" his mother would
sometimes
ask.
Gustavo Adolfo Becuqer
" 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 Inigo, in accents of profound terror, starting with a
bound from his seat.
Fernando, in turn, looked at him as if astonished that Inigo 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 Inigo 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 Antunez.
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 Pena, 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 Pena 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 Senor 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 Provencal 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,
_senorito_, 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.
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 Inigo, in accents of profound terror, starting with a
bound from his seat.
Fernando, in turn, looked at him as if astonished that Inigo 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 Inigo 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 Antunez.
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 Pena, 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 Pena 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 Senor 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 Provencal 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,
_senorito_, 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.
