I.

WHEN a division of the French army, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, took possession of historic Toledo, the officers in command, not unaware of the danger to which French soldiers were exposed in Spanish towns by being quartered in separate lodgings, commenced to fit up as barracks the largest and best edifices of the city.

After occupying the magnificent palace of Carlos V. they appropriated the City Hall, and when this could hold no more, they began to invade the pious shade of monasteries, at last making over into stables even the churches sacred to worship. Such was the state of affairs in the famous old town, scene of the event which I am about to recount, when one night, already late, there entered the city, muffled in their dark army-cloaks and deafening the narrow, lonely streets, from the Gate of the Sun to the Zocodover, with the clang of weapons and the resounding beat of the hoofs that struck sparks from the flinty way, one hundred or so of these tall dragoons, dashing, mettlesome fellows, whom our grandmothers still tell about with admiration.

The force was commanded by a youthful officer, riding about thirty paces in advance of his troop and talking in low tones with a man on foot, who, so far as might be inferred from his dress, was also a soldier. Walking in front of his interlocutor, with a small lantern in hand, he seemed to be serving as guide through that labyrinth of obscure, twisted and intertangled streets.

“In sooth,” said the trooper to his companion, “if the lodging prepared for us is even such as you picture it, perhaps it would be better to camp out in the country or in one of the public squares.”

“But what would you, my captain?” answered the guide, who was, in fact, a sergeant sent on before to make ready for their reception. “In the palace there is not room for another grain of wheat, much less for a man; of San Juan de los Reyes there is no use in talking, for there it has reached such a point that in one of the friars’ cells are sleeping fifteen hussars. The monastery to which I am taking you was not so bad, but some three or four days ago there fell upon us, as if out of the clouds, one of the flying columns that scour the province, and we are lucky to have prevailed on them to heap themselves up along the cloisters and leave the church free for us.”

“Ah, well!” exclaimed the officer, after a brief silence, with an air of resigning himself to the strange quarters which chance had apportioned him, “an ill lodging is better than none. At all events, in case of rain,—not unlikely, judging from the massing of the clouds,—we shall be under cover, and that is something.”

With this the conversation was broken off, and the troopers, preceded by the guide, took the onward way in silence until they came to one of the smaller squares, on the further side of which stood out the black silhouette of the monastery with its Moorish minaret, spired bell-tower, ogive cupola and dark, uneven roof.

“Here is your lodging!” exclaimed the sergeant at sight of it, addressing the captain, who, after commanding his troop to halt, dismounted, caught the lantern from the hands of the guide, and took his way toward the building designated.

Since the church of the monastery was thoroughly dismantled, the soldiers who occupied the other parts of the

building had thought that the doors were now a trifle less than useless and, piece by piece, had wrenched off one to-day, another to-morrow, to make bonfires for warming themselves by night.

Our young officer, therefore, did not have to delay for turning of keys or drawing of bolts before penetrating into the heart of the sanctuary.

By the light of the lantern, whose doubtful ray, lost in the heavy glooms of nave and aisles, threw in giant proportions upon the wall the fantastic shadow of the sergeant going on before, he traversed the length and breadth of the church and peered into the deserted chapels, one by one, until he had made himself thoroughly acquainted with the place, when he ordered his troop to dismount, and set about the bestowing of that confused crowd of men and horses as best he could.

As we have said, the church was completely dismantled; before the High Altar were still hanging from the lofty cornices torn shreds of the veil with which the monks had covered it on abandoning that holy place; at intervals along the aisles might be seen shrines fastened against the wall, their niches bereft of images; in the choir a line of light traced the strange contour of the shadowy larchwood stalls; upon the pavement, destroyed at various points, might still be distinguished broad burial slabs filled with heraldic devices, shields and long Gothic inscriptions; and far away, in the depths of the silent chapels and along the transepts, were vaguely visible in the dimness, like motionless white spectres, marble statues which, some extended at full length and others kneeling on their stony tombs, appeared to be the only tenants of that ruined structure.

For anyone less spent than the captain of dragoons, who carried in his body the fatigues of a ride of fourteen leagues, or less accustomed to seeing these sacrileges as the most natural thing in the world, two drams of imagination would have sufficed to keep eyes from closing the whole night long in that dusky, awesome haunt, where the oaths of the soldiers, who were loudly complaining of their improvised barracks, the metallic clink of their spurs striking rudely against the once sepulchral slabs of the pavement, the clatter of the horses as they pawed impatiently, tossing their heads and rattling the chains which bound them to the pillars, formed a strange and fearful confusion of sounds that reverberated through the reaches of the church and was repeated, ever more weirdly, from echo to echo among the lofty vaults.

But our hero, young though he was, had already become so familiar with those shiftings of the scene in a soldier’s life, that scarcely had he assigned places to his men than he ordered a sack of fodder flung down at the foot of the chancel steps, and rolling himself as snugly as possible into his cloak, resting his head upon the lowest stair, in five minutes was snoring with more tranquillity than King Joseph himself in his palace at Madrid.

The soldiers, making pillows of the saddles, followed his example, and little by little the murmur of their voices died away.

Half an hour later, nothing was to be heard save the stifled groans of the wind which entered by the broken ogive windows of the church, the skurrying flights of night-birds whose nests were built in the stone canopies above the sculptured figures of the walls, and the tramp, now near, now far, of the sentry who was pacing up and down the portico, wound in the wide folds of his military cloak.

II.

In the epoch to which the account of this incident, no less true than strange, reverts, the city of Toledo, for those who knew not how to value the treasures of art which its walls enclose, was, even as now, no more than a great huddle of houses, old-fashioned, ruinous, insufferable.

The officers of the French army who, to judge from the acts of vandalism by which they left in Toledo a sad and enduring memory of their occupation, counted few artists and archÆologists in their number, found themselves, as goes without the saying, supremely bored in the ancient city of the CÆsars.

In this frame of mind, the most trifling event which came to break the monotonous calm of those eternal, unvarying days was eagerly caught up among the idlers, so that the promotion of one of their comrades to the next grade, a report of the strategic movement of a flying column, the departure of an official post or the arrival at the city of any military force whatsoever, became a fertile theme of conversation and object of every sort of comment, until something else occurred to take its place and serve as foundation for new grumblings, criticisms and conjectures.

As was to be expected, among those officers who, according to their custom, gathered on the following day to take the air and chat a little in the Zocodover, the dish of gossip was supplied by nothing else than the arrival of the dragoons, whose leader was left in the former chapter stretched out at his ease, sleeping off the fatigues of the march. For upwards of an hour the conversation had been beating about this event, and already various explanations had been put forward to account for the non-appearance of the new-comer, whom an officer present, a former schoolmate, had invited to the Zocodover, when at last, in one of the side-streets that radiate from the square, appeared our gallant captain, no longer obscured by his voluminous army-cloak, but sporting a great shining helmet with a plume of white feathers, a turquoise-blue coat with scarlet facings, and a magnificent two-handed sword in a steel scabbard which clanked as it struck the ground in time to his martial stride and to the keener, sharper clink of his golden spurs.

As soon as his former chum caught sight of him, off he went to meet him and bid him welcome, followed by almost all the officers who chanced to be in the group that morning and who had been stirred to curiosity and a desire to know him by what they had already heard of his original, extraordinary traits of character.

After the customary close embraces, and the exclamations, compliments and questions enjoined by etiquette in meetings like this; after discussing at length and in detail the latest news from Madrid, the changing fortune of the war, and old friends dead or far away, the conversation, flitting from one subject to another, came to roost at last on the inevitable theme, to wit, the hardships of the service, the dearth of amusements in the city, and the inconveniences of their lodgings.

Now at this juncture one of the company, who, it would seem, had heard of the ill grace with which the young officer had resigned himself to quartering his troop in the abandoned church, said to him with an air of raillery:

“And speaking of lodgings, what sort of a night did you have in yours?”

“We lacked for nothing,” answered the captain, “and if it is the truth that I slept but little, the cause of my insomnia is well worth the pains of wakefulness. A vigil in the society of a charming woman is surely not the worst of evils.”

“A woman!” repeated his interlocutor, as if wondering at the good fortune of the new arrival. “This is what they call ending the pilgrimage and kissing the saint.”

“Perhaps it is some old flame of the Capital who follows him to Madrid to make his exile more endurable,” added another of the circle.

“Oh, no!” exclaimed the captain, “nothing of the sort. I swear to you, on the word of a gentleman, I had never seen her before, nor had I dreamed of finding so gracious a hostess in so bad a hostelry. It is altogether what one might call a genuine adventure.”

“Tell it! tell it!” chorused the officers who surrounded the captain, and as he proceeded so to do, all lent the most eager attention, while he began his story thus:

“I was sleeping last night the sleep of a man who carries in his body the effects of a thirteen-league ride, when, look you, in the best of my slumber I was startled wide-awake,—springing up and leaning on my elbows,—by a horrible uproar, such an uproar that it deafened me for an instant and left my ears, a full minute after, humming as if a horse-fly were singing on my cheek.

“As you will have guessed, the cause of my alarm was the first stroke which I heard of that diabolical campana gorda, a sort of bronze chorister, which the canons of Toledo have placed in their cathedral for the praiseworthy object of killing the weary with wrath.

“Cursing between my teeth both bell and bell-ringer, I disposed myself, as soon as that strange and frightful noise had ceased, to take up anew the thread of my broken dream, when there befell, to pique my imagination and challenge my senses, a thing of wonder. By the uncertain moonlight which entered the church through the narrow Moorish window of the chancel wall, I saw a woman kneeling at the altar.”

The officers exchanged glances of mingled astonishment and incredulity; the captain, without heeding the impression his narrative was making, continued as follows:

“It could not enter into man’s heart to conceive that nocturnal, phantasmal vision, vaguely outlined in the twilight of the chapel, like those virgins painted in colored glass that you have sometimes seen, from afar off, stand out, white and luminous, across the shadowy stretch of the cathedrals.

“Her oval face, on which one saw stamped the seal, delicate and spiritual, of emaciation, her harmonious features full of a gentle, melancholy sweetness, her intense pallor, the perfect lines of her slender figure, her reposeful, noble posture, her robe of flowing white, brought to my memory the women of whom I used to dream when I was still little more than a child. Chaste, celestial images, illusive objects of the wandering love of youth!

“I believed myself the sport of an hallucination and not withdrawing my eyes from her for an instant, I scarcely dared breathe, fearing that a breath might dissolve the enchantment.

“She remained motionless.

“The fancy crossed my mind, on seeing her so shining, so transparent, that this was no creature of the earth, but a spirit, that, once more assuming for an instant the veil of human form, had descended in the moonbeam, leaving in the air behind it the azure track which slanted from the high window to the foot of the opposite wall, breaking the deep gloom of that dusky, mysterious recess.”

“But—” interrupted his former schoolmate, who, inclined at the outset to make fun of the story, had at last grown closely attentive—“how came that woman there? Did you not speak to her? Did she not explain to you her presence in that place?”

“I decided not to address her, because I was sure that she would not answer me, nor see me, nor hear me.”

“Was she deaf?”

“Was she blind?”

“Was she dumb?” exclaimed simultaneously three or four of those who were listening to the story.

“She was all at once,” finally declared the captain after a moment’s pause, “for she was—— marble.”

On hearing this remarkable dÉnouement of so strange an adventure, the bystanders burst into a noisy peal of laughter, while one of them said to the narrator of this curious experience, who alone remained quiet and of grave deportment:

“We will make a complete thing of it. As for this sort of ladies, I have more than a thousand, a regular seraglio, in San Juan de los Reyes, a seraglio which from this time on I put quite at your service, since, it would seem, a woman of stone is the same to you as a woman of flesh.”

“Oh, no!” responded the captain, not nettled in the slightest by the laughter of his companions. “I am sure that they cannot be like mine. Mine is a true Castilian dame of high degree, who by a miracle of sculpture appears not to have been buried in a sepulchre, but still, body and soul, to kneel upon the lid of her own tomb, motionless, with hands joined in attitude of prayer, drowned in an ecstasy of mystic love.”

“You are so plausible that you will end by making us believe in the fable of Galatea.”

“For my part, I admit that I had always supposed it nonsense, but since last night I begin to comprehend the passion of the Greek sculptor.”

“Considering the peculiar circumstances of your new lady, I presume you would have no objection to presenting us. As for me, I vow that already I am dead with longing to behold this paragon. But—what the devil!—one would say that you do not wish to introduce us. Ha, ha, ha! It would be a joke indeed if we should find you jealous.”

“Jealous!” the captain hastened to reply. “Jealous—of men, no; but yet see to what lengths my madness reaches. Close beside the image of this woman is a warrior, also of marble, an august figure, as lifelike as herself,—her husband, without doubt. Well, then! I am going to make a clean breast of it, jeer at my folly as you may,—if I had not feared being taken for a lunatic, I believe I should have broken him to pieces a hundred times over.”

A fresh and yet more riotous outburst of laughter from the officers greeted this original revelation on the part of the eccentric lover of the marble lady.

“We will take no refusal. We must see her,” cried some.

“Yes, yes, we must know if the object of such devotion is as unique as the passion itself,” added others.

“When shall we come together to take a drink in the church where you lodge?” demanded the rest.

“Whenever you please; this very evening, if you like,” replied the young captain, regaining his usual debonair expression, dispelled for an instant by that flash of jealousy. “By the way, along with the baggage I have brought as many as two dozen bottles of champagne, genuine champagne, what was left over from a present given to our brigadier-general, who, as you know, is a distant relative of mine.”

“Bravo! Bravo!” shouted the officers with one voice, breaking into gleeful exclamations.

“We will drink the wine of our native land!”

“And we will sing one of Ronsard’s songs!”

“And we will talk of women, apropos of the lady of our host.”

“And so—good-bye till evening!”

“Till evening!”

III.

It was now a good hour since the peaceful inhabitants of Toledo had secured with key and bolt the massive doors of their ancient mansions; the campana gorda of the cathedral was ringing curfew, and from the summit of the palace, now converted into barracks, was sounding the last bugle-call for silence, when ten or twelve officers, who had been gradually assembling in the Zocodover, took the road leading thence to the monastery where the captain was lodged, impelled more by hope of draining the promised bottles than by eagerness to make acquaintance with the marvellous piece of sculpture.

The night had shut down dark and threatening; the sky was covered with leaden clouds; the wind, whistling along the imprisoning channels of the narrow, tortuous streets, was shaking the dying flames of the shielded lamps before the shrines, or making the iron weather-vanes of the towers whirl about with a shrill creaking.

Scarcely had the officers caught sight of the square where stood the monastery which served as quarters for their new friend, than he, who was impatiently looking out for their arrival, sallied forth to meet them, and after the exchange of a few low-toned sentences, all together entered the church, within whose dim enclosure the faint gleam of a lantern was struggling at hopeless odds with the black and heavy shadows.

“‘Pon my honor!” exclaimed one of the guests, peering about him. “If this isn’t the last place in the world for a revel!”

“True enough!” said another. “You bring us here to meet a lady, and scarcely can a man see his hand before his face.”

“And worst of all, it’s so icy cold that we might as well be in Siberia,” added a third, hugging the folds of his cloak about him.

“Patience, gentlemen, patience!” interposed the host. “A little patience will set all to rights. Here, my lad!” he continued, addressing one of his men. “Hunt us up a bit of fuel and kindle a rousing bonfire in the chancel.”

The orderly, obeying his captain’s directions, commenced to rain swinging blows on the carven stalls of the choir, and after he had thus collected a goodly supply of wood, which was heaped up at the foot of the chancel steps, he took the lantern and proceeded to make an auto de fe of those fragments carved in richest designs. Among them might be seen here a portion of a spiral column, there the effigy of a holy abbot, the torso of a woman, or the misshapen head of a griffin peeping through foliage.

In a few minutes, a great light which suddenly streamed out through all the compass of the church announced to the officers that the hour for the carousal had arrived.

The captain, who did the honors of his lodging with the same punctiliousness which he would have observed in his own house, turned to his guests and said:

“We will, if you please, pass to the refreshment room.”

His comrades, affecting the utmost gravity, responded to the invitation with absurdly profound bows and took their way to the chancel preceded by the lord of the revel, who, on reaching the stone steps, paused an instant, and extending his hand in the direction of the tomb, said to them with the most exquisite courtesy:

“I have the pleasure of presenting you to the lady of my dreams. I am sure you will grant that I have not exaggerated her beauty.”

The officers turned their eyes toward the point which their friend designated, and exclamations of astonishment broke involuntarily from the lips of all.

In the depths of a sepulchral arch lined with black marbles, they saw, in fact, kneeling before a prayer-stool, with folded palms and face turned toward the altar, the image of a woman so beautiful that never did her equal come from sculptor’s hands, nor could desire paint her in imagination more supremely lovely.

“In truth, an angel!” murmured one.

“A pity that she is marble!” added another.

“Well might—illusion though it be—the neighborhood of such a woman suffice to keep one from closing eye the whole night through.”

“And you do not know who she is?” others of the group, contemplating the statue, asked of the captain, who stood smiling, satisfied with his triumph.

“Recalling a little of the Latin which I learned in my boyhood, I have been able, at no small pains, to decipher the inscription on the stone,” he answered, “and by what I have managed to make out, it is the tomb of a Castilian noble, a famous warrior who fought under the Great Captain. His name I have forgotten, but his wife, on whom you look, is called DoÑa Elvira de CastaÑeda, and by my hopes of salvation, if the copy resembles the original, this should be the most notable woman of her time.”

After these brief explanations, the guests, who did not lose sight of the principal object of the gathering, proceeded to uncork some of the bottles and, seating themselves around the bonfire, began to pass the wine from hand to hand.

In proportion as their libations became more copious and frequent, and the fumes of the foaming champagne commenced to cloud their brains, the animation, the uproar and the merriment of the young Frenchmen rose to such a pitch that some of them threw the broken necks of the empty bottles at the granite monks carved against the pillars, and others trolled at the tops of their voices scandalous drinking-songs, while the rest burst into roars of laughter, clapped their hands in applause or quarrelled among themselves with angry words and oaths.

The captain sat drinking in silence, like a man distraught, without moving his eyes from the statue of DoÑa Elvira.

Illumed by the ruddy splendor of the bonfire, and seen across the misty veil which wine had drawn before his vision, the marble image sometimes seemed to him to be changing into an actual woman; it seemed to him that her lips parted, as if murmuring a prayer, that her breast heaved as if with stifled sobs, that her palms were pressed together with more energy, and finally, that rosy color crept into her cheeks, as if she were blushing before that sacrilegious and repugnant scene.

The officers, noting the gloomy silence of their comrade, roused him from the trance into which he had fallen, and thrusting a cup into his hands, exclaimed in noisy chorus:

“Come, give us a toast, you, the only man that has failed of it to-night!”

The young host took the cup, rose and, lifting it on high, turned to face the statue of the warrior kneeling beside DoÑa Elvira and said:

“I drink to the Emperor, and I drink to the success of his arms, thanks to which we have been able to penetrate even to the heart of Castile and to court, at his own tomb, the wife of a conqueror of CerÑiola.”

The officers drank the toast with a storm of applause, and the captain, keeping his balance with some difficulty, took a few steps toward the sepulchre.

“No,” he continued, always addressing, with the stupid smile of intoxication, the statue of the warrior. “Don’t suppose that I have a grudge against you for being my rival. On the contrary, old lad, I admire you for a patient husband, an example of meekness and long suffering, and, for my part, I wish to be generous, too. You should be a tippler, since you are a soldier, and it shall not be said that I left you to die of thirst in the sight of twenty empty bottles. Drink!”

And with these words he raised the cup to his lips and, after wetting them with the liquor which it contained, flung the rest into the marble face, bursting into a boisterous peal of laughter to see how the wine splashed down over the tomb from the carven beard of the motionless warrior.

“Captain,” exclaimed at that point one of his comrades in a tone of raillery, “take heed what you do. Bear in mind that these jests with the stone people are apt to cost dear. Remember what happened to the Fifth Hussars in the monastery of Poblet. The story goes that the warriors of the cloister laid hand to their granite swords one night and gave plenty of occupation to those merry fellows who had amused themselves by adorning them with charcoal mustaches.”

The young revellers received this report with roars of laughter, but the captain, heedless of their mirth, continued, his mind fixed ever on the same idea.

“Do you think that I would have given him the wine, had I not known that he would swallow at least as much as fell upon his mouth? Oh, no! I do not believe like you that these statues are mere blocks of marble as inert to-day as when hewed from the quarry. Undoubtedly the artist, who is always a god, gives to his work a breath of life which is not powerful enough to make the figure move and walk, but which inspires it with a strange, incomprehensible life, a life which I do not fully explain to myself, but which I feel, especially when I am a little drunk.”

“Magnificent!” exclaimed his comrades. “Drink and continue!”

The officer drank and, fixing his eyes upon the image of DoÑa Elvira, went on with mounting excitement:

“Look at her! Look at her! Do you not note those changing flushes of her soft, transparent flesh? Does it not seem that beneath this delicate alabaster skin, azure-veined and tender, circulates a fluid of rose-colored light? Would you wish more life, more reality?”

“Oh, but yes, by all means,” said one of those who was listening. “We would have her of flesh and bone.”

“Flesh and bone! Misery and corruption!” exclaimed the captain. “I have felt in the course of an orgy my lips burn, and my head. I have felt that fire which runs boiling through the veins like the lava of a volcano, that fire whose dim vapors trouble and confuse the brain and conjure up strange visions. Then the kiss of these material women burned me like a red-hot iron, and I thrust them from me with displeasure, with horror and with loathing; for then, as now, I needed for my fevered forehead a breath of the sea-breeze, to drink ice and to kiss snow, snow tinted by mellow light, snow illumined by a golden ray of sunshine,—a woman white, beautiful and cold, like this woman of stone who seems to allure me with her ethereal grace, to sway like a flame—who challenges me with parted lips, offering me a wealth of love. Oh, yes, a kiss! Only a kiss of thine can calm the fire which is consuming me.”

“Captain!” exclaimed some of the officers, on seeing him start toward the statue as if beside himself, his gaze wild and his steps reeling. “What mad foolery would you commit? Enough of jesting! Leave the dead in peace.”

The young host did not even hear the warnings of his friends; staggering, groping his way, he reached the tomb and approached the statue of DoÑa Elvira, but as he stretched out his arms to clasp it, a cry of horror resounded through the temple. With blood gushing from eyes, mouth and nostrils, he had fallen prone, his face crushed in, at the foot of the sepulchre.

The officers, hushed and terrified, dared not take one step forward to his aid.

At the moment when their comrade strove to touch his burning lips to those of DoÑa Elvira, they had seen the marble warrior lift its hand and, with a frightful blow of the stone gauntlet, strike him down.