On the following day, the peaceful monks of the Abbey of Fitero, to whom
the lay-brother had given an account of the strange visit of the night
before, saw the unknown pilgrim, pallid and like a man beside himself,
entering their doors.
“Did you hear the _Miserere_ at last?” the lay-brother asked him with a
certain tinge of irony, slyly casting a glance of intelligence at his
superiors.
“Yes,” replied the musician.
“And how did you like it?”
“I am going to write it. Give me a refuge in your house,” he continued,
addressing the abbot, “a refuge and bread for a few months, and I will
leave you an immortal work of art, a _Miserere_ which shall blot out my
sins from the sight of God, eternize my memory, and with it the memory
of this abbey.”
The monks, out of curiosity, counselled the abbot to grant his request;
the abbot, for charity, though he believed the man a lunatic, finally
consented; and the musician, thus installed in the monastery, began his
work.
Night and day he labored with unremitting zeal. In the midst of his task
he would pause and appear to be listening to something which sounded in
his imagination; his pupils would dilate and he would spring from his
seat exclaiming: “That is it; so; so; no doubt about it--so!” And he
would go on writing notes with a feverish haste which more than once
made those who kept him under secret observation wonder.
He wrote the first verses, and those following to about the middle of
the Psalm; but when he had written the last verse that he had heard upon
the mountain, it was impossible for him to proceed.
He made one, two, one hundred, two hundred rough drafts; all in vain.
His music was not like the music already written. Sleep fled from his
eyelids, he lost his appetite, fever seized upon his brain, he went mad,
and died, at last, without being able to finish the _Miserere_, which,
as a curiosity, the monks treasured till his death, and even yet
preserve in the archives of the abbey.
* * * * *
When the old man had made an end of telling me this story, I could not
refrain from turning my eyes again to the dusty, ancient manuscript of
the _Miserere_, which still lay upon one of the tables.
_In peccatis concepit me mater mea._
These were the words on the page before me, seeming to mock me with
their notes, their keys and their scrawls unintelligible to lay-brothers
in music.