Among the huntsmen of Don Dionís was one named Garcés, the son of an old
servitor of the house and therefore held in high regard by the family.
Garcés was of about the age of Constanza, and from early boyhood had
been accustomed to anticipate the least of her wishes and to divine and
gratify the lightest of her whims.
He amused himself in his moments of leisure in sharpening with his own
hand the pointed arrows of her ivory crossbow; he broke in the colts for
her mounts; he trained her favorite hounds in the arts of the chase and
tamed her falcons for which he bought at the fairs of Castile red hoods
embroidered with gold.
But as for the other huntsmen, the pages and the common folk in the
service of Don Dionís, the delicate attentions of Garcés and the marks
of esteem with which his superiors distinguished him had caused them to
hold him in a sort of general dislike, even to the point of saying, in
their envy, that all his assiduous efforts to anticipate the caprices of
his mistress revealed the character of a flatterer and a sycophant. Yet
there were not wanting those who, more keen-sighted or malicious than
the rest, believed that they detected in the young retainer’s devotion
signs of an ill-dissembled passion.
If this were really so, the secret love of Garcés had more than abundant
excuse in the incomparable charms of Constanza. He must needs have had a
breast of stone, and a heart of ice, who could remain unmoved day after
day at the side of that woman, peerless in her beauty and her bewitching
graces.
The Lily of the Moncayo they called her for twenty leagues around, and
well she merited this soubriquet, for she was so exquisite, so white and
so delicately flushed that it would seem that God had made her, like the
lilies, of snow and gold.
Nevertheless, among the neighboring gentry it was whispered that the
beautiful Lady of Veratón was not so pure of blood as she was fair, and
that despite her bright tresses and her alabaster complexion, she had
had a gipsy mother. How much truth there was in these rumors no one
could say, for, in fact, Don Dionís had in his youth led an adventurous
life, and after fighting long under the banner of the King of Aragon,
from whom he received among other rewards the fief of the Moncayo, had
gone to Palestine, where he wandered for some years, finally returning
to establish himself in his castle of Veratón with a little daughter
born, doubtless, on foreign soil. The only person who could have told
anything about the mysterious origin of Constanza, having attended Don
Dionís in his travels abroad, was the father of Garcés, and he had died
some time since without saying a single word on the subject, not even to
his own son who, at various times and with manifestations of great
interest, had questioned him.
The temperament of Constanza, with its swift alternations from reserve
and melancholy to mirth and glee; the singular vividness of her
imagination; her wild moods; her extraordinary ways; even the
peculiarity of having eyes and eyebrows black as night while her
complexion was white and rosy and her hair as bright as gold, had
contributed to furnish food for the gossip of the countryside; and even
Garcés himself, who knew her so intimately, had come to the conclusion
that his liege lady was something apart and did not resemble the rest of
womankind.
Present, as the other huntsmen were, at the narration of Esteban, Garcés
was perhaps the only one who listened with genuine curiosity to the
details of the shepherd’s incredible adventure; and though he could not
help smiling when the lad repeated the words of the white doe, no sooner
had he left the grove in which they had taken their siesta, than he
began to revolve in his mind the most ridiculous fancies.
“Without doubt this tale of the talking of the deer is a sheer delusion
of Esteban’s, who is a perfect simpleton,” the young huntsman said to
himself as, mounted on a powerful sorrel, he followed step by step the
palfrey of Constanza, who seemed also somewhat preoccupied and was so
silent and so withdrawn from the group of hunters as scarcely to take
any part in the sport. “Yet who can say that in the story which this
poor fool tells there may not be a grain of truth?” thought on the young
retainer. “We have seen stranger things in the world, and a white doe
may indeed exist, since if we can credit the folk-songs, Saint Hubert,
the patron of huntsmen, had one. Oh, if I could take a white doe alive
for an offering to my lady!”
Thus thinking and dreaming, Garcés passed the afternoon; and when the
sun began to descend behind the neighboring hills, and Don Dionís gave
the order to his retinue for the return to the castle, he slipped away
from the company unnoticed and went in search of the shepherd through
the densest and most entangled coverts of the mountain.
Night had almost completely closed in when Don Dionís arrived at the
gates of his castle. Immediately there was placed before him a frugal
collation and he sat down with his daughter at the table.
“And Garcés, where is he?” asked Constanza, noticing that her huntsman
was not there to serve her as usual.
“We do not know,” the other attendants hastened to reply. “He
disappeared from among us near the glen and we have not seen him since.”
At that instant Garcés arrived, all breathless, his forehead still
covered with perspiration, but with the most happy and satisfied
expression imaginable.
“Pardon me, my lady,” he exclaimed, addressing Constanza, “pardon me if
I have been wanting a moment in my duty, but there whence I came at my
horse’s best speed, there, as here, I was busied only in your service.”
“In my service?” repeated Constanza. “I do not understand what you
mean.”
“Yes, my lady, in your service,” repeated the youth, “for I have
ascertained that the white doe really does exist. Besides Esteban, it is
vouched for by various other shepherds, who swear they have seen it more
than once; and with their aid I hope in God and in my patron Saint
Hubert to bring it, living or dead, within three days to you at the
castle.”
“Bah! Bah!” exclaimed Constanza with a jesting air, while the derisive
laughter, more or less dissimulated, of the bystanders chorused her
words. “Have done with midnight hunts and with white does. Bear in mind
that the Devil loves to tempt the simple; and if you persist in
following at his heels, he will make you a laughing-stock like poor
Esteban.”
“My lady,” interrupted Garcés with a broken voice, concealing as far as
possible the anger which the merry scoffs of his companions stirred in
him, “I have never yet had to do with the Devil and consequently I am
not acquainted with his practices; but, for myself, I swear to you that,
do all he can, he will not make me an object of laughter, for that is a
privilege I know how to tolerate in yourself alone.”
Constanza saw the effect which her mocking had produced on the enamoured
youth, but desiring to test his patience to the uttermost, she continued
in the same tone:
“And what if, on aiming at the doe, she salutes you with another laugh
like that which Esteban heard, or flings it into your very face, and
you, hearing those supernatural peals of merriment, let fall your bow
from your hands, and before you recover from the fright, the white doe
has vanished swifter than lightning--what then?”
“Oh, as for that!” exclaimed Garcés, “be sure that if I can speed a
shaft before she is out of bowshot, although she play me more tricks
than a juggler; although she speak to me, not in the language of the
country, but in Latin like the Abbot of Munilla, she will not get off
without an arrow-head in her body.”
At this stage in the conversation, Don Dionís joined in with a forced
gravity through which might be detected the entire irony of his words,
and began to give the now persecuted boy the most original counsels in
the world, in case he should suddenly meet with the demon changed into
a white doe.
At each new suggestion of her father, Constanza fixed her eyes on the
distressed Garcés, and broke into extravagant laughter, while his
fellow-servitors encouraged the jesting with glances of intelligence and
ill-disguised delight.
Only with the close of the supper ceased this scene, in which the
credulity of the young hunter was, so to speak, the theme on which the
general mirth played variations, so that when the cloth was removed and
Don Dionís and Constanza had withdrawn to their apartments, and all the
inmates of the castle had gone to rest, Garcés remained for a long time
irresolute, debating whether, notwithstanding the jeers of his liege
lord and lady, he would stand firm to his purpose, or absolutely abandon
the enterprise.
“What the devil,” he exclaimed, rousing himself from the state of
uncertainty into which he had fallen. “Greater harm than that which has
overtaken me cannot come to pass and if, on the other hand, what Esteban
has told us is true, oh, then, how sweet will be the taste of my
triumph!”
Thus speaking, he fitted a shaft to his crossbow--not without having
made the sign of the cross on the point of the arrow--and swinging it
over his shoulder, he directed his steps toward the postern gate of the
castle to take the mountain path.
When Garcés reached the glen and the point where, according to the
instructions of Esteban, he was to lie in wait for the appearance of the
deer, the moon was slowly rising behind the neighboring mountains.
Like a good hunter, well-practised in his craft, he spent a considerable
time, before selecting a suitable place for an ambush, in going to and
fro, scanning the byways and paths thereabouts, the grouping of the
trees, the irregularities of the ground, the curves of the river and the
depth of its waters.
At last, after completing this minute examination of the locality, he
hid himself upon a sloping bank near some black poplars whose high and
interlacing tops cast a dark shadow, and at whose feet grew a clump of
mastic shrubs high enough to conceal a man lying prone on the ground.
The river, which, from the mossy rocks where it rose, came following the
windings of the rugged fief of the Moncayo to enter the glen by a
cascade, thence went gliding on, bathing the roots of the willows that
shaded its bank, or playing with a murmurous ripple among the stones
rolled down from the mountain, until it fell into a pool very near the
point which served the hunter for a hiding-place.
The poplars, whose silvered leaves the wind stirred with the sweetest
rustle, the willows which, leaning over the limpid current, bedewed in
it the tips of their pale branches, and the crowded groups of evergreen
oaks about whose trunks honeysuckles and blue morning-glories clambered
and twined, formed a thick wall of foliage around this quiet river-pool.
The wind, stirring the leafy curtains of living green which spread round
about their floating shadow, let penetrate at intervals a stealthy ray
of light that gleamed like a flash of silver over the surface of the
motionless, deep waters.
Hidden among the bushes, his ear attent to the slightest sound, and his
gaze fixed upon the spot where, according to his calculations, the deer
should come, Garcés waited a long time in vain.
Everything about him remained buried in a deep calm.
Little by little, and it might well be that the lateness of the
hour--for it was past midnight--began to weigh upon his lids--might well
be that far-off murmurs of the water, the penetrating scent of the wild
flowers and the caresses of the wind affected his senses with the soft
drowsiness in which all nature seemed to be steeped--the enamoured boy,
who until now had been occupied in revolving in his mind the most
alluring fancies, began to find that his ideas took shape more slowly
and his thoughts drifted into vague and indecisive forms.
After lingering a little in this dim border-land between waking and
sleeping, at last he closed his eyes, let his crossbow slip from his
hands, and sank into a profound slumber.
* * * * *
It must have been for two or three hours now that the young hunter had
been snoring at his ease, enjoying to the full one of the serenest
dreams of his life, when suddenly he opened his eyes, with a stare, and
half raised himself to a sitting posture, full yet of that stupor with
which one wakes suddenly from profound sleep.
In the breathings of the wind and blended with the light noises of the
night, he thought he detected a strange hum of delicate voices, sweet
and mysterious, which were talking with one another, laughing or
singing, each in its own individual strain, making a twitter as
clamorous and confused as that of the birds awakening at the first ray
of the sun amid the leaves of a poplar grove.
This extraordinary sound was heard for an instant only, and then all was
still again.
“Without doubt, I was dreaming of the absurdities of which the shepherd
told us,” exclaimed Garcés, rubbing his eyes in all tranquillity, and
firmly persuaded that what he had thought he heard was no more than that
vague impression of slumber which, on awaking, lingers in the
imagination, as the closing cadence of a melody dwells in the ear after
the last trembling note has ceased. And overcome by the unconquerable
languor weighing down his limbs, he was about to lay his head again upon
the turf, when he heard anew the distant echo of those mystic voices,
which to the accompaniment of the soft stir of the air, the water and
the leaves were singing thus: