Romantic legends of Spain

VII.

Beyond the Paradise of the Righteous; beyond the throne where sits the Virgin Mary. The mind of Teobaldo was stricken by terror; a fathomless fear possessed his soul. Eternal solitude, eternal silence live in those spaces that lead to the mysterious sanctuary of the Most High. From time to time a rush of wind, cold as the blade of a poniard, smote his forehead,—a wind that shriveled his hair with horror and penetrated to the marrow of his bones,—a wind like to those which announced to the prophets the approach of the Divine Spirit. At last he reached a point where he thought he perceived a dull murmur that might be likened to the far-off hum of a swarm of bees, when, in autumn evenings, they hover around the last of the flowers.

VIII.

He crossed that fantastic region whither go all the accents of the earth, the sounds which we say have ceased, the words which we deem are lost in the air, the laments which we believe are heard of none.

There, in a harmonious circle, float the prayers of little children, the orisons of virgins, the psalms of holy hermits, the petitions of the humble, the chaste words of the pure in heart, the resigned moans of those in pain, the sobs of souls that suffer and the hymns of souls that hope. Teobaldo heard among those voices, that throbbed still in the luminous ether, the voice of his sainted mother who prayed to God for him; but he heard no prayer of his own.

IX.

Further on, thousands on thousands of harsh, rough accents wounded his ears with a discordant roar,—blasphemies, cries for vengeance, drinking songs, indecencies, curses of despair, threats of the helpless, and sacrilegious oaths of the impious.

Teobaldo traversed the second circle with the rapidity of a meteor crossing the sky in a summer evening, that he might not hear his own voice which vibrated there thunderously loud, exceeding all other voices in the stress of that infernal concert.

“I do not believe in God! I do not believe in God!” still spake his tone beating through that ocean of blasphemies; and Teobaldo began to believe.

X.

He left those regions behind him and crossed other illimitable spaces full of terrible visions, which neither could he comprehend nor am I able to conceive, and finally he came to the uppermost circle of the spiral heavens, where the seraphim adore Jehovah, covering their faces with their triple wings and prostrate at His feet.

He would see God.

A waft of fire scorched his face, a sea of light darkened his eyes, unbearable thunder resounded in his ears and, caught from his charger and hurled into the void, like an incandescent stone shot out from a volcano, he felt himself falling, and falling without ever alighting, blind, burned and deafened, as the rebellious angel fell when God overthrew with a breath the pedestal of his pride.

I.

Night had shut in, and the wind moaned as it stirred the leaves of the trees, through whose luxuriant foliage was slipping a soft ray of moonlight, when Teobaldo, rising upon his elbow and rubbing his eyes as if awakening from profound slumber, looked about him and found himself in the same wood where he had wounded the boar, where his steed fell dead, where was given him that phantasmal courser which had rushed him away to unknown, mysterious realms.

A deathlike silence reigned about him, a silence broken only by the distant calling of the deer, the timid murmur of the leaves, and the echo of a far-off bell borne to his ears from time to time upon the gentle gusts.

“I must have dreamed,” said the baron, and set forth on his way across the wood, coming out at last into the open.

II.

At a great distance, and above the rocks of Montagut, he saw the black silhouette of his castle standing out against the blue, transparent background of the night sky—“My castle is far away and I am weary,” he muttered. “I will await the day in this village-hut near by,” and he bent his steps to the hut. He knocked at the door. “Who are you?” they demanded from within. “The Baron of Fortcastell,” he replied, and they laughed in his face. He knocked at another door. “Who are you and what do you want?” these, too, asked him. “Your liege lord,” urged the knight, surprised that they did not recognize him. “Teobaldo de Montagut.” “Teobaldo de Montagut!” angrily repeated the person within, a woman not yet old. “Teobaldo de Montagut, the count of the story! Bah! Go your way and don’t come back to rouse honest folk from their sleep to hear your stupid jests.”

III.

Teobaldo, full of astonishment, left the village and pursued his way to the castle, at whose gates he arrived when it was scarcely dawn. The moat was filled up with great blocks of stone from the ruined battlements; the raised drawbridge, now useless, was rotting as it still hung from its strong iron chains, covered with rust though they were by the wasting of the years; in the homage-tower slowly tolled a bell; in front of the principal arch of the fortress and upon a granite pedestal was raised a cross; upon the walls not a single soldier was to be discerned; and, indistinct and muffled, there seemed to come from its heart like a distant murmur a sacred hymn, grave, solemn and majestic.

“But this is my castle, beyond a doubt,” said Teobaldo, shifting his troubled gaze from one point to another, unable to comprehend the situation. “That is my escutcheon, still engraved above the keystone of the arch. This is the valley of Montagut. These are the lands it governs, the seigniory of Fortcastell”—

At this instant the heavy doors swung upon their hinges and a monk appeared beneath the lintel.

IV.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” demanded Teobaldo of the monk.

“I am,” he answered, “a humble servant of God, a monk of the monastery of Montagut.”

“But”—interrupted the baron. “Montagut? Is it not a seigniory?”

“It was,” replied the monk, “a long time ago. Its last lord, the story goes, was carried off by the Devil, and as he left no heir to succeed him in the fief, the Sovereign Counts granted his estate to the monks of our order, who have been here for a matter of from one hundred to one hundred and twenty years. And you—who are you?”

“I”—stammered the Baron of Fortcastell, after a long moment of silence, “I am—a miserable sinner, who, repenting of his misdeeds, comes to make confession to your abbot and beg him for admittance into the bosom of his faith.”

THE PROMISE

“Margarita, for thee love is all, and thou seest naught beyond love. Yet there is one thing as binding as our love, and that is my duty. Our lord the Count of Gômara goes forth to-morrow from his castle to join his force to the army of King Fernando, who is on his way to deliver Seville out of the power of the Infidels, and it is my duty to depart with the Count.

“An obscure orphan, without name or family, I owe to him all that I am. I have served him in the idle days of peace, I have slept beneath his roof, I have been warmed at his hearth and eaten at his board. If I forsake him now, to-morrow his men-at-arms, as they sally forth in marching array from his castle gates, will ask, wondering at my absence: ‘Where is the favorite squire of the Count of Gômara?’ And my lord will be silent for shame, and his pages and his fools will say in mocking tone: ‘The Count’s squire is only a gallant of the jousts, a warrior in the game of courtesy.’ ”

When he had spoken thus far, Margarita lifted her eyes full of tears to meet those of her lover and moved her lips as if to answer him; but her voice was choked in a sob.

Pedro, with still tenderer and more persuasive tone, went on:

“Weep not, for God’s sake, Margarita; weep not, for thy tears hurt me. I must go from thee, but I will return as soon as I shall have gained a little glory for my obscure name.

“Heaven will aid us in our holy enterprise; we shall conquer Seville, and to us conquerors the King will give fiefs along the banks of the Guadalquivir. Then I will come back for thee, and we will go together to dwell in that paradise of the Arabs, where they say the sky is clearer and more blue than the sky above Castile.

“I will come back, I swear to thee I will; I will return to keep the troth solemnly pledged thee that day when I placed on thy finger this ring, symbol of a promise.”

“Pedro!” here exclaimed Margarita, controlling her emotion and speaking in a firm, determined tone:

“Go, go to uphold thine honor,” and on pronouncing these words, she threw herself for the last time into the embrace of her lover. Then she added in a tone lower and more shaken: “Go to uphold thine honor, but come back—come back—to save mine.”

Pedro kissed the brow of Margarita, loosed his horse, that was tied to one of the trees of the grove, and rode off at a gallop through the depths of the poplar-wood.

Margarita followed Pedro with her eyes until his dim form was swallowed up in the shades of night. When he could no longer be discerned, she went back slowly to the village where her brothers were awaiting her.

“Put on thy gala dress,” one of them said to her as she entered, “for in the morning we go to Gômara with all the neighborhood to see the Count marching to Andalusia.”

“For my part, it saddens rather than gladdens me to see those go forth who perchance shall not return,” replied Margarita with a sigh.

“Yet come with us thou must,” insisted the other brother, “and thou must come with mien composed and glad; so that the gossiping folk shall have no cause to say thou hast a lover in the castle, and thy lover goeth to the war.”

II.

Hardly was the first light of dawn streaming up the sky when there began to sound throughout all the camp of Gômara the shrill trumpeting of the Count’s soldiers; and the peasants who were arriving in numerous groups from the villages round about saw the seigniorial banner flung to the winds from the highest tower of the fortress.

The peasants were everywhere,—seated on the edge of the moat, ensconced in the tops of trees, strolling over the plain, crowning the crests of the hills, forming a line far along the highway, and it must have been already for nearly an hour that their curiosity had awaited the show, not without some signs of impatience, when the ringing bugle-call sounded again, the chains of the drawbridge creaked as it fell slowly across the moat, and the portcullis was raised, while little by little, groaning upon their hinges, the massive doors of the arched passage which led to the Court of Arms swung wide.

The multitude ran to press for places on the sloping banks beside the road in order to see their fill of the brilliant armor and sumptuous trappings of the following of the Count of Gômara, famed through all the countryside for his splendor and his lavish pomp.

The march was opened by the heralds who, halting at fixed intervals, proclaimed in loud voice, to the beat of the drum, the commands of the King, summoning his feudatories to the Moorish war and requiring the villages and free towns to give passage and aid to his armies.

After the heralds followed the kings-at-arms, proud of their silken vestments, their shields bordered with gold and bright colors, and their caps decked with graceful plumes.

Then came the chief retainer of the castle armed cap-à-pie, a knight mounted on a young black horse, bearing in his hands the pennon of a grandee with his motto and device; at his left hand rode the executioner of the seigniory, clad in black and red.

The seneschal was preceded by fully a score of those famous trumpeters of Castile celebrated in the chronicles of our kings for the incredible power of their lungs.

When the shrill clamor of their mighty trumpeting ceased to wound the wind, a dull sound, steady and monotonous, began to reach the ear,—the tramp of the foot-soldiers, armed with long pikes and provided with a leather shield apiece. Behind these soon came in view the soldiers who managed the engines of war, with their crude machines and their wooden towers, the bands of wall-scalers and the rabble of stable-boys in charge of the mules.

Then, enveloped in the cloud of dust raised by the hoofs of their horses, flashing sparks from their iron breastplates, passed the men-at-arms of the castle, formed in thick platoons, looking from a distance like a forest of spears.

Last of all, preceded by the drummers who were mounted on strong mules tricked out in housings and plumes, surrounded by pages in rich raiment of silk and gold and followed by the squires of the castle, appeared the Count.

As the multitude caught sight of him, a great shout of greeting went up and in the tumult of acclamation was stifled the cry of a woman, who at that moment, as if struck by a thunderbolt, fell fainting into the arms of those who sprang to her aid. It was Margarita, Margarita who had recognized her mysterious lover in that great and dreadful lord, the Count of Gômara, one of the most exalted and powerful feudatories of the Crown of Castile.

III.

The host of Don Fernando, after going forth from Cordova, had marched to Seville, not without having to fight its way at Écija, Carmona, and Alcalá del Rio del Guadaira, whose famous castle, once taken by storm, put the army in sight of the stronghold of the Infidels.

The Count of Gômara was in his tent seated on a bench of larchwood, motionless, pale, terrible, his hands crossed upon the hilt of his broadsword, his eyes fixed on space with that vague regard which appears to behold a definite object and yet takes cognizance of naught in the encompassing scene.

Standing by his side, the squire who had been longest in the castle, the only one who in those moods of black despondency could have ventured to intrude without drawing down upon his head an explosion of wrath, was speaking to him. “What is your ail, my lord?” he was saying. “What trouble wears and wastes you? Sad you go to battle, and sad return, even though returning victorious. When all the warriors sleep, surrendered to the weariness of the day, I hear your anguished sighs; and if I run to your bed, I see you struggling there against some invisible torment. You open your eyes, but your terror does not vanish. What is it, my lord? Tell me. If it be a secret, I will guard it in the depths of my memory as in a grave.”

The Count seemed not to hear his squire, but after a long pause, as if the words had taken all that time to make slow way from his ears to his understanding, he emerged little by little from his trance and, drawing the squire affectionately toward him, said to him with grave and quiet tone:

“I have suffered much in silence. Believing myself the sport of a vain fantasy, I have until now held my peace for shame,—but nay, what is happening to me is no illusion.

“It must be that I am under the power of some awful curse. Heaven or hell must wish something of me, and tell me so by supernatural events. Recallest thou the day of our encounter with the Moors of Nebriza in the Aljarafe de Triana? We were few, the combat was stern, and I was face to face with death. Thou sawest, in the most critical moment of the fight, my horse, wounded and blind with rage, dash toward the main body of the Moorish host. I strove in vain to check him; the reins had escaped from my hands, and the fiery animal galloped on, bearing me to certain death.

“Already the Moors, closing up their ranks, were grounding their long pikes to receive me on the points; a cloud of arrows hissed about my ears; the horse was but a few bounds from the serried spears on which we were about to fling

ourselves, when—believe me, it was not an illusion—I saw a hand that, grasping the bridle, stopped him with an unearthly force and, turning him in the direction of my own troops, saved me by a miracle.

“In vain I asked of one and another who my deliverer was; no one knew him, no one had seen him.

“ ‘When you were rushing to throw yourself upon the wall of pikes,’ they said, ‘you went alone, absolutely alone; this is why we marvelled to see you turn, knowing that the steed no longer obeyed his rider.’

“That night I entered my tent distraught; I strove in vain to extirpate from my imagination the memory of the strange adventure; but on advancing toward my bed, again I saw the same hand, a beautiful hand, white to the point of pallor, which drew the curtains, vanishing after it had drawn them. Ever since, at all hours, in all places, I see that mysterious hand which anticipates my desires and forestalls my actions. I saw it, when we were storming the castle of Triana, catch between its fingers and break in the air an arrow which was about to strike me; I have seen it at banquets where I was trying to drown my trouble in the tumultuous revelry, pour the wine into my cup; and always it flickers before my eyes, and wherever I go it follows me; in the tent, in the battle, by day, by night,—even now, see it, see it here, resting gently on my shoulder!”

On speaking these last words, the Count sprang to his feet, striding back and forth as if beside himself, overwhelmed by utter terror.

The squire dashed away a tear. Believing his lord mad, he did not try to combat his ideas, but confined himself to saying in a voice of deep emotion:

“Come; let us go out from the tent a moment; perhaps the evening air will cool your temples, calming this incomprehensible grief, for which I find no words of consolation.”

IV.

The camp of the Christians extended over all the plain of Guadaira, even to the left bank of the Guadalquivir. In front of the camp and clearly defined against the bright horizon, rose the walls of Seville flanked by massive, menacing towers. Above the crown of battlements showed in its rich profusion the green leafage of the thousand gardens enclosed in the Moorish stronghold, and amid the dim clusters of foliage gleamed the observation turrets, white as snow, the minarets of the mosques, and the gigantic watch-tower, over whose aerial parapet the four great balls of gold, which from the Christian camp looked like four flames, threw out, when smitten by the sun, sparks of living light.

The enterprise of Don Fernando, one of the most heroic and intrepid of that epoch, had drawn to his banners the greatest warriors of the various kingdoms in the Peninsula, with others who, called by fame, had come from foreign, far-off lands to add their forces to those of the Royal Saint. Stretching along the plain might be seen, therefore, army-tents of all forms and colors, above whose peaks waved in the wind the various ensigns with their quartered escutcheons,—stars, griffins, lions, chains, bars and caldrons, with hundreds of other heraldic figures or symbols which proclaimed the name and quality of their owners. Through the streets of that improvised city were circulating in all directions a multitude of soldiers who, speaking diverse dialects, dressed each in the fashion of his own locality and armed according to his fancy, formed a scene of strange and picturesque contrasts.

Here a group of nobles were resting from the fatigues of combat, seated on benches of larchwood at the door of their tents and playing at chess, while their pages poured them wine in metal cups; there some foot-soldiers were taking advantage of a moment of leisure to clean and mend their armor, the worse for their last skirmish; further on, the most expert archers of the army were covering the mark with arrows, amidst the applause of the crowd marvelling at their dexterity; and the beating of the drums, the shrilling of the trumpets, the cries of pedlars hawking their wares, the clang of iron striking on iron, the ballad-singing of the minstrels who entertained their hearers with the relation of prodigious exploits, and the shouts of the heralds who published the orders of the camp-masters, all these, filling the air with thousands of discordant noises, contributed to that picture of soldier life a vivacity and animation impossible to portray in words.

The Count of Gômara, attended by his faithful squire, passed among the lively groups without raising his eyes from the ground, silent, sad, as if not a sight disturbed his gaze nor the least sound reached his hearing. He moved mechanically, as a sleepwalker, whose spirit is busy in the world of dreams, steps and takes his course without consciousness of his actions, as if impelled by a will not his own.

Close by the royal tent and in the middle of a ring of soldiers, little pages and camp-servants, who were listening to him open-mouthed, making haste to buy some of the tawdry knickknacks which he was enumerating in a loud voice, with extravagant praises, was an odd personage, half pilgrim, half minstrel, who, at one moment reciting a kind of litany in barbarous Latin, and the next giving vent to some buffoonery or scurrility, was mingling in his interminable tale devout prayers with jests broad enough to make a common soldier blush, romances of illicit love with legends of saints. In the huge pack that hung from his shoulders were a thousand different objects all tossed and tumbled together,—ribbons touched to the sepulchre of Santiago, scrolls with words which he averred were Hebrew, the very same that King Solomon spoke when he founded the temple, and the only words able to keep you free of every contagious disease; marvellous balsams capable of sticking together men who were cut in two; secret charms to make all women in love with you; Gospels sewed into little silk bags; relics of the patron saints of all the towns in Spain; tinsel jewels, chains, sword-belts, medals and many other gewgaws of brass, glass and lead.

When the Count approached the group formed by the pilgrim and his admirers, the fellow began to tune a kind of mandolin or Arab guitar with which he accompanied himself in the singsong recital of his romances. When he had thoroughly tested the strings, one after another, very coolly, while his companion made the round of the circle coaxing out the last coppers from the flaccid pouches of the audience, the pilgrim began to sing in nasal voice, to a monotonous and plaintive air, a ballad whose stanzas always ended in the same refrain.

The Count drew near the group and gave attention. By an apparently strange coincidence, the title of this tale was entirely at one with the melancholy thoughts that burdened his mind. As the singer had announced before beginning, the lay was called the Ballad of the Dead Hand.

The squire, on hearing so strange an announcement, had striven to draw his lord away; but the Count, with his eyes fixed on the minstrel, remained motionless, listening to this song.

Hardly had the singer finished the last stanza, when, breaking through the wall of eager listeners who respectfully gave way on recognizing him, the Count fronted the pilgrim and, clutching his arm, demanded in a low, convulsive voice:

“From what part of Spain art thou?”

“From Soria,” was the unmoved response.

“And where hast thou learned this ballad? Who is that maiden of whom the story tells?” again exclaimed the Count, with ever more profound emotion.

“My lord,” said the pilgrim, fixing his eyes upon the Count with imperturbable steadiness, “this ballad is passed from mouth to mouth among the peasants in the fief of Gômara, and it refers to an unhappy village-girl cruelly wronged by a great lord. The high justice of God has permitted that, in her burial, there shall still remain above the earth the hand on which her lover placed a ring in plighting her his troth. Perchance you know whom it behooves to keep that pledge.”

V.

In a wretched village which may be found at one side of the highway leading to Gômara, I saw not long since the spot where the strange ceremony of the Count’s marriage is said to have taken place.

After he, kneeling upon the humble grave, had pressed the hand of Margarita in his own, and a priest, authorized by the Pope, had blessed the mournful union, the story goes that the miracle ceased, and the dead hand buried itself forever.

At the foot of some great old trees there is a bit of meadow which, every spring, covers itself spontaneously with flowers.

The country-folk say that this is the burial place of Margarita.

THE KISS

The force was commanded by a youthful officer, riding about thirty paces in advance of his troop and talking in low tones with a man on foot, who, so far as might be inferred from his dress, was also a soldier. Walking in front of his interlocutor, with a small lantern in hand, he seemed to be serving as guide through that labyrinth of obscure, twisted and intertangled streets.

“In sooth,” said the trooper to his companion, “if the lodging prepared for us is even such as you picture it, perhaps it would be better to camp out in the country or in one of the public squares.”

“But what would you, my captain?” answered the guide, who was, in fact, a sergeant sent on before to make ready for their reception. “In the palace there is not room for another grain of wheat, much less for a man; of San Juan de los Reyes there is no use in talking, for there it has reached such a point that in one of the friars’ cells are sleeping fifteen hussars. The monastery to which I am taking you was not so bad, but some three or four days ago there fell upon us, as if out of the clouds, one of the flying columns that scour the province, and we are lucky to have prevailed on them to heap themselves up along the cloisters and leave the church free for us.”

“Ah, well!” exclaimed the officer, after a brief silence, with an air of resigning himself to the strange quarters which chance had apportioned him, “an ill lodging is better than none. At all events, in case of rain,—not unlikely, judging from the massing of the clouds,—we shall be under cover, and that is something.”

With this the conversation was broken off, and the troopers, preceded by the guide, took the onward way in silence until they came to one of the smaller squares, on the further side of which stood out the black silhouette of the monastery with its Moorish minaret, spired bell-tower, ogive cupola and dark, uneven roof.

“Here is your lodging!” exclaimed the sergeant at sight of it, addressing the captain, who, after commanding his troop to halt, dismounted, caught the lantern from the hands of the guide, and took his way toward the building designated.

Since the church of the monastery was thoroughly dismantled, the soldiers who occupied the other parts of the

building had thought that the doors were now a trifle less than useless and, piece by piece, had wrenched off one to-day, another to-morrow, to make bonfires for warming themselves by night.

Our young officer, therefore, did not have to delay for turning of keys or drawing of bolts before penetrating into the heart of the sanctuary.

By the light of the lantern, whose doubtful ray, lost in the heavy glooms of nave and aisles, threw in giant proportions upon the wall the fantastic shadow of the sergeant going on before, he traversed the length and breadth of the church and peered into the deserted chapels, one by one, until he had made himself thoroughly acquainted with the place, when he ordered his troop to dismount, and set about the bestowing of that confused crowd of men and horses as best he could.

As we have said, the church was completely dismantled; before the High Altar were still hanging from the lofty cornices torn shreds of the veil with which the monks had covered it on abandoning that holy place; at intervals along the aisles might be seen shrines fastened against the wall, their niches bereft of images; in the choir a line of light traced the strange contour of the shadowy larchwood stalls; upon the pavement, destroyed at various points, might still be distinguished broad burial slabs filled with heraldic devices, shields and long Gothic inscriptions; and far away, in the depths of the silent chapels and along the transepts, were vaguely visible in the dimness, like motionless white spectres, marble statues which, some extended at full length and others kneeling on their stony tombs, appeared to be the only tenants of that ruined structure.

For anyone less spent than the captain of dragoons, who carried in his body the fatigues of a ride of fourteen leagues, or less accustomed to seeing these sacrileges as the most natural thing in the world, two drams of imagination would have sufficed to keep eyes from closing the whole night long in that dusky, awesome haunt, where the oaths of the soldiers, who were loudly complaining of their improvised barracks, the metallic clink of their spurs striking rudely against the once sepulchral slabs of the pavement, the clatter of the horses as they pawed impatiently, tossing their heads and rattling the chains which bound them to the pillars, formed a strange and fearful confusion of sounds that reverberated through the reaches of the church and was repeated, ever more weirdly, from echo to echo among the lofty vaults.

But our hero, young though he was, had already become so familiar with those shiftings of the scene in a soldier’s life, that scarcely had he assigned places to his men than he ordered a sack of fodder flung down at the foot of the chancel steps, and rolling himself as snugly as possible into his cloak, resting his head upon the lowest stair, in five minutes was snoring with more tranquillity than King Joseph himself in his palace at Madrid.

The soldiers, making pillows of the saddles, followed his example, and little by little the murmur of their voices died away.

Half an hour later, nothing was to be heard save the stifled groans of the wind which entered by the broken ogive windows of the church, the skurrying flights of night-birds whose nests were built in the stone canopies above the sculptured figures of the walls, and the tramp, now near, now far, of the sentry who was pacing up and down the portico, wound in the wide folds of his military cloak.

II.

In the epoch to which the account of this incident, no less true than strange, reverts, the city of Toledo, for those who knew not how to value the treasures of art which its walls enclose, was, even as now, no more than a great huddle of houses, old-fashioned, ruinous, insufferable.

The officers of the French army who, to judge from the acts of vandalism by which they left in Toledo a sad and enduring memory of their occupation, counted few artists and archæologists in their number, found themselves, as goes without the saying, supremely bored in the ancient city of the Cæsars.

In this frame of mind, the most trifling event which came to break the monotonous calm of those eternal, unvarying days was eagerly caught up among the idlers, so that the promotion of one of their comrades to the next grade, a report of the strategic movement of a flying column, the departure of an official post or the arrival at the city of any military force whatsoever, became a fertile theme of conversation and object of every sort of comment, until something else occurred to take its place and serve as foundation for new grumblings, criticisms and conjectures.

As was to be expected, among those officers who, according to their custom, gathered on the following day to take the air and chat a little in the Zocodover, the dish of gossip was supplied by nothing else than the arrival of the dragoons, whose leader was left in the former chapter stretched out at his ease, sleeping off the fatigues of the march. For upwards of an hour the conversation had been beating about this event, and already various explanations had been put forward to account for the non-appearance of the new-comer, whom an officer present, a former schoolmate, had invited to the Zocodover, when at last, in one of the side-streets that radiate from the square, appeared our gallant captain, no longer obscured by his voluminous army-cloak, but sporting a great shining helmet with a plume of white feathers, a turquoise-blue coat with scarlet facings, and a magnificent two-handed sword in a steel scabbard which clanked as it struck the ground in time to his martial stride and to the keener, sharper clink of his golden spurs.

As soon as his former chum caught sight of him, off he went to meet him and bid him welcome, followed by almost all the officers who chanced to be in the group that morning and who had been stirred to curiosity and a desire to know him by what they had already heard of his original, extraordinary traits of character.

After the customary close embraces, and the exclamations, compliments and questions enjoined by etiquette in meetings like this; after discussing at length and in detail the latest news from Madrid, the changing fortune of the war, and old friends dead or far away, the conversation, flitting from one subject to another, came to roost at last on the inevitable theme, to wit, the hardships of the service, the dearth of amusements in the city, and the inconveniences of their lodgings.

Now at this juncture one of the company, who, it would seem, had heard of the ill grace with which the young officer had resigned himself to quartering his troop in the abandoned church, said to him with an air of raillery:

“And speaking of lodgings, what sort of a night did you have in yours?”

“We lacked for nothing,” answered the captain, “and if it is the truth that I slept but little, the cause of my insomnia is well worth the pains of wakefulness. A vigil in the society of a charming woman is surely not the worst of evils.”

“A woman!” repeated his interlocutor, as if wondering at the good fortune of the new arrival. “This is what they call ending the pilgrimage and kissing the saint.”

“Perhaps it is some old flame of the Capital who follows him to Madrid to make his exile more endurable,” added another of the circle.

“Oh, no!” exclaimed the captain, “nothing of the sort. I swear to you, on the word of a gentleman, I had never seen her before, nor had I dreamed of finding so gracious a hostess in so bad a hostelry. It is altogether what one might call a genuine adventure.”

“Tell it! tell it!” chorused the officers who surrounded the captain, and as he proceeded so to do, all lent the most eager attention, while he began his story thus:

“I was sleeping last night the sleep of a man who carries in his body the effects of a thirteen-league ride, when, look you, in the best of my slumber I was startled wide-awake,—springing up and leaning on my elbows,—by a horrible uproar, such an uproar that it deafened me for an instant and left my ears, a full minute after, humming as if a horse-fly were singing on my cheek.

“As you will have guessed, the cause of my alarm was the first stroke which I heard of that diabolical campana gorda, a sort of bronze chorister, which the canons of Toledo have placed in their cathedral for the praiseworthy object of killing the weary with wrath.

“Cursing between my teeth both bell and bell-ringer, I disposed myself, as soon as that strange and frightful noise had ceased, to take up anew the thread of my broken dream, when there befell, to pique my imagination and challenge my senses, a thing of wonder. By the uncertain moonlight which entered the church through the narrow Moorish window of the chancel wall, I saw a woman kneeling at the altar.”

The officers exchanged glances of mingled astonishment and incredulity; the captain, without heeding the impression his narrative was making, continued as follows:

“It could not enter into man’s heart to conceive that nocturnal, phantasmal vision, vaguely outlined in the twilight of the chapel, like those virgins painted in colored glass that you have sometimes seen, from afar off, stand out, white and luminous, across the shadowy stretch of the cathedrals.

“Her oval face, on which one saw stamped the seal, delicate and spiritual, of emaciation, her harmonious features full of a gentle, melancholy sweetness, her intense pallor, the perfect lines of her slender figure, her reposeful, noble posture, her robe of flowing white, brought to my memory the women of whom I used to dream when I was still little more than a child. Chaste, celestial images, illusive objects of the wandering love of youth!

“I believed myself the sport of an hallucination and not withdrawing my eyes from her for an instant, I scarcely dared breathe, fearing that a breath might dissolve the enchantment.

“She remained motionless.

“The fancy crossed my mind, on seeing her so shining, so transparent, that this was no creature of the earth, but a spirit, that, once more assuming for an instant the veil of human form, had descended in the moonbeam, leaving in the air behind it the azure track which slanted from the high window to the foot of the opposite wall, breaking the deep gloom of that dusky, mysterious recess.”

“But—” interrupted his former schoolmate, who, inclined at the outset to make fun of the story, had at last grown closely attentive—“how came that woman there? Did you not speak to her? Did she not explain to you her presence in that place?”

“I decided not to address her, because I was sure that she would not answer me, nor see me, nor hear me.”

“Was she deaf?”

“Was she blind?”

“Was she dumb?” exclaimed simultaneously three or four of those who were listening to the story.

“She was all at once,” finally declared the captain after a moment’s pause, “for she was—— marble.”

On hearing this remarkable dénouement of so strange an adventure, the bystanders burst into a noisy peal of laughter, while one of them said to the narrator of this curious experience, who alone remained quiet and of grave deportment:

“We will make a complete thing of it. As for this sort of ladies, I have more than a thousand, a regular seraglio, in San Juan de los Reyes, a seraglio which from this time on I put quite at your service, since, it would seem, a woman of stone is the same to you as a woman of flesh.”

“Oh, no!” responded the captain, not nettled in the slightest by the laughter of his companions. “I am sure that they cannot be like mine. Mine is a true Castilian dame of high degree, who by a miracle of sculpture appears not to have been buried in a sepulchre, but still, body and soul, to kneel upon the lid of her own tomb, motionless, with hands joined in attitude of prayer, drowned in an ecstasy of mystic love.”

“You are so plausible that you will end by making us believe in the fable of Galatea.”

“For my part, I admit that I had always supposed it nonsense, but since last night I begin to comprehend the passion of the Greek sculptor.”

“Considering the peculiar circumstances of your new lady, I presume you would have no objection to presenting us. As for me, I vow that already I am dead with longing to behold this paragon. But—what the devil!—one would say that you do not wish to introduce us. Ha, ha, ha! It would be a joke indeed if we should find you jealous.”

“Jealous!” the captain hastened to reply. “Jealous—of men, no; but yet see to what lengths my madness reaches. Close beside the image of this woman is a warrior, also of marble, an august figure, as lifelike as herself,—her husband, without doubt. Well, then! I am going to make a clean breast of it, jeer at my folly as you may,—if I had not feared being taken for a lunatic, I believe I should have broken him to pieces a hundred times over.”

A fresh and yet more riotous outburst of laughter from the officers greeted this original revelation on the part of the eccentric lover of the marble lady.

“We will take no refusal. We must see her,” cried some.

“Yes, yes, we must know if the object of such devotion is as unique as the passion itself,” added others.

“When shall we come together to take a drink in the church where you lodge?” demanded the rest.

“Whenever you please; this very evening, if you like,” replied the young captain, regaining his usual debonair expression, dispelled for an instant by that flash of jealousy. “By the way, along with the baggage I have brought as many as two dozen bottles of champagne, genuine champagne, what was left over from a present given to our brigadier-general, who, as you know, is a distant relative of mine.”

“Bravo! Bravo!” shouted the officers with one voice, breaking into gleeful exclamations.

“We will drink the wine of our native land!”

“And we will sing one of Ronsard’s songs!”

“And we will talk of women, apropos of the lady of our host.”

“And so—good-bye till evening!”

“Till evening!”

III.

It was now a good hour since the peaceful inhabitants of Toledo had secured with key and bolt the massive doors of their ancient mansions; the campana gorda of the cathedral was ringing curfew, and from the summit of the palace, now converted into barracks, was sounding the last bugle-call for silence, when ten or twelve officers, who had been gradually assembling in the Zocodover, took the road leading thence to the monastery where the captain was lodged, impelled more by hope of draining the promised bottles than by eagerness to make acquaintance with the marvellous piece of sculpture.

The night had shut down dark and threatening; the sky was covered with leaden clouds; the wind, whistling along the imprisoning channels of the narrow, tortuous streets, was shaking the dying flames of the shielded lamps before the shrines, or making the iron weather-vanes of the towers whirl about with a shrill creaking.

Scarcely had the officers caught sight of the square where stood the monastery which served as quarters for their new friend, than he, who was impatiently looking out for their arrival, sallied forth to meet them, and after the exchange of a few low-toned sentences, all together entered the church, within whose dim enclosure the faint gleam of a lantern was struggling at hopeless odds with the black and heavy shadows.

“ ‘Pon my honor!” exclaimed one of the guests, peering about him. “If this isn’t the last place in the world for a revel!”

“True enough!” said another. “You bring us here to meet a lady, and scarcely can a man see his hand before his face.”

“And worst of all, it’s so icy cold that we might as well be in Siberia,” added a third, hugging the folds of his cloak about him.

“Patience, gentlemen, patience!” interposed the host. “A little patience will set all to rights. Here, my lad!” he continued, addressing one of his men. “Hunt us up a bit of fuel and kindle a rousing bonfire in the chancel.”

The orderly, obeying his captain’s directions, commenced to rain swinging blows on the carven stalls of the choir, and after he had thus collected a goodly supply of wood, which was heaped up at the foot of the chancel steps, he took the lantern and proceeded to make an auto de fe of those fragments carved in richest designs. Among them might be seen here a portion of a spiral column, there the effigy of a holy abbot, the torso of a woman, or the misshapen head of a griffin peeping through foliage.

In a few minutes, a great light which suddenly streamed out through all the compass of the church announced to the officers that the hour for the carousal had arrived.

The captain, who did the honors of his lodging with the same punctiliousness which he would have observed in his own house, turned to his guests and said:

“We will, if you please, pass to the refreshment room.”

His comrades, affecting the utmost gravity, responded to the invitation with absurdly profound bows and took their way to the chancel preceded by the lord of the revel, who, on reaching the stone steps, paused an instant, and extending his hand in the direction of the tomb, said to them with the most exquisite courtesy:

“I have the pleasure of presenting you to the lady of my dreams. I am sure you will grant that I have not exaggerated her beauty.”

The officers turned their eyes toward the point which their friend designated, and exclamations of astonishment broke involuntarily from the lips of all.

In the depths of a sepulchral arch lined with black marbles, they saw, in fact, kneeling before a prayer-stool, with folded palms and face turned toward the altar, the image of a woman so beautiful that never did her equal come from sculptor’s hands, nor could desire paint her in imagination more supremely lovely.

“In truth, an angel!” murmured one.

“A pity that she is marble!” added another.

“Well might—illusion though it be—the neighborhood of such a woman suffice to keep one from closing eye the whole night through.”

“And you do not know who she is?” others of the group, contemplating the statue, asked of the captain, who stood smiling, satisfied with his triumph.

“Recalling a little of the Latin which I learned in my boyhood, I have been able, at no small pains, to decipher the inscription on the stone,” he answered, “and by what I have managed to make out, it is the tomb of a Castilian noble, a famous warrior who fought under the Great Captain. His name I have forgotten, but his wife, on whom you look, is called Doña Elvira de Castañeda, and by my hopes of salvation, if the copy resembles the original, this should be the most notable woman of her time.”

After these brief explanations, the guests, who did not lose sight of the principal object of the gathering, proceeded to uncork some of the bottles and, seating themselves around the bonfire, began to pass the wine from hand to hand.

In proportion as their libations became more copious and frequent, and the fumes of the foaming champagne commenced to cloud their brains, the animation, the uproar and the merriment of the young Frenchmen rose to such a pitch that some of them threw the broken necks of the empty bottles at the granite monks carved against the pillars, and others trolled at the tops of their voices scandalous drinking-songs, while the rest burst into roars of laughter, clapped their hands in applause or quarrelled among themselves with angry words and oaths.

The captain sat drinking in silence, like a man distraught, without moving his eyes from the statue of Doña Elvira.

Illumed by the ruddy splendor of the bonfire, and seen across the misty veil which wine had drawn before his vision, the marble image sometimes seemed to him to be changing into an actual woman; it seemed to him that her lips parted, as if murmuring a prayer, that her breast heaved as if with stifled sobs, that her palms were pressed together with more energy, and finally, that rosy color crept into her cheeks, as if she were blushing before that sacrilegious and repugnant scene.

The officers, noting the gloomy silence of their comrade, roused him from the trance into which he had fallen, and thrusting a cup into his hands, exclaimed in noisy chorus:

“Come, give us a toast, you, the only man that has failed of it to-night!”

The young host took the cup, rose and, lifting it on high, turned to face the statue of the warrior kneeling beside Doña Elvira and said:

“I drink to the Emperor, and I drink to the success of his arms, thanks to which we have been able to penetrate even to the heart of Castile and to court, at his own tomb, the wife of a conqueror of Cerñiola.”

The officers drank the toast with a storm of applause, and the captain, keeping his balance with some difficulty, took a few steps toward the sepulchre.

“No,” he continued, always addressing, with the stupid smile of intoxication, the statue of the warrior. “Don’t suppose that I have a grudge against you for being my rival. On the contrary, old lad, I admire you for a patient husband, an example of meekness and long suffering, and, for my part, I wish to be generous, too. You should be a tippler, since you are a soldier, and it shall not be said that I left you to die of thirst in the sight of twenty empty bottles. Drink!”

And with these words he raised the cup to his lips and, after wetting them with the liquor which it contained, flung the rest into the marble face, bursting into a boisterous peal of laughter to see how the wine splashed down over the tomb from the carven beard of the motionless warrior.

“Captain,” exclaimed at that point one of his comrades in a tone of raillery, “take heed what you do. Bear in mind that these jests with the stone people are apt to cost dear. Remember what happened to the Fifth Hussars in the monastery of Poblet. The story goes that the warriors of the cloister laid hand to their granite swords one night and gave plenty of occupation to those merry fellows who had amused themselves by adorning them with charcoal mustaches.”

The young revellers received this report with roars of laughter, but the captain, heedless of their mirth, continued, his mind fixed ever on the same idea.

“Do you think that I would have given him the wine, had I not known that he would swallow at least as much as fell upon his mouth? Oh, no! I do not believe like you that these statues are mere blocks of marble as inert to-day as when hewed from the quarry. Undoubtedly the artist, who is always a god, gives to his work a breath of life which is not powerful enough to make the figure move and walk, but which inspires it with a strange, incomprehensible life, a life which I do not fully explain to myself, but which I feel, especially when I am a little drunk.”

“Magnificent!” exclaimed his comrades. “Drink and continue!”

The officer drank and, fixing his eyes upon the image of Doña Elvira, went on with mounting excitement:

“Look at her! Look at her! Do you not note those changing flushes of her soft, transparent flesh? Does it not seem that beneath this delicate alabaster skin, azure-veined and tender, circulates a fluid of rose-colored light? Would you wish more life, more reality?”

“Oh, but yes, by all means,” said one of those who was listening. “We would have her of flesh and bone.”

“Flesh and bone! Misery and corruption!” exclaimed the captain. “I have felt in the course of an orgy my lips burn, and my head. I have felt that fire which runs boiling through the veins like the lava of a volcano, that fire whose dim vapors trouble and confuse the brain and conjure up strange visions. Then the kiss of these material women burned me like a red-hot iron, and I thrust them from me with displeasure, with horror and with loathing; for then, as now, I needed for my fevered forehead a breath of the sea-breeze, to drink ice and to kiss snow, snow tinted by mellow light, snow illumined by a golden ray of sunshine,—a woman white, beautiful and cold, like this woman of stone who seems to allure me with her ethereal grace, to sway like a flame—who challenges me with parted lips, offering me a wealth of love. Oh, yes, a kiss! Only a kiss of thine can calm the fire which is consuming me.”

“Captain!” exclaimed some of the officers, on seeing him start toward the statue as if beside himself, his gaze wild and his steps reeling. “What mad foolery would you commit? Enough of jesting! Leave the dead in peace.”

The young host did not even hear the warnings of his friends; staggering, groping his way, he reached the tomb and approached the statue of Doña Elvira, but as he stretched out his arms to clasp it, a cry of horror resounded through the temple. With blood gushing from eyes, mouth and nostrils, he had fallen prone, his face crushed in, at the foot of the sepulchre.

The officers, hushed and terrified, dared not take one step forward to his aid.

At the moment when their comrade strove to touch his burning lips to those of Doña Elvira, they had seen the marble warrior lift its hand and, with a frightful blow of the stone gauntlet, strike him down.