Romantic legends of Spain. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

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СКАЧАТЬ there is going to break out such a racket of timbrels, tambourines and rustic drums that nothing else can be heard. But hush! there’s the hero of the occasion just going into the church. Jesus! what a showy jacket, what a fluted ruff, what a high and mighty air! Come, come, the archbishop arrived a minute ago, and the mass is going to begin. Come; it looks as though this night would give us something to talk about for many a day.”

      With these words the worthy woman, whom our readers recognize by her disconnected loquacity, entered Santa Inés, opening a way through the press, as usual, by dint of shoving and elbowing.

      Already the ceremony had begun.

      The church was as brilliant as the year before.

      The new organist, after passing through the midst of the faithful who thronged the nave, on his way to kiss the ring of the prelate, had mounted to the organ-loft, where he was trying one stop of the organ after another with a solicitous gravity as affected as it was ridiculous.

      Among the common people clustered at the rear of the church was heard a murmur, muffled and confused, sure augury of the coming storm which would not be long in breaking.

      “He’s a clown, who doesn’t know how to do anything, not even to look straight,” said some.

      “He’s an ignoramus, who after having made the organ in his own parish church worse than a rattle comes here to profane Master Pérez’s,” said others.

      And while one was throwing off his coat so as to beat his drum to better advantage, and another was trying his timbrels, and the clatter was increasing more and more, only here and there could one be found to defend in lukewarm fashion that alien personage, whose pompous and pedantic bearing formed so strong a contrast to the modest manner and kindly courtesy of the dead Master Pérez.

      At last the looked-for moment came, the solemn moment when the priest, after bowing low and murmuring the sacred words, took the Host in his hands. The little bells rang out, their chime like a rain of crystal notes; the translucent waves of incense rose, and the organ sounded.

      At that instant a horrible din filled the compass of the church, drowning the first chord.

      Bagpipes, horns, timbrels, drums, all the instruments of the populace raised their discordant voices at once, but the confusion and the clang lasted but a few seconds. All at once as the tumult had begun, so all at once it ceased.

      The second chord, full, bold, magnificent, sustained itself, still pouring from the organ’s metal tubes like a cascade of inexhaustible, sonorous harmony.

      Celestial songs like those that caress the ear in moments of ecstasy, songs which the spirit perceives but the lip cannot repeat; fugitive notes of a far-off melody, which reach us at intervals, sounding in the bugles of the wind; the rustle of leaves kissing one another on the trees with a murmur like rain; trills of larks which rise warbling from among the flowers like a flight of arrows to the clouds; nameless crashes, overwhelming as the thunders of a tempest; a chorus of seraphim without rhythm or cadence, unknown harmony of heaven which only the imagination understands; soaring hymns, that seem to mount to the throne of God like a fountain of light and sound—all this was expressed by the organ’s hundred voices, with more vigor, more mystic poetry, more weird coloring than had ever been known before.

      When the organist came down from the loft, the crowd which pressed up to the stairway was so great, and their eagerness to see and praise him so intense, that the prefect, fearing, and not without reason, that he would be suffocated among them all, commanded some of the police to open, by their staves, a path for him that he might reach the High Altar where the prelate waited his arrival.

      “You perceive,” said the archbishop, when the musician was brought into his presence, “that I have come all the way from my palace hither only to hear you. Will you be as cruel as Master Pérez, who would never save me the journey by playing the Midnight Mass in the cathedral?”

      “Next year,” responded the organist, “I promise to give you that pleasure, for not all the gold of the earth would induce me to play this organ again.”

      “And why not?” interrupted the prelate.

      “Because,” replied the organist, striving to repress the agitation revealed in the pallor of his face,—“because it is old and poor, and one cannot express on it all that one would.”

      The archbishop retired, followed by his attendants. One by one, the litters of the great folk went filing away, lost to sight in the windings of the neighboring streets; the groups of the portico melted, as the faithful dispersed in different directions; and already the lay-sister who acted as gate-keeper was about to lock the vestibule doors, when there appeared two women, who, after crossing themselves and muttering a prayer before the arched shrine of Saint Philip, went their way, turning into Dueñas alley.

      “What would you have, my dear Doña Baltasara?” one of them was saying. “That’s the way I’m made. Every fool has his fancy. The barefooted Capuchins might assure me that it was so and I wouldn’t believe it in the least. That man cannot have played what we have just been hearing. A thousand times have I heard him in San Bartolomé, his parish church, from which the priest had to send him away for his bad playing,—enough to make you stop your ears with cotton. Besides, all you need is to look at his face, which, they say, is the mirror of the soul. I remember, poor dear man, as if I were seeing him now,—I remember Master Pérez’s look when, on a night like this, he would come down from the organ loft, after having entranced the audience with his marvels. What a gracious smile, what a happy glow on his face! Old as he was, he seemed like an angel. But this fellow came plunging down the stairs as if a dog were barking at him on the landing, his face the color of the dead, and—come now, my dear Doña Baltasara, believe me, believe me with all your soul. I suspect a mystery in this.”

      With these last words, the two women turned the corner of the street and disappeared.

      We count it needless to inform our readers who one of them was.

      IV.

      Another year had gone by. The abbess of the convent of Santa Inés and the daughter of Master Pérez, half hidden in the shadows of the church choir, were talking in low tones. The peremptory voice of the bell was calling from its tower to the faithful, and occasionally an individual would cross the portico, silent and deserted now, and after taking the holy water at the door, would choose a place in a corner of the nave, where a few residents of the neighborhood were quietly waiting for the Midnight Mass to begin.

      “There, you see,” the mother superior was saying, “your fear is excessively childish. There is nobody in the church. All Seville is trooping to the cathedral to-night. Play the organ and play it without the least uneasiness. We are only the sisterhood here. Well? Still you are silent, still your breaths are like sighs. What is it? What is the matter?”

      “I am—afraid,” exclaimed the girl, in a tone of the deepest agitation.

      “Afraid? Of what?”

      “I don’t know—of something supernatural. Last night, see, I had heard you say that you earnestly wished me to play the organ for the mass and, pleased with this honor, I thought I would look to the stops and tune it, so as to give you a surprise to-day. I went into the choir—alone—I opened the door which leads to the organ-loft. At that moment the clock of the cathedral struck the hour—what hour, I do not know. The peals were exceedingly mournful, and many—many. They kept on sounding all the time that I stood as if nailed to the threshold, and that time seemed to me a СКАЧАТЬ