Romantic legends of Spain
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Title: Romantic legends of Spain
Author: Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Translator: Cornelia Frances Bates
Katharine Lee Bates
Release date: September 23, 2015 [eBook #50044]
Most recently updated: October 22, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMANTIC LEGENDS OF SPAIN ***
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, TOLEDO]
ROMANTIC LEGENDS
OF SPAIN
_By_
GUSTAVO ADOLFO BECQUER
TRANSLATED BY
CORNELIA FRANCES BATES
AND
KATHARINE LEE BATES
NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1909
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY
DEDICATED
TO
A SHINING MEMORY
PREFACE
A word regarding the circumstances under which this translation was made
will be pardoned by all children of dear mothers.
Mrs. Cornelia Frances Bates (1826-1908), a graduate of Mount Holyoke in
the days of Mary Lyon and the widow of a Congregational minister, took
up the study of Spanish at the age of seventy-one. Until her death ten
years later, the proverbial ten years of “labor and sorrow,” her Spanish
readings and translations were a keen intellectual delight. Her Spanish
Bible, from which she had committed many passages to memory, was found
at her death no less worn than her English one. Even a few hours before
dying, she repeated in Spanish, without the failure of a syllable, the
Shepherd’s Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer.
So youthful was her spirit that, of the various modern Spanish works
with which she became acquainted, nothing fascinated her so much as
Becquer’s strange, romantic tales. The wilder they were, the brighter
would be the eager face, under its soft white cap, bent over the
familiar little green volumes and the great red dictionary. Seeing the
pleasure she took in these legends and learning that no complete English
translation existed, I suggested that we unite in a “Becquer Book.” Her
full share of the work was promptly done; mine was delayed; and the
volume--which we had meant to inscribe to my sister--becomes her own
memorial.
Gratitude for helpful suggestions is due to the late Mr. Frederick
Gulick of Auburndale, Mass., formerly of San Sebastian, and to Señorita
Carolina Marcial, formerly of Seville and now of Wellesley College.
Especial and most cordial acknowledgment is made of the critical reading
given the entire manuscript by Miss Alice H. Bushée of the _Colegio
Internacional_, Madrid.
K. L. B.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE v
GUSTAVO ADOLFO BECQUER xi
FOREWORD 1
MASTER PÉREZ THE ORGANIST 5
_A Tale of Seville_
THE EMERALD EYES 23
_A Legend of the Moncayo_
THE GOLDEN BRACELET 32
_A Tale of Toledo_
THE RAY OF MOONSHINE 40
_A Tale of Soria_
THE DEVIL’S CROSS 52
_A Legend of the Eastern Pyrenees_
THREE DATES 72
_Reminiscences of Toledo_
THE CHRIST OF THE SKULL 93
_A Legend of Toledo_
THE WHITE DOE 105
_A Legend of Aragon_
THE PASSION ROSE 126
_A Legend of Toledo_
BELIEVE IN GOD 137
_A Legend of the Montagut Valley in Tarragona_
THE PROMISE 151
_A Legend of Soria_
THE KISS 163
_A Tale of Toledo_
THE SPIRITS’ MOUNTAIN 179
_A Legend of Soria_
THE CAVE OF THE MOOR’S DAUGHTER 189
_A Legend of Fitero_
THE GNOME 196
_A Tale of the Moncayo_
THE MISERERE 214
_A Legend of Fitero_
STRANGE! 226
_A Story of Madrid_
WITHERED LEAVES 239
_A Phantasy_
THE SET OF EMERALDS 244
_A story of Madrid_
THE TAVERN OF THE CATS 252
_An Idyl of Andalusia_
ALL SOULS’ NIGHT 266
_In Madrid_
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE CATHEDRAL, TOLEDO _Frontispiece_
PAGE
THE CATHEDRAL, SEVILLE 8
A CITY SQUARE, TOLEDO 32
THE BRIDGE OF TOLEDO 40
CLOISTER OF SAN JUAN DE LOS REYES 74
THE VISAGRA GATE 94
A MOORISH WINDOW 126
THE MONASTERY OF MONTSERRAT 146
AN ANCIENT CASTLE 156
PALACE OF CARLOS V, TOLEDO 164
A MOUNTAIN PASS 182
A MOUNTAIN GROTTO 190
GIRLS AT THE FOUNTAIN 198
A MONASTERY COURT 216
A SEÑORITA 246
A RUINED CLOISTER 266
GUSTAVO ADOLFO BECQUER
The writer of these tales was a young poet, oppressed by illness, care
and poverty. His brief life held many troubles. Born in Seville,
February 17, 1836, of a distinguished family that came to Andalusia from
Flanders at about the end of the sixteenth century, he was but five
years old, the fourth of eight little sons, when he lost his father. The
bereavement was greater than anyone knew, for Don José Dominguez
Becquer, a genre painter of repute, could have given this imaginative
child, a genius in germ, parental sympathy and guidance in an unusual
degree. Less than five years later, the mother died, and the disposition
of the orphans became a puzzling problem for relatives and friends.
Gustavo, who had already attended the day school of San Antonio Abad,
was admitted, through the efforts of an uncle, to the _Colegio de San
Telmo_, a naval academy, maintained by the government, on the banks of
the Guadalquivir. This famous school of Seville was originally founded
by the companions of Columbus in gratitude to St. Elmo, patron of
mariners. Here Gustavo found a friend of congenial tastes, Narciso
Campillo, with whom he composed and presented before their admiring
mates what Señor Campillo, who also made a name for himself in Spanish
letters, has described as “a fearful and extravagant drama.” But Gustavo
had enjoyed barely a year of this new life when Isabella II suppressed
the academy, bestowing building and grounds on her newly wedded sister,
the Duchesse de Montpensier. Visitors to modern Seville know well the
_Palacio de Santelmo_, with the fountains playing in its marble courts,
with its gardens of orange trees, palms and aloes, of trellised roses
and luxuriant tropic shrubs; but who gives a thought there to the exiled
boy thrown again, at the age of ten, upon the chances of the world?
His godmother, Doña Manuela Monchay, opened her doors to the waif, and
in her comfortable home he dwelt for the next eight years. His schooling
was over, but he read his way through Doña Manuela’s library and, at
fourteen, entered the studio of a Seville painter; here for two years he
trained his talent for drawing. Then he changed to the rival studio,
that of his father’s brother, who was sufficiently impressed by the
lad’s literary promise to have him taught a little Latin. Meanwhile his
godmother, childless and well-to-do, was urging him to adopt a
mercantile career. Had he consented, it is supposed that she would have
made him her heir, and his manhood, instead of the exhausting struggle
it was for bread and shelter, might have been, from the worldly point of
view, prosperous enough. But the visionary youth, who, says his friend
Correa,[1] “had learned to draw while he was yet learning to write,
whose unbounded passion for reading had given him wider horizons than
those of book-keeping, and who could never do a sum in mental
arithmetic,” would not betray his ideal. While his prudent godmother was
making her own plans for his future, he was composing with Campillo the
opening cantos of an epic on _The Conquest of Seville_, or wandering
alone on the banks of the Guadalquivir, his “majestic Bétis, the river
of nymphs, naiads and poets, which, crowned with belfries and laurels,
flows to the sea from a crystal amphora.” In the shade of the white
poplars he would lie and dream “of an independent, blissful life, like
that of the bird, which is born to sing, while God provides it with
food, ... that tranquil life of the poet, which glows with a soft lustre
from generation to generation.” And when that life should be over, he
saw his grateful city, the Sultana of Andalusia, laying her poet down
“to dream the golden dream of immortality on the banks of the Bétis,
whose praise I should have sung in splendid odes, in that very spot
where I used to go so often to hear the sweet murmur of its waves.” His
pensive fancy loved to picture that white cross under the poplars whose
green and silver leaves, as they rustled in the wind, would seem to be
praying for his soul, while the birds in their branches would carol at
dawn a joyous resurrection hymn. And when the river reeds and the wild
morning-glories, his favorite “blue morning-glories with a disk of
carmine at the heart,” hovered over by “golden insects with wings of
light,” should have grown up about the marble, hiding his time-blurred
name with a leafy curtain, what matter? “Who would not know that I was
sleeping there?” And so, to escape commercial drudgery and realize these
fair visions, the young Andalusian, at eighteen, the mid-point of his
life, with no more than sufficed for the costs of the journey to Madrid,
started forth on his quest of glory.
It may truly be said of Becquer that, like Hakluyt’s staunch old
worthies, he was “content to take his adventure gladly.” Nobody ever
knew how narrow were the straits of those first years in Madrid. He had
to turn his hand to anything, from odds and ends of journalism to a
day’s job of fresco-painting. Homesick, hungry, ill, he kept through it
all a brave buoyancy of spirits and a manly reticence as to his
sufferings. “He was never known,” testifies Correa, “to complain of his
hard life or his physical distresses, nor to curse his fate. Silent as
long as he was unhappy, he would find voice only to express a moment’s
pleasure.” He made fun of his troubles, which he, more easily than
grosser souls, could indeed forget in the ecstatic contemplation of
beauty or in giving form to the crowding fantasies that clamored in his
brain. A friend, more concerned over his privations than was Becquer
himself, found him a position as copyist in an office of one of the
state departments at a salary of one hundred and fifty dollars a year.
The poet, more out of gratitude for the intended kindness than from any
sense of personal relief, for he would rather starve body than mind,
undertook the irksome employment. But the national finances, under the
drain of the Carlist wars and the popular uprisings and official
corruption of Isabella’s disastrous reign, had become so embarrassed
that economy in the public service was imperative, and Becquer was
pointed out--perhaps, after all, by his good angel--for a victim. In the
_Dirección de Bienes Nacionales_, as in other departments, superfluous
men were to be weeded out. The Director, as chance would have it, came
into the office one day when all the clerks were gathered about
Becquer’s stool, eagerly looking over his shoulders, lost in admiration
of the sketches that his facile pen was turning off. The Director,
joining the group and peering with the rest, demanded: “What is this?”
Not recognizing the voice, the culprit, absorbed in the joy of art,
innocently answered: “This is Ophelia, plucking the leaves from her
garland. That old uncle is a grave-digger. Over there”--At this point
the awful silence smote his senses and he looked up only to meet the
verdict: “Here is one that can be spared.”
But although Becquer thus failed to serve his country with proper zeal
in the only direct opportunity she afforded him, the touch of the
capital, with its sense of impending crisis, its call for patriotic
leadership, had given a new turn to his dreams. Or perhaps it would be
truer to say that the Gothic cathedrals, old castles and ruined abbeys
so abundant in Castile, though not in the Crowned City itself, had
fastened the hold of the feudal world, with its military ideals, upon
his imagination. In these days he longed--or fancied that he longed--to
be “a thunderbolt of war,” to exert a mighty influence on the destinies
of Spain, so that every revolution of the future might be, as it were, a
personification of himself, but most of all he indulged his musings in
the glorious picture of a warrior’s death and burial. He would have
chosen, his “thirst for triumphs and acclaim assuaged, to fall in
battle, hearing as the last sound of earth the shrill clamor of the
trumpets of my valiant hosts,--to be borne upon a shield, wrapped in the
folds of my tattered banner, emblem of a hundred victories, finding the
peace of the grave in the depths of one of those holy cloisters where
dwells eternal silence and to which the centuries lend majesty and a
mysterious, indefinable hue.” And then the artist in him revelled in all
the detailed beauty of that visioned tomb “bathed in dusky shadow,” on
which his statue, “of richest, transparent alabaster,” with sword on
breast and couchant lion at the feet, was to sleep an august sleep under
the hushed watch of long-robed, praying angels.
Meanwhile, bad lodging and uncertain fare were telling on his delicate
constitution. In one respect, Becquer was always fortunate--in friends.
Early in his Madrid life he had won the faithful affection of Correa,
another young literary aspirant leading a hand-to-mouth existence, but
of vigorous physique and practical capabilities. When in the third year
of his struggle Becquer fell seriously ill--“horribly” ill, says
Correa--this devoted comrade not only nursed him through, but, finding
among the poet’s papers a long legend purporting to be an East Indian
tradition, managed to get it published in _La Crónica_,--the beginning
of success. This legend, _The Chieftain of the Crimson Hands_, has to do
with the expiation of a fratricide by a pilgrimage up the Ganges to its
far sources in the Himalayas, that in the most secret of those sacred
springs the clinging bloodstains might be washed away. But after forty
moons of weary travel across the broad plains of India up into the very
shadow of the dread Himalayan wall, a law of the pilgrimage was broken,
and Vishnu could no longer shield the slayer from the wrath of Siva,
who, himself the Destroyer, resents all other destruction as an
infringement on his great prerogative.
Another Indian subject, _The Creation_, on which Becquer had tried his
hand with a peculiarly light, ironic touch, yielded a more
characteristic result. The fable tells how Brahma, utterly bored by the
contemplation of his own perfections, took to chemistry. The astonished
cherubs fluttered on their thousand-colored wings about the smoking,
roaring tower where the Deity had his laboratory and where his eight
arms and sixteen hands were all kept busy with managing his test-tubes
and retorts, for he was shaping worlds to people space. But one day,
tired of his experiments, he went out to take the air and, for all his
omniscience, absent-mindedly failed to lock the door. In swarmed the
cherubs, ripe for mischief, and lost no time in turning everything
topsy-turvy. They flung the parchments into the fire, pulled the
stoppers out of the flasks, overturned the great glass vessels, breaking
not a few of them and spilling their contents, and wound up their
meddling by blowing a ridiculous, soap-bubble planet of their own. This
imperfect globe, all awry, with flattened poles and with contradictory
elements, heat and cold, joy and grief, good and evil, life and death,
at war within itself, went rolling so grotesquely on its axis, that the
peals of cherubic laughter brought Brahma hurrying back. In his vexation
he was about to crush that preposterous, misformed world, our world, but
the appealing cries of the celestial children moved him to let them toss
their absurd toy out into the ether among his own beautiful,
self-consistent, harmonious spheres. Ever since, the cherubs have been
trundling it about the sky, to the amazement of the other planets and
the despair of us poor mortals; but it will not last. “There is nothing
more tender nor more terrible than the hands of little children; in
these the plaything cannot long endure.”
It was not literature like this that the Spanish periodicals were
seeking in the stormy fifties. It was a time of the keenest political
strife, when even poets and novelists were bought by one party or
another and made to fight in the midst of the newspaper arena. But no
extremity could bring Becquer to be a politician’s tool. “Incapable of
hatred,” says Correa, “he never placed his enviable powers as a writer
at the service of animosity ... nor was his noble character fitted for
adulation or assiduous servility.” Yet in his own way he played the
patriot by earnest effort, continued unceasingly throughout his life, to
assist in recording by pen and pencil the architectural beauties and
devout traditions of Spain before these should have utterly perished
under the march of progress. Putting politics out of his mind as a
matter of little moment, Becquer undertook, with a few kindred spirits,
what might have proved, with adequate support, a monumental work on the
Spanish churches. As it was, there appeared only one volume, to which he
contributed the Introduction, the chapters on the famous Toledo
monastery, _San Juan de los Reyes_, and a number of drawings. In his
story _Three Dates_, more descriptive than narrative, we catch a few
fleeting glimpses of him, always with his sketch-book, pursuing his
artistic and archæological researches in Toledo. A similar errand, in
all probability, took him to Soria, an ancient city peculiarly rich in
mediæval buildings, situated on the Douro, to the north-east of Madrid.
In Soria he found several of his legends and, less fortunately, a wife,
Carta Estéban y Navarro. The marriage, which took place about 1861, soon
resulted in separation. Becquer retained possession of the children, two
baby boys, for whom he tenderly cared, as best he could in his Bohemian
life, until the last.
It would seem to have been the unwonted sense of an assured income that
gave him courage to undertake the support of a wife, for in this year
1861 his constant friend Correa obtained for him a position on the staff
of a new Madrid daily, _El Contemporáneo_, a journal into whose labors
he threw himself with a zest far beyond his strength and which he came
to love with a touching enthusiasm. “_El Contemporáneo_ is not for me a
newspaper like any other; its columns are yourselves, my friends, my
comrades in hope or disappointment, in failure or triumph, in joy or
bitterness.” It was in _El Contemporáneo_ that many of his legends
appeared. But even as he thus became more and more closely identified
with the life of Madrid, homesickness grew upon him for his own
Andalusia “with her golden days and luminous, transparent nights,”--for
his own Seville, “with her Giralda of lace-work mirrored in the
trembling Guadalquivir, ... with her barred windows and her serenades,
her iron door-screens and her night watchmen that chant the hour, her
shrines and her stories, her brawls and her music, her tranquil nights
and fiery afternoons, her rosy dawns and azure twilights,--Seville, with
all the traditions that twenty centuries have heaped upon her brow, with
all the pageantry and festal beauty of her southern nature, with all
the poetry that imagination lends to a beloved memory.”
He re-visited Seville, if _The Tavern of the Cats_ can be taken as
testimony, at about this time, and may so have renewed intercourse with
his family, for in 1862 his next older brother, Valeriano, who,
following in their father’s path, had entered on a promising career as a
painter of Andalusian types, came to him in Madrid. Valeriano, too, was
of frail physique; he, too, had been unhappy in his marriage; yet the
brothers affectionately joined such forces as they had and set up, with
the little children, a makeshift for a home. But in a year or two some
wasting illness, apparently the early stages of consumption, forced the
poet to leave “the Court” and seek renewal of health in the mountain
valley of Veruela. During this sojourn he gathered several legends of
the Moncayo, that precipitous granite wall--known to Martial as the
haunt of Æolus--which bars Old Castile from Aragon and divides the basin
of the Douro, the river of Soria, from that of the Ebro, the river of
Saragossa. To Becquer its snowy crests looked “like the waves of a
motionless, gigantic sea.” But the main literary result of that
retirement is found in the series of eight exquisite letters, _From My
Cell_, the high-water mark of Becquer’s prose, sent back to _El
Contemporáneo_. In these he gives a vivid, humorous account of his
journey, by rail to Tudela, by diligence to Tarazona, and by mule up the
Moncayo to Veruela, in whose walled and towered old Cistercian abbey he
found an austere refuge. He had his Shakespeare with him and his Byron,
but the event of the day, in the earlier weeks of his banishment, was
the arrival of the mounted postman with _El Contemporáneo_. He could not
wait for it in the Gothic cloisters, but would wander halfway down the
poplar avenue to the Black Cross of Veruela and, seated at its foot on
one of the marble steps, would wait sometimes the afternoon long
listening for the far-off beat of the horse’s hoofs. The journal came
to him like a personal greeting from the life he had left behind. He
loved even the odor of the damp paper and the printer’s ink, an odor
that brought back to him “the incessant pounding and creaking of the
presses” and all the eager activity of those hurrying nights in which
the words “came palpitating from the pen.” But with sunset the feverish
memories of Madrid fell from him and his thoughts took on the serenity
of faith, “the faith in something grander, in a coming, unknown destiny
beyond this life, the faith in eternity.” Again he found himself
dreaming of death, but not now of a poet’s cherished grave beside the
Guadalquivir, not now of a great patriot’s tomb in some sublime
cathedral, but of a mound in a village burial-plot, forgotten under
nettles, thistles and grass. Long tormented by insomnia, it seemed sweet
to him to slumber in such untroubled peace, “wrapt in a light cloak of
earth,” without having over him “even the weight of a sepulchral stone.”
As the mountain air brought strength, he began to ramble over the
Moncayo, sketching and gathering up traditions, while through _El
Contemporáneo_ he passionately urged the claims of the past, and
proposed the state organization of archæological expeditions in groups
made up of an artist, an architect and a man of letters, to explore the
provinces for their hidden, perishing traces of that bygone Spain of
Roman, Visigoth, Moor, mailed knight and saintly vision. Bent, as ever,
on doing his part in this unprized service, he wrote out, in the quiet
and leisure that had been so seldom his, masterly descriptions of the
market-place of Tarazona, and of the peasant-women of the Amazonian
hamlet of Añón. In the sixth letter he narrates, with a pen almost
unendurably graphic, the recent doing to death of a reputed hereditary
witch, a wretched old woman whom the superstitious Aragonese peasants
had, in very truth, hunted to a peak of the Moncayo off which, bleeding
from stones and knives, she had been thrust down the precipice. In the
seventh and eighth letters he goes on to relate, in his most attractive
manner, two local legends of witchcraft,--one of the necromancer who
built in a night the castle of Trasmoz, and one of the pious priest who
exorcised the witches that had come, in course of time, to make its
ruined tower their tryst, only to have his work undone by the girlish
vanity of his niece. She tampered with the holy water and restored to
the witches the freedom of the castle in return for their kind offices
in scrambling down her chimney, gray cats, black cats, all manner of
cats, the night before a festival, and stitching up for her such
fascinating finery that she forthwith won a husband.
His brother followed Becquer to Veruela and together they made trial of
the neighboring Baths of Fitero in Navarre, but they were in Madrid
again by 1865, often sorely put to it in the effort to carry the costs
of their little household. If one of the children fell ill and a doctor
must be called in, a friend might be entreated for an emergency loan of
three or four dollars; but as a rule these invalid brothers bore their
burden unassisted. Valeriano drew woodcuts for such market as he could
find, talking, says Correa, of “the great pictures he would paint as
soon as he could get the canvases,” and Gustavo translated the trashy
French novels that were in demand, writing, in the intervals of such
hack work, an occasional fantasy of delicate beauty, as _Withered
Leaves_, and ever looking forward to the time when he should have golden
hours of calm in which he might give his higher and more mystical
conceptions fitting utterance. Twice it seemed as if the way were
opening. Isabella’s last prime minister, Luis González Bravo, became
interested in the poet and made him censor of novels. Becquer
immediately availed himself of the comparative leisure thus afforded to
gather together a volume of his poems, which González Bravo was
proposing to print at his own expense. Then burst the long-gathering
storm of 1868, the genial, unprincipled queen was dethroned, and her
prime minister of literary tastes fled to the frontier with such
precipitation that the precious manuscript entrusted to his keeping was
lost. Becquer, with that scrupulous honor well known to his friends,
promptly resigned his censorship; Valeriano’s pension for the study of
national types was withdrawn; and the year 1869 saw them again in
straits. Yet they took daily comfort in their close brotherly love and
their artistic sympathies, even though, in those troublous times, their
joint enthusiasm for the beauties of Toledo once landed them in jail.
They were then temporarily residing, with their little family, in their
favorite city, “the city sombre and melancholy _par excellence_,” and
had sallied out, one evening, to contemplate its ghostly charms by
moonlight. Their disordered dress, long beards, excited gestures and
eager talk roused the suspicion of a brace of Civil Guards, who, drawing
near and overhearing such dangerous terms as “apses, squinches, ogives,”
seized the conspirators without more ado and lodged them, for their
further artistic illumination, in one of the historic dungeons of
Toledo. The next morning the editorial room of _El Contemporáneo_
resounded with merriment as a letter from Becquer went the rounds,--a
letter “all full,” says Correa, “of sketches representing in detail the
probable passion and death of both innocents.” The entire staff united
in a written protest and explanation to the jailer, and it was long
remembered in that office with what shining eyes and peals of laughter
the delivered prisoners, on their return, set out their adventure in
exuberant wit of words and pencil.
The second opportunity came with the founding of that now famous
periodical, _La Ilustración de Madrid_; but it came too late. Becquer
was appointed director and looked to for regular contributions, while
Valeriano furnished many of the illustrations. The management had large
schemes in hand, including a _Library of Great Authors_, for which
Becquer began a translation of Dante. But now, when a certain degree of
freedom, relief and recognition had been at last attained, the strained
and fretted cord of life gave way. The first number of _La Ilustración_
appeared January 12, 1870. On September 23, Valeriano died in his
brother’s arms. On December 22, the poet, surrounded by devoted friends
to whom, with his failing breath, he commended his children, sank
exhausted into that mysterious repose on which, from boyhood, his
musings had so often dwelt. But his mocking destiny was not yet content.
His body was buried in one of those crowded city cemeteries always so
repugnant to him, San Nicolás in Madrid. His younger son did not live to
manhood; the elder, his namesake, went wrong.
His loyal friends, after raising what money they could for the children,
gathered together and published in three small volumes the most
characteristic of Becquer’s writings,--a series of lyrical poems,[2] the
letters _From My Cell_,[3] some legends and tales of unequal merit;[4]
and a few miscellaneous articles[3] on architecture, literature and the
like.
The _Rimas_ almost immediately established Becquer’s fame. He is counted
to-day among the chief lyrists of the nineteenth century. These poignant
snatches of song pass, in theme, from life to love and from love to
death. So far as they give, or purport to give, a history of the poet’s
heart, they tell of passion at first requited, then of estrangement and
despair. It is supposed that a certain Julia Espín y Guillén, later the
wife of Don Benigno Quiroga Ballesteros, a living Spaniard of
distinction, figures to some extent in the _Rimas_. The house of her
father, director of the orchestra in the _Teatro Reál_, was a resort of
young musicians, artists and men of letters, and here Becquer, during
his earlier years in Madrid, was a frequent guest. There seems little
doubt that his youthful devotion was given, though in silence, to this
disdainful brunette, but the poems likewise tell of a love “of gold and
snow.” There is a green-eyed maiden, too, whom he essays to comfort for
this peculiarity,--though, indeed, eyes of jewel green, strangely
fascinating, are not rare in Spain. He may have had her in mind in
writing his legend of _The Emerald Eyes_. And one of the most beautiful
lyrics follows out the slight thread of story in _Three Dates_,
representing the poet as gazing night after night up from that ancient
Toledo square, with its glorified rubbish-heap, to the ogive windows of
the convent where the nun who had so thrilled his imagination was
immured. Over the spirit of Becquer, to whom the immaterial was ever
more real than the material, no one actual woman held lasting sway. He
tells the truth of the matter in his eleventh lyric:
I am black and comely; my lips are glowing;
I am passion; my heart is hot;
The rapture of life in my veins is flowing.
For me thou callest?--I call thee not.
Pale is my forehead and gold my tresses;
Endless comforts are locked in me,
Treasure of hearthside tendernesses.
’Tis I whom thou seekest?--Nay, not thee.
I am a dream, afar, forbidden.
Vague as the mist on the mountain-brow,
A bodiless glory, haunting, hidden;
I cannot love thee.--Oh, come! come thou!
Becquer himself was wont to ascribe the premature death of poets, that
breaking of the harp while yet the golden chords have yielded but their
least of melodies, to a restless fulness of life, the imprisoned vapor
that bursts the vessel. This appears with pathetic emphasis in the
_Introduction_ that he wrote, not long before his death, for a projected
volume of tales and fantasies. He felt that he must rid his fevered
brain of their importunity, but he had begun to give expression to only
one, _The Woman of Stone_, when death broke the magic pen. The story
remains a fragment,[5] not passing beyond its opening pages of rich
artistic description, nor can its course be clearly conjectured even
though in _The Kiss_, and in the closing passages of his _Literary
Letters to a Woman_, his imagination hovers about the theme. He left,
like Hawthorne, many tantalizing titles that suggest the greatness of
our loss. That drama on “The Brothers of Sorrow,” that poem on the
discovery of America, those Andalusian novels on “The Last Minstrel,”
“To Live or Not to Live,” those Toledo legends on “The Foundress of
Convents,” “_El Cristo de la Vega_,” “The Angel Musicians,” those
fantasies on “Light and Snow,” “The Diana of the Indies,” “The Life of
the Dead,”--these are but a few of the conceptions that teemed in his
mind but found no outlet to the world. It seemed to his friends, who
knew the man and had listened to his marvellous talk, that the scanty
handful of tales they could collect from newspapers here and there made
so inadequate a showing as almost to misrepresent his powers. Yet
however thwarted and wronged by circumstance this harvest of his
imagination may be, it deserves attention if only for its finer and less
obvious qualities. Becquer charges himself with a melancholy
temperament, and seldom, in fact, do we find in these pages the blither
humor playing in _The Set of Emeralds_; but the occasional morbidness of
his tone is due rather, it would seem, to illness and its consequent
despondency than to any native quality of his thought. He deals too much
in the horrible for modern taste, but he cannot claim, like Baudelaire,
to have “invented a new shudder.” Tales grounded in folk-lore are bound
to contain elements of superstitious terror, and the affinity of these
legends in that respect is rather with German balladry and the earlier
romanticism in general than with the genius of Poe. Becquer’s truer
kinship is with Hawthorne, whose outer faculty of close and minute
observation is his as well as the inner preoccupation with mystery and
symbol. All the senses of this young Spaniard seem to have been of the
finest, his exquisite hearing entering into these tales as effectively
as his keen sight; but he is most himself in presence of the dim, the
fugitive, the impalpable. His mind was essentially mystical. His
religion was not without its human side. In brooding on the inequalities
of the mortal lot, he finds comfort in the reflection: “God, though
invisible, yet holds a hand outreached to lift a little the burden that
presses on the poor.” But faith in him was of the very fibre of
imagination. He even lent a certain sympathetic credence to the mediæval
legends of the Church, at least when the spell of Toledo was upon him.
“Outside the place that guards their memory,” he says, “far from the
precincts which still preserve their traces, and where we seem yet to
breathe the atmosphere of the ages that gave them being, traditions lose
their poetic mystery, their inexplicable hold upon the soul. At a
distance we question, we analyze, we doubt; but there faith, like a
secret revelation, illuminates the spirit, and we believe.” In a letter
from Veruela to a lady of his acquaintance, a letter relating a brief
but lovely legend[6] of an appearance of the Virgin, he asserts: “Only
the hand of faith can touch the delicate flowers of tradition.” “God,”
he elsewhere says, “is the glowing, eternal centre of all beauty.”
The writer of these tales described himself thus: “I have a special
predilection for all that which cannot be vulgarized by the touch and
the judgment of the indifferent multitude. If I were to paint
landscapes, I would paint them without figures. I like the fleeting
ideas that slip away without leaving a trace on the understandings of
practical folk, like a drop of water over a marble shelf. In the cities
I visit, I seek the narrow, lonely streets; in the edifices I examine,
the dusky nooks and corners of the inner courts, where grass springs up,
and moisture enriches with its patches of greenish color the parched
tint of the wall; in the women who impress me, the hint of mystery that
I think I see shining with wavering light in the depths of their eyes,
like the glimmer of a lamp that burns unknown and unsuspected in the
sanctuary of their hearts; even in the blossoms of a shrub, I believe
there is for me something more potent and exciting in the one that
hides beneath the leaves and there, concealed, fills the air with
fragrance, unprofaned by human gaze. In all this I find a certain
unsullied purity of feelings and of things.”
Becquer goes on to admit that this “pronounced inclination sometimes
degenerates into extravagances.”
FOREWORD
In dim corners of my mind there sleep, hidden away and naked, the
freakish children of my imagination, waiting in silence for art to
clothe them with language that it may present them in decency upon the
stage of the world.
My Muse, as fruitful as the marriage-bed of poverty, and like those
parents who bring to birth more children than they have means to rear,
is ever conceiving and bearing in the mystic sanctuary of the
intelligence, peopling it with innumerable creations, to which not my
utmost effort nor all the years that are left to me of life, will be
sufficient to give form.
And here within me I sometimes feel them, all unclad and shapeless as
they are, huddled and twisted together in confusion indescribable,
stirring and living with a dim, strange life, similar to that of those
myriad germs which seethe and quiver in eternal generation within the
secret places of the earth, without winning strength enough to reach the
surface and transform themselves, at the kiss of the sun, into flowers
and fruits.
They go with me, destined to die with me, leaving no more trace than is
left by a midnight dream which the morning cannot recall. On certain
occasions and in face of this terrible idea, there rises in them the
instinct of life, and trooping in formidable though silent multitudes
they seek tumultuously a way of escape from amid the shadows of their
dwelling-place forth to the light. But alas! between the world of idea
and the world of form yawns an abyss which only the word can bridge, and
the word, timid and slothful, refuses to aid their efforts. Mute, dim
and powerless, after the unavailing struggle they fall back into their
old passivity. So fall, inert, into the hollows by the wayside, when the
wind ceases, the yellow leaves which the autumn storm blew up.
These seditions on the part of the rebel sons of my imagination explain
some of my attacks of fever; they are the cause, unrecognized by
science, of my excitements and depressions. And thus, although in ill
estate, have I lived till now, walking among the indifferent throngs of
men with this silent tempest in my head. Thus have I lived till now, but
all things reach an end, and to these must be put their period.
Sleeplessness and fantasy go on begetting and producing with monstrous
fecundity. Their creations, crowded already like the feeble plants of a
conservatory, strive one with another for the expanding of their unreal
existences, fighting for the drops of memory as for the scanty moisture
of a sterile land. It is needful to open a channel for the deep waters,
which, daily fed from a living spring, will at last break down the dike.
Go forth, then! Go forth and live with the only life I can give you. My
intellect shall supply you with nutriment enough to make you palpable; I
will clothe you, though in rags, so that you need not blush for
nakedness. I would like to fashion for each one of you a marvellous
stuff woven of exquisite phrases, in which you could fold yourselves
with pride, as in mantles of purple. I would like to engrave the form
that must contain you as the golden vase which holds a precious ointment
is engraved. But this may not be.
And yet, I need to rest. I need, just as the body through whose swollen
veins the life-blood surges with phlethoric force, is bled, to clear my
brain, inadequate to the lodging of so many grotesqueries.
Then gather here, like the misty trail that marks the passing of an
unknown comet, like atoms dispersed in an embryonic world which Death
fans through the air, until the Creator shall have spoken the _fiat lux_
that divides light from darkness.
I would not that in my sleepless nights you still should pass before my
eyes in weird procession, begging me with gestures and contortions to
draw you out from the limbo in which you lead these phantom, thin
existences into the life of reality. I would not that at the breaking of
this harp already old and cracked the unknown notes which it contained
should perish with the instrument. I would interest myself a little in
the world which lies without me, free at last to withdraw my eyes from
this other world that I carry within my head. Common sense, which is the
barrier of dreamland, is beginning to give way, and the people of the
different camps mingle and grow confused. It costs me an effort to know
which things I have dreamed and which have actually happened. My
affections are divided between real persons and phantasms of the
imagination. My memory shifts from one category to the other the names
of women who have died and the dates of days that have passed, with days
and women that have existed only in my mind. I must put an end to this
by flinging you all forth from my brain once and forever.
If to die is to sleep, I would sleep in peace in the night of death,
without your coming to be my nightmare, cursing me for having doomed you
to nothingness before you had been born. Go, then, to the world at whose
touch you came into being, and linger there, as the echo which life’s
joys and griefs, hopes and struggles, found in one soul that passed
across the earth.
Perchance very soon must I pack my portmanteau for the great journey. At
any moment the spirit may free herself from the material that she may
rise to purer air. I would not, when this moment comes, take with me, as
the trivial baggage of a mountebank, the treasure of tinsel and tatters
that my Fancy has been heaping up in the rubbish chambers of the brain.
ROMANTIC LEGENDS OF SPAIN
MASTER PÉREZ THE ORGANIST
In Seville, in the very portico of Santa Inés, and while, on Christmas
Eve, I was waiting for the Midnight Mass to begin, I heard this
tradition from a lay-sister of the convent.
As was natural, after hearing it, I waited impatiently for the ceremony
to commence, eager to be present at a miracle.
Nothing could be less miraculous, however, than the organ of Santa Inés,
and nothing more vulgar than the insipid motets with which that night
the organist regaled us.
On going out from the mass, I could not resist asking the lay-sister
mischievously:
“How does it happen that the organ of Master Pérez is so unmusical at
present?”
“Why!” replied the old woman. “Because it isn’t his.”
“Not his? What has become of it?”
“It fell to pieces from sheer old age, a number of years ago.”
“And the soul of the organist?”
“It has not appeared again since the new organ was set up in place of
his own.”
If anyone of my readers, after perusing this history, should be moved to
ask the same question, now he knows why the notable miracle has not
continued into our own time.
I.
“Do you see that man with the scarlet cloak and the white plume in his
hat,--the one who seems to wear on his waistcoat all the gold of the
galleons of the Indies,--that man, I mean, just stepping down from his
litter to give his hand to the lady there, who, now that she is out of
hers, is coming our way, preceded by four pages with torches? Well, that
is the Marquis of Moscoso, suitor to the widowed Countess of
Villapineda. They say that before setting his eyes upon this lady, he
had asked in marriage the daughter of a man of large fortune, but the
girl’s father, of whom the rumor goes that he is a bit of a miser,--but
hush! Speaking of the devil--do you see that man coming on foot under
the arch of San Felipe, all muffled up in a dark cloak and attended by a
single servant carrying a lantern? Now he is in front of the outer
shrine.
“Do you notice, as his cloak falls back while he salutes the image, the
embroidered cross that sparkles on his breast?
“If it were not for this noble decoration, one would take him for a
shop-keeper from Culebras street. Well, that is the father in question.
See how the people make way for him and lift their hats.
“Everybody in Seville knows him on account of his immense fortune. That
one man has more golden ducats in his chests than our lord King Philip
maintains soldiers, and with his merchantmen he could form a squadron
equal to that of the Grand Turk----
“Look, look at that group of stately cavaliers! Those are the four and
twenty knights. Aha, aha! There goes that precious Fleming, too, whom,
they say, the gentlemen of the green cross have not challenged for
heresy yet, thanks to his influence with the magnates of Madrid. All he
comes to church for is to hear the music. But if Master Pérez does not
draw from him with his organ tears as big as fists, then sure it is that
his soul isn’t under his doublet, but sizzles in the Devil’s frying-pan.
Alack, neighbor! Trouble, trouble! I fear there is going to be a fight.
I shall take refuge in the church; for, from what I see, there will be
hereabouts more blows than _Pater Nosters_. Look, look! The Duke of
Alcalá’s people are coming round the corner of San Pedro’s square, and I
think I spy the Duke of Medinasidonia’s men in Dueñas alley. Didn’t I
tell you?
“Now they have caught sight of each other, now the two parties stop
short, without breaking their order, the groups of bystanders dissolve,
the police, who on these occasions get pounded by both sides, slip away,
even the prefect, staff of office and all, seeks the shelter of the
portico,--and yet they say that there is law to be had.
“For the poor----
“There, there! already shields are shining through the dark. Our Lord
Jesus of All Power deliver us! Now the blows are beginning. Neighbor,
neighbor! this way--before they close the doors. But hush! What is this?
Hardly have they begun when they leave off. What light is that? Blazing
torches! A litter! It’s His Reverence the Bishop.
“The most holy Virgin of Protection, on whom this very instant I was
calling in my heart, brings him to my aid. Ah! But nobody knows what I
owe to that Blessed Lady,--how richly she pays me back for the little
candles that I burn to her every Saturday.--See him! How beautiful he is
with his purple vestments and his red cardinal’s cap! God preserve him
in his sacred chair as many centuries as I wish to live myself! If it
were not for him, half Seville would have been burned up by this time
with these quarrels of the dukes. See them, see them, the great
hypocrites, how they both press close to the litter of the prelate to
kiss his ring! How they drop behind and, mingling with his household
attendants, follow in his train! Who would dream that those two who
appear on such good terms, if within the half hour they should meet in a
dark street--that is, the dukes themselves--God deliver me from thinking
them cowards; good proof have they given of valor, warring more than
once against the enemies of Our Lord; but the truth remains, that if
they should seek each other--and seek with the wish to find--they would
find each other, putting end once for all to these continuous scuffles,
in which those who really do the fighting are their kinsmen, their
friends and their servants.
“But come, neighbor, come into the church, before it is packed full.
Some nights like this it is so crowded that there is not room left for a
grain of wheat. The nuns have a prize in their organist. When has the
convent ever been in such high favor as now? I can tell you that the
other sisterhoods have made Master Pérez magnificent offers, but there
is nothing strange about that, for the Lord Archbishop himself has
offered him mountains of gold to entice him to the cathedral,--but he,
not a bit of it! He would sooner give up his life than his beloved
organ. You don’t know Master Pérez? True enough, you are a newcomer in
this neighborhood. Well, he is a saint; poor, but the most charitable
man alive. With no other relative than his daughter and no other friend
than his organ, he devotes all his life to watching over the innocence
of the one and patching up the registers of the other. Mind that the
organ is old. But that counts for nothing, he is so handy in mending it
and caring for it that its sound is a marvel. For he knows it so
perfectly that only by touch,--for I am not sure that I have told you
the poor gentleman is blind from his birth. And how patiently he bears
his misfortune! When people ask him how much
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, SEVILLE]
he would give to see, he replies: ‘Much, but not as much as you think,
for I have hopes.’ ‘Hopes of seeing?’ ‘Yes, and very soon,’ he adds,
smiling like an angel. ‘Already I number seventy-six years; however long
my life may be, soon I shall see God.’
“Poor dear! And he will see Him, for he is humble as the stones of the
street, which let all the world trample on them. He always says that he
is only a poor convent organist, when the fact is he could give lessons
in harmony to the very chapel master of the Cathedral, for he was, as it
were, born to the art. His father held the same position before him; I
did not know the father, but my mother--God rest her soul!--says that he
always had the boy at the organ with him to blow the bellows. Then the
lad developed such talent that, as was natural, he succeeded to the
position on the death of his father. And what a touch is in his hands,
God bless them! They deserve to be taken to Chicarreros street and there
enchased in gold. He always plays well, always, but on a night like this
he is a wonder. He has the greatest devotion for this ceremony of the
Midnight Mass, and when the Host is elevated, precisely at twelve
o’clock, which is the moment Our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world,
the tones of his organ are the voices of angels.
“But, after all, why should I praise to you what you will hear to-night?
It is enough to see that all the most distinguished people of Seville,
even the Lord Archbishop himself, come to a humble convent to listen to
him; and don’t suppose that it is only the learned people and those who
are versed in music that appreciate his genius, but the very rabble of
the streets. All these groups that you see arriving with pine-torches
ablaze, chorusing popular songs, broken by rude outcries, to the
accompaniment of timbrels, tambourines and rustic drums, these, contrary
to their custom, which is to make disturbance in the churches, are still
as the dead when Master Pérez lays his hands upon the organ, and when
the Host is elevated, you can’t hear a fly; great tears roll down from
the eyes of all, and at the end is heard a sound like an immense sigh,
which is nothing else than the expulsion of the breath of the multitude,
held in while the music lasts. But come, come! The bells have stopped
ringing, and the mass is going to begin. Come inside.
“This night is Christmas Eve for all the world, but for nobody more than
for us.”
So saying, the good woman who had been acting as _cicerone_ for her
neighbor pressed through the portico of the Convent of Santa Inés, and
by dint of elbowing and pushing succeeded in getting inside the church,
disappearing amid the multitude which thronged the inner spaces near the
doors.
II.
The church was illuminated with astonishing brilliancy. The flood of
light which spread from the altars through all its compass sparkled on
the rich jewels of the ladies who, kneeling on the velvet cushions
placed before them by their pages and taking their prayer-books from the
hands of their duennas, formed a brilliant circle around the
choir-screen. Grouped just behind them, on foot, wrapped in bright-lined
cloaks garnished with gold-lace, with studied carelessness letting
glimpses of their red and green crosses be seen, in one hand the hat,
whose plumes kissed the carpet, the other hand resting upon the polished
hilt of a rapier or caressing the handle of an ornate dagger, the four
and twenty knights, with a large proportion of the highest nobility of
Seville, seemed to form a wall for the purpose of protecting their
daughters and their wives from contact with the populace. This, swaying
back and forth at the rear of the nave, with a murmur like that of a
surging sea, broke out into a joyous acclaim, accompanied by the
discordant sounds of the timbrels and tambourines, at the appearance of
the archbishop, who, after seating himself, surrounded by his
attendants, near the High Altar under a scarlet canopy, thrice blessed
the assembled people.
It was time for the mass to begin.
There passed, nevertheless, several minutes without the appearance of
the celebrant. The throng commenced to stir about impatiently; the
knights exchanged low-toned words with one another, and the archbishop
sent one of his attendants to the sacristy to inquire the cause of the
delay.
“Master Pérez has been taken ill, very ill, and it will be impossible
for him to come to the Midnight Mass.”
This was the word brought back by the attendant.
The news spread instantly through the multitude. It would be impossible
to depict the dismay which it caused; suffice it to say that such a
clamor began to arise in the church that the prefect sprang to his feet,
and the police came in to enforce silence, mingling with the
close-pressed, surging crowd.
At that moment, a man with unpleasant features, thin, bony, and
cross-eyed, too, hurriedly made his way to the place where the prelate
was sitting.
“Master Pérez is sick,” he said. “The ceremony cannot begin. If it is
your pleasure, I will play the organ in his absence; for neither is
Master Pérez the first organist of the world, nor at his death need this
instrument be left unused for lack of skill.”
The archbishop gave a nod of assent, and already some of the faithful,
who recognized in that strange personage an envious rival of the
organist of Santa Inés, were breaking out in exclamations of
displeasure, when suddenly a startling uproar was heard in the portico.
“Master Pérez is here! Master Pérez is here!”
At these cries from the press in the doorway, every one looked around.
Master Pérez, his face pallid and drawn, was in fact entering the
church, brought in a chair about which all were contending for the honor
of carrying it upon their shoulders.
The commands of the physicians, the tears of his daughter had not been
able to keep him in bed.
“No,” he had said. “This is the end, I know it, I know it, and I would
not die without visiting my organ, and this night above all, Christmas
Eve. Come, I wish it, I command it; let us go to the church.”
His desire had been fulfilled. The people carried him in their arms to
the organ-loft, and the mass began.
At that instant the cathedral clock struck twelve.
The introit passed, and the Gospel, and the offertory, and then came the
solemn moment in which the priest, after having blessed the Sacred
Wafer, took it in the tips of his fingers and began to elevate it.
A cloud of incense, rolling forth in azure waves, filled the length and
breadth of the church; the little bells rang out with silvery
vibrations, and Master Pérez placed his quivering hands upon the keys of
the organ.
The hundred voices of its metal tubes resounded in a prolonged, majestic
chord, which died away little by little, as if a gentle breeze had
stolen its last echoes.
To this opening chord, that seemed a voice lifted from earth to heaven,
responded a sweet and distant note, which went on swelling and swelling
in volume until it became a torrent of pealing harmony.
It was the song of the angels, which, traversing the ethereal spaces,
had reached the world.
Then there began to be heard a sound as of far-off hymns entoned by the
hierarchies of seraphim, a thousand hymns at once, melting into one,
which, nevertheless, was no more than accompaniment to a strange
melody,--a melody that seemed to float above that ocean of mysterious
echoes as a strip of fog above the billows of the sea.
One anthem after another died away; the movement grew simpler; now there
were but two voices, whose echoes blended; then one alone remained,
sustaining a note as brilliant as a thread of light. The priest bowed
his face, and above his gray head, across an azure mist made by the
smoke of the incense, appeared to the eyes of the faithful the uplifted
Host. At that instant the thrilling note which Master Pérez was holding
began to swell and swell until an outburst of colossal harmony shook the
church, in whose corners the straitened air vibrated and whose stained
glass shivered in its narrow Moorish embrasures.
From each of the notes forming that magnificent chord a theme was
developed,--some near, some far, these keen, those muffled, until one
would have said that the waters and the birds, the winds and the woods,
men and angels, earth and heaven, were chanting, each in its own tongue,
an anthem of praise for the Redeemer’s birth.
The multitude listened in amazement and suspense. In all eyes were
tears, in all spirits a profound realization of the divine.
The officiating priest felt his hands trembling, for the Holy One whom
they upheld, the Holy One to whom men and archangels did reverence, was
God, was very God, and it seemed to the priest that he had beheld the
heavens open and the Host become transfigured.
The organ still sounded, but its music was gradually sinking away, like
a tone dropping from echo to echo, ever more remote, ever fainter with
the remoteness, when suddenly a cry rang out in the organ-loft, shrill,
piercing, the cry of a woman.
The organ gave forth a strange, discordant sound, like a sob, and then
was still.
The multitude surged toward the stair leading up to the organ-loft, in
whose direction all the faithful, startled out of their religious
ecstasy, were turning anxious looks.
“What has happened?” “What is the matter?” they asked one of another,
and none knew what to reply, and all strove to conjecture, and the
confusion increased, and the excitement began to rise to a height which
threatened to disturb the order and decorum fitting within a church.
“What was it?” asked the great ladies of the prefect who, attended by
his officers, had been one of the first to mount to the loft, and now,
pale and showing signs of deep grief, was making his way to the
archbishop, waiting in anxiety, like all the rest, to know the cause of
that disturbance.
“What has occurred?”
“Master Pérez has just died.”
In fact, when the foremost of the faithful, after pressing up the
stairway, had reached the organ-loft, they saw the poor organist fallen
face down upon the keys of his old instrument, which was still faintly
murmuring, while his daughter, kneeling at his feet, was vainly calling
to him amid sighs and sobs.
III.
“Good evening, my dear Doña Baltasara. Are you, too, going to-night to
the Christmas Eve Mass? For my part, I was intending to go to the parish
church to hear it, but after what has happened--‘where goes John? With
all the town.’ And the truth, if I must tell it, is that since Master
Pérez died, a marble slab seems to fall on my heart whenever I enter
Santa Inés.--Poor dear man! He was a saint. I assure you that I keep a
piece of his doublet as a relic, and he deserves it, for by God and my
soul it is certain that if our Lord Archbishop would stir in the matter,
our grandchildren would see the image of Master Pérez upon an altar.
But what hope of it? ‘The dead and the gone are let alone.’ We’re all
for the latest thing now-a-days; you understand me. No? You haven’t an
inkling of what has happened? It’s true we are alike in this,--from
house to church, and from church to house, without concerning ourselves
about what is said or isn’t said--except that I, as it were, on the
wing, a word here, another there, without the least curiosity whatever,
usually run across any news that may be going. Well, then! It seems to
be settled that the organist of San Román, that squint-eye, who is
always throwing out slurs against the other organists, that great
sloven, who looks more like a butcher from the slaughter-house than a
professor of music, is going to play this Christmas Eve in place of
Master Pérez. Now you must know, for all the world knows and it is a
public matter in Seville, that nobody was willing to attempt it. Not
even his daughter, though she is herself an expert, and after her
father’s death entered the convent as a novice. And naturally enough;
accustomed to hear those marvellous performances, any other playing
whatever must seem poor to us, however much we would like to avoid
comparisons. But no sooner had the sisterhood decided that, in honor of
the dead and as a token of respect to his memory, the organ should be
silent to-night, than--look you!--here comes along our modest friend,
saying that he is ready to play it. Nothing is bolder than ignorance. It
is true the fault is not so much his as theirs who have consented to
this profanation, but so goes the world. I say, it’s no trifle--this
crowd that is coming. One would think nothing had changed since last
year. The same great people, the same magnificence, the same pushing in
the doorway, the same excitement in the portico, the same throng in the
church. Ah, if the dead should rise, he would die again rather than hear
his organ played by hands like those. The fact is, if what the people of
the neighborhood have told me is true, they are preparing a fine
reception for the intruder. When the moment comes for placing the hand
upon the keys, there is going to break out such a racket of timbrels,
tambourines and rustic drums that nothing else can be heard. But hush!
there’s the hero of the occasion just going into the church. Jesus! what
a showy jacket, what a fluted ruff, what a high and mighty air! Come,
come, the archbishop arrived a minute ago, and the mass is going to
begin. Come; it looks as though this night would give us something to
talk about for many a day.”
With these words the worthy woman, whom our readers recognize by her
disconnected loquacity, entered Santa Inés, opening a way through the
press, as usual, by dint of shoving and elbowing.
Already the ceremony had begun.
The church was as brilliant as the year before.
The new organist, after passing through the midst of the faithful who
thronged the nave, on his way to kiss the ring of the prelate, had
mounted to the organ-loft, where he was trying one stop of the organ
after another with a solicitous gravity as affected as it was
ridiculous.
Among the common people clustered at the rear of the church was heard a
murmur, muffled and confused, sure augury of the coming storm which
would not be long in breaking.
“He’s a clown, who doesn’t know how to do anything, not even to look
straight,” said some.
“He’s an ignoramus, who after having made the organ in his own parish
church worse than a rattle comes here to profane Master Pérez’s,” said
others.
And while one was throwing off his coat so as to beat his drum to better
advantage, and another was trying his timbrels, and the clatter was
increasing more and more, only here and there could one be found to
defend in lukewarm fashion that alien personage, whose pompous and
pedantic bearing formed so strong a contrast to the modest manner and
kindly courtesy of the dead Master Pérez.
At last the looked-for moment came, the solemn moment when the priest,
after bowing low and murmuring the sacred words, took the Host in his
hands. The little bells rang out, their chime like a rain of crystal
notes; the translucent waves of incense rose, and the organ sounded.
At that instant a horrible din filled the compass of the church,
drowning the first chord.
Bagpipes, horns, timbrels, drums, all the instruments of the populace
raised their discordant voices at once, but the confusion and the clang
lasted but a few seconds. All at once as the tumult had begun, so all at
once it ceased.
The second chord, full, bold, magnificent, sustained itself, still
pouring from the organ’s metal tubes like a cascade of inexhaustible,
sonorous harmony.
Celestial songs like those that caress the ear in moments of ecstasy,
songs which the spirit perceives but the lip cannot repeat; fugitive
notes of a far-off melody, which reach us at intervals, sounding in the
bugles of the wind; the rustle of leaves kissing one another on the
trees with a murmur like rain; trills of larks which rise warbling from
among the flowers like a flight of arrows to the clouds; nameless
crashes, overwhelming as the thunders of a tempest; a chorus of seraphim
without rhythm or cadence, unknown harmony of heaven which only the
imagination understands; soaring hymns, that seem to mount to the throne
of God like a fountain of light and sound--all this was expressed by the
organ’s hundred voices, with more vigor, more mystic poetry, more weird
coloring than had ever been known before.
* * * * *
When the organist came down from the loft, the crowd which pressed up
to the stairway was so great, and their eagerness to see and praise him
so intense, that the prefect, fearing, and not without reason, that he
would be suffocated among them all, commanded some of the police to
open, by their staves, a path for him that he might reach the High Altar
where the prelate waited his arrival.
“You perceive,” said the archbishop, when the musician was brought into
his presence, “that I have come all the way from my palace hither only
to hear you. Will you be as cruel as Master Pérez, who would never save
me the journey by playing the Midnight Mass in the cathedral?”
“Next year,” responded the organist, “I promise to give you that
pleasure, for not all the gold of the earth would induce me to play this
organ again.”
“And why not?” interrupted the prelate.
“Because,” replied the organist, striving to repress the agitation
revealed in the pallor of his face,--“because it is old and poor, and
one cannot express on it all that one would.”
The archbishop retired, followed by his attendants. One by one, the
litters of the great folk went filing away, lost to sight in the
windings of the neighboring streets; the groups of the portico melted,
as the faithful dispersed in different directions; and already the
lay-sister who acted as gate-keeper was about to lock the vestibule
doors, when there appeared two women, who, after crossing themselves and
muttering a prayer before the arched shrine of Saint Philip, went their
way, turning into Dueñas alley.
“What would you have, my dear Doña Baltasara?” one of them was saying.
“That’s the way I’m made. Every fool has his fancy. The barefooted
Capuchins might assure me that it was so and I wouldn’t believe it in
the least. That man cannot have played what we have just been hearing. A
thousand times have I heard him in San Bartolomé, his parish church,
from which the priest had to send him away for his bad playing,--enough
to make you stop your ears with cotton. Besides, all you need is to look
at his face, which, they say, is the mirror of the soul. I remember,
poor dear man, as if I were seeing him now,--I remember Master Pérez’s
look when, on a night like this, he would come down from the organ loft,
after having entranced the audience with his marvels. What a gracious
smile, what a happy glow on his face! Old as he was, he seemed like an
angel. But this fellow came plunging down the stairs as if a dog were
barking at him on the landing, his face the color of the dead, and--come
now, my dear Doña Baltasara, believe me, believe me with all your soul.
I suspect a mystery in this.”
With these last words, the two women turned the corner of the street and
disappeared.
We count it needless to inform our readers who one of them was.
IV.
Another year had gone by. The abbess of the convent of Santa Inés and
the daughter of Master Pérez, half hidden in the shadows of the church
choir, were talking in low tones. The peremptory voice of the bell was
calling from its tower to the faithful, and occasionally an individual
would cross the portico, silent and deserted now, and after taking the
holy water at the door, would choose a place in a corner of the nave,
where a few residents of the neighborhood were quietly waiting for the
Midnight Mass to begin.
“There, you see,” the mother superior was saying, “your fear is
excessively childish. There is nobody in the church. All Seville is
trooping to the cathedral to-night. Play the organ and play it without
the least uneasiness. We are only the sisterhood here. Well? Still you
are silent, still your breaths are like sighs. What is it? What is the
matter?”
“I am--afraid,” exclaimed the girl, in a tone of the deepest agitation.
“Afraid? Of what?”
“I don’t know--of something supernatural. Last night, see, I had heard
you say that you earnestly wished me to play the organ for the mass and,
pleased with this honor, I thought I would look to the stops and tune
it, so as to give you a surprise to-day. I went into the choir--alone--I
opened the door which leads to the organ-loft. At that moment the clock
of the cathedral struck the hour--what hour, I do not know. The peals
were exceedingly mournful, and many--many. They kept on sounding all the
time that I stood as if nailed to the threshold, and that time seemed to
me a century.
“The church was empty and dark. Far away, in the hollow depth, there
gleamed, like a single star lost in the sky of night, a feeble light,
the light of the lamp which burns on the High Altar. By its faint rays,
which only served to make more visible all the deep horror of the
darkness, I saw--I saw--mother, do not disbelieve it--I saw a man who,
in silence and with his back turned toward the place where I stood, was
running over the organ-keys with one hand, while he tried the stops with
the other. And the organ sounded, but it sounded in a manner
indescribable. It seemed as if each of its notes were a sob smothered
within the metal tube which vibrated with its burden of compressed air,
and gave forth a muffled tone, almost inaudible, yet exact and true.
“And the cathedral clock kept on striking, and that man kept on running
over the keys. I heard his very breathing.
“The horror of it had frozen the blood in my veins. In my body I felt an
icy chill and in my temples fire. Then I longed to cry out, but could
not. That man had turned his face and looked at me,--no, not looked at
me, for he was blind. It was my father.”
“Bah, sister! Put away these fancies with which the wicked enemy tries
to trouble weak imaginations. Pray a _Pater Noster_ and an _Ave Maria_
to the archangel Saint Michael, captain of the celestial hosts, that he
may aid you to resist the evil spirits. Wear on your neck a scapulary
which has been touched to the relics of Saint Pacomio, our advocate
against temptations, and go, go in power to the organ-loft. The mass is
about to begin, and the faithful are growing impatient. Your father is
in heaven, and thence, instead of giving you a fright, he will descend
to inspire his daughter in this solemn service which he so especially
loved.”
The prioress went to occupy her seat in the choir in the centre of the
sisterhood. The daughter of Master Pérez opened the door of the loft
with trembling hand, sat down at the organ, and the mass began.
The mass began, and continued without any unusual occurrence until the
consecration. Then the organ sounded, and at the same time came a scream
from the daughter of Master Pérez.
The mother superior, the nuns, and some of the faithful rushed up to the
organ-loft.
“Look at him! look at him!” cried the girl, fixing her eyes, starting
from their sockets, upon the organ-bench, from which she had risen in
terror, clinging with convulsed hands to the railing of the organ-loft.
All eyes were fixed upon the spot to which her gaze was turned. No one
was at the organ, yet it went on sounding--sounding as the archangels
sing in their raptures of mystic ecstasy.
* * * * *
“Didn’t I tell you so a thousand times, my dear Doña Baltasara--didn’t I
tell you so? There is a mystery here. What? You were not at the
Christmas Eve Mass last night? But, for all that, you must know what
happened. Nothing else is talked about in all Seville. The archbishop is
furious, and with good reason. To have missed going to Santa Inés--to
have missed being present at the miracle! And for what? To hear a
charivari, a rattle-go-bang, for people who heard it tell me that what
the inspired organist of San Bartolomé did in the cathedral was just
that. I told you so. The squint-eye could never have played that divine
music of last year, never. There is mystery about all this, a mystery
that is, in truth, the soul of Master Pérez.”
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 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.”
“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 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 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 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.
“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, entangling 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.”
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 GOLDEN BRACELET
I.
She was beautiful, beautiful with that beauty which turns a man dizzy;
beautiful with that beauty which in no wise resembles our dream of the
angels, and yet is supernatural; a diabolical beauty that the devil
perchance gives to certain beings to make them his instruments on earth.
He loved her--he loved her with that love which knows not check nor
bounds; he loved her with that love which seeks delight and finds but
martyrdom; a love which is akin to bliss, yet which Heaven seems to cast
on mortals for the expiation of their sins.
She was wayward, wayward and unreasonable, like all the women of the
world.
He, superstitious, superstitious and valiant, like all the men of his
time.
Her name was Maria Antúnez.
His, Pedro Alfonso de Orellana.
Both were natives of Toledo, and both had their homes in the city which
saw their birth.
The tradition which relates this marvellous event, an event of many
years since, tells nothing more of these two central actors.
I, in my character of scrupulous historian, will not add a single word
of my own invention to describe them further.
II.
One day he found her in tears and asked her:
“Why dost thou weep?”
[Illustration: A CITY SQUARE, TOLEDO]
She dried her eyes, looked at him searchingly, heaved a sigh and began
to weep anew.
Then, drawing close to Maria, he took her hand, leaned his elbow on the
fretted edge of the Arabic parapet whence the beautiful maiden was
watching the river flow beneath, and again he asked her: “Why dost thou
weep?”
The Tajo, moaning at the tower’s foot, twisted in and out amid the rocks
on which is seated the imperial city. The sun was sinking behind the
neighboring mountains, the afternoon haze was floating, a veil of azure
gauze, and only the monotonous sound of the water broke the profound
stillness.
Maria exclaimed: “Ask me not why I weep, ask me not; for I would not
know how to answer thee, nor thou how to understand. In the souls of us
women are stifling desires which reveal themselves only in a sigh, mad
ideas that cross the imagination without our daring to form them into
speech, strange phenomena of our mysterious nature which man cannot even
conceive. I implore thee, ask me not the cause of my grief; if I should
reveal it to thee, perchance thou wouldst reply with peals of laughter.”
When these words were faltered out, again she bowed the head and again
he urged his questions.
The radiant damsel, breaking at last her stubborn silence, said to her
lover in a hoarse, unsteady voice:
“Thou wilt have it. It is a folly that will make thee laugh, but be it
so. I will tell thee, since thou dost crave to hear.
“Yesterday I was in the temple. They were celebrating the feast of the
Virgin; her image, placed on a golden pedestal above the High Altar,
glowed like a burning coal; the notes of the organ trembled, spreading
from echo to echo throughout the length and breadth of the church, and
in the choir the priests were chanting the _Salve, Regina_.
“I was praying; I was praying, all absorbed in my religious meditations,
when involuntarily I lifted my head, and my gaze sought the altar. I
know not why my eyes from that instant fixed themselves upon the image,
but I speak amiss--it was not on the image; they fixed themselves upon
an object which until then I had not seen--an object which, I know not
why, thenceforth held all my attention. Do not laugh; that object was
the golden bracelet that the Mother of God wears on one of the arms in
which rests her divine Son. I turned aside my gaze and strove again to
pray. Impossible. Without my will, my eyes moved back to the same point.
The altar lights, reflected in the thousand facets of those diamonds,
were multiplied prodigiously. Millions of living sparks, rosy, azure,
green and golden, were whirling around the jewels like a storm of fiery
atoms, like a dizzy round of those spirits of flame which fascinate with
their brightness and their marvellous unrest.
“I left the church. I came home, but I came with that idea fixed in
imagination. I went to bed; I could not sleep. The night passed, a night
eternal with one thought. At dawn my eyelids closed and--believest
thou?--even in slumber I saw crossing before me, dimming in the distance
and ever returning, a woman, a woman dark and beautiful, who wore the
ornament of gold and jewel work; a woman, yes, for it was no longer the
Virgin, whom I adore and at whose feet I bow; it was a woman, another
woman like myself, who looked upon me and laughed mockingly. ‘Dost see
it?’ she appeared to say, showing me the treasure. ‘How it glitters! It
seems a circlet of stars snatched from the sky some summer night. Dost
see it? But it is not thine, and it will be thine never, never. Thou
wilt perchance have others that surpass it, others richer, if it be
possible, but this, this which sparkles so piquantly, so bewitchingly,
never, never.’ I awoke, but with the same idea fixed here, then as now,
like a red-hot nail, diabolical, irresistible, inspired beyond a doubt
by Satan himself.--And what then?--Thou art silent, silent, and dost
hang thy head.--Does not my folly make thee laugh?”
Pedro, with a convulsive movement, grasped the hilt of his sword, raised
his head, which he had, indeed, bent low and said with smothered voice:
“Which Virgin has this jewel?”
“The Virgin of the Sagrario,” murmured Maria.
“The Virgin of the Sagrario!” repeated the youth, with accent of terror.
“The Virgin of the Sagrario of the cathedral!”
And in his features was portrayed for an instant the state of his mind,
appalled before a thought.
“Ah, why does not some other Virgin own it?” he continued, with a tense,
impassioned tone. “Why does not the archbishop bear it in his mitre, the
king in his crown, or the devil between his claws? I would tear it away
for thee, though its price were death or hell. But from the Virgin of
the Sagrario, our own Holy Patroness,--I--I who was born in Toledo!
Impossible, impossible!”
“Never!” murmured Maria, in a voice that scarcely reached the ear.
“Never!”
And she wept again.
Pedro fixed a stupefied stare on the running waves of the river--on the
running waves, which flowed and flowed unceasingly before his
absent-thoughted eyes, breaking at the foot of the tower amid the rocks
on which is seated the imperial city.
III.
The cathedral of Toledo! Imagine a forest of colossal palm trees of
granite, that by the interlacing of their branches form a gigantic,
magnificent arch, beneath which take refuge and live, with the life
genius has lent them, a whole creation of beings, both fictitious and
real.
Imagine an incomprehensible fall of shadow and light wherein the
colored rays from the ogive windows meet and are merged with the dusk of
the nave; where the gleam of the lamps struggles and is lost in the
gloom of the sanctuary.
Imagine a world of stone, immense as the spirit of our religion, sombre
as its traditions, enigmatic as its parables, and yet you will not have
even a remote idea of this eternal monument of the enthusiasm and faith
of our ancestors--a monument upon which the centuries have emulously
lavished their treasures of knowledge, inspiration and the arts.
In the cathedral-heart dwells silence, majesty, the poetry of mysticism,
and a holy dread which guards those thresholds against worldly thoughts
and the paltry passions of earth.
Consumption of the body is stayed by breathing pure mountain air;
atheism should be cured by breathing this atmosphere of faith.
But great and impressive as the cathedral presents itself to our eyes at
whatsoever hour we enter its mysterious and sacred precinct, never does
it produce an impression so profound as in those days when it arrays
itself in all the splendors of religious pomp, when its shrines are
covered with gold and jewels, its steps with costly carpeting and its
pillars with tapestry.
Then, when its thousand silver lamps, aglow, shed forth a flood of
light, when a cloud of incense floats in air, and the voices of the
choir, the harmonious pealing of the organs, and the bells of the tower
make the building tremble from its deepest foundations to its highest
crown of spires, then it is we comprehend, because we feel, the
ineffable majesty of God who dwells within, gives it life with His
breath and fills it with the reflection of His glory.
The same day on which occurred the scene we have just described, the
last rites of the magnificent eight-day feast of the Virgin were held in
the cathedral.
The holy festival had attracted an immense multitude of the faithful;
but already they had dispersed in all directions; already the lights of
the chapels and of the High Altar had been extinguished, and the mighty
doors of the temple had groaned upon their hinges as they closed behind
the last departing worshipper, when forth from the depth of shadow, and
pale, pale as the statue of the tomb on which he leant for an instant,
while he conquered his emotion, there advanced a man, who came slipping
with the utmost stealthiness toward the screen of the central chapel.
There the gleam of a lamp made it possible to distinguish his features.
It was Pedro.
What had passed between the two lovers to bring him to the point of
putting into execution an idea whose mere conception had lifted his hair
with horror? That could never be learned.
But there he was, and he was there to carry out his criminal intent. In
his restless glances, in the trembling of his knees, in the sweat which
ran in great drops down his face, his thought stood written.
The cathedral was alone, utterly alone, and drowned in deepest hush.
Nevertheless, there were perceptible from time to time suggestions of
dim disturbance, creakings of wood maybe or murmurs of the wind, or--who
knows?--perchance illusion of the fancy, which in its excited moments
hears and sees and feels what is not; but in very truth there sounded,
now here, now there, now behind him, now even at his side, something
like sobs suppressed, something like the rustle of trailing robes, and a
muffled stir as of steps that go and come unceasingly.
Pedro forced himself to hold his course; he reached the grating and
mounted the first step of the chancel. All along the inner wall of this
chapel are ranged the tombs of kings, whose images of stone, with hand
upon the sword-hilt, seem to keep watch night and day over the sanctuary
in whose shade they take their everlasting rest.
“Onward!” he murmured under his breath, and he strove to move and could
not. It seemed as if his feet were nailed to the pavement. He lowered
his eyes, and his hair stood on end with horror. The floor of the chapel
was made of wide, dark burial slabs.
For a moment he believed that a cold and fleshless hand was holding him
there with strength invincible. The dying lamps, which sparkled in the
hollow aisles and transepts like lost stars in the dark, wavered before
his vision, the statues of the sepulchres wavered and the images of the
altar, all the cathedral wavered, with its granite arcades and
buttresses of solid stone.
“Onward!” Pedro exclaimed again, as if beside himself; he approached the
altar and climbing upon it, he reached the pedestal of the image. All
the space about clothed itself in weird and frightful shapes, all was
shadow and flickering light, more awful even than total darkness. Only
the Queen of Heaven, softly illuminated by a golden lamp, seemed to
smile, tranquil, gracious and serene, in the midst of all that horror.
Nevertheless, that silent, changeless smile, which calmed him for an
instant, in the end filled him with fear, a fear stranger and more
profound than what he had suffered hitherto.
Yet he regained his self-control, shut his eyes so as not to see her,
extended his hand with a spasmodic movement and snatched off the golden
bracelet, pious offering of a sainted archbishop, the golden bracelet
whose value equalled a fortune.
Now the jewel was in his possession; his convulsed fingers clutched it
with superhuman force; there was nothing left save to flee--to flee
with it; but for this it was necessary to open his eyes, and Pedro was
afraid to see, to see the image, to see the kings of the sepulchres, the
demons of the cornices, the griffins of the capitals, the blotches of
shadow and flashes of light which, like ghostly, gigantic phantoms, were
moving slowly in the depths of the nave, now filled with confused
noises, unearthly and appalling.
At last he opened his eyes, cast one glance about him, and from his lips
escaped a piercing cry.
The cathedral was full of statues, statues which, clothed in strange,
flowing raiment, had descended from their niches and were thronging all
the vast compass of the church, staring at him with their hollow eyes.
Saints, nuns, angels, devils, warriors, great ladies, pages, hermits,
peasants surrounded him on every side and were massed confusedly in the
open spaces and about the altar. Before it there officiated, in presence
of the kings who were kneeling upon their tombs, the marble archbishops
whom he had seen heretofore stretched motionless upon their beds of
death, while a whole world of granite beasts and creeping things,
writhing over the paving-stones, twisting along the buttresses, curled
up in the canopies, swinging from the vaulted roof, quivered into life
like worms in a giant corpse, fantastic, distorted, hideous.
He could resist no longer. His brows throbbed with terrible violence; a
cloud of blood darkened his vision; he uttered a second scream, a scream
heart-rending, inhuman, and fell swooning across the altar.
When the sacristans found him crouching on the altar steps the next
morning, he still clutched the golden bracelet in both hands and on
seeing them draw near, he shrieked with discordant yells of laughter:
“Hers! hers!”
The poor wretch had gone mad.
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
[Illustration: 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.
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, 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.
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 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.
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 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?”
“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,--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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
“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, 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, 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 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 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, 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.
“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 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 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.
“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 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 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.
“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 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.”
THREE DATES
In a portfolio which I still treasure, full of idle drawings made during
some of my semi-artistic excursions to the city of Toledo, are written
three dates.
The events whose memory these figures keep are up to a certain point
insignificant.
Nevertheless, by recollecting them I have entertained myself on certain
wakeful nights in shaping a novel more or less sentimental or sombre, in
proportion as my imagination found itself more or less exalted, and
disposed toward the humorous or tragic view of life.
If on the morning following one of these darkling, delirious reveries, I
had tried to write out the extraordinary episodes of the impossible
fictions which I invented before my eyelids utterly closed, these
romances, whose dim dénouement finally floats undetermined on that sea
between waking and sleep, would assuredly form a book of preposterous
inconsistencies but original and peradventure interesting.
This is not what I am attempting now. These light--one might almost say
impalpable--fantasies are in a sense like butterflies which cannot be
caught in the hands without there being left between the fingers the
golden dust of their wings.
I am going to confine myself, then, to the brief narration of three
events which are wont to serve as headings for the chapters of my
dream-novels; the three isolated points which I am accustomed to connect
in my mind by a series of ideas like a shining thread; the three themes,
in short, upon which I play thousands on thousands of variations,
amounting to what might be called absurd symphonies of the imagination.
I.
There is in Toledo a narrow street, crooked and dim, which guards so
faithfully the traces of the hundred generations that have dwelt in it,
which speaks so eloquently to the eyes of the artist and reveals to him
so many secret points of affinity between the ideas and customs of each
century, and the form and special character impressed upon even its most
insignificant works, that I would close the entrances with a barrier and
place above the barrier a shield with this device:
“In the name of poets and artists, in the name of those who dream and of
those who study, civilization is forbidden to touch the least of these
bricks with its destructive and prosaic hand.”
At one of the ends of this street, entrance is afforded by a massive
arch, flat and dark, which provides a covered passage.
In its keystone is an escutcheon, battered now and corroded by the
action of the years; in it grows ivy which, blown by the air, floats
above the helmet, that crowns it, like a plumy crest.
Below the vaulting and nailed to the wall is seen a shrine with a sacred
picture of blackened canvas and undecipherable design, in frame of gilt
rococo, with its lantern hanging by a cord and with its waxen votive
offerings.
Leading away from this arch, which enfolds the whole place in its
shadow, giving to it an undescribable tint of mystery and sadness,
extend on the two sides of the street lines of dusky, dissimilar,
odd-looking houses, each having its individual form, size and color.
Some are built of rough, uneven stones, without other adornment than a
few armorial bearings rudely carved above the portal; others are of
brick, with an Arab arch for entrance, two or three Moorish windows
opening at caprice in a thick, fissured wall, and a glassed observation
turret topped by a lofty weather-vane. Some have a general aspect which
does not belong to any order of architecture and yet is a patchwork of
all; some are finished models of a distinct and recognized style, some
curious examples of the extravagances of an artistic period.
Here are some that boast a wooden balcony with incongruous roof; there
are others with a Gothic window freshly whitened and adorned with pots
of flowers; and yonder is one with crudely colored tiles set into its
door-frame, huge spikes in its panels, and the shafts of two columns,
perhaps taken from a Moorish castle, mortised into the wall.
The palace of a grandee converted into a tenement-house; the home of a
pundit occupied by a prebendary; a Jewish synagogue transformed into a
Christian church; a convent erected on the ruins of an Arab mosque whose
minaret is still standing; a thousand strange and picturesque contrasts;
thousands on thousands of curious traces left by distinct races,
civilizations and epochs epitomized, so to speak, on one hundred yards
of ground. All the past is in this one street,--a street built up
through many centuries, a narrow, dim, disfigured street with an
infinite number of twists where each man in building his house had
jutted out or left a corner or made an angle to suit his own taste,
regardless of level, height or regularity,--a street rich in
uncalculated combinations of lines, with a veritable wealth of whimsical
details, with so many, many chance effects that on every visit it offers
to the student something new.
When I was first at Toledo, while I was busying myself in making a few
sketch-book notes of _San Juan de los Reyes_, I had to go through this
street every afternoon in order to reach the convent from the little
inn, with hotel pretensions, where I lodged.
Almost always I would traverse the street from one end to the other
without meeting a single person, without any further
[Illustration: CLOISTER OF SAN JUAN DE LOS REYES]
sound than my own footfalls disturbing the deep silence, without even
catching a chance glimpse, behind balcony-blind, door-screen or
casement-lattice, of the wrinkled face of a peering old woman, or the
great black eyes of a Toledan girl. Sometimes I seemed to myself to be
walking through the midst of a deserted city, abandoned by its
inhabitants since ages far remote.
Yet one afternoon, on passing in front of a very ancient, gloomy
mansion, in whose lofty, massive walls might be seen three or four
windows of dissimilar form, placed without order or symmetry, I happened
to fix my attention on one of these. It was formed by a great ogee arch
surrounded by a wreath of sharply pointed leaves. The arch was closed in
by a light wall, recently built and white as snow. In the middle of
this, as if contained in the original window, might be seen a little
casement with frame and gratings painted green, with a flower-pot of
blue morning-glories whose sprays were clambering up over the
granite-work, and with panes of leaded glass curtained by white cloth
thin and translucent.
The window of itself, peculiar as it was, would have been enough to
arrest the gaze, but the circumstance most effective in fixing my
attention upon it was that, just as I turned my head to look at it, the
curtain had been lifted for a moment only to fall again, concealing from
my eyes the person who undoubtedly was at that same instant looking
after me.
I pursued my way preoccupied with the idea of the window, or, rather,
the curtain, or, to put it still more clearly, the woman who had raised
it, for beyond all doubt only a woman could be peeping out from that
window so poetic, so white, so green, so full of flowers, and when I say
a woman, be it understood that she is imaged as young and beautiful.
The next afternoon I passed the house,--passed with the same close
scrutiny; I rapped down my heels sharply, astonishing the silent street
with the clatter of my steps, a clatter that repeated itself in
responsive echoes, one after another; I looked at the window and the
curtain was raised again.
The plain truth is that behind the curtain I saw nothing at all; but by
aid of the imagination I seemed to discern a figure,--the figure, in
fact, of a woman.
That day twice or thrice I fell into a muse over my drawing. And on
other days I passed the house, and always when I was passing the curtain
would be raised again, remaining so till the sound of my steps was lost
in the distance and I from afar had looked back at it for the last time.
My sketches were making but little progress. In that cloister of _San
Juan de los Reyes_, in that cloister so mysterious and bathed in so
profound a melancholy,--seated on the broken capital of a column, my
portfolio on my knees, my elbows on my portfolio, and my head between my
hands,--to the music of water which flows there with an incessant
murmur, to the rustling of leaves under the evening wind in the wild,
forsaken garden, what dreams did I not dream of that window and that
woman! I knew her; I knew her name and even the color of her eyes.
I would see her crossing the wide and lonely courts of that most ancient
house, rejoicing them with her presence as a sunbeam gilds a pile of
ruins. Again I would seem to see her in a garden of very lofty, very
shadowy walls, among colossal, venerable trees, such as there ought to
be at the back of that sort of Gothic palace where she lived, gathering
flowers and seating herself alone on a stone bench and there sighing
while she plucked them leaf from leaf thinking on--who knows? Perchance
on me. Why say perchance? Assuredly on me. Oh, what dreams, what
follies, what poetry did that window awaken in my soul while I abode at
Toledo!
But my allotted time for sojourning in that city went by. One day, heavy
of heart and pensive of mood, I shut up all my drawings in the
portfolio, bade farewell to the world of fancy, and took a seat in the
coach for Madrid.
Before the highest of the Toledo towers had faded on the horizon, I
thrust my head from the carriage window to see it once more, and
remembered the street.
I still held the portfolio under my arm, and on taking my seat again,
while we rounded the hill which suddenly hid the city from my eyes, I
drew out my pencil and set down a date. It is the first of the three,
and the one which I call the Date of the Window.
II.
At the end of several months, I again had an opportunity to leave the
Capital for three or four days. I dusted my portfolio, tucked it under
my arm, provided myself with a quire of paper, a half-dozen pencils and
a few napoleons and, deploring the fact that the railroad was not yet
finished, crowded myself into a public stage that I might journey in
reverse order through the scenes of Tirso’s famous comedy _From Toledo
to Madrid_.
Once installed in the historic city, I devoted myself to visiting again
the spots which had most excited my interest on my former trip, and
certain others which as yet I knew only by name.
Thus I let slip by, in long, solitary rambles among the most ancient
quarters of the town, the greater part of the time which I could spare
for my little artistic expedition, finding a veritable pleasure in
losing myself in that confused labyrinth of blind lanes, narrow streets,
dark passages and steep, impracticable heights.
One afternoon, the last that I might at that time remain in Toledo,
after one of these long wanderings in unknown ways, I arrived--by what
streets I can scarcely tell--at a great deserted square, apparently
forgotten by the very inhabitants of the city and hidden away, as it
were, in one of its most remote nooks.
The filth and the rubbish cast out in this square from time immemorial
had identified themselves, if I may say so, with the earth in such a
manner as to present the broken and mountainous aspect of a miniature
Switzerland. On the hillocks and in the valleys formed by these
irregularities were growing at their own will wild mallows of colossal
proportions, circles of giant nettles, creeping tangles of white
morning-glories, stretches of that nameless, common herb, small, fine
and of a darkish green, and among these, swaying gently in the light
breath of the air, overtopping like kings all the other parasitic
plants, the no less poetic than vulgar yellow mustard, true flower of
wastes and ruins.
Scattered along the ground, some half buried, others almost hidden by
the tall weeds, might be seen an infinite number of fragments of
thousands on thousands of diverse articles, broken and thrown out on
that spot in different epochs, where they were in process of forming
strata in which it would be easy to follow out a course of genealogical
history.
Moorish tiles enamelled in various colors, sections of marble and of
jasper columns, fragments of brick of a hundred varying kinds, great
blocks covered with verdure and moss, pieces of wood already nearly
turned to dust, remains of antique panelling, rags of cloth, strips of
leather, and countless other objects, formless, nameless, were what at
first sight appeared on the surface, even while the attention was caught
and the eyes dazzled by glancing sparks of light sprinkled over the
green like a handful of diamonds flung broadcast and which, on closer
survey, proved to be nothing else than tiny bits of glass and of glazed
earthenware,--pots, plates, pitchers,--that, flashing back the sunlight,
counterfeited a very heaven of microscopic, glittering stars.
Such was the flooring of that square, though actually paved in some
places with small pebbles of various colors arranged in patterns, and in
others covered with great slabs of slate, but in the main, as we have
just said, like a garden of parasitic plants or a waste and weedy field.
Nor were the buildings which outlined its irregular form less strange
and worthy of study. On one side it was bounded by a line of dingy
little houses, the roofs twinkling with chimneys, weathercocks and
overhangs, the marble guardposts fastened to the corners with iron
rings, the balconies low or narrow, the small windows set with
flower-pots, and the hanging lantern surrounded by a wire network to
protect its smoky glass from the missiles of the street urchins.
Another boundary was constituted by a great, time-blackened wall full of
chinks and crevices, from which, amid patches of moss, peeped out, with
little bright eyes, the heads of various reptiles,--a wall exceedingly
high, formed of bulky blocks sprinkled over with hollows for doors and
balconies that had been closed up with stone and mortar, and on one of
whose extremities joined, forming an angle with it, a wall of brick
stripped of its plaster and full of rough holes, daubed at intervals
with streaks of red, green and yellow and crowned with a thatch of hay,
in and out of which ran sprays of climbing plants.
This was no more, so to speak, than the side scenery of the strange
stage-setting which, as I made my way into the square, suddenly
presented itself to view, captivating my mind and holding it spell-bound
for a space, for the true culminating point of the panorama, the edifice
which gave it its general tone, rose at the rear of the square, more
whimsical, more original, infinitely more beautiful in its artistic
disorder than all the buildings about.
“Here is what I have been wanting to find,” I exclaimed on seeing it,
and seating myself on a rough piece of marble, placing my portfolio on
my knees and sharpening a pencil, I made ready to sketch, though only in
outline, its irregular and eccentric form that I might ever keep it in
memory.
If I could fasten on here with wafers the very slight and ill-drawn
sketch of this building that I still keep, imperfect and impressionistic
though it is, it would save me a mountain of words, giving to my readers
a truer idea of it than all the descriptions imaginable.
But since this may not be, I will try to depict it as best I can, so
that the readers of these lines may form a remote conception if not of
its infinite details, at least of its effect as a whole.
Imagine an Arab palace with horse-shoe portals, its walls adorned by
long rows of arches with hundreds of intercrossings, running over a
stripe of brilliant tiles; here is seen the recess of an arched window,
cut in two by a group of slender colonnettes and enclosed in a frame of
exquisite, fanciful ornament; there rises a watch-tower with its light
and airy turret, roofed with glazed tiles of green and yellow, its keen
golden arrow losing itself in the void; further on is descried the
cupola that covers a chamber painted in gold and blue, or lofty
galleries closed with green Venetian blinds which on opening reveal
gardens with walks of myrtle, groves of laurel, and high-jetting
fountains. All is unique, all harmonious, though unsymmetrical; all
gives one a glimpse of the luxury and the marvels of its interior; all
lets one divine the character and the customs of its inmates.
The wealthy Arab who owned this edifice finally abandons it; the process
of the years begins to disintegrate the walls, dim their colors and even
corrode their marbles. A king of Castile then chooses for his residence
that already crumbling palace, and at this point he breaks the front,
opening an ogee and adorning it with a border of escutcheons through
whose midst is curled a garland of thistles and clover; yonder he
raises a massive fortress-tower of hewn stone with narrow loopholes and
pointed battlements; further along he builds on a wing of lofty, gloomy
rooms, where may be seen, in curious fellowship, stretches of shining
tiles, dusky vaulting, or a solitary Arab window, or a horse-shoe arch,
light and elegant, giving entrance to a Gothic hall, austere and grand.
But there comes a day when the king, too, abandons this dwelling,
passing it over to a community of nuns, and these in their turn remodel
it, adding new features to the already strange physiognomy of the
Moorish palace. They lattice the windows; between two Arab arches they
set the symbol of their faith, carved in granite; where tamarinds and
laurels used to grow they plant sad and gloomy cypresses; and making use
of some remnants of the old edifice, and building on top of others, they
form the most picturesque and incongruous combinations conceivable.
Above the main portal of the church, where may be dimly seen, as if
enveloped in the mystic twilight made by the shadows of their canopies,
a broadside of saints, angels and virgins at whose feet are
twisted--among acanthus leaves--stone serpents, monsters and dragons,
rises a slender minaret filagreed over with Moorish work; close below
the loopholes of the battlemented walls, whose merlons are now broken,
they place a shrine with a sacred fresco; and they close up the great
slits with thin partitions decorated with little squares like a
chess-board; they put crosses on all the pinnacles, and finally they
rear a spire full of bells which peal mournfully night and day calling
to prayer,--bells which swing at the impulsion of an unseen hand, bells
whose far-off sound sometimes draws from the listener tears of
involuntary grief.
Still the years are passing and are bathing in a dull, mellow,
nondescript hue the whole edifice, harmonizing its colors and sowing ivy
in its crevices.
White storks hang their nests on the tower-vane, martins build under the
eaves, swallows in the granite canopies, and the owls choose for their
haunt lofty holes left by fallen stones, whence on cloudy nights they
affright superstitious old women and timid children with the phosphoric
gleam of their round eyes and their shrill, uncanny hoots.
Only all these changes of fortune, only all these special circumstances
could have resulted in a building so individual, so full of contrasts,
of poetry and of memories as the one which on that afternoon presented
itself to my view and which to-day I have essayed, albeit in vain, to
describe by words.
I had drawn it in part on one of the leaves of my sketch-book. The sun
was scarcely gilding the highest spires of the city, the evening breeze
was beginning to caress my brow, when rapt in the ideas that suddenly
had assailed me on contemplating the silent remains of other eras more
poetic than the material age in which we live, suffocating in its utter
prose, I let my pencil slip from my fingers and gave over the drawing,
leaning against the wall at my back and yielding myself up completely to
the visions of imagination. Of what was I thinking? I do not know that I
can tell. I clearly saw epoch succeeding epoch, walls falling and other
walls rising in their stead. I saw men or, rather, women giving place to
other women, and the first and those who came after changing into dust
and flying like dust upon the air, a puff of wind bearing away
beauty,--beauty which had been wont to call forth secret sighs,
to engender passions, to be the source of ecstasies; then--what
know I?--all confused of thought, I saw many things jumbled
together,--boudoirs of cunning work, with clouds of perfume and beds of
flowers, strait and dreary cells with prayer-stool and crucifix, at the
foot of the crucifix an open book, and upon the book a skull; stern and
stately halls, hung with tapestries and adorned with trophies of war;
and many women passing and still repassing before my gaze, tall nuns
pale and thin, brown concubines with reddest lips and blackest eyes;
great dames of faultless profile, high bearing and majestic gait.
All these things I saw; and many more of those which, though visioned,
cannot be remembered; of those so immaterial that it is impossible to
confine them in the narrow compass of a word,--when suddenly I gave a
bound upon my seat and, passing my hand over my eyes to convince myself
that I was not still dreaming, leaping up as if moved by a nerve-spring,
I fastened my gaze on one of the lofty turrets of the convent. I had
seen--there is no room for doubt--perfectly had I seen a hand of
transcendent whiteness, which, reaching out from one of the apertures of
those turrets mortared like chess-boards, had waved several times as if
greeting me with a mute and loving sign. And it was I whom it greeted;
there was no possibility of a mistake; I was alone, utterly alone in the
square.
In vain I waited till night, nailed to that spot and without removing my
eyes for an instant from the turret; fruitlessly I often returned to
take up my watch again on the dark stone which had served me for seat
that afternoon when I saw appear the mysterious hand, already the object
of my dreams by night and wildest fantasies by day. I beheld it
nevermore.
And finally came the hour when I must depart from Toledo, leaving there,
as a useless and ridiculous burden, all the illusions which in its bosom
had been raised in my mind. I turned with a sigh to put my papers
together in my portfolio; but before securing them there, I wrote
another date, the second, the one which I know as the Date of the Hand.
As I wrote it, I noticed for a moment the earlier, that of the Window,
and could not but smile at my own folly.
III.
From the time of the strange occurrence which I have just related until
my return to Toledo, there elapsed about a year, during which the memory
of that afternoon was still present to my imagination, at first
constantly and in full detail, then less often, and at last so vaguely
that I even came to believe sometimes that I had been the sport of an
illusive dream.
Nevertheless, scarcely had I arrived at the city which some with good
reason call the Spanish Rome than this recollection beset me anew and
under its spell I set forth in absent-minded fashion to roam the
streets, without determined direction, with no preconceived purpose of
making my way to any special point.
The day was gloomy with that gloom which invades all that one hears and
sees and feels. The sky was the color of lead, and under its melancholy
shadow the houses seemed older, quainter and duskier than ever. The wind
moaned along the tortuous, narrow streets, bearing upon its gusts, like
the lost notes of a mysterious symphony, unintelligible words, the peal
of bells, and echoes of heavy, far-off blows. The damp, chill air froze
the soul with its icy breath.
I wandered for several hours through the most remote and deserted parts
of the city, rapt in a thousand confused imaginings; and, contrary to my
custom, with a gaze all vague and lost in space, nor could my attention
be aroused by any playful detail of architecture, by any monument of an
unknown style, by any marvellous and hidden work of sculpture, by any
one, in short, of those rare features for whose minute examination I had
been wont to pause at every step, at times when only artistic and
antiquarian interests held sway in my mind.
The sky was continually growing darker; the wind was blowing more
strongly and more boisterously; and a fine sleet had begun to fall,
very keen and penetrating, when unwittingly,--for I was still ignorant
of the way--and as if borne thither by an impulse which I could not
resist, an impulse whose occult force had brought me to the spot whither
my thoughts were tending, I found myself in the lonely square which my
readers already know.
On finding myself in that place I sprang to clear consciousness from out
the depths of that lethargy in which I had been sunken, as if awakened
from profound slumber by a violent shock.
I looked about me. All was as I described it--nay, it was more dreary. I
know not whether this gloom was due to the darkness of the sky, the lack
of verdure, or the state of my own spirit, but the truth is that between
the feeling with which I first contemplated that spot and this later
impression there was all the distance which lies between poetic
melancholy and personal bitterness.
For some moments I stood gazing at the sombre convent, now more sombre
than ever to my eyes, and I was already on the point of withdrawing when
my ears were wounded by the sound of a bell, a bell of broken, husky
voice, which was tolling slowly, while in vivid contrast it was
accompanied by something like a little clapper-bell which suddenly began
to revolve with the rapidity of a ringing so sharp and so incessant that
it seemed to have been seized by an attack of vertigo.
Nothing was ever stranger than that edifice, whose black silhouette was
outlined against the sky like that of a cliff bristling with thousands
of freakish points, speaking with tongues of bronze through bells that
seemed moved by the touch of invisible powers, the one weeping with
smothered sobs, the other laughing with shrill, wild outcry, like the
laughter of a madwoman.
At intervals and confused with the bewildering clamor of the bells, I
seemed to hear, too, something like the indistinct notes of an organ and
the words of a sacred, solemn chant.
I changed my intention; and instead of departing I approached the door
of the church and asked one of the ragged beggars squatted on the stone
steps:
“What is going on here?”
“A taking of the veil,” the mendicant answered, interrupting the prayer
which he was muttering between his teeth to resume it later, although
not until he had kissed the bit of copper that I dropped into his hand
as I put my question.
I had never been present at that ceremony, nor had I ever seen the
interior of the convent church. Both considerations impelled me to
enter.
The church was high and dark; its aisles were defined by two rows of
pillars made up of slender columns gathered into sheaves and resting on
broad octagonal bases, while from their rich crowning of capitals sprang
the vaulting of the strong ogee arches. The High Altar was placed at the
further end under a cupola of Renaissance style decorated with great
shield-bearing angels, griffins, a profusion of foliage on the finials,
cornices with gilded moldings and rosettes, and odd, elaborate frescoes.
Bordering the aisles might be seen a countless number of dusky chapels,
in whose recesses were burning a few lamps like stars lost in a cloudy
sky. Chapels there were of Arab architecture, Gothic, rococo; some
enclosed by magnificent iron gratings; some by humble wooden rails; some
submerged in shadow with an ancient marble tomb before the altar; some
brightly lighted, with an image clad in tinsel and surrounded by votive
offerings of silver and wax, together with little bows of gay-colored
ribbon.
The fantastic light which illuminated all the church, whose structural
confusion and artistic disorder were entirely in keeping with the rest
of the convent, tended to enhance its effect of mystery. From the lamps
of silver and copper, suspended from the vaulting, from the
altar-candles, from the narrow ogive windows and Moorish casements of
the walls, were shed rays of a thousand diverse hues,--white, stealing
in from the street by little skylights in the cupola; red, spreading
their glow from the great wax-candles before the shrines; green, blue,
and a hundred other diverse tints making their way through the stained
glass of the rose-windows. All these lustres, insufficient to flood that
sacred place with adequate light, seemed at certain points to blend in
strife, while others stood out, clear patches of brightness, over
against the veiled, dim depths of the chapels. Despite the solemnity of
the rite which was there taking place, but few of the faithful were in
attendance. The ceremony had commenced some time ago and was now nearing
its close. The priests who officiated at the High Altar were, at that
moment, enveloped in a cloud of azure incense which swayed slowly
through the air, as they descended the carpeted steps to take their way
to the choir where the nuns were heard intoning a psalm.
I, too, moved toward that spot with the intent of peering through the
double gratings which isolated the choir from the rest of the church. It
seemed borne in upon me that I must know the face of that woman of whom
I had seen only--and for one instant--the hand; and opening my eyes to
their widest extent and dilating the pupils in the effort to give them
greater power and penetration, I strained my gaze on to the deepest
recesses of the choir. Fruitless attempt; across the interwoven irons,
little or nothing could be seen. Some white and black phantoms moving
amidst a gloom against which fought in vain the inadequate radiance of a
few tall wax candles; a long line of lofty, crocketed sedilia, crowned
with canopies, beneath which might be divined, veiled by the dusk, the
indistinct figures of nuns clad in long flowing robes; a crucifix
illuminated by four candles and standing out against the dark
background of the picture as those points of high light which, on the
canvases of Rembrandt, make the shadows more palpable; this was the
utmost that could be discerned from the place where I stood.
The priests, covered with their gold-bordered copes, preceded by
acolytes who bore a silver cross and two great candles, and followed by
others who swung censers that shed perfume all about, advancing through
the throng of the faithful who kissed their hands and the hems of their
vestments, finally reached the choir-screen.
Up to this moment I had not been able to distinguish, amid the other
vague phantoms, that of the maiden who was about to consecrate herself
to Christ.
Have you never seen, in those last instants of twilight, a shred of mist
rise from the waters of a river, the surface of a fen, the waves of the
sea, or the deep heart of a mountain tarn,--a shred of mist that floats
slowly in the void, and now looks like a woman moving, walking, trailing
her gown behind her, now like a white veil fastening the tresses of an
invisible sylph, now a ghost which rises in the air hiding its yellow
bones beneath a winding-sheet against which is still seen outlined its
angular shape? Such was the hallucination I experienced in beholding
draw near the screen, as if detaching herself from the sombre depth of
the choir, that white, tall, most lightly moving form.
The face I could not see. She had placed herself exactly in front of the
candles which lit up the crucifix; and their gleam, making a halo about
her head, had left the rest obscure, bathing her in a wavering shadow.
Profound silence reigned; all eyes were fixed on her, and the final act
of the ceremony began.
The abbess, murmuring some unintelligible words, words which in their
turn the priests repeated with deep and hollow voice, caught from the
virgin’s brow the enwreathing crown of blossoms and flung it far
away.--Poor flowers! They were the last she was to wear, that woman,
sister of the flowers even as all women are.
Then the abbess despoiled her of her veil, and her fair tresses poured
in a golden cascade down her back and shoulders, which they were
suffered to cover but an instant, for at once there began to be heard,
in the midst of that profound silence reigning among the faithful, a
sharp, metallic clickity-click which set the nerves twitching, and first
the magnificent waves of hair fell from the forehead they had shaded,
and then those flowing locks that the fragrant air must have kissed so
many times slipped over her bosom and dropped upon the floor.
Again the abbess fell to murmuring the unintelligible words; the priest
repeated them; and once more all was silence in the church. Only from
time to time were heard, afar off, sounds like long-drawn, dreadful
moans. It was the wind complaining as it broke upon the edges of the
battlements and towers, and shuddering as it passed the colored panes of
the ogive windows.
She was motionless, motionless and pallid as a maiden of stone wrenched
from the niche of a Gothic cloister.
And they despoiled her of the jewels which covered her arms and throat,
and finally they divested her of her wedding robe, that raiment which
seemed to have been wrought that a lover might break its clasps with a
hand trembling for bliss and passion.
The mystic Bridegroom was awaiting the bride. Where? Beyond the doors of
death; lifting, undoubtedly, the stone of the sepulchre and calling her
to enter, even as the timid bride crosses the threshold of the sanctuary
of nuptial love, for she fell to the floor prostrate as a corpse. As if
she were clay, the nuns strewed her body with flowers, intoning a most
mournful psalm; a murmur went up from amid the multitude, and the
priests with their deep and hollow voices commenced the service for the
dead, accompanied by those instruments that seem to weep, augmenting the
unfathomable fear which the terrible words they pronounce inspire of
themselves.
_De profundis clamavi a te!_ chanted the nuns from the depths of the
choir with plaintive, lamenting voices.
_Dies irae, dies illa!_ responded the priests in thunderous, awful echo,
and therewith the bells pealed slowly, tolling for the dead, and between
the peals the metal was heard to vibrate with a strange and dolorous
drone.
I was touched; no, not touched--terrified. I believed that I was in
presence of the supernatural, that I felt the heart of my own life torn
from me, and that vacancy was closing in upon me; I felt that I had just
lost something precious, as a father, a mother, or a cherished wife, and
I suffered that immeasurable desolation which death leaves behind
wheresoever it passes, a desolation nameless, indescribable, to be
comprehended only by those who have had it to bear.
I was still rooted to that spot with wildly staring eyes, quaking from
head to foot and half beside myself, when the new nun rose from the
ground. The abbess robed her in the habit of the order, the sisters took
lighted candles in their hands and, forming two long lines, led her in
procession back to the further side of the choir.
There, amid the shadows, I saw the sudden glint of a ray of light; the
door of the cloister was opened. As she stepped beneath the lintel, the
nun turned for the last time toward the altar. The brightness of all the
lights suddenly shone upon her, and I could see her face. As I saw it, I
had to choke back a cry.
I knew that woman; not that I had ever seen her, but I knew her from the
visions of my dreams; she was one of those beings whom the soul
foretells or perchance remembers from another better world which, in
our descent to this, some of us do not altogether forget.
I took two steps forward; I longed to call to her--to cry out--I know
not what--giddiness assailed me; but at that instant the cloister door
shut--forever. The silver bells rang blithely, the priests raised a
_Hosanna_, clouds of incense swept through the air, the organ poured
forth from a hundred metal mouths a torrent of thunderous harmony, and
the bells of the tower began to chime, swinging with a frightful
ecstasy.
That mad and clamorous glee made my hair rise on my head. I looked about
searching for the parents, family, motherless children of that woman. I
found none.
“Perhaps she was alone in the world,” I said, and could not repress a
tear.
“God grant thee in the cloister the happiness which He denied thee in
the world!” simultaneously exclaimed an old woman by my side, and she
sobbed and groaned, clutching the grating.
“Do you know her?” I asked.
“The poor dear! Indeed I knew her. I saw her born and I have nursed her
in my arms.”
“And why does she take the veil?”
“Because she found herself alone in the world. Her father and mother
died of the cholera on one and the same day, a little more than a year
ago. Seeing her an orphan and unprotected, the dean gave her a dowry so
that she might enter the sisterhood; and now you see--what else was
there to do?”
“And who was she?”
“Daughter of the steward of the Count of C----, whom I served until his
death.”
“Where did he live?”
When I heard the name of the street, I could not repress an exclamation
of surprise.
A line of light, that line of light which is as swift as thought,
running brightly through the obscurity and confusion of the mind,
uniting experiences far removed from one another and marvellously
binding them together, connected my vague memories and I understood--or
believed that I understood--all.
* * * * *
This date, which has no name, I have not written anywhere,--nay; I bear
it written there where only I may read it and whence it shall never be
erased.
Occasionally in recalling these events, even now in relating them here,
I have asked myself:--
Some day in the mysterious hour of twilight, when the breath of the
spring zephyr, warm and laden with perfumes, penetrates even into the
recesses of the most retired dwellings, bearing there an airy touch of
memory, of the world, must not a woman, alone, lost in the dim shades of
a Gothic cloister, her cheek upon her hand, her elbow resting on the
embrasure of an ogive window, have exhaled a sigh as the recollection of
these dates crossed her imagination?
Who knows?
Oh! if she sighed, where might that sigh be?
THE CHRIST OF THE SKULL
The King of Castile was going to the Moorish war and, in order to
contend with the enemies of the faith, he had sent a martial summons to
all the flower of his nobility. The silent streets of Toledo now
resounded night and day with the stirring sound of kettle-drums and
trumpets; and in the Moorish gateway of Visagra, or in that of Cambrón,
or in the narrow entrance to the ancient bridge of St. Martin, not an
hour passed without one’s hearing the hoarse cry of the sentinels
proclaiming the arrival of some knight who, preceded by his seigniorial
banner and followed by horsemen and foot-soldiers, had come to join the
main body of the Castilian army.
The time which remained before taking the road to the frontier and
completing the order of the royal hosts was spent in public
entertainments, lavish feasts and brilliant tournaments, until at last,
on the evening before the day appointed by His Highness for the setting
out of the army, a grand ball closed the festivities.
On the night of the ball, the royal palace presented a singular
appearance. In the spacious courts might be seen, promiscuously mingled
around huge bonfires, a motley multitude of pages, soldiers, crossbowmen
and hangers-on, who, some grooming their chargers and polishing their
arms preparatory to combat, others bewailin
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