแห่งนี้ และขอไฟเล็กๆ เพื่อใช้ทำให้เสื้อผ้าของเขาแห้ง ขอขนมปังสักชิ้นเพื่อดับความหิวโหย และขอที่พักพิง แม้ว่าจะเป็นเพียงที่พักพิงเล็กๆ น้อยๆ จนกว่าจะถึงเช้า แล้วเขาจะเดินทางต่อในตอนรุ่งสาง
พี่น้องฆราวาสผู้ถูกขอได้นำอาหารอันน้อยนิด เตียงนอนอันแสนสกปรก และเตาผิงอันอบอุ่นมาให้บริการผู้เดินทาง ซึ่งหลังจากที่เขาฟื้นจากความอ่อนล้าแล้ว ผู้เดินทางก็ถูกซักถามถึงจุดประสงค์ในการเดินทางแสวงบุญและเป้าหมายในการเดินทางของเขา
“ฉันเป็นนักดนตรี” ชายแปลกหน้าตอบ “ฉันเกิดไกลจากที่นี่ และในบ้านเกิดของฉันเอง ฉันสนุกกับวันอันแสนจะโด่งดัง ในวัยเยาว์ ฉันทำให้ศิลปะของฉันเป็นอาวุธที่ทรงพลังในการล่อลวง และฉันก็จุดไฟแห่งกิเลสตัณหาด้วยมัน ซึ่งทำให้ฉันมุ่งไปสู่การก่ออาชญากรรม ในวัยชรา ฉันจะใช้ความสามารถที่ฉันเคยใช้ในทางชั่วให้เกิดประโยชน์ เพื่อไถ่บาปให้กับวิญญาณของฉันด้วยวิธีการที่นำมันเข้าสู่อันตรายของการพิพากษา”
ขณะที่คำพูดลึกลับของแขกที่ไม่รู้จักดูเหมือนจะไม่{216}ชัดเจนต่อพี่น้องฆราวาสที่ตอนนี้ความอยากรู้เริ่มถูกกระตุ้นแล้ว เขาจึงถามต่อไป และได้รับคำตอบดังนี้:
“ข้าพเจ้าเคยร้องไห้ในจิตใจลึกๆ เนื่องมาจากบาปที่ข้าพเจ้าได้ก่อไว้ แต่เมื่อข้าพเจ้าพยายามอธิษฐานขอความเมตตาจากพระเจ้า ข้าพเจ้าก็ไม่พบถ้อยคำใดที่เหมาะสมที่จะกล่าวแสดงความสำนึกผิด จนกระทั่งวันหนึ่ง ข้าพเจ้าบังเอิญไปเห็นหนังสือศักดิ์สิทธิ์เล่มหนึ่ง ข้าพเจ้าเปิดหนังสือเล่มนั้นออก และเมื่อถึงหน้าหนึ่ง ข้าพเจ้าก็ได้ยินเสียงร้องอันดังสนั่นด้วยความสำนึกผิดอย่างแท้จริง เป็นบทสดุดีของดาวิด โดยเริ่มด้วย Miserere mei, Domine!ตั้งแต่วินาทีที่ข้าพเจ้าอ่านบทสดุดีเหล่านั้น ความคิดเดียวของข้าพเจ้าคือ ต้องหาบทเพลงที่ไพเราะและยิ่งใหญ่เพียงพอที่จะเป็นเพลงสรรเสริญอันยิ่งใหญ่ของนักแต่งเพลงเพลงสรรเสริญแห่งราชวงศ์เกี่ยวกับความทุกข์ทรมาน ข้าพเจ้ายังไม่พบมันเลย แต่ถ้าหากข้าพเจ้าสามารถแสดงความรู้สึกในใจและสิ่งที่ได้ยินอย่างสับสนในสมองได้ ข้าพเจ้าแน่ใจว่าได้เขียนMiserereที่งดงามอย่างน่าอัศจรรย์จนมนุษย์ไม่เคยได้ยินบทอื่นที่เหมือนกับบทนี้มาก่อน Miserere โศกเศร้าอย่างสิ้นหวัง เมื่อบทเพลงแรกๆ ของบทนี้ลอยขึ้นสู่สวรรค์ เหล่าทูตสวรรค์ซึ่งมีดวงตาคลอไปด้วยน้ำตา จะร้องทูลต่อพระเจ้าพร้อมกับข้าพเจ้า วิงวอนขอความเมตตาและพระเจ้าจะทรงเมตตาต่อสิ่งมีชีวิตที่ทุกข์ยากของพระองค์”
เมื่อผู้แสวงบุญมาถึงจุดนี้ในเรื่องเล่าของเขา ก็หยุดชะงักชั่วขณะหนึ่ง จากนั้นก็ถอนหายใจยาวๆ แล้วกลับมาเล่าเรื่องต่อ พี่น้องฆราวาส ผู้พึ่งพาอาศัยในวัดไม่กี่คน และคนเลี้ยงแกะสองสามคนจากฟาร์มของภิกษุ ซึ่งยืนเป็นวงกลมรอบเตาผิง ต่างฟังเขาพูดด้วยความเงียบสนิท
“หลังจากเดินทางไปทั่วเยอรมนีแล้ว” เขากล่าวต่อ “ทั่วอิตาลีและเกือบทั้งประเทศซึ่งมีดนตรีศักดิ์สิทธิ์อันคลาสสิก ฉันยังไม่เคยได้ยินเพลงMiserereที่สามารถสร้างแรงบันดาลใจให้กับฉันได้ ไม่แม้แต่เพลงเดียว ไม่แม้แต่เพลงเดียว และฉันได้ยินมาหลายเพลงมากจนพูดได้ว่าได้ยินมาหมดทุกเพลงแล้ว”
“ทั้งหมดเหรอ?” หนึ่งในคนเลี้ยงแกะชั้นบนถามขึ้น “แต่เจ้าไม่เคยได้ยินเรื่องมิเซเรเรแห่งภูเขาบ้างหรือ?”
ลานวัด
“ มิเซเรเร่แห่งขุนเขา!” นักดนตรีอุทานด้วยท่าทีประหลาดใจ “ มิเซเรเร่ อะไร นั่นน่ะ”
“ฉันไม่ได้พูดอย่างนั้นเหรอ” ชาวนาพึมพำเบาๆ จากนั้นก็พูดต่อไปด้วยน้ำเสียงลึกลับ “ มิเซเรเร นี้ ซึ่งได้ยินโดยบังเอิญโดยผู้ที่เดินตามแกะผ่านพุ่มไม้และเนินหินทั้งวันทั้งคืนเช่นเดียวกับฉัน แท้จริงแล้วเป็นประเพณีเก่าแก่ แม้จะดูเหลือเชื่อ แต่ก็เป็นความจริงเช่นเดียวกัน
“ข้อเท็จจริงคือ ในส่วนขรุขระที่สุดของเทือกเขาที่กั้นระหว่างขอบฟ้าของหุบเขาซึ่งเป็นที่ตั้งของวัดนั้น เคยมีอารามที่มีชื่อเสียงอยู่เมื่อหลายปีก่อน—ทำไมฉันถึงพูดว่าหลายปี!—หลายศตวรรษเสียอีก อารามแห่งนี้ดูเหมือนจะสร้างขึ้นด้วยค่าใช้จ่ายส่วนตัวโดยขุนนางด้วยความมั่งคั่งที่เขาควรจะทิ้งไว้ให้ลูกชายของเขา ซึ่งเมื่อเขาสิ้นใจ เขาได้ตัดมรดกทิ้งเพื่อเป็นการลงโทษสำหรับการกระทำอันชั่วร้ายของชายหนุ่มผู้สุรุ่ยสุร่าย
“จนถึงตอนนี้ทุกอย่างก็ผ่านไปด้วยดี แต่ปัญหาคือลูกชายคนนี้ ซึ่งจากสิ่งที่จะเห็นต่อไป ต้องเป็นผิวหนังของปีศาจ ถ้าไม่ใช่ปีศาจเอง เมื่อรู้ว่าทรัพย์สมบัติของเขาตกไปอยู่ในความครอบครองของบรรดาภิกษุ และปราสาทของเขาถูกเปลี่ยนเป็นโบสถ์ จึงได้รวบรวมพวกโจรซึ่งเป็นเพื่อนร่วมทางในชีวิตอันธพาลที่เขาดำเนินชีวิตโดยละทิ้งบ้านของบิดา และในคืนวันพฤหัสบดีศักดิ์สิทธิ์คืนหนึ่ง เมื่อบรรดาภิกษุอยู่ในคณะนักร้องประสานเสียง และในเวลาที่พวกเขาเพิ่งจะเริ่มต้นหรือเพิ่งจะเริ่ม Miserere พวกนอกกฎหมายเหล่านี้ก็จุดไฟเผาอาราม ปล้นโบสถ์ และไม่ปล่อยให้ภิกษุสักองค์มีชีวิตอยู่เลย”
“ภายหลังจากเหตุการณ์โหดร้ายครั้งนี้ พวกโจรและหัวหน้าของพวกเขาก็จากไป โดยไม่มีใครรู้ บางทีอาจจะลงนรกไปเลยก็ได้
“เปลวเพลิงเผาผลาญอารามจนกลายเป็นเถ้าถ่าน ส่วนโบสถ์ยังคงเหลือซากปรักหักพังบนโพรง{218}หินผาที่ก่อให้เกิดน้ำตกไหลลงมาจากหินก้อนหนึ่งสู่อีกก้อนหนึ่ง กลายเป็นลำธารที่ไหลลงมาท่วมผนังวัดแห่งนี้”
“แต่ว่า” นักดนตรีขัดขึ้นอย่างใจร้อน “ มิเซเรเรเหรอ”
“รอสักครู่” คนเลี้ยงแกะกล่าวอย่างครุ่นคิด “แล้วทุกอย่างจะถูกเล่าตามลำดับ” เขาเล่าต่อไปโดยไม่ตอบอะไรเพิ่มเติม
“ประชาชนทั่วทั้งประเทศโดยรอบต่างตกตะลึงกับอาชญากรรมดังกล่าว อาชญากรรมนี้ถูกเล่าขานด้วยความสยองขวัญในช่วงค่ำคืนอันยาวนานของฤดูหนาว ถ่ายทอดจากพ่อสู่ลูก และจากลูกสู่หลาน แต่สิ่งที่ทำให้เรื่องนี้ยังคงอยู่ในความทรงจำเสมอมาคือ ทุกปี ในวันครบรอบคืนที่โบสถ์ถูกเผา จะเห็นแสงสว่างส่องออกมาจากหน้าต่างที่แตก และได้ยินเสียงดนตรีประหลาดพร้อมกับเสียงสวดภาวนาอันน่าสะพรึงกลัวที่ดังเป็นระยะๆ ตามลมกระโชกแรง”
“นักร้องคือบรรดาภิกษุสงฆ์ที่ถูกสังหารก่อนที่พวกเขาจะพร้อมไปปรากฏตัวที่บัลลังก์แห่งการพิพากษาของพระเจ้าด้วยความบริสุทธิ์ใจ แต่พวกเขาก็ยังคงมาจากนรกเพื่อขอความเมตตาจากพระองค์ โดยสวดบทMiserere ”
กลุ่มคนรอบกองไฟต่างมองกันด้วยความไม่เชื่อ แต่ผู้แสวงบุญซึ่งดูเหมือนจะสนใจการเล่านิทานเรื่องนี้เป็นอย่างยิ่ง ได้สอบถามผู้บรรยายอย่างกระตือรือร้น:
“แล้วท่านว่าสิ่งมหัศจรรย์นี้ยังเกิดขึ้นอยู่หรือ?”
“จะเริ่มต้นโดยไม่ล้มเหลวในเวลาน้อยกว่าสามชั่วโมง เนื่องด้วยเหตุผลที่ชัดเจนว่านี่คือคืนวันพฤหัสบดีศักดิ์สิทธิ์ และนาฬิกาของวัดเพิ่งตีแปดโมง”
“วัดอยู่ห่างจากที่นี่กี่กิโลเมตร?”
“แค่ลีกครึ่งเท่านั้น แต่ท่านกำลังทำอะไรอยู่?” “ท่านจะไปที่ไหนในคืนเช่นนี้?” “ท่านตกลงมาจากที่กำบังของพระหัตถ์ของพระเจ้าหรือ?” คนละคนอุทานเมื่อเห็นผู้แสวงบุญลุกขึ้นจากม้านั่ง{219}และหยิบไม้เท้าออกจากเตาผิงแล้วเดินไปที่ประตู
“ข้าพเจ้าจะไปที่ไหน? เพื่อจะได้ยินเสียงดนตรีอันน่าอัศจรรย์นี้ เพื่อจะได้ยินเสียงมิเซเรเรที่ยิ่งใหญ่และแท้จริงเสียงมิเซเรเรของผู้ที่กลับคืนสู่โลกหลังความตาย ผู้ที่รู้ว่าการตายในบาปเป็นอย่างไร”
เมื่อกล่าวเช่นนี้แล้ว พระองค์ก็หายไปจากสายตาของฆราวาสผู้ประหลาดใจ และบรรดาคนเลี้ยงแกะซึ่งก็ประหลาดใจไม่แพ้กัน
ลมพัดแรงจากภายนอกและเขย่าประตูราวกับว่ามีมืออันทรงพลังกำลังพยายามจะฉีกประตูออกจากบานพับ ฝนตกหนักซัดสาดไปที่กระจกหน้าต่าง และในบางครั้ง แสงฟ้าแลบก็สว่างขึ้นชั่วพริบตาจนสุดขอบฟ้าที่สามารถมองเห็นได้จากที่นั่น
เมื่อผ่านช่วงแรกของความสับสนไปแล้ว พี่ชายฆราวาสก็อุทานว่า:
“เขาเป็นบ้า”
“เขาเป็นบ้า” พวกเลี้ยงแกะพูดซ้ำ แล้วเมื่อพวกเขาเติมไฟ พวกเขาก็มารวมตัวกันอย่างแน่นหนารอบเตาผิง
II.
หลังจากเดินไปประมาณหนึ่งหรือสองชั่วโมง บุคคลลึกลับซึ่งพวกเขาได้ให้ระดับความบ้าในวัดให้ โดยเดินตามลำธารที่คนเลี้ยงแกะที่เล่าเรื่องได้ชี้ให้เขาเห็น ก็ได้มาถึงจุดที่ซากปรักหักพังของวัดอันดำมืดและน่าประทับใจผุดขึ้นมา
ฝนหยุดตกแล้ว เมฆลอยเป็นก้อนยาวและมืดมิด มีแสงจางๆ ล่องลอยออกมาจากระหว่างก้อนเมฆเป็นระยะๆ และบางคนอาจกล่าวได้ว่าลมที่พัดผ่านเชิงเทินที่แข็งแรงและพัดปีกกว้างผ่านระเบียงที่รกร้างว่างเปล่านั้นส่งเสียงครวญครางขณะบิน แต่ไม่มีสิ่งใดเหนือธรรมชาติหรือสิ่งพิเศษใดๆ ที่จะมากระตุ้นจินตนาการได้ สำหรับผู้ที่หลับไปมากกว่าหนึ่งคืน{220}โดยไม่มีที่พักพิงอื่นใดนอกจากซากปรักหักพังของหอคอยร้างหรือปราสาทที่โดดเดี่ยว สำหรับผู้ที่เผชิญพายุหลายร้อยลูกในการเดินทางไกล เสียงทั้งหมดเหล่านี้ล้วนคุ้นเคย
หยดน้ำที่ไหลผ่านรอยแตกร้าวของซุ้มโค้งที่แตกหักและตกลงบนก้อนหินเบื้องล่างพร้อมเสียงที่ค่อยเป็นค่อยไปราวกับเสียงนาฬิกาขนาดใหญ่ที่กำลังเดิน เสียงฮูกของนกฮูกที่ร้องแหลมออกมาจากที่หลบภัยใต้รัศมีหินของรูปปั้นที่ยังคงตั้งอยู่ในซอกของกำแพง เสียงกระเพื่อมของสัตว์เลื้อยคลานที่ตื่นจากความเฉื่อยชาจากพายุและโผล่หัวที่ผิดรูปออกมาจากรูที่มันนอน หรือคลานไปในต้นมัสตาร์ดป่าและพุ่มไม้ที่ขึ้นอยู่เชิงแท่นบูชาซึ่งฝังรากอยู่ในรอยแยกระหว่างแผ่นหินสำหรับฝังศพที่เป็นทางเดินของโบสถ์ เสียงกระซิบที่แปลกประหลาดและลึกลับทั้งหมดเกี่ยวกับพื้นที่โล่งแจ้ง ความสันโดษ และความมืดมิด ดังไปถึงหูของผู้แสวงบุญที่นั่งอยู่บนรูปปั้นหลุมศพที่พังทลายและรอคอยอย่างใจจดใจจ่อว่าจะเกิดเหตุการณ์ที่น่าอัศจรรย์นี้ขึ้นเมื่อใด
แต่เวลายังคงผ่านไปและไม่มีใครได้ยินเสียงใดๆ อีก เสียงที่สับสนนับไม่ถ้วนยังคงดังและรวมเข้าด้วยกันในรูปแบบที่แตกต่างกันนับพันวิธี แต่ก็ยังคงเหมือนเดิมเสมอ
“โอ้ พวกเขาเล่นตลกกับฉัน!” นักดนตรีคิด แต่ในขณะนั้น เขาก็ได้ยินเสียงใหม่ เสียงที่อธิบายไม่ได้ในสถานที่เช่นนี้ เหมือนกับเสียงนาฬิกาที่ดังขึ้นก่อนจะตีบอกชั่วโมงไม่กี่วินาที เสียงล้อหมุน เสียงเชือกที่ยืดออก เสียงเครื่องจักรที่แอบทำงานและเตรียมพร้อมที่จะใช้พลังชีวิตอันลึกลับของมัน และเสียงระฆังที่ดังบอกชั่วโมง หนึ่ง สอง สาม ไปจนถึงสิบเอ็ด
ในโบสถ์ที่พังนั้นไม่มีระฆังหรือนาฬิกาแม้แต่หอระฆังก็ไม่มี
เสียงระฆังสุดท้ายที่ค่อยๆ ลดน้อยลงจากเสียงสะท้อนหนึ่งไปสู่อีกเสียงหนึ่งก็ยังไม่จางหายไป ความสั่นสะเทือนยังคงรับรู้ได้ สั่นสะเทือนอยู่ในอากาศ{221}เมื่อหลังคาหินแกรนิตที่ยื่นออกมาคลุมประติมากรรม ขั้นบันไดหินอ่อนของแท่นบูชา หินเจียระไนของซุ้มโค้งสูง ม่านบังตาของคณะนักร้องประสานเสียง พวงมาลัยดอกสามแฉกที่ประดับบนชายคา ค้ำยันสีดำของกำแพง ทางเท้า เพดานโค้ง ทั้งโบสถ์เริ่มมีแสงสว่างจากสิ่งใดๆ ที่มองเห็นได้ และไม่มีคบเพลิง โคมไฟ หรือเทียนไขที่จะส่องแสงที่ไม่คุ้นเคยให้เห็นอีกต่อไป
มันบอกเป็นนัยถึงโครงกระดูกที่มีกระดูกสีเหลืองซึ่งกระจายแก๊สฟอสฟอรัสที่เผาไหม้และปล่อยควันในความมืดเหมือนแสงสีฟ้า ที่กระสับกระส่ายและน่ากลัว
ดูเหมือนว่าทุกสิ่งทุกอย่างจะเคลื่อนไหว แต่การเคลื่อนไหวด้วยกระแสไฟฟ้าซึ่งทำให้เกิดการหดตัวที่ล้อเลียนชีวิต การเคลื่อนไหวในทันทีนั้นน่ากลัวยิ่งกว่าแรงเฉื่อยของศพที่เคลื่อนไหวด้วยพลังที่ไม่รู้จักนั้นเสียอีก ก้อนหินรวมตัวกันอีกครั้ง แท่นบูชาซึ่งเศษชิ้นส่วนที่แตกกระจัดกระจายอยู่ก่อนแล้วตั้งตระหง่านอยู่โดยไม่บุบสลาย ราวกับว่าช่างฝีมือเพิ่งจะตีสิ่วเป็นครั้งสุดท้าย และในเวลาเดียวกันกับแท่นบูชา โบสถ์น้อยที่พังทลาย หัวเสาที่แตก และซุ้มโค้งขนาดใหญ่ที่พังทลายลงมา ซึ่งตัดกันและพันกันอย่างไม่แน่นอน ก่อตัวเป็นเขาวงกตของหินปูนพอร์ไฟรีด้วยเสา
ทันทีที่สร้างโบสถ์ขึ้นใหม่ ก็ได้ยินเสียงประสานเสียงจากระยะไกล ซึ่งอาจเข้าใจผิดว่าเป็นเสียงลมพัด แต่แท้จริงแล้วกลับเป็นเสียงประสานอันเคร่งขรึมที่อยู่ไกลออกไป ราวกับว่ามาจากส่วนลึกของโลก และค่อย ๆ ลอยขึ้นมาที่ผิวดิน และชัดเจนขึ้นเรื่อย ๆ
ผู้แสวงบุญผู้กล้าหาญเริ่มที่จะกลัว แต่ด้วยความกลัวที่ยังคงต่อสู้กับความหลงใหลในสิ่งที่ผ่านไปแล้วและสิ่งที่น่าอัศจรรย์ และกล้าหาญขึ้นจากความแข็งแกร่งของความปรารถนาของเขา เขาออกจากหลุมศพที่เขากำลังพักผ่อน โน้มตัวไปที่ขอบเหว ซึ่งมีน้ำเชี่ยวกรากกระโจนลงไปในโขดหิน ไหลลงสู่หน้าผาพร้อมกับฟ้าร้องที่ไม่หยุดหย่อนและน่าสะพรึงกลัว และผมของเขาก็ลุกขึ้นด้วยความสยองขวัญ{222}
เขาถูกห่อหุ้มด้วยเสื้อผ้าขาดรุ่งริ่ง เสื้อคลุมที่ใต้รอยพับของเสื้อมีโพรงตาสีดำของกะโหลกศีรษะซึ่งตัดกับขากรรไกรที่ไร้เนื้อและฟันสีขาวที่ถูกดึงมาไว้เหนือศีรษะ เขามองเห็นโครงกระดูกของภิกษุที่ถูกโยนลงมาจากป้อมปราการของโบสถ์ลงมาที่ชันชันอย่างรวดเร็ว โผล่ขึ้นมาจากความลึกของน้ำ และคว้านิ้วมือที่ยาวเป็นกระดูกของพวกเขาไว้ที่รอยแยกของหิน จากนั้นปีนขึ้นไปบนขอบผา สวดมนต์ด้วยน้ำเสียงต่ำราวกับอยู่ในสุสาน แต่ด้วยน้ำเสียงที่เจ็บปวดแสนสาหัส ซึ่งเป็นบทแรกของสดุดีของดาวิด:
มิเซเรเร เมย์, โดมิเน, ซีคุนดัม แม็กนัม มิเซอรีคอร์เดียม ทูม!
เมื่อภิกษุสงฆ์มาถึงบริเวณเชิงเทินของโบสถ์ พวกเขาก็จัดแถวเป็นสองแถว และเมื่อเดินเข้าไปในโบสถ์ พวกเขาก็จะเดินขบวนไปที่คณะนักร้องประสานเสียง พวกเขาคุกเข่าลง และร้องเพลงสดุดีต่อไปด้วยเสียงที่ดังและเคร่งขรึมยิ่งขึ้น ดนตรีบรรเลงประกอบเสียงของพวกเขา ดนตรีนั้นคือเสียงฟ้าร้องที่ดังอยู่ไกลๆ ซึ่งค่อยๆ เงียบลงเมื่อพายุสงบลง ดนตรีนั้นคือเสียงลมที่พัดผ่านหุบเขา ดนตรีนั้นคือเสียงน้ำตกที่ไหลลงมาจากหน้าผา เสียงหยดน้ำที่กรองแล้ว เสียงนกเค้าแมวที่แอบอยู่ และเสียงสัตว์เลื้อยคลานที่เคลื่อนไหวอย่างไม่มั่นคง ทั้งหมดนี้อยู่ในดนตรี และบางสิ่งที่ไม่อาจแสดงออกหรือแทบจะนึกไม่ถึง บางสิ่งที่ดูเหมือนเสียงสะท้อนของออร์แกนที่บรรเลงประกอบกับบทเพลงสรรเสริญความสำนึกผิดอันยิ่งใหญ่ของนักประพันธ์เพลงสดุดีแห่งราชวงศ์ โดยมีโน้ตและคอร์ดที่ยิ่งใหญ่อลังการเท่ากับถ้อยคำที่น่ากลัว
พิธีดำเนินต่อไป นักดนตรีที่ได้เห็นพิธีนี้ ซึมซับและหวาดกลัวอย่างที่เป็นอยู่ เชื่อว่าตนเองอยู่ภายนอกโลกแห่งความเป็นจริง อาศัยอยู่ในดินแดนแห่งความฝันอันแสนวิเศษ{223}ซึ่งสรรพสิ่งทั้งหลายจะแต่งตัวใหม่ในรูปแบบที่แปลกประหลาดและแปลกประหลาด
ความตกใจกลัวอย่างร้ายแรงทำให้เขาตื่นจากอาการมึนงงที่อุดตันอยู่ในจิตใจของเขา เส้นประสาทของเขากระโจนเข้าสู่ความตื่นเต้นของอารมณ์ที่รุนแรง ฟันของเขากระทบกัน สั่นสะท้านด้วยความสั่นสะท้านที่เขาไม่สามารถระงับได้ และความหนาวเย็นแทรกซึมเข้าไปในไขกระดูกของเขา
ทันใดนั้น ภิกษุทั้งหลายก็เปล่งวาจาอันน่าสะพรึงกลัวของพระ มิเซเรเรอ อกมา ว่า
ในผลรวมแนวคิด iniquitatibus; และใน peccatis concepit me mater mea
ในขณะที่เสียงฟ้าร้องของบทกวีนี้ดังก้องกังวานไปจากห้องใต้ดินสู่ห้องใต้ดิน ก็มีเสียงร้องโวยวายอันน่ากลัวซึ่งดูเหมือนเสียงคร่ำครวญด้วยความทุกข์ทรมานที่แตกสลายจากความรู้สึกผิดบาปของมนุษย์ เสียงคร่ำครวญอันน่ากลัวที่ประกอบด้วยเสียงคร่ำครวญของผู้โชคร้าย เสียงกรี๊ดร้องแห่งความสิ้นหวัง คำดูหมิ่นพระเจ้าของผู้ไร้ศีลธรรม เสียงประสานอันน่าสะพรึงกลัว ผู้แปลความหมายของผู้ที่ดำเนินชีวิตในบาปและถูกตั้งครรภ์ในความชั่วร้ายอย่างเหมาะสม
บทสวดดำเนินต่อไปอย่างเศร้าโศกและลึกซึ้ง เหมือนแสงอาทิตย์ที่ส่องผ่านเมฆฝนอันมืดมิด ตามมาด้วยแสงวาบแห่งความหวาดกลัวและแสงวาบแห่งความยินดีอีกครั้ง จนกระทั่งด้วยพระคุณที่เปลี่ยนแปลงอย่างกะทันหัน โบสถ์ก็ยืนตระหง่านสง่าผ่าเผยด้วยแสงจากสวรรค์ โครงกระดูกของบรรดาภิกษุก็กลับมาสวมเสื้อผ้าที่เป็นเนื้อหนังอีกครั้ง มีรัศมีแวววาววับรอบคิ้วของพวกเขา หลังคาหายไปและมองเห็นท้องฟ้าเหนือขึ้นไปราวกับทะเลแห่งแสงสว่างที่เปิดกว้างต่อสายตาของผู้ชอบธรรม
เซราฟิม เหล่าทูตสวรรค์ เทวดา และบรรดาเทพนิรมิตในสวรรค์ทั้งหมด มาพร้อมกับบทเพลงสรรเสริญพระเกียรติ ซึ่งบทนี้ดังขึ้นอย่างสูงส่งสู่บัลลังก์ของพระเจ้าเหมือนเสียงแตรอันเป็นจังหวะ เหมือนเกลียวธูปอันใหญ่โต:
Auditui meo dabis gaudium et laetitiam และ ossa humiliata ที่น่ายินดี
ณ จุดนี้ ความสว่างจ้าทำให้ผู้แสวงบุญตาพร่าไป{224}ดวงตาของเขา ขมับของเขาเต้นระรัวอย่างรุนแรง มีเสียงดังคำรามในหูของเขา เขาล้มลงกับพื้นอย่างหมดสติและไม่ได้ยินเสียงอะไรอีก
สาม.
ในวันรุ่งขึ้น ภิกษุสงฆ์ผู้สงบเสงี่ยมแห่งแอบบีย์ฟิเทโร ซึ่งภราดาฆราวาสได้เล่าเรื่องการเยี่ยมเยือนอันแปลกประหลาดเมื่อคืนก่อนให้ฟัง ได้เห็นผู้แสวงบุญที่ไม่รู้จักเดินเข้ามาในประตูบ้านของตนในสภาพซีดเซียวและเหมือนกับคนที่เสียสติ
“ในที่สุดท่านก็ได้ยินเสียงมิเซเรเรไหม” พี่ชายถามเขาด้วยน้ำเสียงประชดประชันเล็กน้อย พร้อมกับมองผู้บังคับบัญชาอย่างมีเลศนัยด้วยสายตาที่เฉียบแหลม
“ใช่” นักดนตรีตอบ
“แล้วคุณชอบมันแค่ไหน?”
“ข้าพเจ้าจะเขียนเรื่องนี้ขึ้น ขอให้ข้าพเจ้าได้ที่พักพิงในบ้านของท่าน” เขากล่าวต่อโดยหันไปหาเจ้าอาวาส “ที่พักพิงและอาหารสักสองสามเดือน ข้าพเจ้าจะทิ้งผลงานศิลปะอมตะไว้ให้ท่าน เป็นมิเซเรเรที่จะลบล้างบาปของข้าพเจ้าจากสายพระเนตรของพระเจ้า ทำให้ความทรงจำของข้าพเจ้าเป็นนิรันดร์ และความทรงจำเกี่ยวกับวัดนี้ก็จะคงอยู่ตลอดไป”
ภิกษุทั้งหลายเกิดความอยากรู้อยากเห็น จึงแนะนำให้เจ้าอาวาสอนุญาตตามคำขอของเขา แม้เจ้าอาวาสจะเชื่อว่าชายผู้นี้เป็นคนวิกลจริต แต่สุดท้ายก็ยอมทำตามเพื่อการกุศล และนักดนตรีจึงได้รับการแต่งตั้งให้มาอยู่ในวัดแห่งนี้และเริ่มงานของเขา
เขาทำงานอย่างขยันขันแข็งทั้งกลางวันและกลางคืน ท่ามกลางงานของเขา เขาจะหยุดพักและดูเหมือนจะกำลังฟังสิ่งที่ฟังดูในจินตนาการของเขา รูม่านตาของเขาจะขยายออกและเขาจะลุกขึ้นจากที่นั่งและร้องอุทานว่า: "นั่นสิ นั่นสิ ไม่ต้องสงสัยเลยว่าเป็นอย่างนั้น!" และเขาจะเขียนบันทึกต่อไปด้วยความเร่งรีบอย่างเร่าร้อน ซึ่งทำให้ผู้ที่คอยเฝ้าสังเกตเขาอย่างลับๆ ประหลาดใจมากกว่าหนึ่งครั้ง
ท่านได้เขียนบทแรกและบทต่อๆ มาเกี่ยวกับ{225}กลางบทสดุดี แต่เมื่อท่านได้เขียนบทสุดท้ายที่ได้ยินจากบนภูเขาแล้ว ก็ไม่สามารถดำเนินการต่อได้
เขาเขียนร่างคร่าวๆ หนึ่ง สอง หนึ่งร้อย สองร้อยฉบับ ซึ่งล้วนไร้ประโยชน์ ดนตรีของเขาไม่เหมือนกับดนตรีที่เขียนไว้แล้ว เปลือกตาของเขาเริ่มง่วงนอน เขาเริ่มเบื่ออาหาร ไข้เริ่มกำเริบในสมอง เขาคลั่ง และเสียชีวิตในที่สุดโดยไม่สามารถแต่ง Miserere จนจบได้ซึ่งบรรดาภิกษุต่างเก็บรักษาไว้เป็นสมบัติล้ำค่าจนกระทั่งเขาเสียชีวิต และยังคงเก็บรักษาไว้ในหอจดหมายเหตุของวัด
เมื่อชายชราเล่าเรื่องนี้ให้ฉันฟังจบ ฉันก็อดไม่ได้ที่จะหันไปดูต้นฉบับ Miserere โบราณที่เต็มไปด้วยฝุ่นซึ่งยังวางอยู่บนโต๊ะตัวหนึ่งอีกครั้ง
ใน peccatis concepit me mater mea
นี่คือคำพูดบนหน้ากระดาษตรงหน้าฉัน ซึ่งดูเหมือนเป็นการล้อเลียนฉันด้วยโน้ต คีย์บอร์ด และลายเส้นที่ผู้ที่ไม่ใช่นักดนตรีสามารถเข้าใจได้
ฉันอยากจะให้ทั้งโลกได้อ่านพวกมัน
ใครจะรู้ว่าสิ่งเหล่านั้นอาจจะไม่ใช่แค่เรื่องไร้สาระ?
