I will not deny that I was piqued, and perhaps the feeling strengthened

my desire to go, for I was confident that I could break down that

barrier if I desired. "There is nothing offensive in such a

stipulation," said I; "and I even sympathise with the feeling that

inspired it."

"It is true they have never seen you," returned the doctor politely;

"and if they knew you were the handsomest and the most pleasant man that

ever came from England (where I am told that handsome men are common,

but pleasant ones not so much so), they would doubtless make you welcome

with a better grace. But since you take the thing so well, it matters

not. To me, indeed, it seems discourteous. But you will find yourself

the gainer. The family will not much tempt you. A mother, a son, and a

daughter; an old woman said to be half-witted, a country lout, and a

country girl, who stands very high with her confessor, and is,

therefore," chuckled the physician, "most likely plain; there is not much

in that to attract the fancy of a dashing officer."

"And yet you say they are high-born," I objected.

"Well, as to that, I should distinguish," returned the doctor. "The

mother is; not so the children. The mother was the last representative

of a princely stock, degenerate both in parts and fortune. Her father

was not only poor, he was mad: and the girl ran wild about the

residencia till his death. Then, much of the fortune having died with

him, and the family being quite extinct, the girl ran wilder than ever,

until at last she married, Heaven knows whom, a muleteer some say,

others a smuggler; while there are some who uphold there was no marriage

at all, and that Felipe and Olalla are bastards. The union, such as it

was, was tragically dissolved some years ago; but they live in such

seclusion, and the country at that time was in so much disorder, that

the precise manner of the man's end is known only to the priest--if even

to him."

"I begin to think I shall have strange experiences," said I.

"I would not romance, if I were you," replied the doctor; "you will

find, I fear, a very grovelling and commonplace reality. Felipe, for

instance, I have seen. And what am I to say? He is very rustic, very

cunning, very loutish, and, I should say, an innocent; the others are

probably to match. No, no, senor commandante, you must seek congenial

society among the great sights of our mountains; and in these at least,

if you are at all a lover of the works of nature, I promise you will not

be disappointed."

The next day Felipe came for me in a rough country cart, drawn by a

mule; and a little before the stroke of noon, after I had said farewell

to the doctor, the innkeeper, and different good souls who had

befriended me during my sickness, we set forth out of the city by the

eastern gate, and began to ascend into the Sierra. I had been so long a

prisoner, since I was left behind for dying after the loss of the

convoy, that the mere smell of the earth set me smiling. The country

through which we went was wild and rocky, partially covered with rough

woods, now of the cork-tree, and now of the great Spanish chestnut, and

frequently intersected by the beds of mountain torrents. The sun shone,

the wind rustled joyously; and we had advanced some miles, and the city

had already shrunk into an inconsiderable knoll upon the plain behind

us, before my attention began to be diverted to the companion of my

drive. To the eye, he seemed but a diminutive, loutish, well-made

country lad, such as the doctor had described, mighty quick and active,

but devoid of any culture; and this first impression was with most

observers final. What began to strike me was his familiar, chattering

talk; so strangely inconsistent with the terms on which I was to be

received; and partly from his imperfect enunciation, partly from the

sprightly incoherence of the matter, so very difficult to follow clearly

without an effort of the mind. It is true I had before talked with

persons of a similar mental constitution; persons who seemed to live (as

he did) by the senses, taken and possessed by the visual object of the

moment and unable to discharge their minds of that impression. His

seemed to me (as I sat, distantly giving ear) a kind of conversation

proper to drivers, who pass much of their time in a great vacancy of the

intellect and threading the sights of a familiar country. But this was

not the case of Felipe; by his own account, he was a home-keeper; "I

wish I was there now," he said; and then, spying a tree by the wayside,

he broke off to tell me that he had once seen a crow among its branches.

"A crow?" I repeated, struck by the ineptitude of the remark, and

thinking I had heard imperfectly.

But by this time he was already filled with a new idea; hearkening with

a rapt intentness, his head on one side, his face puckered; and he

struck me rudely, to make me hold my peace. Then he smiled and shook his

head.

"What did you hear?" I asked.

"Oh, it is all right," he said; and began encouraging his mule with

cries that echoed unhumanly up the mountain walls.

I looked at him more closely. He was superlatively well-built, light,

and lithe and strong; he was well-featured; his yellow eyes were very

large, though, perhaps, not very expressive; take him altogether, he was

a pleasant-looking lad, and I had no fault to find with him, beyond that

he was of a dusky hue, and inclined to hairiness; two characteristics

that I disliked. It was his mind that puzzled, and yet attracted me. The

doctor's phrase--an innocent--came back to me; and I was wondering if

that were, after all, the true description, when the road began to go

down into the narrow and naked chasm of a torrent. The waters thundered

tumultuously in the bottom; and the ravine was filled full of the sound,

the thin spray, and the claps of wind, that accompanied their descent.

The scene was certainly impressive; but the road was in that part very

securely walled in; the mule went steadily forward; and I was astonished

to perceive the paleness of terror in the face of my companion. The

voice of that wild river was inconstant, now sinking lower as if in

weariness, now doubling its hoarse tones; momentary freshets seemed to

swell its volume, sweeping down the gorge, raving and booming against

the barrier walls; and I observed it was at each of these accessions to

the clamour that my driver more particularly winced and blanched. Some

thoughts of Scottish superstition and the river-kelpie passed across my

mind; I wondered if perchance the like were prevalent in that part of

Spain; and turning to Felipe, sought to draw him out.

"What is the matter?" I asked.

"Oh, I am afraid," he replied.

"Of what are you afraid?" I returned. "This seems one of the safest

places on this very dangerous road."

"It makes a noise," he said, with a simplicity of awe that set my doubts

at rest.

The lad was but a child in intellect; his mind was like his body, active

and swift, but stunted in development; and I began from that time forth

to regard him with a measure of pity, and to listen at first with

indulgence, and at last even with pleasure, to his disjointed babble.

By about four in the afternoon we had crossed the summit of the mountain

line, said farewell to the western sunshine, and began to go down upon

the other side, skirting the edge of many ravines and moving through the

shadow of dusky woods. There rose upon all sides the voice of falling

water, not condensed and formidable as in the gorge of the river, but

scattered and sounding gaily and musically from glen to glen. Here, too,

the spirits of my driver mended, and he began to sing aloud in a

falsetto voice, and with a singular bluntness of musical perception,

never true either to melody or key, but wandering at will, and yet

somehow with an effect that was natural and pleasing, like that of the

song of birds. As the dusk increased, I fell more and more under the

spell of this artless warbling, listening and waiting for some

articulate air, and still disappointed; and when at last I asked him

what it was he sang--"Oh," cried he, "I am just singing!" Above all, I

was taken with a trick he had of unweariedly repeating the same note at

little intervals; it was not so monotonous as you would think, or, at

least, not disagreeable; and it seemed to breathe a wonderful

contentment with what is, such as we love to fancy in the attitude of

trees, or the quiescence of a pool.

Night had fallen dark before we came out upon a plateau, and drew up a

little after, before a certain lump of superior blackness which I could

only conjecture to be the residencia. Here my guide, getting down from

the cart, hooted and whistled for a long time in vain; until at last an

old peasant man came towards us from somewhere in the surrounding dark,

carrying a candle in his hand. By the light of this I was able to

perceive a great arched doorway of a Moorish character: it was closed by

iron-studded gates, in one of the leaves of which Felipe opened a

wicket. The peasant carried off the cart to some out-building; but my

guide and I passed through the wicket, which was closed again behind us;

and, by the glimmer of the candle, passed through a court, up a stone

stair, along a section of an open gallery, and up more stairs again,

until we came at last to the door of a great and somewhat bare

apartment. This room, which I understood was to be mine, was pierced by

three windows, lined with some lustrous wood disposed in panels, and

carpeted with the skins of many savage animals. A bright fire burned in

the chimney, and shed abroad a changeful flicker; close up to the blaze

there was drawn a table, laid for supper; and in the far end a bed stood

ready. I was pleased by these preparations, and said so to Felipe; and

he, with the same simplicity of disposition that I had already remarked

in him, warmly re-echoed my praises. "A fine room," he said; "a very

fine room. And fire, too; fire is good; it melts out the pleasure in

your bones. And the bed," he continued, carrying over the candle in that

direction--"see what fine sheets--how soft, how smooth, smooth"; and he

passed his hand again and again over their texture, and then laid down

his head and rubbed his cheeks among them with a grossness of content

that somehow offended me. I took the candle from his hand (for I feared

he would set the bed on fire) and walked back to the supper-table,

where, perceiving a measure of wine, I poured out a cup and called to

him to come and drink of it. He started to his feet at once and ran to

me with a strong expression of hope; but when he saw the wine he visibly

shuddered.

"Oh, no," he said, "not that; that is for you. I hate it."

"Very well, Senor," said I; "then I will drink to your good health, and

to the prosperity of your house and family. Speaking of which," I added,

after I had drunk, "shall I not have the pleasure of laying my

salutations in person at the feet of the Senora, your mother?"

But at these words all the childishness passed out of his face, and was

succeeded by a look of indescribable cunning and secrecy. He backed away

from me at the same time, as though I were an animal about to leap or

some dangerous fellow with a weapon, and when he had got near the door,

glowered at me sullenly with contracted pupils. "No," he said at last,

and the next moment was gone noiselessly out of the room; and I heard

his footing die away downstairs as light as rainfall, and silence closed

over the house.

After I had supped I drew up the table nearer to the bed and began to

prepare for rest; but in the new position of the light, I was struck by

a picture on the wall. It represented a woman, still young. To judge by

her costume and the mellow unity which reigned over the canvas, she had

long been dead; to judge by the vivacity of the attitude, the eyes and

the features, I might have been beholding in a mirror the image of life.

Her figure was very slim and strong, and of a just proportion; red

tresses lay like a crown over her brow; her eyes, of a very golden

brown, held mine with a look; and her face, which was perfectly shaped,

was yet marred by a cruel, sullen, and sensual expression. Something in

both face and figure, something exquisitely intangible, like the echo of

an echo, suggested the features and bearing of my guide; and I stood a

while unpleasantly attracted and wondering at the oddity of the

resemblance. The common, carnal stock of that race, which had been

originally designed for such high dames as the one now looking on me

from the canvas, had fallen to baser uses, wearing country clothes,

sitting on the shaft and holding the reins of a mule cart, to bring

home a lodger. Perhaps an actual link subsisted; perhaps some scruple of

the delicate flesh that was once clothed upon with the satin and brocade

of the dead lady, now winced at the rude contact of Felipe's frieze.

The first light of the morning shone full upon the portrait, and, as I

lay awake, my eyes continued to dwell upon it with growing complacency;

its beauty crept about my heart insidiously, silencing my scruples one

after another; and while I knew that to love such a woman were to sign

and seal one's own sentence of degeneration, I still knew that, if she

were alive, I should love her. Day after day the double knowledge of her

wickedness and of my weakness grew clearer. She came to be the heroine

of many day-dreams, in which her eyes led on to, and sufficiently

rewarded, crimes. She cast a dark shadow on my fancy, and when I was out

in the free air of heaven, taking vigorous exercise and healthily

renewing the current of my blood, it was often a glad thought to me that

my enchantress was safe in the grave, her wand of beauty broken, her

lips closed in silence, her philtre spilt. And yet I had a

half-lingering terror that she might not be dead after all, but

re-arisen in the body of some descendant.

Felipe served my meals in my own apartment; and his resemblance to the

portrait haunted me. At times it was not; at times, upon some change of

attitude or flash of expression, it would leap out upon me like a ghost.

It was above all in his ill tempers that the likeness triumphed. He

certainly liked me; he was proud of my notice, which he sought to engage

by many simple and childlike devices; he loved to sit close before my

fire, talking his broken talk or singing his odd, endless, wordless,

songs, and sometimes drawing his hand over my clothes with an

affectionate manner of caressing that never failed to cause in me an

embarrassment of which I was ashamed. But for all that, he was capable

of flashes of causeless anger and fits of sturdy sullenness. At a word

of reproof, I have seen him upset the dish of which I was about to eat,

and this not surreptitiously, but with defiance; and similarly at a hint

of inquisition. I was not unnaturally curious, being in a strange place

and surrounded by strange people; but at the shadow of a question he

shrank back, lowering and dangerous. Then it was that, for a fraction of

a second, this rough lad might have been the brother of the lady in the

frame. But these humours were swift to pass; and the resemblance died

along with them.

In these first days I saw nothing of any one but Felipe, unless the

portrait is to be counted; and since the lad was plainly of weak mind,

and had moments of passion, it may be wondered that I bore his dangerous

neighbourhood with equanimity. As a matter of fact, it was for some time

irksome; but it happened before long that I obtained over him so

complete a mastery as set my disquietude at rest.

It fell in this way. He was by nature slothful, and much of a vagabond,

and yet he kept by the house, and not only waited upon my wants, but

laboured every day in the garden or small farm to the south of the

residencia. Here he would be joined by the peasant whom I had seen on

the night of my arrival, and who dwelt at the far end of the enclosure,

about half a mile away, in a rude out-house; but it was plain to me that

of these two, it was Felipe who did most; and though I would sometimes

see him throw down his spade and go to sleep among the very plants he

had been digging, his constancy and energy were admirable in themselves,

and still more so since I was well assured they were foreign to his

disposition, and the fruit of an ungrateful effort. But while I admired,

I wondered what had called forth in a lad so shuttle-witted this

enduring sense of duty. How was it sustained? I asked myself, and to

what length did it prevail over his instincts? The priest was possibly

his inspirer; but the priest came one day to the residencia. I saw him

both come and go after an interval of close upon an hour, from a knoll

where I was sketching, and all that time Felipe continued to labour

undisturbed in the garden.

At last, in a very unworthy spirit, I determined to debauch the lad from

his good resolutions, and, waylaying him at the gate, easily persuaded

him to join me in a ramble. It was a fine day, and the woods to which I

led him were green and pleasant and sweet-smelling, and alive with the

hum of insects. Here he discovered himself in a fresh character,

mounting up to heights of gaiety that abashed me, and displaying an

energy and grace of movement that delighted the eye. He leaped, he ran

round me in mere glee; he would stop, and look and listen, and seem to

drink in the world like a cordial; and then he would suddenly spring

into a tree with one bound, and hang and gambol there like one at home.

Little as he said to me, and that of not much import, I have rarely

enjoyed more stirring company; the sight of his delight was a continual

feast; the speed and accuracy of his movements pleased me to the heart;

and I might have been so thoughtlessly unkind as to make a habit of

these walks, had not chance prepared a very rude conclusion to my

pleasure. By some swiftness or dexterity the lad captured a squirrel in

a tree top. He was then some way ahead of me, but I saw him drop to the

ground and crouch there, crying aloud for pleasure like a child. The

sound stirred my sympathies, it was so fresh and innocent; but as I

bettered my pace to draw near, the cry of the squirrel knocked upon my

heart. I have heard and seen much of the cruelty of lads, and above all,

of peasants; but what I now beheld struck me into a passion of anger. I

thrust the fellow aside, plucked the poor brute out of his hands, and

with swift mercy killed it. Then I turned upon the torturer, spoke to

him long out of the heat of my indignation, calling him names at which

he seemed to wither; and at length, pointing towards the residencia,

bade him begone and leave me, for I chose to walk with men, not with

vermin. He fell upon his knees, and, the words coming to him with more

clearness than usual, poured out a stream of the most touching

supplications, begging me in mercy to forgive him, to forget what he had

done, to look to the future. "Oh, I try so hard," he said. "Oh,

commandante, bear with Felipe this once; he will never be a brute

again!" Thereupon, much more affected than I cared to show, I suffered

myself to be persuaded, and at last shook hands with him and made it up.

But the squirrel, by way of penance, I made him bury; speaking of the

poor thing's beauty, telling him what pains it had suffered, and how

base a thing was the abuse of strength. "See, Felipe," said I, "you are

strong indeed; but in my hands you are as helpless as that poor thing of

the trees. Give me your hand in mine. You cannot remove it. Now suppose

that I were cruel like you, and took a pleasure in pain. I only tighten

my hold, and see how you suffer." He screamed aloud, his face stricken

ashy and dotted with needle-points of sweat; and when I set him free, he

fell to the earth and nursed his hand and moaned over it like a baby.

But he took the lesson in good part; and whether from that, or from what

I had said to him, or the higher notion he now had of my bodily

strength, his original affection was changed into a dog-like, adoring

fidelity.

Meanwhile I gained rapidly in health. The residencia stood on the crown

of a stony plateau; on every side the mountains hemmed it about; only

from the roof, where was a bartizan, there might be seen, between two

peaks, a small segment of plain, blue with extreme distance. The air in

these altitudes moved freely and largely; great clouds congregated

there, and were broken up by the wind and left in tatters on the

hill-tops; a hoarse and yet faint rumbling of torrents rose from all

round; and one could there study all the ruder and more ancient

characters of nature in something of their pristine force. I delighted

from the first in the vigorous scenery and changeful weather; nor less

in the antique and dilapidated mansion where I dwelt. This was a large

oblong, flanked at two opposite corners by bastion-like projections, one

of which commanded the door, while both were loopholed for musketry. The

lower story was, besides, naked of windows, so that the building, if

garrisoned, could not be carried without artillery. It enclosed an open

court planted with pomegranate trees. From this a broad flight of marble

stairs ascended to an open gallery, running all round and resting,

towards the court, on slender pillars. Thence, again, several enclosed

stairs led to the upper stories of the house, which were thus broken up

into distinct divisions. The windows, both within and without, were

closely shuttered; some of the stonework in the upper parts had fallen;

the roof, in one place, had been wrecked in one of the flurries of wind

which were common in these mountains; and the whole house, in the

strong, beating sunlight, and standing out above a grove of stunted

cork-trees, thickly laden and discoloured with dust, looked like the

sleeping palace of the legend. The court, in particular, seemed the very

home of slumber. A hoarse cooing of doves haunted about the eaves; the

winds were excluded, but when they blew outside, the mountain dust fell

here as thick as rain, and veiled the red bloom of the pomegranates;

shuttered windows and the closed doors of numerous cellars, and the

vacant arches of the gallery, enclosed it; and all day long the sun made

broken profiles on the four sides, and paraded the shadow of the pillars

on the gallery floor. At the ground level there was, however, a certain

pillared recess, which bore the marks of human habitation. Though it was

open in front upon the court, it was yet provided with a chimney, where

a wood fire would be always prettily blazing; and the tile floor was

littered with the skins of animals.

It was in this place that I first saw my hostess. She had drawn one of

the skins forward and sat in the sun, leaning against a pillar. It was

her dress that struck me first of all, for it was rich and brightly

coloured, and shone out in that dusty courtyard with something of the

same relief as the flowers of the pomegranates. At a second look it was

her beauty of person that took hold of me. As she sat back--watching me,

I thought, though with invisible eyes--and wearing at the same time an

expression of almost imbecile good-humour and contentment, she showed a

perfectness of feature and a quiet nobility of attitude that were beyond

a statue's. I took off my hat to her in passing, and her face puckered

with suspicion as swiftly and lightly as a pool ruffles in the breeze;

but she paid no heed to my courtesy. I went forth on my customary walk a

trifle daunted, her idol-like impassivity haunting me; and when I

returned, although she was still in much the same posture, I was half

surprised to see that she had moved as far as the next pillar, following

the sunshine. This time, however, she addressed me with some trivial

salutation, civilly enough conceived, and uttered in the same

deep-chested, and yet indistinct and lisping tones, that had already

baffled the utmost niceness of my hearing from her son. I answered

rather at a venture; for not only did I fail to take her meaning with

precision, but the sudden disclosure of her eyes disturbed me. They were

unusually large, the iris golden like Felipe's, but the pupil at that

moment so distended that they seemed almost black; and what affected me

was not so much their size as (what was perhaps its consequence) the

singular insignificance of their regard. A look more blankly stupid I

have never met. My eyes dropped before it even as I spoke, and I went on

my way upstairs to my own room, at once baffled and embarrassed. Yet

when I came there and saw the face of the portrait, I was again reminded

of the miracle of family descent. My hostess was, indeed, both older and

fuller in person; her eyes were of a different colour; her face,

besides, was not only free from the ill-significance that offended and

attracted me in the painting; it was devoid of either good or bad--a

moral blank expressing literally naught. And yet there was a likeness,

not so much speaking as immanent, not so much in any particular feature

as upon the whole. It should seem, I thought, as if when the master set

his signature to that grave canvas, he had not only caught the image of

one smiling and false-eyed woman, but stamped the essential quality of a

race.

From that day forth, whether I came or went, I was sure to find the

Senora seated in the sun against a pillar, or stretched on a rug before

the fire; only at times she would shift her station to the top round of

the stone staircase, where she lay with the same nonchalance right

across my path. In all these days, I never knew her to display the least

spark of energy beyond what she expended in brushing and re-brushing her

copious copper-coloured hair, or in lisping out, in the rich and broken

hoarseness of her voice, her customary idle salutations to myself.

These, I think, were her two chief pleasures, beyond that of mere

quiescence. She seemed always proud of her remarks, as though they had

been witticisms: and, indeed, though they were empty enough, like the

conversation of many respectable persons, and turned on a very narrow

range of subjects, they were never meaningless or incoherent; nay, they

had a certain beauty of their own, breathing, as they did, of her entire

contentment. Now she would speak of the warmth, in which (like her son)

she greatly delighted; now of the flowers of the pomegranate trees, and

now of the white doves and long-winged swallows that fanned the air of

the court. The birds excited her. As they raked the eaves in their swift

flight, or skimmed sidelong past her with a rush of wind, she would

sometimes stir, and sit a little up, and seem to awaken from her doze of

satisfaction. But for the rest of her days she lay luxuriously folded on

herself and sunk in sloth and pleasure. Her invincible content at first

annoyed me, but I came gradually to find repose in the spectacle, until

at last it grew to be my habit to sit down beside her four times in the

day, both coming and going, and to talk with her sleepily, I scarce knew

of what. I had come to like her dull, almost animal neighbourhood; her

beauty and her stupidity soothed and amused me. I began to find a kind

of transcendental good sense in her remarks, and her unfathomable

good-nature moved me to admiration and envy. The liking was returned;

she enjoyed my presence half-unconsciously, as a man in deep meditation

may enjoy the babbling of a brook. I can scarce say she brightened when

I came, for satisfaction was written on her face eternally, as on some

foolish statue's; but I was made conscious of her pleasure by some more

intimate communication than the sight. And one day, as I sat within

reach of her on the marble step, she suddenly shot forth one of her

hands and patted mine. The thing was done, and she was back in her

accustomed attitude, before my mind had received intelligence of the

caress; and when I turned to look her in the face I could perceive no

answerable sentiment. It was plain she attached no moment to the act,

and I blamed myself for my own more uneasy consciousness.

The sight and (if I may so call it) the acquaintance of the mother

confirmed the view I had already taken of the son. The family blood had

been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a

common error among the proud and the exclusive. No decline, indeed, was

to be traced in the body, which had been handed down unimpaired in

shapeliness and strength; and the faces of to-day were struck as sharply

from the mint as the face of two centuries ago that smiled upon me from

the portrait. But the intelligence (that more precious heirloom) was

degenerate; the treasure of ancestral memory ran low; and it had

required the potent, plebeian crossing of a muleteer or mountain

_contrabandista_ to raise what approached hebetude in the mother into

the active oddity of the son. Yet of the two, it was the mother I

preferred. Of Felipe, vengeful and placable, full of starts and shyings,

inconstant as a hare, I could even conceive as a creature possibly

noxious. Of the mother I had no thoughts but those of kindness. And

indeed, as spectators are apt ignorantly to take sides, I grew something

of a partisan in the enmity which I perceived to smoulder between them.

True, it seemed mostly on the mother's part. She would sometimes draw in

her breath as he came near, and the pupils of her vacant eyes would

contract as if with horror or fear. Her emotions, such as they were,

were much upon the surface and readily shared; and this latent repulsion

occupied my mind, and kept me wondering on what grounds it rested, and

whether the son was certainly in fault.

I had been about ten days in the residencia, when there sprang up a high

and harsh wind, carrying clouds of dust. It came out of malarious

lowlands, and over several snowy sierras. The nerves of those on whom it

blew were strung and jangled; their eyes smarted with the dust; their

legs ached under the burthen of their body; and the touch of one hand

upon another grew to be odious. The wind, besides, came down the gullies

of the hills and stormed about the house with a great, hollow buzzing

and whistling that was wearisome to the ear and dismally depressing to

the mind. It did not so much blow in gusts as with the steady sweep of a

waterfall, so that there was no remission of discomfort while it blew.

But higher up on the mountain it was probably of a more variable

strength, with accesses of fury; for there came down at times a far-off

wailing, infinitely grievous to hear; and at times, on one of the high

shelves or terraces, there would start up, and then disperse, a tower of

dust, like the smoke of an explosion.

I no sooner awoke in bed than I was conscious of the nervous tension and

depression of the weather, and the effect grew stronger as the day

proceeded. It was in vain that I resisted; in vain that I set forth upon

my customary morning's walk; the irrational, unchanging fury of the

storm had soon beat down my strength and wrecked my temper; and I

returned to the residencia, glowing with dry heat, and foul and gritty

with dust. The court had a forlorn appearance; now and then a glimmer of

sun fled over it; now and then the wind swooped down upon the

pomegranates, and scattered the blossoms, and set the window shutter

clapping on the wall. In the recess the Senora was pacing to and fro

with a flushed countenance and bright eyes; I thought, too, she was

speaking to herself, like one in anger. But when I addressed her with my

customary salutation, she only replied by a sharp gesture and continued

her walk. The weather had distempered even this impassive creature; and

as I went on upstairs I was the less ashamed of my own discomposure.

All day the wind continued; and I sat in my room and made a feint of

reading, or walked up and down, and listened to the riot overhead. Night

fell, and I had not so much as a candle. I began to long for some

society, and stole down to the court. It was now plunged in the blue of

the first darkness; but the recess was redly lighted by the fire. The

wood had been piled high, and was crowned by a shock of flames, which

the draught of the chimney brandished to and fro. In this strong and

shaken brightness the Senora continued pacing from wall to wall with

disconnected gestures, clasping her hands, stretching forth her arms,

throwing back her head as in appeal to heaven. In these disordered

movements the beauty and grace of the woman showed more clearly; but

there was a light in her eye that struck on me unpleasantly; and when I

had looked on a while in silence, and seemingly unobserved, I turned

tail as I had come, and groped my way back again to my own chamber.

By the time Felipe brought my supper and lights, my nerve was utterly

gone; and, had the lad been such as I was used to seeing him, I should

have kept him (even by force, had that been necessary) to take off the

edge from my distasteful solitude. But on Felipe, also, the wind had

exercised its influence. He had been feverish all day; now that the

night had come he was fallen into a low and tremulous humour that

reacted on my own. The sight of his scared face, his starts and pallors

and sudden hearkenings, unstrung me; and when he dropped and broke a

dish, I fairly leaped out of my seat.

"I think we are all mad to-day," said I, affecting to laugh.

"It is the black wind," he replied dolefully. "You feel as if you must

do something, and you don't know what it is."

I noted the aptness of the description; but, indeed, Felipe had

sometimes a strange felicity in rendering into words the sensations of

the body. "And your mother, too," said I; "she seems to feel this

weather much. Do you not fear she may be unwell?"

He stared at me a little, and then said, "No," almost defiantly; and the

next moment, carrying his hand to his brow, cried out lamentably on the

wind and the noise that made his head go round like a millwheel. "Who

can be well?" he cried; and, indeed, I could only echo his question, for

I was disturbed enough myself.

I went to bed early, wearied with day-long restlessness; but the

poisonous nature of the wind, and its ungodly and unintermittent uproar,

would not suffer me to sleep. I lay there and tossed, my nerves and

senses on the stretch. At times I would doze, dream horribly, and wake

again; and these snatches of oblivion confused me as to time. But it

must have been late on in the night, when I was suddenly startled by an

outbreak of pitiable and hateful cries. I leaped from my bed, supposing

I had dreamed; but the cries still continued to fill the house, cries of

pain, I thought, but certainly of rage also, and so savage and

discordant that they shocked the heart. It was no illusion; some living

thing, some lunatic or some wild animal was being foully tortured. The

thought of Felipe and the squirrel flashed into my mind, and I ran to

the door; but it had been locked from the outside, and I might shake it

as I pleased, I was a fast prisoner. Still the cries continued. Now they

would dwindle down into a moaning that seemed to be articulate, and at

these times I made sure they must be human; and again they would break

forth and fill the house with ravings worthy of hell. I stood at the

door and gave ear to them, till at last they died away. Long after that,

I still lingered and still continued to hear them mingle in fancy with

the storming of the wind; and when at last I crept to my bed, it was

with a deadly sickness and a blackness of horror on my heart.

It was little wonder if I slept no more. Why had I been locked in? What

had passed? Who was the author of these indescribable and shocking

cries? A human being? It was inconceivable. A beast? The cries were

scarce quite bestial; and what animal, short of a lion or a tiger, could

thus shake the solid walls of the residencia? And while I was thus

turning over the elements of the mystery, it came into my mind that I

had not yet set eyes upon the daughter of the house. What was more

probable than that the daughter of the Senora, and the sister of Felipe,

should be herself insane? Or, what more likely than that these ignorant

and half-witted people should seek to manage an afflicted kinswoman by

violence? Here was a solution; and yet when I called to mind the cries

(which I never did without a shuddering chill) it seemed altogether

insufficient: not even cruelty could wring such cries from madness. But

of one thing I was sure: I could not live in a house where such a thing

was half conceivable, and not probe the matter home and, if necessary,

interfere.

The next day came, the wind had blown itself out, and there was nothing

to remind me of the business of the night. Felipe came to my bedside

with obvious cheerfulness; as I passed through the court the Senora was

sunning herself with her accustomed immobility; and when I issued from

the gateway I found the whole face of nature austerely smiling, the

heavens of a cold blue, and sown with great cloud islands, and the

mountain-sides mapped forth into provinces of light and shadow. A short

walk restored me to myself, and renewed within me the resolve to plumb

this mystery; and when, from the vantage of my knoll, I had seen Felipe

pass forth to his labours in the garden, I returned at once to the

residencia to put my design in practice. The Senora appeared plunged in

slumber; I stood a while and marked her, but she did not stir; even if

my design were indiscreet, I had little to fear from such a guardian;

and turning away, I mounted to the gallery and began my exploration of

the house.

All morning I went from one door to another, and entered spacious and

faded chambers, some rudely shuttered, some receiving their full charge

of daylight, all empty and unhomely. It was a rich house, on which Time

had breathed its tarnish and dust had scattered disillusion. The spider

swung there; the bloated tarantula scampered on the cornices; ants had

their crowded highways on the floor of halls of audience; the big and

foul fly, that lives on carrion and is often the messenger of death, had

set up his nest in the rotten woodwork, and buzzed heavily about the

rooms. Here and there a stool or two, a couch, a bed, or a great carved

chair remained behind, like islets on the bare floors, to testify of

man's bygone habitation; and everywhere the walls were set with the

portraits of the dead. I could judge, by these decaying effigies, in the

house of what a great and what a handsome race I was then wandering.

Many of the men wore orders on their breasts and had the port of noble

offices; the women were all richly attired; the canvases, most of them,

by famous hands. But it was not so much these evidences of greatness

that took hold upon my mind, even contrasted, as they were, with the

present depopulation and decay of that great house. It was rather the

parable of family life that I read in this succession of fair faces and

shapely bodies. Never before had I so realised the miracle of the

continued race, the creation and re-creation, the weaving and changing

and handing down of fleshly elements. That a child should be born of its

mother, that it should grow and clothe itself (we know not how) with

humanity, and put on inherited looks, and turn its head with the manner

of one ascendant, and offer its hand with the gesture of another, are

wonders dulled for us by repetition. But in the singular unity of look,

in the common features and common bearing, of all these painted

generations on the walls of the residencia, the miracle started out and

looked me in the face. And an ancient mirror falling opportunely in my

way, I stood and read my own features a long while, tracing out on

either hand the filaments of descent and the bonds that knit me with my

family.

At last, in the course of these investigations, I opened the door of a

chamber that bore the marks of habitation. It was of large proportions

and faced to the north, where the mountains were most wildly figured.

The embers of a fire smouldered and smoked upon the hearth, to which a

chair had been drawn close. And yet the aspect of the chamber was

ascetic to the degree of sternness; the chair was uncushioned; the floor

and walls were naked; and beyond the books which lay here and there in

some confusion, there was no instrument of either work or pleasure. The

sight of books in the house of such a family exceedingly amazed me; and

I began with a great hurry, and in momentary fear of interruption, to go

from one to another and hastily inspect their character. They were of

all sorts, devotional, historical, and scientific, but mostly of a great

age and in the Latin tongue. Some I could see to bear the marks of

constant study; others had been torn across and tossed aside as if in

petulance or disapproval. Lastly, as I cruised about that empty chamber,

I espied some papers written upon with pencil on a table near the

window. An unthinking curiosity led me to take one up. It bore a copy of

verses, very roughly metred in the original Spanish, and which I may

render somewhat thus--

"Pleasure approached with pain and shame,

Grief with a wreath of lilies came.

Pleasure showed the lovely sun;

Jesu dear, how sweet it shone!

Grief with her worn hand pointed on,

Jesu dear, to Thee!"

Shame and confusion at once fell on me; and, laying down the paper, I

beat an immediate retreat from the apartment. Neither Felipe nor his

mother could have read the books nor written these rough but feeling

verses. It was plain I had stumbled with sacrilegious feet into the room

of the daughter of the house. God knows, my own heart most sharply

punished me for my indiscretion. The thought that I had thus secretly

pushed my way into the confidence of a girl so strangely situated, and

the fear that she might somehow come to hear of it, oppressed me like

guilt. I blamed myself besides for my suspicions of the night before;

wondered that I should ever have attributed those shocking cries to one

of whom I now conceived as of a saint, spectral of mien, wasted with

maceration, bound up in the practices of a mechanical devotion, and

dwelling in a great isolation of soul with her incongruous relatives;

and as I leaned on the balustrade of the gallery and looked down into

the bright close of pomegranates and at the gaily dressed and somnolent

woman, who just then stretched herself and delicately licked her lips as

in the very sensuality of sloth, my mind swiftly compared the scene with

the cold chamber looking northward on the mountains, where the daughter

dwelt.

That same afternoon, as I sat upon my knoll, I saw the Padre enter the

gates of the residencia. The revelation of the daughter's character had

struck home to my fancy, and almost blotted out the horrors of the

night before; but at sight of this worthy man the memory revived. I

descended, then, from the knoll, and making a circuit among the woods,

posted myself by the wayside to await his passage. As soon as he

appeared I stepped forth and introduced myself as the lodger of the

residencia. He had a very strong, honest countenance, on which it was

easy to read the mingled emotions with which he regarded me, as a

foreigner, a heretic, and yet one who had been wounded for the good

cause. Of the family at the residencia he spoke with reserve, and yet

with respect. I mentioned that I had not yet seen the daughter,

whereupon he remarked that that was as it should be, and looked at me a

little askance. Lastly, I plucked up courage to refer to the cries that

had disturbed me in the night. He heard me out in silence, and then

stopped and partly turned about, as though to mark beyond doubt that he

was dismissing me.

"Do you take tobacco-powder?" said he, offering his snuff-box; and then,

when I had refused, "I am an old man," he added, "and I may be allowed

to remind you that you are a guest."

"I have, then, your authority," I returned, firmly enough, although I

flushed at the implied reproof, "to let things take their course, and

not to interfere?"

He said "Yes," and with a somewhat uneasy salute turned and left me

where I was. But he had done two things: he had set my conscience at

rest, and he had awakened my delicacy. I made a great effort, once more

dismissed the recollections of the night, and fell once more to brooding

on my saintly poetess. At the same time, I could not quite forget that I

had been locked in, and that night when Felipe brought me my supper I

attacked him warily on both points of interest.

"I never see your sister," said I casually.

"Oh, no," said he; "she is a good, good girl," and his mind instantly

veered to something else.

"Your sister is pious, I suppose?" I asked in the next pause.

"Oh!" he cried, joining his hands with extreme fervour, "a saint; it is

she that keeps me up."

"You are very fortunate," said I, "for the most of us, I am afraid, and

myself among the number, are better at going down."

"Senor," said Felipe earnestly, "I would not say that. You should not

tempt your angel. If one goes down, where is he to stop?"

"Why, Felipe," said I, "I had no guess you were a preacher, and I may

say a good one; but I suppose that is your sister's doing?"

He nodded at me with round eyes.

"Well, then," I continued, "she has doubtless reproved you for your sin

of cruelty?"

"Twelve times!" he cried; for this was the phrase by which the odd

creature expressed the sense of frequency. "And I told her you had done

so--I remembered that," he added proudly--"and she was pleased."

"Then, Felipe," said I, "what were those cries that I heard last night?

for surely they were cries of some creature in suffering."

"The wind," returned Felipe, looking in the fire.

I took his hand in mine, at which, thinking it to be a caress, he smiled

with a brightness of pleasure that came near disarming my resolve. But I

trod the weakness down. "The wind," I repeated; "and yet I think it was

this hand," holding it up, "that had first locked me in." The lad shook

visibly, but answered never a word. "Well," said I, "I am a stranger and

a guest. It is not my part either to meddle or to judge in your affairs;

in these you shall take your sister's counsel, which I cannot doubt to

be excellent. But in so far as concerns my own I will be no man's

prisoner, and I demand that key." Half an hour later my door was

suddenly thrown open, and the key tossed ringing on the floor.

A day or two after I came in from a walk a little before the point of

noon. The Senora was lying lapped in slumber on the threshold of the

recess; the pigeons dozed below the eaves like snowdrifts; the house was

under a deep spell of noontide quiet; and only a wandering and gentle

wind from the mountain stole round the galleries, rustled among the

pomegranates, and pleasantly stirred the shadows. Something in the

stillness moved me to imitation, and I went very lightly across the

court and up the marble staircase. My foot was on the topmost round,

when a door opened, and I found myself face to face with Olalla.

Surprise transfixed me; her loveliness struck to my heart; she glowed in

the deep shadow of the gallery, a gem of colour; her eyes took hold upon

mine and clung there, and bound us together like the joining of hands;

and the moments we thus stood face to face, drinking each other in, were

sacramental and the wedding of souls. I know not how long it was before

I awoke out of a deep trance, and, hastily bowing, passed on into the

upper stair. She did not move, but followed me with her great, thirsting

eyes; and as I passed out of sight it seemed to me as if she paled and

faded.

In my own room, I opened the window and looked out, and could not think

what change had come upon that austere field of mountains that it should

thus sing and shine under the lofty heaven. I had seen her--Olalla! And

the stone crags answered, Olalla! and the dumb, unfathomable azure

answered, Olalla! The pale saint of my dreams had vanished for ever; and

in her place I beheld this maiden on whom God had lavished the richest

colours and the most exuberant energies of life, whom He had made active

as a deer, slender as a reed, and in whose great eyes He had lighted the

torches of the soul. The thrill of her young life, strung like a wild

animal's, had entered into me; the force of soul that had looked out

from her eyes and conquered mine, mantled about my heart and sprang to

my lips in singing. She passed through my veins: she was one with me.

I will not say that this enthusiasm declined; rather my soul held out in

its ecstasy as in a strong castle, and was there besieged by cold and

sorrowful considerations. I could not doubt but that I loved her at

first sight, and already with a quivering ardour that was strange to my

experience. What then was to follow? She was the child of an afflicted

house, the Senora's daughter, the sister of Felipe; she bore it even in

her beauty. She had the lightness and swiftness of the one, swift as an

arrow, light as dew; like the other, she shone on the pale background of

the world with the brilliancy of flowers. I could not call by the name

of brother that half-witted lad, nor by the name of mother that

immovable and lovely thing of flesh, whose silly eyes and perpetual

simper now recurred to my mind like something hateful. And if I could

not marry, what then? She was helplessly unprotected; her eyes, in that

single and long glance, which had been all our intercourse, had

confessed a weakness equal to my own; but in my heart I knew her for the

student of the cold northern chamber, and the writer of the sorrowful

lines; and this was a knowledge to disarm a brute. To flee was more than

I could find courage for; but I registered a vow of unsleeping

circumspection.

As I turned from the window, my eyes alighted on the portrait. It had

fallen dead, like a candle after sunrise; it followed me with eyes of

paint. I knew it to be like, and marvelled at the tenacity of type in

that declining race; but the likeness was swallowed up in difference. I

remembered how it had seemed to me a thing unapproachable in the life, a

creature rather of the painter's craft than of the modesty of nature,

and I marvelled at the thought, and exulted in the image of Olalla.

Beauty I had seen before, and not been charmed, and I had been often

drawn to women, who were not beautiful except to me; but in Olalla all

that I desired and had not dared to imagine was united.

I did not see her the next day, and my heart ached and my eyes longed

for her, as men long for morning. But the day after, when I returned,

about my usual hour, she was once more on the gallery, and our looks

once more met and embraced. I would have spoken, I would have drawn near

to her; but strongly as she plucked at my heart, drawing me like a

magnet, something yet more imperious withheld me; and I could only bow

and pass by; and she, leaving my salutation unanswered, only followed me

with her noble eyes.

I had now her image by rote, and as I conned the traits in memory it

seemed as if I read her very heart. She was dressed with something of

her mother's coquetry and love of positive colour. Her robe, which I

knew she must have made with her own hands, clung about her with a

cunning grace. After the fashion of that country, besides, her bodice

stood open in the middle, in a long slit, and here, in spite of the

poverty of the house, a gold coin, hanging by a ribbon, lay on her brown

bosom. These were proofs, had any been needed, of her inborn delight in

life and her own loveliness. On the other hand, in her eyes that hung

upon mine, I could read depth beyond depth of passion and sadness,

lights of poetry and hope, blacknesses of despair, and thoughts that

were above the earth. It was a lovely body, but the inmate, the soul,

was more than worthy of that lodging. Should I leave this incomparable

flower to wither unseen on these rough mountains? Should I despise the

great gift offered me in the eloquent silence of her eyes? Here was a

soul immured; should I not burst its prison? All side considerations

fell off from me; were she the child of Herod I swore I should make her

mine; and that very evening I set myself, with a mingled sense of

treachery and disgrace, to captivate the brother. Perhaps I read him

with more favourable eyes, perhaps the thought of his sister always

summoned up the better qualities of that imperfect soul; but he had

never seemed to me so amiable, and his very likeness to Olalla, while it

annoyed, yet softened me.

A third day passed in vain--an empty desert of hours. I would not lose a

chance, and loitered all afternoon in the court, where (to give myself a

countenance) I spoke more than usual with the Senora. God knows it was

with a most tender and sincere interest that I now studied her; and even

as for Felipe, so now for the mother, I was conscious of a growing

warmth of toleration. And yet I wondered. Even while I spoke with her,

she would doze off into a little sleep, and presently awake again

without embarrassment; and this composure staggered me. And again, as I

marked her make infinitesimal changes in her posture, savouring and

lingering on the bodily pleasure of the movement, I was driven to wonder

at this depth of passive sensuality. She lived in her body; and her

consciousness was all sunk into and disseminated through her members,

where it luxuriously dwelt. Lastly, I could not grow accustomed to her

eyes. Each time she turned on me those great beautiful and meaningless

orbs, wide open to the day, but closed against human inquiry--each time

I had occasion to observe the lively changes of her pupils which

expanded and contracted in a breath--I know not what it was came over

me, I can find no name for the mingled feeling of disappointment,

annoyance, and distaste that jarred along my nerves. I tried her on a

variety of subjects, equally in vain; and at last led the talk to her

daughter. But even there she proved indifferent; said she was pretty,

which (as with children) was her highest word of commendation, but was

plainly incapable of any higher thought; and when I remarked that Olalla

seemed silent, merely yawned in my face and replied that speech was of

no great use when you had nothing to say. "People speak much, very

much," she added, looking at me with expanded pupils; and then again

yawned, and again showed me a mouth that was as dainty as a toy. This

time I took the hint, and, leaving her to her repose, went up into my

own chamber to sit by the open window, looking on the hills and not

beholding them, sunk in lustrous and deep dreams, and hearkening in

fancy to the note of a voice that I had never heard.

I awoke on the fifth morning with a brightness of anticipation that

seemed to challenge fate. I was sure of myself, light of heart and foot,

and resolved to put my love incontinently to the touch of knowledge. It

should lie no longer under the bonds of silence, a dumb thing, living by

the eye only, like the love of beasts; but should now put on the spirit,

and enter upon the joys of the complete human intimacy. I thought of it

with wild hopes, like a voyager to El Dorado; into that unknown and

lovely country of her soul, I no longer trembled to adventure. Yet when

I did indeed encounter her, the same force of passion descended on me

and at once submerged my mind; speech seemed to drop away from me like a

childish habit; and I but drew near to her as the giddy man draws near

to the margin of a gulf. She drew back from me a little as I came; but

her eyes did not waver from mine, and these lured me forward. At last,

when I was already within reach of her, I stopped. Words were denied me;

if I advanced I could but clasp her to my heart in silence; and all that

was sane in me, all that was still unconquered, revolted against the

thought of such an accost. So we stood for a second, all our life in our

eyes, exchanging salvos of attraction and yet each resisting; and then,

with a great effort of the will, and conscious at the same time of a

sudden bitterness of disappointment, I turned and went away in the same

silence.

What power lay upon me that I could not speak? And she, why was she also

silent? Why did she draw away before me dumbly, with fascinated eyes?

Was this love? or was it a mere brute attraction, mindless and

inevitable, like that of the magnet for the steel? We had never spoken,

we were wholly strangers; and yet an influence, strong as the grasp of a

giant, swept us silently together. On my side, it filled me with

impatience; and yet I was sure that she was worthy; I had seen her

books, read her verses, and thus, in a sense, divined the soul of my

mistress. But on her side, it struck me almost cold. Of me, she knew

nothing but my bodily favour; she was drawn to me as stones fall to the

earth; the laws that rule the earth conducted her, unconsenting, to my

arms; and I drew back at the thought of such a bridal, and began to be

jealous for myself. It was not thus that I desired to be loved. And then

I began to fall into a great pity for the girl herself. I thought how

sharp must be her mortification, that she, the student, the recluse,

Felipe's saintly monitress, should have thus confessed an overweening

weakness for a man with whom she had never exchanged a word. And at the

coming of pity, all other thoughts were swallowed up; and I longed only

to find and console and reassure her; to tell her how wholly her love

was returned on my side, and how her choice, even if blindly made, was

not unworthy.

The next day it was glorious weather; depth upon depth of blue

over-canopied the mountains; the sun shone wide; and the wind in the

trees and the many fallen torrents in the mountains filled the air with

delicate and haunting music. Yet I was prostrated with sadness. My heart

wept for the sight of Olalla, as a child weeps for its mother. I sat

down on a boulder on the verge of the low cliffs that bound the plateau

to the north. Thence I looked down into the wooded valley of a stream,

where no foot came. In the mood I was in, it was even touching to behold

the place untenanted; it lacked Olalla; and I thought of the delight and

glory of a life passed wholly with her in that strong air, and among

these rugged and lovely surroundings, at first with a whimpering

sentiment, and then again with such a fiery joy that I seemed to grow

in strength and stature, like a Samson.

And then suddenly I was aware of Olalla drawing near. She appeared out

of a grove of cork-trees, and came straight towards me; and I stood up

and waited. She seemed in her walking a creature of such life and fire

and lightness as amazed me; yet she came quietly and slowly. Her energy

was in the slowness; but for inimitable strength, I felt she would have

run, she would have flown to me. Still, as she approached, she kept her

eyes lowered to the ground; and when she had drawn quite near, it was

without one glance that she addressed me. At the first note of her voice

I started. It was for this I had been waiting; this was the last test of

my love. And lo, her enunciation was precise and clear, not lisping and

incomplete like that of her family; and the voice, though deeper than

usual with women, was still both youthful and womanly. She spoke in a

rich chord; golden contralto strains mingled with hoarseness, as the red

threads were mingled with the brown among her tresses. It was not only a

voice that spoke to my heart directly; but it spoke to me of her. And

yet her words immediately plunged me back upon despair.

"You will go away," she said, "to-day."

Her example broke the bonds of my speech; I felt as lightened of a

weight, or as if a spell had been dissolved. I know not in what words I

answered; but, standing before her on the cliffs, I poured out the whole

ardour of my love, telling her that I lived upon the thought of her,

slept only to dream of her loveliness, and would gladly forswear my

country, my language, and my friends, to live for ever by her side. And

then, strongly commanding myself, I changed the note; I reassured, I

comforted her; I told her I had divined in her a pious and heroic

spirit, with which I was worthy to sympathise, and which I longed to

share and lighten. "Nature," I told her, "was the voice of God, which

men disobey at peril; and if we were thus dumbly drawn together, ay,

even as by a miracle of love, it must imply a divine fitness in our

souls; we must be made," I said--"made for one another. We should be mad

rebels," I cried out--"mad rebels against God, not to obey this

instinct."

She shook her head. "You will go to-day," she repeated, and then with a

gesture, and in a sudden, sharp note--"no, not to-day," she cried,

"to-morrow!"

But at this sign of relenting, power came in upon me in a tide. I

stretched out my arms and called upon her name; and she leaped to me and

clung to me. The hills rocked about us, the earth quailed; a shock as of

a blow went through me and left me blind and dizzy. And the next moment

she had thrust me back, broken rudely from my arms, and fled with the

speed of a deer among the cork-trees.

I stood and shouted to the mountains; I turned and went back towards the

residencia, walking upon air. She sent me away, and yet I had but to

call upon her name and she came to me. These were but the weaknesses of

girls, from which even she, the strangest of her sex, was not exempted.

Go? Not I, Olalla--Oh, not I, Olalla, my Olalla! A bird sang near by;

and in that season birds were rare. It bade me be of good cheer. And

once more the whole countenance of nature, from the ponderous and stable

mountains down to the lightest leaf and the smallest darting fly in the

shadow of the groves, began to stir before me and to put on the

lineaments of life and wear a face of awful joy. The sunshine struck

upon the hills, strong as a hammer on the anvil, and the hills shook;

the earth, under that vigorous insolation, yielded up heady scents; the

woods smouldered in the blaze. I felt the thrill of travail and delight

run through the earth. Something elemental, something rude, violent, and

savage, in the love that sang in my heart, was like a key to nature's

secrets; and the very stones that rattled under my feet appeared alive

and friendly. Olalla! Her touch had quickened, and renewed, and strung

me up to the old pitch of concert with the rugged earth, to a swelling

of the soul that men learn to forget in their polite assemblies. Love

burned in me like rage; tenderness waxed fierce; I hated, I adored, I

pitied, I revered her with ecstasy. She seemed the link that bound me in

with dead things on the one hand, and with our pure and pitying God upon

the other: a thing brutal and divine, and akin at once to the innocence

and to the unbridled forces of the earth.

My head thus reeling, I came into the courtyard of the residencia, and

the sight of the mother struck me like a revelation. She sat there, all

sloth and contentment, blinking under the strong sunshine, branded with

a passive enjoyment, a creature set quite apart, before whom my ardour

fell away like a thing ashamed. I stopped a moment, and, commanding such

shaken tones as I was able, said a word or two. She looked at me with

her unfathomable kindness; her voice in reply sounded vaguely out of the

realm of peace in which she slumbered, and there fell on my mind, for

the first time, a sense of respect for one so uniformly innocent and

happy, and I passed on in a kind of wonder at myself that I should be so

much disquieted.

On my table there lay a piece of the same yellow paper I had seen in the

north room; it was written on with pencil in the same hand, Olalla's

hand, and I picked it up with a sudden sinking of alarm, and read, "If

you have any kindness for Olalla, if you have any chivalry for a

creature sorely wrought, go from here to-day; in pity, in honour, for

the sake of Him who died, I supplicate that you shall go." I looked at

this a while in mere stupidity, then I began to awaken to a weariness

and horror of life; the sunshine darkened outside on the bare hills, and

I began to shake like a man in terror. The vacancy thus suddenly opened

in my life unmanned me like a physical void. It was not my heart, it was

not my happiness, it was life itself that was involved. I could not

lose her. I said so, and stood repeating it. And then, like one in a

dream, I moved to the window, put forth my hand to open the casement,

and thrust it through the pane. The blood spurted from my wrist; and

with an instantaneous quietude and command of myself, I pressed my thumb

on the little leaping fountain, and reflected what to do. In that empty

room there was nothing to my purpose; I felt, besides, that I required

assistance. There shot into my mind a hope that Olalla herself might be

my helper, and I turned and went downstairs, still keeping my thumb

upon the wound.

There was no sign of either Olalla or Felipe, and I addressed myself to

the recess, whither the Senora had now drawn quite back and sat dozing

close before the fire, for no degree of heat appeared too much for her.

"Pardon me," said I, "if I disturb you, but I must apply to you for

help."

She looked up sleepily and asked me what it was, and with the very words

I thought she drew in her breath with a widening of the nostrils and

seemed to come suddenly and fully alive.

"I have cut myself," I said, "and rather badly. See!" And I held out my

two hands, from which the blood was oozing and dripping.

Her great eyes opened wide, the pupils shrank into points; a veil seemed

to fall from her face, and leave it sharply expressive and yet

inscrutable. And as I still stood, marvelling a little at her

disturbance, she came swiftly up to me, and stooped and caught me by the

hand; and the next moment my hand was at her mouth, and she had bitten

me to the bone. The pang of the bite, the sudden spurting of blood, and

the monstrous horror of the act, flashed through me all in one, and I

beat her back; and she sprang at me again and again, with bestial cries,

cries that I recognised, such cries as had awakened me on the night of

the high wind. Her strength was like that of madness; mine was rapidly

ebbing with the loss of blood; my mind besides was whirling with the

abhorrent strangeness of the onslaught, and I was already forced against

the wall, when Olalla ran betwixt us, and Felipe, following at a bound,

pinned down his mother on the floor.

A trance-like weakness fell upon me; I saw, heard, and felt, but I was

incapable of movement. I heard the struggle roll to and fro upon the

floor, the yells of the catamount ringing up to heaven as she strove to

reach me. I felt Olalla clasp me in her arms, her hair falling on my

face, and, with the strength of a man, raise and half drag, half carry

me upstairs into my own room, where she cast me down upon the bed. Then

I saw her hasten to the door and lock it, and stand an instant listening

to the savage cries that shook the residencia. And then, swift and light

as a thought, she was again beside me, binding up my hand, laying it in

her bosom, moaning and mourning over it, with dove-like sounds. They

were not words that came to her, they were sounds more beautiful than

speech, infinitely touching, infinitely tender; and yet as I lay there,

a thought stung to my heart, a thought wounded me like a sword, a

thought, like a worm in a flower, profaned the holiness of my love. Yes,

they were beautiful sounds, and they were inspired by human tenderness;

but was their beauty human?

All day I lay there. For a long time the cries of that nameless female

thing, as she struggled with her half-witted whelp, resounded through

the house, and pierced me with despairing sorrow and disgust. They were

the death-cry of my love; my love was murdered; it was not only dead,

but an offence to me; and yet, think as I pleased, feel as I must, it

still swelled within me like a storm of sweetness, and my heart melted

at her looks and touch. This horror that had sprung out, this doubt upon

Olalla, this savage and bestial strain that ran not only through the

whole behaviour of her family, but found a place in the very

foundations and story of our love--though it appalled, though it shocked

and sickened me, was yet not of power to break the knot of my

infatuation.

When the cries had ceased, there came a scraping at the door, by which I

knew Felipe was without; and Olalla went and spoke to him--I know not

what. With that exception, she stayed close beside me, now kneeling by

my bed and fervently praying, now sitting with her eyes upon mine. So

then, for these six hours I drank in her beauty, and silently perused

the story in her face. I saw the golden coin hover on her breaths; I saw

her eyes darken and brighten, and still speak no language but that of an

unfathomable kindness; I saw the faultless face, and, through the robe,

the lines of the faultless body. Night came at last, and in the growing

darkness of the chamber the sight of her slowly melted; but even then

the touch of her smooth hand lingered in mine and talked with me. To lie

thus in deadly weakness and drink in the traits of the beloved, is to

re-awake to love from whatever shock of disillusion. I reasoned with

myself; and I shut my eyes on horrors, and again I was very bold to

accept the worst. What mattered it, if that imperious sentiment

survived; if her eyes still beckoned and attached me; if now, even as

before, every fibre of my dull body yearned and turned to her? Late on

in the night some strength revived in me, and I spoke:--

"Olalla," I said, "nothing matters; I ask nothing; I am content; I love

you."

She knelt down a while and prayed, and I devoutly respected her

devotions. The moon had begun to shine in upon one side of each of the

three windows, and make a misty clearness in the room, by which I saw

her indistinctly. When she re-arose she made the sign of the cross.

"It is for me to speak," she said, "and for you to listen. I know; you

can but guess. I prayed, how I prayed for you to leave this place. I

begged it of you, and I know you would have granted me even this; or if

not, oh let me think so!"

"I love you," I said.

"And yet you have lived in the world," she said; after a pause, "you are

a man and wise; and I am but a child. Forgive me, if I seem to teach,

who am as ignorant as the trees of the mountain; but those who learn

much do but skim the face of knowledge; they seize the laws, they

conceive the dignity of the design--the horror of the living fact fades

from their memory. It is we who sit at home with evil who remember, I

think, and are warned and pity. Go, rather, go now, and keep me in mind.

So I shall have a life in the cherished places of your memory; a life as

much my own as that which I lead in this body."

"I love you," I said once more; and reaching out my weak hand, took

hers, and carried it to my lips, and kissed it. Nor did she resist, but

winced a little; and I could see her look upon me with a frown that was

not unkindly, only sad and baffled. And then it seemed she made a call

upon her resolution; plucked my hand towards her, herself at the same

time leaning somewhat forward, and laid it on the beating of her heart.

"There," she cried, "you feel the very footfall of my life. It only

moves for you; it is yours. But is it even mine? It is mine indeed to

offer you, as I might take the coin from my neck, as I might break a

live branch from a tree, and give it you. And yet not mine! I dwell, or

I think I dwell (if I exist at all), somewhere apart, an impotent

prisoner, and carried about and deafened by a mob that I disown. This

capsule, such as throbs against the sides of animals, knows you at a

touch for its master; ay, it loves you! But my soul, does my soul? I

think not; I know not, fearing to ask. Yet when you spoke to me, your

words were of the soul; it is of the soul that you ask--it is only from

the soul that you would take me."

"Olalla," I said, "the soul and the body are one, and mostly so in love.

What the body chooses, the soul loves; where the body clings, the soul

cleaves; body for body, soul to soul, they come together at God's

signal; and the lower part (if we can call aught low) is only the

footstool and foundation of the highest."

"Have you," she said, "seen the portraits in the house of my fathers?

Have you looked at my mother or at Felipe? Have your eyes never rested

on that picture that hangs by your bed? She who sat for it died ages

ago; and she did evil in her life. But, look again: there is my hand to

the least line, there are my eyes and my hair. What is mine, then, and

what am I? If not a curve in this poor body of mine (which you love, and

for the sake of which you dotingly dream that you love me), not a

gesture that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not any look from my

eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love, but has belonged to

others? Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes; other men

have heard the pleading of the same voice that now sounds in your ears.

The hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me, they

guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but re-inform features

and attributes that have long been laid aside from evil in the quiet of

the grave. Is it me you love, friend? or the race that made me? The girl

who does not know and cannot answer for the least portion of herself? or

the stream of which she is a transitory eddy, the tree of which she is

the passing fruit? The race exists; it is old, it is ever young, it

carries its eternal destiny in its bosom; upon it, like waves upon the

sea, individual succeeds to individual, mocked with a semblance of

self-control, but they are nothing. We speak of the soul, but the soul

is in the race."

"You fret against the common law," I said. "You rebel against the voice

of God, which He has made so winning to convince, so imperious to

command. Hear it, and how it speaks between us! Your hand clings to

mine, your heart leaps at my touch, the unknown elements of which we

are compounded awake and run together at a look; the clay of the earth

remembers its independent life and yearns to join us; we are drawn

together as the stars are turned about in space, or as the tides ebb and

flow; by things older and greater than we ourselves."

"Alas!" she said, "what can I say to you? My fathers, eight hundred

years ago, ruled all this province: they were wise, great, cunning, and

cruel; they were a picked race of the Spanish; their flags led in war;

the king called them his cousin; the people, when the rope was slung for

them or when they returned and found their hovels smoking, blasphemed

their name. Presently a change began. Man has risen; if he has sprung

from the brutes, he can descend again to the same level. The breath of

weariness blew on their humanity and the cords relaxed; they began to go

down; their minds fell on sleep, their passions awoke in gusts, heady

and senseless like the wind in the gutters of the mountains; beauty was

still handed down, but no longer the guiding wit nor the human heart;

the seed passed on, it was wrapped in flesh, the flesh covered the

bones, but they were the bones and the flesh of brutes, and their mind

was as the mind of flies. I speak to you as I dare; but you have seen

for yourself how the wheel has gone backward with my doomed race. I

stand, as it were, upon a little rising ground in this desperate

descent, and see both before and behind, both what we have lost and to

what we are condemned to go farther downward. And shall I--I that dwell

apart in the house of the dead, my body, loathing its ways--shall I

repeat the spell? Shall I bind another spirit, reluctant as my own, into

this bewitched and tempest-broken tenement that I now suffer in? Shall I

hand down this cursed vessel of humanity, charge it with fresh life as

with fresh poison, and dash it, like a fire, in the faces of posterity?

But my vow has been given; the race shall cease from off the earth. At

this hour my brother is making ready; his foot will soon be on the

stair; and you will go with him and pass out of my sight for ever.

Think of me sometimes as one to whom the lesson of life was very harshly

told, but who heard it with courage; as one who loved you indeed, but

who hated herself so deeply that her love was hateful to her; as one who

sent you away and yet would have longed to keep you for ever: who had no

dearer hope than to forget you, and no greater fear than to be

forgotten."

She had drawn towards the door as she spoke, her rich voice sounding

softer and farther away; and with the last word she was gone, and I lay

alone in the moonlit chamber. What I might have done had not I lain

bound by my extreme weakness, I know not; but as it was, there fell upon

me a great and blank despair. It was not long before there shone in at

the door the ruddy glimmer of a lantern, and Felipe, coming, charged me

without a word upon his shoulders, and carried me down to the great

gate, where the cart was waiting. In the moonlight the hills stood out

sharply, as if they were of cardboard; on the glimmering surface of the

plateau, and from among the low trees which swung together and sparkled

in the wind, the great black cube of the residencia stood out bulkily,

its mass only broken by three dimly lighted windows in the northern

front above the gate. They were Olalla's windows, and as the cart jolted

onwards I kept my eyes fixed upon them till, where the road dipped into

a valley, they were lost to my view for ever. Felipe walked in silence

beside the shafts, but from time to time he would check the mule and

seem to look back upon me; and at length drew quite near and laid his

hand upon my head. There was such kindness in the touch, and such a

simplicity, as of the brutes, that tears broke from me like the bursting

of an artery.

"Felipe," I said, "take me where they will ask no questions."

He said never a word, but he turned his mule about, end for end,

retraced some part of the way we had gone, and, striking into another

path, led me to the mountain village, which was, as we say in Scotland,

the kirk-town of that thinly peopled district. Some broken memories

dwell in my mind of the day breaking over the plain, of the cart

stopping, of arms that helped me down, of a bare room into which I was

carried, and of a swoon that fell upon me like sleep.

The next day and the days following, the old priest was often at my side

with his snuff-box and prayer-book, and after a while, when I began to

pick up strength, he told me that I was now on a fair way to recovery,

and must as soon as possible hurry my departure; whereupon, without

naming any reason, he took snuff and looked at me sideways. I did not

affect ignorance; I knew he must have seen Olalla. "Sir," said I, "you

know that I do not ask in wantonness. What of that family?"

He said they were very unfortunate; that it seemed a declining race, and

that they were very poor and had been much neglected.

"But she has not," I said. "Thanks, doubtless, to yourself, she is

instructed and wise beyond the use of women."

"Yes," he said, "the Senorita is well-informed. But the family has been

neglected."

"The mother?" I queried.

"Yes, the mother too," said the Padre, taking snuff. "But Felipe is a

well-intentioned lad."

"The mother is odd?" I asked.

"Very odd," replied the priest.

"I think, sir, we beat about the bush," said I. "You must know more of

my affairs than you allow. You must know my curiosity to be justified on

many grounds. Will you not be frank with me?"

"My son," said the old gentleman, "I will be very frank with you on

matters within my competence; on those of which I know nothing it does

not require much discretion to be silent. I will not fence with you, I

take your meaning perfectly; and what can I say, but that we are all in

God's hands, and that His ways are not our ways? I have even advised

with my superiors in the Church, but they, too, were dumb. It is a great

mystery."

"Is she mad?" I asked.

"I will answer you according to my belief. She is not," returned the

Padre, "or she was not. When she was young--God help me, I fear I

neglected that wild lamb--she was surely sane; and yet, although it did

not run to such heights, the same strain was already notable; it had

been so before her in her father, ay, and before him, and this inclined

me, perhaps, to think too lightly of it. But these things go on growing,

not only in the individual but in the race."

"When she was young," I began, and my voice failed me for a moment, and

it was only with a great effort that I was able to add, "was she like

Olalla?"

"Now God forbid!" exclaimed the Padre. "God forbid that any man should

think so slightingly of my favourite penitent. No, no; the Senorita (but

for her beauty, which I wish most honestly she had less of) has not a

hair's resemblance to what her mother was at the same age. I could not

bear to have you think so; though, heaven knows, it were, perhaps,

better that you should."

At this I raised myself in bed, and opened my heart to the old man;

telling him of our love and of her decision; owning my own horrors, my

own passing fancies, but telling him that these were at an end; and with

something more than a purely formal submission, appealing to his

judgment.

He heard me very patiently and without surprise; and when I had done he

sat for some time silent. Then he began: "The Church," and instantly

broke off again to apologise. "I had forgotten, my child, that you were

not a Christian," said he. "And indeed, upon a point so highly unusual,

even the Church can scarce be said to have decided. But would you have

my opinion? The Senorita is, in a matter of this kind, the best judge;

I would accept her judgment."

On the back of that he went away, nor was he thenceforward so assiduous

in his visits; indeed, even when I began to get about again, he plainly

feared and deprecated my society, not as in distaste, but much as a man

might be disposed to flee from the riddling sphinx. The villagers, too,

avoided me; they were unwilling to be my guides upon the mountain. I

thought they looked at me askance, and I made sure that the more

superstitious crossed themselves on my approach. At first I set this

down to my heretical opinions; but it began at length to dawn upon me

that if I was thus redoubted it was because I had stayed at the

residencia. All men despise the savage notions of such peasantry; and

yet I was conscious of a chill shadow that seemed to fall and dwell upon

my love. It did not conquer, but I may not deny that it restrained, my

ardour.

Some miles westward of the village there was a gap in the sierra, from

which the eye plunged direct upon the residencia; and thither it became

my daily habit to repair. A wood crowned the summit; and just where the

pathway issued from its fringes, it was overhung by a considerable shelf

of rock, and that, in its turn, was surmounted by a crucifix of the size

of life and more than usually painful in design. This was my perch;

thence, day after day, I looked down upon the plateau, and the great old

house, and could see Felipe, no bigger than a fly, going to and fro

about the garden. Sometimes mists would draw across the view, and be

broken up again by mountain winds; sometimes the plain slumbered below

me in unbroken sunshine; it would sometimes be all blotted out by rain.

This distant post, these interrupted sights of the place where my life

had been so strangely changed, suited the indecision of my humour. I

passed whole days there, debating with myself the various elements of

our position, now leaning to the suggestions of love, now giving an ear

to prudence, and in the end halting irresolute between the two.

One day, as I was sitting on my rock, there came by that way a somewhat

gaunt peasant wrapped in a mantle. He was a stranger, and plainly did

not know me even by repute; for, instead of keeping the other side, he

drew near and sat down beside me, and we had soon fallen in talk. Among

other things, he told me he had been a muleteer, and in former years had

much frequented these mountains; later on, he had followed the army with

his mules, had realised a competence, and was now living retired with

his family.

"Do you know that house?" I inquired at last, pointing to the

residencia, for I readily wearied of any talk that kept me from the

thought of Olalla.

He looked at me darkly and crossed himself.

"Too well," he said, "it was there that one of my comrades sold himself

to Satan; the Virgin shield us from temptations! He has paid the price;

he is now burning in the reddest place in hell!"

A fear came upon me; I could answer nothing; and presently the man

resumed, as if to himself: "Yes," he said, "O yes, I know it. I have

passed its doors. There was snow upon the pass, the wind was driving it;

sure enough there was death that night upon the mountains, but there was

worse beside the hearth. I took him by the arm, Senor, and dragged him

to the gate; I conjured him, by all he loved and respected, to go forth

with me; I went on my knees before him in the snow; and I could see he

was moved by my entreaty. And just then she came out on the gallery, and

called him by his name; and he turned, and there was she, standing with

a lamp in her hand and smiling on him to come back. I cried out aloud to

God, and threw my arms about him, but he put me by, and left me alone.

He had made his choice; God help us. I would pray for him, but to what

end? there are sins that not even the Pope can loose."

"And your friend," I asked, "what became of him?"

"Nay, God knows," said the muleteer. "If all be true that we hear, his

end was like his sin, a thing to raise the hair."

"Do you mean that he was killed?" I asked.

"Sure enough, he was killed," returned the man. "But how? Ah, how? But

these are things that it is sin to speak of."

"The people of that house ..." I began.

But he interrupted me with a savage outburst. "The people?" he cried.

"What people? There are neither men nor women in that house of Satan's!

What? have you lived here so long, and never heard?" And here he put his

mouth to my ear and whispered, as if even the fowls of the mountain

might have overheard and been stricken with horror.

What he told me was not true, nor was it even original; being, indeed,

but a new edition, vamped up again by village ignorance and

superstition, of stories nearly as ancient as the race of man. It was

rather the application that appalled me. In the old days, he said, the

Church would have burned out that nest of basilisks; but the arm of the

Church was now shortened; his friend Miguel had been unpunished by the

hands of men, and left to the more awful judgment of an offended God.

This was wrong; but it should be so no more. The Padre was sunk in age;

he was even bewitched himself; but the eyes of his flock were now awake

to their own danger; and some day--ay, and before long--the smoke of

that house should go up to heaven.

He left me filled with horror and fear. Which way to turn I knew not;

whether first to warn the Padre, or to carry my ill news direct to the

threatened inhabitants of the residencia. Fate was to decide for me;

for, while I was still hesitating, I beheld the veiled figure of a woman

drawing near to me up the pathway. No veil could deceive my penetration;

by every line and every movement I recognised Olalla; and keeping

hidden behind a corner of the rock, I suffered her to gain the summit.

Then I came forward. She knew me and paused, but did not speak; I, too,

remained silent; and we continued for some time to gaze upon each other

with a passionate sadness.

"I thought you had gone," she said at length. "It is all that you can do

for me--to go. It is all I ever asked of you. And you still stay. But do

you know, that every day heaps up the peril of death, not only on your

head, but on ours? A report has gone about the mountain; it is thought

you love me, and the people will not suffer it."

I saw she was already informed of her danger, and I rejoiced at it.

"Olalla," I said, "I am ready to go this day, this very hour, but not

alone."

She stepped aside and knelt down before the crucifix to pray, and I

stood by and looked now at her and now at the object of her adoration,

now at the living figure of the penitent, and now at the ghastly, daubed

countenance, the painted wounds, and the projected ribs of the image.

The silence was only broken by the wailing of some large birds that

circled sidelong, as if in surprise or alarm, about the summit of the

hills. Presently Olalla rose again, turned towards me, raised her veil,

and, still leaning with one hand on the shaft of the crucifix, looked

upon me with a pale and sorrowful countenance.

"I have laid my hand upon the cross," she said. "The Padre says you are

no Christian; but look up for a moment with my eyes, and behold the face

of the Man of Sorrows. We are all such as He was--the inheritors of sin;

we must all bear and expiate a past which was not ours; there is in all

of us--ay, even in me--a sparkle of the divine. Like Him, we must endure

for a little while, until morning returns, bringing peace. Suffer me to

pass on upon my way alone; it is thus that I shall be least lonely,

counting for my friend Him who is the friend of all the distressed; it

is thus that I shall be the most happy, having taken my farewell of

earthly happiness, and willingly accepted sorrow for my portion."

I looked at the face of the crucifix, and, though I was no friend to

images, and despised that imitative and grimacing art of which it was a

rude example, some sense of what the thing implied was carried home to

my intelligence. The face looked down upon me with a painful and deadly

contraction; but the rays of a glory encircled it, and reminded me that

the sacrifice was voluntary. It stood there, crowning the rock, as it

still stands on so many highway sides, vainly preaching to passers-by,

an emblem of sad and noble truths; that pleasure is not an end, but an

accident; that pain is the choice of the magnanimous; that it is best to

suffer all things and do well. I turned and went down the mountain in

silence; and when I looked back for the last time before the wood closed

about my path, I saw Olalla still leaning on the crucifix.

HEATHERCAT

A FRAGMENT

HEATHERCAT

CHAPTER I

TRAQUAIRS OF MONTROYMONT

The period of this tale is in the heat of the _killing-time_; the scene

laid for the most part in solitary hills and morasses, haunted only by

the so-called Mountain Wanderers, the dragoons that came in chase of

them, the women that wept on their dead bodies, and the wild birds of

the moorland that have cried there since the beginning. It is a land of

many rain-clouds; a land of much mute history, written there in

pre-historic symbols. Strange green raths are to be seen commonly in the

country, above all by the kirkyards; barrows of the dead, standing

stones; beside these, the faint, durable footprints and handmarks of the

Roman; and an antiquity older perhaps than any, and still living and

active--a complete Celtic nomenclature and a scarce-mingled Celtic

population. These rugged and grey hills were once included in the

boundaries of the Caledonian Forest. Merlin sat here below his

apple-tree and lamented Gwendolen; here spoke with Kentigern; here fell

into his enchanted trance. And the legend of his slumber seems to body

forth the story of that Celtic race, deprived for so many centuries of

their authentic speech, surviving with their ancestral inheritance of

melancholy perversity and patient, unfortunate courage.

The Traquairs of Montroymont (_Mons Romanus_, as the erudite expound it)

had long held their seat about the head-waters of the Dule and in the

back parts of the moorland parish of Balweary. For two hundred years

they had enjoyed in these upland quarters a certain decency (almost to

be named distinction) of repute; and the annals of their house, or what

is remembered of them, were obscure and bloody. Ninian Traquair was

"cruallie slochtered" by the Crozers at the kirk-door of Balweary, anno

1482. Francis killed Simon Ruthven of Drumshoreland, anno 1540; bought

letters of slayers at the widow and heir, and, by a barbarous form of

compounding, married (without tocher) Simon's daughter Grizzel, which is

the way the Traquairs and Ruthvens came first to an intermarriage. About

the last Traquair and Ruthven marriage, it is the business of this book,

among many other things, to tell.

The Traquairs were always strong for the Covenant; for the King also,

but the Covenant first; and it began to be ill days for Montroymont when

the Bishops came in and the dragoons at the heels of them. Ninian (then

laird) was an anxious husband of himself and the property, as the times

required, and it may be said of him, that he lost both. He was heavily

suspected of the Pentland Hills rebellion. When it came the length of

Bothwell Brig, he stood his trial before the Secret Council, and was

convicted of talking with some insurgents by the wayside, the subject of

the conversation not very clearly appearing, and of the reset and

maintenance of one Gale, a gardener man, who seen before Bothwell with a

musket, and afterwards, for a continuance of months, delved the garden

at Montroymont. Matters went very ill with Ninian at the Council; some

of the lords were clear for treason; and even the boot was talked of.

But he was spared that torture; and at last, having pretty good

friendship among great men, he came off with a fine of seven thousand

marks, that caused the estate to groan. In this case, as in so many

others, it was the wife that made the trouble. She was a great keeper of

conventicles; would ride ten miles to one, and when she was fined,

rejoiced greatly to suffer for the Kirk; but it was rather her husband

that suffered. She had their only son, Francis, baptized privately by

the hands of Mr. Kidd; there was that much the more to pay for! She

could neither be driven nor wiled into the parish kirk; as for taking

the sacrament at the hands of any Episcopalian curate, and tenfold more

at those of Curate Haddo, there was nothing further from her purposes;

and Montroymont had to put his hand in his pocket month by month and

year by year. Once, indeed, the little lady was cast in prison, and the

laird, worthy, heavy, uninterested man, had to ride up and take her

place; from which he was not discharged under nine months and a sharp

fine. It scarce seemed she had any gratitude to him; she came out of

gaol herself, and plunged immediately deeper in conventicles, resetting

recusants, and all her old, expensive folly, only with greater vigour

and openness, because Montroymont was safe in the Tolbooth and she had

no witness to consider. When he was liberated and came back, with his

fingers singed, in December 1680, and late in the black night, my lady

was from home. He came into the house at his alighting, with a

riding-rod yet in his hand; and, on the servant-maid telling him, caught

her by the scruff of the neck, beat her violently, flung her down in the

passage-way, and went upstairs to his bed fasting and without a light.

It was three in the morning when my lady returned from that conventicle,

and, hearing of the assault (because the maid had sat up for her,

weeping), went to their common chamber with a lantern in hand and

stamping with her shoes so as to wake the dead; it was supposed, by

those that heard her, from a design to have it out with the good man at

once. The house-servants gathered on the stair, because it was a main

interest with them to know which of these two was the better horse; and

for the space of two hours they were heard to go at the matter, hammer

and tongs. Montroymont alleged he was at the end of possibilities; it

was no longer within his power to pay the annual rents; she had served

him basely by keeping conventicles while he lay in prison for her sake;

his friends were weary, and there was nothing else before him but the

entire loss of the family lands, and to begin life again by the wayside

as a common beggar. She took him up very sharp and high: called upon

him, if he were a Christian? and which he most considered, the loss of a

few dirty, miry glebes, or of his soul? Presently he was heard to weep,

and my lady's voice to go on continually like a running burn, only the

words indistinguishable; whereupon it was supposed a victory for her

ladyship, and the domestics took themselves to bed. The next day

Traquair appeared like a man who had gone under the harrows; and his

lady wife thenceforward continued in her old course without the least

deflection.

Thenceforward Ninian went on his way without complaint, and suffered his

wife to go on hers without remonstrance. He still minded his estate, of

which it might be said he took daily a fresh farewell, and counted it

already lost; looking ruefully on the acres and the graves of his

fathers, on the moorlands where the wildfowl consorted, the low,

gurgling pool of the trout, and the high, windy place of the calling

curlews--things that were yet his for the day and would be another's

to-morrow; coming back again, and sitting ciphering till the dusk at his

approaching ruin, which no device of arithmetic could postpone beyond a

year or two. He was essentially the simple ancient man, the farmer and

landholder; he would have been content to watch the seasons come and go,

and his cattle increase, until the limit of age; he would have been

content at any time to die, if he could have left the estates

undiminished to an heir-male of his ancestors, that duty standing first

in his instinctive calendar. And now he saw everywhere the image of the

new proprietor come to meet him, and go sowing and reaping, or fowling

for his pleasure on the red moors, or eating the very gooseberries in

the Place garden; and saw always, on the other hand, the figure of

Francis go forth, a beggar, into the broad world.

It was in vain the poor gentleman sought to moderate; took every test

and took advantage of every indulgence; went and drank with the dragoons

in Balweary; attended the communion and came regularly to the church to

Curate Haddo, with his son beside him. The mad, raging, Presbyterian

zealot of a wife at home made all of no avail; and indeed the house must

have fallen years before if it had not been for the secret indulgence of

the curate, who had a great sympathy with the laird, and winked hard at

the doings in Montroymont. This curate was a man very ill reputed in the

countryside, and indeed in all Scotland. "Infamous Haddo" is Shield's

expression. But Patrick Walker is more copious. "Curate Hall Haddo,"

says he, _sub voce_ Peden, "or _Hell_ Haddo, as he was more justly to be

called, a pokeful of old condemned errors and the filthy vile lusts of

the flesh, a published whoremonger, a common gross drunkard, continually

and godlessly scraping and skirling on a fiddle, continually breathing

flames against the remnant of Israel. But the Lord put an end to his

piping, and all these offences were composed into one bloody grave." No

doubt this was written to excuse his slaughter; and I have never heard

it claimed for Walker that he was either a just witness or an indulgent

judge. At least, in a merely human character, Haddo comes off not wholly

amiss in the matter of these Traquairs: not that he showed any graces of

the Christian, but had a sort of Pagan decency, which might almost tempt

one to be concerned about his sudden, violent, and unprepared fate.

CHAPTER II

FRANCIE

Francie was eleven years old, shy, secret, and rather childish of his

age, though not backward in schooling, which had been pushed on far by a

private governor, one M'Brair, a forfeited minister harboured in that

capacity at Montroymont. The boy, already much employed in secret by his

mother, was the most apt hand conceivable to run upon a message, to

carry food to lurking fugitives, or to stand sentry on the skyline above

a conventicle. It seemed no place on the moorlands was so naked but what

he would find cover there; and as he knew every hag, boulder, and

heather-bush in a circuit of seven miles about Montroymont, there was

scarce any spot but what he could leave or approach it unseen. This

dexterity had won him a reputation in that part of the country; and

among the many children employed in these dangerous affairs, he passed

under the by-name of Heathercat.

How much his father knew of this employment might be doubted. He took

much forethought for the boy's future, seeing he was like to be left so

poorly, and would sometimes assist at his lessons, sighing heavily,

yawning deep, and now and again patting Francie on the shoulder if he

seemed to be doing ill, by way of a private, kind encouragement. But a

great part of the day was passed in aimless wanderings with his eyes

sealed, or in his cabinet sitting bemused over the particulars of the

coming bankruptcy; and the boy would be absent a dozen times for once

that his father would observe it.

On 2nd of July 1682 the boy had an errand from his mother, which must

be kept private from all, the father included in the first of them.

Crossing the braes, he hears the clatter of a horse's shoes, and claps

down incontinent in a hag by the wayside. And presently he spied his

father come riding from one direction, and Curate Haddo walking from

another; and Montroymont leaning down from the saddle, and Haddo getting

on his toes (for he was a little, ruddy, bald-pated man, more like a

dwarf), they greeted kindly, and came to a halt within two fathoms of

the child.

"Montroymont," the curate said, "the deil's in 't but I'll have to

denunciate your leddy again."

"Deil's in 't indeed!" says the laird.

"Man! can ye no induce her to come to the kirk?" pursues Haddo; "or to a

communion at the least of it? For the conventicles, let be! and the same

for yon solemn fule, M'Brair: I can blink at them. But she's got to come

to the kirk, Montroymont."

"Dinna speak of it," says the laird. "I can do nothing with her."

"Couldn't ye try the stick to her? it works wonders whiles," suggested

Haddo. "No? I'm wae to hear it. And I suppose ye ken where you're

going?"

"Fine!" said Montroymont. "Fine do I ken where: bankrup'cy and the Bass

Rock!"

"Praise to my bones that I never married!" cried the curate. "Well, it's

a grievous thing to me to see an auld house dung down that was here

before Flodden Field. But naebody can say it was with my wish."

"No more they can, Haddo!" says the laird. "A good friend ye've been to

me, first and last. I can give you that character with a clear

conscience."

Whereupon they separated, and Montroymont rode briskly down into the

Dule Valley. But of the curate Francis was not to be quit so easily. He

went on with his little, brisk steps to the corner of a dyke, and

stopped and whistled and waved upon a lassie that was herding cattle

there. This Janet M'Clour was a big lass, being taller than the curate;

and what made her look the more so, she was kilted very high. It seemed

for a while she would not come, and Francie heard her calling Haddo a

"daft auld fule," and saw her running and dodging him among the whins

and hags till he was fairly blown. But at the last he gets a bottle from

his plaid-neuk and holds it up to her; whereupon she came at once into a

composition, and the pair sat, drinking of the bottle, and daffing and

laughing together, on a mound of heather. The boy had scarce heard of

these vanities, or he might have been minded of a nymph and satyr, if

anybody could have taken long-leggit Janet for a nymph. But they seemed

to be huge friends, he thought; and was the more surprised, when the

curate had taken his leave, to see the lassie fling stones after him

with screeches of laughter, and Haddo turn about and caper, and shake

his staff at her, and laugh louder than herself. A wonderful merry pair,

they seemed; and when Francie had crawled out of the hag, he had a great

deal to consider in his mind. It was possible they were all fallen in

error about Mr. Haddo, he reflected,--having seen him so tender with

Montroymont, and so kind and playful with the lass Janet; and he had a

temptation to go out of his road and question her herself upon the

matter. But he had a strong spirit of duty on him; and plodded on

instead over the braes till he came near the House of Cairngorm. There,

in a hollow place, by the burnside that was shaded by some birks, he was

aware of a barefoot boy, perhaps a matter of three years older than

himself. The two approached with the precautions of a pair of strange

dogs, looking at each other queerly.

"It's ill weather on the hills," said the stranger, giving the

watchword.

"For a season," said Francie, "but the Lord will appear."

"Richt," said the barefoot boy; "wha're ye frae?"

"The Leddy Montroymont," says Francie.

"Ha'e, then!" says the stranger, and handed him a folded paper, and they

stood and looked at each other again. "It's unco' het," said the boy.

"Dooms het," says Francie.

"What do they ca' ye?" says the other.

"Francie," says he. "I'm young Montroymont. They ca' me Heathercat."

"I'm Jock Crozer," said the boy. And there was another pause, while each

rolled a stone under his foot.

"Cast your jaiket and I'll fecht ye for a bawbee," cried the elder boy

with sudden violence, and dramatically throwing back his jacket.

"Na, I have nae time the now," said Francie, with a sharp thrill of

alarm, because Crozer was much the heavier boy.

"Ye're feared. Heathercat indeed!" said Crozer, for among this infantile

army of spies and messengers, the fame of Crozer had gone forth and was

resented by his rivals. And with that they separated.

On his way home Francie was a good deal occupied with the recollection

of this untoward incident. The challenge had been fairly offered and

basely refused: the tale would be carried all over the country, and the

lustre of the name of Heathercat be dimmed. But the scene between Curate

Haddo and Janet M'Clour had also given him much to think of: and he was

still puzzling over the case of the curate, and why such ill words were

said of him, and why, if he were so merry-spirited, he should yet preach

so dry, when coming over a knowe, whom should he see but Janet, sitting

with her back to him, minding her cattle! He was always a great child

for secret, stealthy ways, having been employed by his mother on errands

when the same was necessary; and he came behind the lass without her

hearing.

"Jennet," says he.

"Keep me," cries Janet, springing up. "O, it's you, Maister Francie!

Save us, what a fricht ye gied me."

"Ay, it's me," said Francie. "I've been thinking, Jennet; I saw you and

the curate a while back----"

"Brat!" cried Janet, and coloured up crimson; and the one moment made as

if she would have stricken him with a ragged stick she had to chase her

bestial with, and the next was begging and praying that he would mention

it to none. It was "naebody's business, whatever," she said; "it would

just start a clash in the country"; and there would be nothing left for

her but to drown herself in Dule Water.

"Why?" says Francie.

The girl looked at him and grew scarlet again.

"And it isna that, anyway," continued Francie. "It was just that he

seemed so good to ye--like our Father in heaven, I thought; and I

thought that mebbe, perhaps, we had all been wrong about him from the

first. But I'll have to tell Mr. M'Brair; I'm under a kind of a bargain

to him to tell him all."

"Tell it to the divil if ye like for me!" cried the lass. "I've naething

to be ashamed of. Tell M'Brair to mind his ain affairs," she cried

again: "they'll be hot eneugh for him, if Haddie likes!" And so strode

off, shoving her beasts before her, and ever and again looking back and

crying angry words to the boy, where he stood mystified.

By the time he had got home his mind was made up that he would say

nothing to his mother. My Lady Montroymont was in the keeping-room,

reading a godly book; she was a wonderful frail little wife to make so

much noise in the world and be able to steer about that patient sheep

her husband; her eyes were like sloes, the fingers of her hands were

like tobacco-pipe shanks, her mouth shut tight like a trap; and even

when she was the most serious, and still more when she was angry, there

hung about her face the terrifying semblance of a smile.

"Have ye gotten the billet, Francie?" said she; and when he had handed

it over, and she had read and burned it, "Did you see anybody?" she

asked.

"I saw the laird," said Francie.

"He didna see you, though?" asked his mother.

"Deil a fear," from Francie.

"Francie!" she cried. "What's that I hear? an aith? The Lord forgive me,

have I broughten forth a brand for the burning, a fagot for hell-fire?"

"I'm very sorry, ma'am," said Francie. "I humbly beg the Lord's pardon,

and yours, for my wickedness."

"H'm," grunted the lady. "Did ye see nobody else?"

"No, ma'am," said Francie, with the face of an angel, "except Jock

Crozer, that gied me the billet."

"Jock Crozer!" cried the lady. "I'll Crozer them! Crozers indeed! What

next? Are we to repose the lives of a suffering remnant in Crozers? The

whole clan of them wants hanging, and if I had my way of it, they

wouldna want it long. Are you aware, sir, that these Crozers killed your

forebear at the kirk-door?"

"You see, he was bigger 'n me," said Francie.

"Jock Crozer!" continued the lady. "That'll be Clement's son, the

biggest thief and reiver in the countryside. To trust a note to him! But

I'll give the benefit of my opinions to Lady Whitecross when we two

forgather. Let her look to herself! I have no patience with half-hearted

carlines, that complies on the Lord's day morning with the kirk, and

comes taigling the same night to the conventicle. The one or the other!

is what I say: hell or heaven--Haddie's abominations or the pure word of

God dreeping from the lips of Mr. Arnot,

"'Like honey from the honeycomb

That dreepeth, sweeter far.'"

My lady was now fairly launched, and that upon two congenial subjects:

the deficiencies of the Lady Whitecross and the turpitudes of the whole

Crozer race--which, indeed, had never been conspicuous for

respectability. She pursued the pair of them for twenty minutes on the

clock with wonderful animation and detail, something of the pulpit

manner, and the spirit of one possessed. "O hellish compliance!" she

exclaimed. "I would not suffer a complier to break bread with Christian

folk. Of all the sins of this day there is not one so God-defying, so

Christ-humiliating, as damnable compliance": the boy standing before her

meanwhile, and brokenly pursuing other thoughts, mainly of Haddo and

Janet, and Jock Crozer stripping off his jacket. And yet, with all his

distraction, it might be argued that he heard too much: his father and

himself being "compliers"--that is to say, attending the church of the

parish as the law required.

Presently, the lady's passion beginning to decline, or her flux of ill

words to be exhausted, she dismissed her audience. Francie bowed low,

left the room, closed the door behind him: and then turned him about in

the passage-way, and with a low voice, but a prodigious deal of

sentiment, repeated the name of the evil one twenty times over, to the

end of which, for the greater efficacy, he tacked on "damnable" and

"hellish." _Fas est ab hoste doceri_--disrespect is made more pungent by

quotation; and there is no doubt but he felt relieved, and went upstairs

into his tutor's chamber with a quiet mind. M'Brair sat by the cheek of

the peat-fire and shivered, for he had a quartan ague and this was his

day. The great nightcap and plaid, the dark unshaven cheeks of the man,

and the white, thin hands that held the plaid about his chittering body,

made a sorrowful picture. But Francie knew and loved him; came straight

in, nestled close to the refugee, and told his story. M'Brair had been

at the College with Haddo; the Presbytery had licensed both on the same

day; and at this tale, told with so much innocency by the boy, the

heart of the tutor was commoved.

"Woe upon him! Woe upon that man!" he cried. "O the unfaithful shepherd!

O the hireling and apostate minister! Make my matters hot for me? quo'

she! the shameless limmer! And true it is, that he could repose me in

that nasty, stinking hole, the Canongate Tolbooth, from which your

mother drew me out--the Lord reward her for it!--or to that cold,

unbieldy, marine place of the Bass Rock, which, with my delicate kist,

would be fair ruin to me. But I will be valiant in my Master's service.

I have a duty here: a duty to my God, to myself, and to Haddo: in His

strength, I will perform it."

Then he straitly discharged Francie to repeat the tale, and bade him in

the future to avert his very eyes from the doings of the curate. "You

must go to his place of idolatry; look upon him there!" says he, "but

nowhere else. Avert your eyes, close your ears, pass him by like a three

days' corp. He is like that damnable monster Basiliscus, which

defiles--yea, poisons!--by the sight."--All which was hardly claratory

to the boy's mind.

Presently Montroymont came home, and called up the stairs to Francie.

Traquair was a good shot and swordsman: and it was his pleasure to walk

with his son over the braes of the moorfowl, or to teach him arms in the

back court, when they made a mighty comely pair, the child being so

lean, and light, and active, and the laird himself a man of a manly,

pretty stature, his hair (the periwig being laid aside) showing already

white with many anxieties, and his face of an even, flaccid red. But

this day Francie's heart was not in the fencing.

"Sir," says he, suddenly lowering his point, "will ye tell me a thing if

I was to ask it?"

"Ask away," says the father.

"Well, it's this," said Francie: "Why do you and me comply if it's so

wicked?"

"Ay, ye have the cant of it too!" cried Montroymont. "But I'll tell ye

for all that. It's to try and see if we can keep the rigging on this

house, Francie. If she had her way, we would be beggar-folk, and hold

our hands out by the wayside. When ye hear her--when ye hear folk," he

corrected himself briskly, "call me a coward, and one that betrayed the

Lord, and I kenna what else, just mind it was to keep a bed to ye to

sleep in and a bite for ye to eat.--On guard!" he cried, and the lesson

proceeded again till they were called to supper.

"There's another thing yet," said Francie, stopping his father. "There's

another thing that I am not sure that I am very caring for. She--she

sends me errands."

"Obey her, then, as is your bounden duty," said Traquair.

"Ay, but wait till I tell ye," says the boy. "If I was to see you I was

to hide."

Montroymont sighed. "Well, and that's good of her too," said he. "The

less that I ken of thir doings the better for me; and the best thing you

can do is just to obey her, and see and be a good son to her, the same

as ye are to me, Francie."

At the tenderness of this expression the heart of Francie swelled within

his bosom, and his remorse was poured out. "Faither!" he cried, "I said

'deil' to-day; many's the time I said it, and _damnable_ too, and

_hellish_. I ken they're all right; they're beeblical. But I didna say

them beeblically; I said them for sweir words--that's the truth of it."

"Hout, ye silly bairn!" said the father, "dinna do it nae mair, and come

in by to your supper." And he took the boy, and drew him close to him a

moment, as they went through the door, with something very fond and

secret, like a caress between a pair of lovers.

The next day M'Brair was abroad in the afternoon, and had a long

advising with Janet on the braes where she herded cattle. What passed

was never wholly known; but the lass wept bitterly, and fell on her

knees to him among the whins. The same night, as soon as it was dark, he

took the road again for Balweary. In the Kirkton, where the dragoons

quartered, he saw many lights, and heard the noise of a ranting song and

people laughing grossly, which was highly offensive to his mind. He gave

it the wider berth, keeping among fields; and came down at last by the

water-side, where the manse stands solitary between the river and the

road. He tapped at the back door, and the old woman called upon him to

come in, and guided him through the house to the study, as they still

called it, though there was little enough study there in Haddo's days,

and more song-books than theology.

"Here's yin to speak wi' ye, Mr. Haddie!" cries the old wife.

And M'Brair, opening the door and entering, found the little, round, red

man seated in one chair and his feet upon another. A clear fire and a

tallow dip lighted him barely. He was taking tobacco in a pipe, and

smiling to himself; and a brandy-bottle and glass, and his fiddle and

bow, were beside him on the table.

"Hech, Patey M'Brair, is this you?" said he, a trifle tipsily. "Step in

by, man, and have a drop brandy: for the stomach's sake! Even the deil

can quote Scripture--eh, Patey?"

"I will neither eat nor drink with you," replied M'Brair. "I am come

upon my Master's errand! woe be upon me if I should anyways mince the

same. Hall Haddo, I summon you to quit this kirk which you encumber."

"Muckle obleeged!" says Haddo, winking.

"You and me have been to kirk and market together," pursued M'Brair; "we

have had blessed seasons in the kirk, we have sat in the same

teaching-rooms and read in the same book; and I know you still retain

for me some carnal kindness. It would be my shame if I denied it; I live

here at your mercy and by your favour, and glory to acknowledge it. You

have pity on my wretched body, which is but grass, and must soon be

trodden under: but O, Haddo! how much greater is the yearning with which

I yearn after and pity your immortal soul! Come now, let us reason

together! I drop all points of controversy, weighty though these be; I

take your defaced and damnified kirk on your own terms; and I ask you,

Are you a worthy minister? The communion season approaches; how can you

pronounce thir solemn words, 'The elders will now bring forrit the

elements,' and not quail? A parishioner may be summoned to-night; you

may have to rise from your miserable orgies; and I ask you, Haddo, what

does your conscience tell you? Are you fit? Are you fit to smooth the

pillow of a parting Christian? And if the summons should be for

yourself, how then?"