He was noble, he had been born amid the clash of arms, and yet the
sudden blare of a war trumpet would not have caused him to lift his head
an instant or turn his eyes an inch away from the dim parchment in which
he was reading the last song of a troubadour.
Those who desired to see him had no need to look for him in the spacious
court of his castle, where the grooms were breaking in the colts, the
pages teaching the falcons to fly, and the soldiers employing their
leisure days in sharpening on stones the iron points of their lances.
“Where is Manrico? Where is your lord?” his mother would sometimes ask.
“We do not know,” the servants would reply. “Perchance he is in the
cloister of the monastery of the Peña, seated on the edge of a tomb,
listening to see if he may
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE OF TOLEDO]
surprise some word of the conversation of the dead; or on the bridge
watching the river-waves chasing one another under its arches, or curled
up in the fissure of some rock counting the stars in the sky, following
with his eyes a cloud, or contemplating the will-o’-the-wisps that flit
like exhalations over the surface of the marshes. Wherever he is, it is
where he has least company.”
In truth, Manrico was a lover of solitude, and so extreme a lover that
sometimes he would have wished to be a body without a shadow, because
then his shadow would not follow him everywhere he went.
He loved solitude, because in its bosom he would invent, giving free
rein to his imagination, a phantasmal world, inhabited by wonderful
beings, daughters of his weird fancies and his poetic dreams; for
Manrico was a poet,--so true a poet that never had he found adequate
forms in which to utter his thoughts nor had he ever imprisoned them in
words.
He believed that among the red coals of the hearth there dwelt
fire-spirits of a thousand hues which ran like golden insects along the
enkindled logs or danced in a luminous whirl of sparks on the pointed
flames, and he passed long hours of inaction seated on a low stool by
the high Gothic chimney-place, motionless, his eyes fixed on the fire.
He believed that in the depths of the waves of the river, among the
mosses of the fountain and above the mists of the lake there lived
mysterious women, sibyls, nymphs, undines, who breathed forth laments
and sighs, or sang and laughed in the monotonous murmur of the water, a
murmur to which he listened in silence, striving to translate it.
In the clouds, in the air, in the depths of the groves, in the clefts of
the rocks, he imagined that he perceived forms, or heard mysterious
sounds, forms of supernatural beings, indistinct words which he could
not comprehend.
Love! He had been born to dream love, not to feel it. He loved all women
an instant, this one because she was golden-haired, that one because she
had red lips, another because in walking she swayed as a river-reed.
Sometimes his delirium reached the point of his spending an entire night
gazing at the moon, which floated in heaven in a silvery mist, or at the
stars, which twinkled afar off like the changing lights of precious
stones. In those long nights of poetic wakefulness, he would exclaim:
“If it is true, as the Prior of the Peña has told me, that it is
possible those points of light may be worlds, if it is true that people
live on that pearly orb which rides above the clouds, how beautiful must
the women of those luminous regions be! and I shall not be able to see
them, and I shall not be able to love them! What must their beauty be!
And what their love!”
Manrico was not yet so demented that the boys would run after him, but
he was sufficiently so to talk and gesticulate to himself, which is
where madness begins.