Romantic legends of Spain

“ ‘Toward the Lavender Glen,’ they replied.

“This information did not enter one ear to go out at the other; that very night I posted myself among the poplars. During all its hours I kept hearing here and there, far off as well as near by, the trumpeting of the deer as they called one to another, and from time to time I felt the boughs stirring behind me; but however sharply I looked, the truth is, I could distinguish nothing.

“Nevertheless, at break of day, when I took the lambs to water, at the bank of the stream, about two throws of the sling from the place where we now are, and in so dense a shade of poplars that not even at mid-day is it pierced by a ray of sunshine, I found fresh deer-tracks, broken branches, the stream a little roiled and, what is more peculiar, among the deer-tracks the short prints of tiny feet no larger than the half of the palm of my hand, without any exaggeration.”

On saying this, the boy, instinctively seeming to seek a point of comparison, directed his glance to the foot of Constanza, which peeped from beneath her petticoat shod in a dainty sandal of yellow morocco, but as the eyes of Don Dionís and of some of the huntsmen who were about him followed Esteban’s, the beautiful girl hastened to conceal it, exclaiming in the most natural voice in the world:

“Oh, no! unluckily mine are not so tiny, for feet of this size are found only among the fairies of whom the troubadours sing.”

“But I did not give up with this,” continued the shepherd, when Constanza had finished. “Another time, having concealed myself in another hiding-place by which, undoubtedly, the deer would have to pass in going to the glen, at just about midnight sleep overcame me for a little, although not so much but that I opened my eyes at the very moment when I perceived the branches were stirring around me. I opened my eyes, as I have said; I rose with the utmost caution and, listening intently to the confused murmur, which every moment sounded nearer, I heard in the gusts of wind something like cries and strange songs, bursts of laughter, and three or four distinct voices which talked together with a chatter and gay confusion like that of the young girls at the village when, laughing and jesting on the way, they return in groups from the fountain with their water-jars on their heads.

“As I gathered from the nearness of the voices and close-by crackle of twigs which broke noisily in giving way to that throng of merry maids, they were just about to come out of the thicket on to a little platform formed by a jut of the mountain there where I was hid when, right at my back, as near or nearer than I am to you, I heard a new voice, fresh, fine and vibrant, which said – believe it, señores, it is as true as that I have to die – it said, clearly and distinctly, these very words:

“ ‘Hither, hither, comrades dear!That dolt of an Esteban is here!’ ”

On reaching this point in the shepherd’s story, the bystanders could no longer repress the merriment which for many minutes had been dancing in their eyes and, giving free rein to their mirth, they broke into clamorous laughter. Among the first to begin to laugh, and the last to leave off, were Don Dionís, who, notwithstanding his air of dignity, could not but take part in the general hilarity, and his daughter Constanza, who, every time she looked at Esteban, all in suspense and embarrassment as he was, fell to laughing again like mad till the tears sprang from her eyes.

The shepherd-lad, for his part, although without heeding the effect his story had produced, seemed disturbed and restless, and while the great folk laughed to their hearts’ content at his simple tale, he turned his face from one side to the other with visible signs of fear and as if trying to descry something beyond the intertwined trunks of the trees.

“What is it, Esteban, what is the matter?” asked one of the huntsmen, noting the growing disquietude of the poor boy, who now was fixing his frightened eyes on the laughing daughter of Don Dionís, and again gazing all around him with an expression of astonishment and dull dismay:

“A very strange thing is happening to me,” exclaimed Esteban. “When, after hearing the words which I have just repeated, I quickly sat upright to surprise the person who had spoken them, a doe white as snow leaped from the very copse in which I was hidden and, taking a few prodigious bounds over the tops of the evergreen oaks and mastic trees, sped away, followed by a herd of deer of the natural color; and these, like the white one who was guiding them, did not utter the cries of deer in flight, but laughed with great peals of laughter, whose echo, I could swear, is sounding in my ears at this moment.”

“Bah, bah, Esteban!” exclaimed Don Dionís, with a jesting air, “follow the counsels of the priest of Tarazona; do not talk of your adventures with the joke-loving deer, lest the Devil bring it to pass that in the end you lose the little sense you have, and since now you are provided with the gospels and know the prayer of Saint Bartholomew, return to your lambs which are beginning to scatter through the glen. If the evil spirits tease you again, you know the remedy —Pater Noster and a big stick.”

The shepherd, after putting away in his pouch a half loaf of white bread and a piece of boar’s meat, and in his stomach a mighty draught of wine, which, by order of his lord, one of the grooms gave him, took leave of Don Dionís and his daughter and had scarcely gone four steps when he began whirling his sling, casting stones from it to gather the lambs together.

As, by this time, Don Dionís observed that, what with one diversion and another, the hours of heat were now passed and the light afternoon breeze was beginning to stir the leaves of the poplars and to freshen the fields, he gave orders to his retinue to make ready the horses which were grazing loose in the grove hard by; and when everything was prepared, he signalled to some to slip the leashes, and to others to blow the horns and, sallying forth in a troop from the poplar-grove, took up the interrupted chase.

II

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:

CHORUS.“The archer who watched on the top of the tower has laid his heavy head down on the wall.The stealthy hunter who was expecting to surprise the deer has been surprised by sleep.The shepherd who awaited the day, consulting the stars, sleeps now, and will sleep till dawn.Queen of the water-sprites, follow our steps.Come to swing in the branches of the willows over the surface of the water.“Come to intoxicate thyself with the perfume of the violets which open at dusk.“Come to enjoy the night, which is the day of the spirits.”

While the sweet notes of that delicious music floated on the air, Garcés remained motionless. After it had melted away, with much caution he slightly parted the branches and, not without experiencing a certain shock, saw come into sight the deer, which, moving in a confused group and sometimes bounding over the bushes with incredible lightness, stopping as though listening for others, frolicking together, now hiding in the thicket, now sallying out again into the path, were descending the mountain in the direction of the river-pool.

In advance of her companions, more agile, more graceful, more sportive, more joyous than all of them, leaping, running, pausing and running again so lightly that she seemed not to touch the ground with her feet, went the white doe, whose wonderful color stood out like a fantastic light against the dark background of the trees.

Although the young man was inclined to see in his surroundings something of the supernatural and miraculous, the fact of the case was that, apart from the momentary hallucination which disturbed his senses for an instant, suggesting to him music, murmurs and words, there was nothing either in the form of the deer, nor in their movements, nor in their short cries with which they seemed to call one to another, that ought not to be entirely familiar to a huntsman experienced in this sort of night expeditions.

In proportion as he put away the first impression, Garcés began to take the practical view of the situation and, smiling inwardly at his credulity and fright, from that instant was intent only on determining, in view of the route they were following, the point where the deer would take the water.

Having made his calculation, he gripped his crossbow between his teeth and, twisting along like a snake behind the mastic shrubs, located himself about forty paces from his former situation. Once ensconced in his new ambush, he waited long enough for the deer to be within the river, that his aim might be the surer. Scarcely had he begun to hear that peculiar sound which is produced by the violent disturbance of water, when Garcés commenced to lift himself little by little, with the greatest precaution, resting first on the tips of his fingers, and afterwards on one knee.

Erect at last, and assuring himself by touch that his weapon was ready, he took a step forward, craned his neck above the shrubs to command a view of the pool and aimed the shaft, but at the very moment when he strained his eyes, together with the cord, in search of the victim whom he must wound, there escaped from his lips a faint, involuntary cry of amazement.

The moon, which had been slowly climbing up the broad horizon, was motionless, and hung as if suspended in the height of heaven. Her clear radiance flooded the forest, shimmered on the unquiet surface of the river, and caused objects to be seen as through an azure gauze.

The deer had disappeared.

In their place, Garcés, filled with consternation and almost with terror, saw a throng of most beautiful women, some of whom were sportively entering the water, while others were just freeing themselves from the light garments which as yet concealed from the covetous view the treasure of their forms.

In those thin, brief dreams of dawn, rich in joyous and luxurious images, – dreams as diaphanous and celestial as the light which then begins to shine through the white bed-curtains, never had the imagination of twenty years sketched with fanciful coloring a scene equal to that which now presented itself to the eyes of the astonished Garcés.

Having now cast off their robes and their veils of a thousand colors which, suspended from the trees or thrown carelessly down on the carpet of turf, stood out against the dim background, the maidens ran hither and thither through the grove, forming picturesque groups, going in and out of the water and splashing it in glistening sparks over the flowers of the margin, like a little shower of dewdrops.

Here, one of them, white as the fleece of a lamb, lifted her fair head among the green floating leaves of an aquatic plant of which she seemed the half-opened blossom whose flexible stem, one might imagine, could be seen to tremble beneath the endless gleaming circles of the waves.

Another, with her hair loose on her shoulders, swung from the branch of a willow over the river, and her little rose-colored feet made a ray of silvery light as they grazed the smooth surface. While some remained couched on the bank, with their blue eyes drowsy, breathing voluptuously the perfume of the flowers and shivering slightly at the touch of the fresh breeze, others were dancing in a giddy round, interlacing their hands capriciously, letting their heads droop back with delicious abandon, and striking the ground with their feet in harmonious cadence.