Romantic legends of Spain

“I do not know how it may be in your part of the country,” replied the beauty, “but in mine to accept a gift is to incur an obligation. Only on a holy day may one receive a present from a kinsman, – though he may go to Rome without returning empty-handed.”

The frigid tone in which Beatriz spoke these words troubled the youth for a moment, but, clearing his brow, he replied sadly:

“I know it, cousin, but to-day is the festival of All Saints, and yours among them, – a holiday on which gifts are fitting. Will you accept mine?”

Beatriz slightly bit her lip and put out her hand for the jewel, without a word.

The two again fell silent and again heard the quavering voices of the old women telling of witches and hobgoblins, the whistling wind which shook the ogive windows, and the mournful, monotonous tolling of the bells.

After the lapse of some little time, the interrupted dialogue was thus renewed:

“And before All Saints’ Day ends, which is holy to my saint as well as to yours, so that you can, without compromising yourself, give me a keepsake, will you not do so?” pleaded Alonso, fixing his eyes on his cousin’s, which flashed like lightning, gleaming with a diabolical thought.

“Why not?” she exclaimed, raising her hand to her right shoulder as though seeking for something amid the folds of her wide velvet sleeve embroidered with gold. Then, with an innocent air of disappointment, she added:

“Do you recollect the blue scarf I wore to-day to the hunt, – the scarf which you said, because of something about the meaning of its color, was the emblem of your soul?”

“Yes.”

“Well! it is lost! it is lost, and I was thinking of letting you have it for a souvenir.”

“Lost! where?” asked Alonso, rising from his seat with an indescribable expression of mingled fear and hope.

“I do not know, – perhaps on the mountain.”

“On the Spirits’ Mountain!” he murmured, paling and sinking back into his seat. “On the Spirits’ Mountain!”

Then he went on in a voice choked and broken:

“You know, for you have heard it a thousand times, that I am called in the city, in all Castile, the king of the hunters. Not having yet had a chance to try, like my ancestors, my strength in battle, I have brought to bear on this pastime, the image of war, all the energy of my youth, all the hereditary ardor of my race. The rugs your feet tread on are the spoils of the chase, the hides of the wild beasts I have killed with my own hand. I know their haunts and their habits; I have fought them by day and by night, on foot and on horseback, alone and with hunting-parties, and there is not a man will say that he has ever seen me shrink from danger. On any other night I would fly for that scarf, – fly as joyously as to a festival; but to-night, this one night – why disguise it? – I am afraid. Do you hear? The bells are tolling, the Angelus has sounded in San Juan del Duero, the ghosts of the mountain are now beginning to lift their yellowing skulls from amid the brambles that cover their graves – the ghosts! the mere sight of them is enough to curdle with horror the blood of the bravest, turn his hair white, or sweep him away in the stormy whirl of their fantastic chase as a leaf, unwitting whither, is carried by the wind.”

While the young man was speaking, an almost imperceptible smile curled the lips of Beatriz, who, when he had ceased, exclaimed in an indifferent tone, while she was stirring the fire on the hearth, where the wood blazed and snapped, throwing off sparks of a thousand colors:

“Oh, by no means! What folly! To go to the mountain at this hour for such a trifle! On so dark a night, too, with ghosts abroad, and the road beset by wolves!”

As she spoke this closing phrase, she emphasized it with so peculiar an intonation that Alonso could not fail to understand all her bitter irony. As moved by a spring, he leapt to his feet, passed his hand over his brow as if to dispel the fear which was in his brain, not in his breast, and with firm voice he said, addressing his beautiful cousin, who was still leaning over the hearth, amusing herself by stirring the fire:

“Farewell, Beatriz, farewell. If I return, it will be soon.”

“Alonso, Alonso!” she called, turning quickly, but now that she wished – or made show of wishing – to detain him, the youth had gone.

In a few moments she heard the beat of a horse’s hoofs departing at a gallop. The beauty, with a radiant expression of satisfied pride flushing her cheeks, listened attentively to the sound which grew fainter and fainter until it died away.

The old dames, meanwhile, were continuing their tales of ghostly apparitions; the wind was shrilling against the balcony glass, and far away the bells of the city tolled on.

III

An hour had passed, two, three; midnight would soon be striking, and Beatriz withdrew to her chamber. Alonso had not returned; he had not returned, though less than an hour would have sufficed for his errand.

“He must have been afraid!” exclaimed the girl, closing her prayer-book and turning toward her bed after a vain attempt to murmur some of the prayers that the church offers for the dead on the Day of All Souls.

After putting out her light and drawing the double silken curtains, she fell asleep; but her sleep was restless, light, uneasy.

The Postigo clock struck midnight. Beatriz heard through her dreams the slow, dull, melancholy strokes, and half opened her eyes. She thought she had heard, at the same time, her name spoken, but far, far away, and in a faint, suffering voice. The wind groaned outside her window.

“It must have been the wind,” she said, and pressing her hand above her heart, she strove to calm herself. But her heart beat ever more wildly. The larchwood doors of the chamber grated on their hinges with a sharp creak, prolonged and strident.

First these doors, then the more distant ones, – all the doors which led to her room opened, one after another, some with a heavy, groaning sound, some with a long wail that set the nerves on edge. Then silence, a silence full of strange noises, the silence of midnight, with a monotonous murmur of far-off water, the distant barking of dogs, confused voices, unintelligible words, echoes of footsteps going and coming, the rustle of trailing garments, half-suppressed sighs, labored breathing almost felt upon the face, involuntary shudders that announce the presence of something not seen, though its approach is felt in the darkness.

Beatriz, stiffening with fear, yet trembling, thrust her head out from the bed-curtains and listened a moment. She heard a thousand diverse noises; she passed her hand across her brow and listened again; nothing, silence.

She saw, with that dilation of the pupils common in nervous crises, dim shapes moving hither and thither all about the room, but when she fixed her gaze on any one point, there was nothing but darkness and impenetrable shadows.

“Bah!” she exclaimed, again resting her beautiful head upon her blue satin pillow, “am I as timid as these poor kinsfolk of mine, whose hearts thump with terror under their armor when they hear a ghost-story?”

And closing her eyes she tried to sleep, – but her effort to compose herself was in vain. Soon she started up again, paler, more uneasy, more terrified. This time it was no illusion; the brocade hangings of the door had rustled as they were pushed to either side, and slow footsteps were heard upon the carpet; the sound of those footsteps was muffled, almost imperceptible, but continuous, and she heard, keeping measure with them, a creaking as of dry wood or bones. And the footfalls came nearer, nearer; the prayer-stool by the side of her bed moved. Beatriz uttered a sharp cry, and burying herself under the bedclothes, hid her head and held her breath.

The wind beat against the balcony glass; the water of the far-off fountain was falling, falling, with a monotonous, unceasing sound; the barking of the dogs was borne upon the gusts, and the church bells in the city of Soria, some near, some remote, tolled sadly for the souls of the dead.

So passed an hour, two, the night, a century, for that night seemed to Beatrix eternal. At last the day began to break; putting fear from her, she half opened her eyes to the first silver rays. How beautiful, after a night of wakefulness and terrors, is the clear white light of dawn! She parted the silken curtains of her bed and was ready to laugh at her past alarms, when suddenly a cold sweat covered her body, her eyes seemed starting from their sockets, and a deadly pallor overspread her cheeks; for on her prayer-stool she had seen, torn and blood-stained, the blue scarf she lost on the mountain, the blue scarf Alonso went to seek.

When her attendants rushed in, aghast, to tell her of the death of the heir of Alcudiel, whose body, partly devoured by wolves, had been found that morning among the brambles on the Spirits’ Mountain, they discovered her motionless, convulsed, clinging with both hands to one of the ebony bedposts, her eyes staring, her mouth open, the lips white, her limbs rigid, – dead, dead of fright!

IV

They say that, some time after this event, a hunter who, having lost his way, had been obliged to pass the Night of the Dead on the Spirits’ Mountain, and who in the morning, before he died, was able to relate what he had seen, told a tale of horror. Among other awful sights, he avowed he beheld the skeletons of the ancient Knights Templars and of the nobles of Soria, buried in the cloister of the chapel, rise at the hour of the Angelus with a horrible rattle and, mounted on their bony steeds, chase, as a wild beast, a beautiful woman, pallid, with streaming hair, who, uttering cries of terror and anguish, had been wandering, with bare and bloody feet, about the tomb of Alonso.

THE CAVE OF THE MOOR’S DAUGHTER

I

Opposite the Baths of Fitero, on a rocky, precipitous eminence, at whose base flows the river Alhama, there may be seen to this day the abandoned ruins of a Moorish castle celebrated in the glorious memories of the Reconquest as having been the theatre of great and famous exploits, as well on the part of the defenders as of those who valiantly nailed to its parapets the standard of the Cross.

Of the walls there remain only some scattered ruins; the stones of the watch-tower have fallen one above another into the moat, filling it to the top; in the court-of-arms grow briers and patches of yellow mustard; in whatever direction you look, you see only broken arches, blackened and crumbling blocks of stone; here a section of the barbican in whose fissures springs the ivy, there a round tower, standing yet, as by a miracle; further on, pillars of cement with the iron rings which supported the drawbridge.

During my stay at the Baths, partly for exercise, which I was assured would be conducive to my health, and partly from curiosity, I strolled every afternoon along the rough path that leads to the ruins of the Arab fortress. There I passed hours and hours, closely scanning the ground in the hope of discovering some fragments of armor, beating the walls to find out whether they were hollow and might be the hiding place of treasure, and investigating all the nooks and crannies with the idea of hitting upon the entrance to some of those underground cells which are believed to exist in all Moorish castles.

My diligent search was, after all, a fruitless one.

But yet, one afternoon, when I had quite despaired of discovering anything new and curious on the rocky height crowned by the castle and had given up the climb, limiting my walk to the banks of the river which flows by its foot, I saw, as I walked along by the stream, a sort of gaping hole in the living rock, half hidden by thickly-leaved bushes. Not without a little tremor, I parted the branches covering the entrance to what seemed a natural cave, but what I perceived, after advancing a few steps, was a subterranean vault narrowing to the mouth. Not being able to penetrate to the end, which was lost in darkness, I confined myself to observing attentively the peculiarities of the arch and of the pavement that appeared to me to rise in great stairs toward the height on which stood the castle I have mentioned, and in whose ruins I then remembered having seen a closed-up trap door. Doubtless I had discovered one of those secret passages so common in the fortifications of that epoch, serving for covert sallies, or for bringing, in state of siege, water from the river which flows hard by.

That I might be more sure of the truth of my inferences, after I had come out from the cave by the same way in which I had entered, I fell into conversation with a workman who was pruning some vines in that rough region and whom I accosted under pretence of asking a light for my cigarette.

We talked of various matters: the medicinal properties of the waters of Fitero; the last harvest and the next; the women of Navarre and the cultivation of vines; indeed, we talked of everything which occurred to the sociable body before we spoke of the cave, the object of my curiosity.

When, at last, the conversation had reached this point, I asked him if he knew of any one who had gone through it, and seen the other end.

“Gone through the cave of the Moor’s Daughter!” he repeated, astonished at hearing such a question. “Who would dare? Do you not know that from this cave there comes out, every night, a ghost?”

“A ghost!” I exclaimed, smiling. “Whose ghost?”

“The ghost of the daughter of a Moorish chief, she who yet wanders mourning about these places and is seen every night coming out of this cave, robed in white, and filling at the river a water-jar.”

Through this good fellow I learned that there was a tradition clinging to this Arab castle and the vault which I believed to communicate with it. And as I am a most willing hearer of all these legends, especially from the lips of the neighbor-folk, I begged him to relate it to me, and so he did, almost in the very words in which I in turn am going to relate it to my readers.

II

When the castle, of which there remain to-day only a few shapeless ruins, was still held by the Moorish kings, and its towers, not one stone now left upon another, commanded from their lofty site all that most fertile valley watered by the river Alhama, there was fought near the town of Fitero a hotly contested battle in which a famous Christian knight, as worthy of renown for his piety as for his valor, fell, wounded, into the hands of the Arabs.

Taken to the fortress and loaded with irons by his enemies, he was for some days in the depths of a dungeon struggling between life and death, until, healed as if miraculously of his wounds, he was redeemed by his kindred with a ransom of gold.

The captive returned to his home, – returned to clasp to his breast those who had given him being. His brothers-in-arms and his men-of-war were overjoyed to see him, supposing that he would sound the call to new combat, but the soul of the knight had become possessed by a deep melancholy, and neither the endearments of parental love nor the assiduities of friendship could dissipate his strange gloom.

During his imprisonment he had managed to see the daughter of the Moorish chief, rumors of whose beauty had already reached his ears. But when he beheld her, he found her so superior to the idea he had formed of her that he could not resist the fascination of her charms and fell desperately in love with one who could never be his bride.

Months and months were spent by the knight in devising the most daring, most absurd plans; now he would imagine some way of breaking the barriers that separated him from that woman; again, he would make the utmost efforts to forget her; to-day he would decide on one course of action and to-morrow he would resolve on another absolutely different. At last, one morning, he called together his brothers and companions-in-arms, summoned his men-of-war, and after having made, with the greatest secrecy, all necessary preparations, fell suddenly upon the fortress which sheltered the beautiful being who was the object of his insensate love.

On setting out on this expedition, all believed that their commander was moved only by eagerness to avenge himself for the sufferings he had endured loaded with irons in the dungeon depth, but after the fortress was taken, the true cause of that reckless enterprise, in which so many good Christians had perished to contribute to the satisfaction of an unworthy passion, was hid from none.

The knight, intoxicated with the love which he had at last succeeded in kindling in the breast of the beautiful Moorish girl, gave no heed to the counsels of his friends, and was deaf to the murmurs and complaints of his soldiers. One and all were clamoring to go out as soon as possible from those walls, upon which it was natural that the Arabs, recovered from the panic of the surprise, would fall anew.

And this, in fact, was what took place. The Moorish chief called together the Arabs from all about; and, one morning, the look-out who was stationed in the watch-tower of the keep went down to announce to the infatuated lovers that over all the mountain range which was discernible from that summit, such a cloud of warriors was descending that he was convinced all Mohammedanism was going to fall upon the castle.

The Moor’s daughter, hearing this, stood still, pale as death; the knight shouted for his arms, and everything was put in motion in the fortress. The soldiers rushed out tumultuously from their quarters; the captains began to give orders; the portcullis was lowered; the drawbridge was raised, and the battlements were manned with archers.

After some hours, the assault began.

The castle might well be called impregnable. Only by surprise, as the Christians had taken it, could it be overcome. So its defenders resisted one, two, and even ten onsets.

The Moors, seeing the uselessness of their efforts, contented themselves with closely surrounding the castle, that they might bring its defenders to capitulation through famine.

Hunger began, indeed, to make frightful ravages among the Christians, but, knowing that once the castle was surrendered, the price of the life of its defenders would be the head of their leader, no one would betray him, and the very soldiers who had reprobated his conduct swore to perish in his defence.

The Moors, waxing impatient, resolved to make a fresh assault in the middle of the night. The attack was furious; the defence, desperate; the encounter, horrible. During the combat, the Moorish chief, his forehead cleft by an axe, fell into the moat from the top of the wall to which he had succeeded in climbing by the aid of a scaling ladder. Simultaneously the knight received a mortal stroke in the breach of the barbican where men were fighting hand to hand in the darkness.

The Christians began to give way and fell back. At this point, the Moorish girl bent over her lover, who lay in deathlike swoon on the ground and, taking him in her arms, with a strength born of desperation and the sense of peril, she dragged him to the castle court. There she touched a spring and through a passage disclosed by a stone, which rose as if supernaturally moved, she disappeared with her precious burden and began to descend until she reached the bottom of the vault.

III

When the knight recovered consciousness, he cast a wandering glance about him, crying: “I thirst! I die! I burn!” And in his delirium, precursor of death, from his dry lips, through which whistled the difficult breath, came only these words of agony: “I thirst! I burn! Water! Water!”

The Moorish girl knew that there was an opening from that vault to the valley through which the river flows. The valley and all the heights which overlook it were full of Moslem soldiers, who, the fortress now surrendered, were vainly seeking everywhere the knight and his beloved to satiate on them their thirst for destruction; yet she did not hesitate an instant, but taking the helmet of the dying man, she slipped like a shadow through the thicket which covered the mouth of the cave and went down to the river bank.

Already she had dipped up the water and was rising to return to the side of her lover, when an arrow hissed and a cry resounded.

Two Arab archers who were on watch near the fortress had drawn their bows in the direction in which they heard the foliage rustle.

The Moor’s daughter, mortally wounded, yet succeeded in dragging herself to the entrance of the vault and down into its depths where she joined the knight. He, on seeing her bathed with blood and at the point of death, recovered his reason and, realizing the enormity of the sin which demanded so fearful an expiation, raised his eyes to heaven, took the water which his beloved offered him and, without lifting it to his lips, asked the Moorish girl: “Would you be a Christian? Would you die in my faith and, if I am saved, be saved with me?” The Moor’s daughter, who had fallen to the ground, faint with loss of blood, made a slight movement of her head, and upon it the knight poured the baptismal water, invoking the name of the Almighty.

The next day the soldier who had shot the arrow saw a trace of blood on the river bank and, following it, went into the cave where he found the dead bodies of the cavalier and his beloved, who, ever since, come out at night to wander through these parts.

THE GNOME

THE young girls of the village were returning from the fountain with their water-jars on their heads; they were returning with song and laughter, a merry confusion of sound comparable only to the gleeful twitter of a flock of swallows when, thick as hail, they circle around the weather-vane of a belfry.

Just in front of the church porch, seated at the foot of a juniper tree, was Uncle Gregorio. Uncle Gregorio was the patriarch of the village; he was nearly ninety years old, with white hair, smiling lips, roguish eyes and trembling hands. In childhood he had been a shepherd; in his young manhood, a soldier; then he tilled a little piece of fruitful land inherited from his parents, until at last his strength was spent and he sat tranquilly awaiting death which he neither dreaded nor longed for. Nobody retailed a bit of gossip more spicily than he, nor knew more marvellous tales, nor could bring so neatly to bear an old refrain, proverb or adage.

The girls, on seeing him, quickened their steps, eager for his talk, and when they were in the porch they all began to tease him for a story to pass away the time still left them before nightfall – not much, for the setting sun was slanting his rays across the earth, and the shadows of the mountains grew larger moment by moment all along the plain.

Uncle Gregorio smiled as he listened to the pleading of the lasses, who, having once coaxed from him a promise to tell them something, let down their water-jars upon the ground, and sitting all about him, made a circle with the patriarch in the centre; then he began to talk to them after this fashion:

“I will not tell you a story, for though several come into my mind this minute, they have to do with such weighty matters that the attention of a group of giddypates, like you, would never hold out to the end; besides, with the afternoon so nearly gone, I would not have time to tell them through. So I will give you instead a piece of good counsel.”

“Good counsel!” exclaimed the girls with undisguised vexation. “Bah! it isn’t to hear good counsel that we are stopping here; when we have need of that, his Reverence the priest will give it to us.”

“But perhaps,” went on the old man with his habitual smile, speaking in his broken, tremulous voice, “his Reverence the priest will not know how to give you, this once, such timely advice as Uncle Gregorio; for the priest, busy with his liturgies and litanies, will not have noticed, as I have noticed, that every day you go earlier to the fountain and come back later.”

The girls looked at one another with hardly perceptible smiles of derision, while some of those who were placed behind Uncle Gregorio touched finger to forehead, accompanying the action with a significant gesture.

“And what harm do you find in our lingering at the fountain to chat a minute with our friends and neighbors?” asked one of them. “Do slanders, perhaps, go about the village because the lads step out on to the road for a pleasant word or two, or come offering to carry our water-jars till we are in sight of the houses?”

“Ay, people talk,” replied the old man to the girl who had asked him the question for them all. “The old dames of the village murmur that to-day the girls resort for fun and frolic to a spot whither they used to go swiftly and in fear to draw the water, since only there can water be had; and I find it much amiss that you are losing little by little the dread which the vicinity of the fountain inspires in all your elders, – for so it might come to pass that some time the night should overtake you there.”