V.
It was high noon as Little Blue Ribbons and I left the empty Plaza and started out with grim determination to do our duty. The streets were silent as the sun crept over our heads and sent its burning, perpendicular rays through the white umbrella. But that was of no consequence. We two had made up our minds to accomplish a certain purpose, and when we make up our minds neither man nor weather can prevail against us. We had been idle long enough. Time and time again we had drifted to the time-ripened Morro. Days had gone by and we lacked the energy to begrudge their inconsequential passing, but now a time of reckoning had come. We would have no more such idleness. Little Blue Ribbons and I had awakened on this particular day to a realisation of our unperformed duty, and although detained through one pretext and another all the morning, by noon we forswore further procrastination and hurriedly left the Plaza before our good intentions could again be lulled by inaction.
It was to the Square of Ponce de Leon we were going; and although not sure of its exact location, we remembered a fine old church near by, and that was our landmark.
It is strange indeed what a web of dreams the past weaves about its heroes, however recent their careers; but when the hand of time leads us back to the remote events of centuries gone by, we are hopelessly bewildered by the discordant wrangling between the real and the improbable.
Although the early companion of Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of Florida and the intrepid voyager on many seas, the conqueror and the first governor of Puerto Rico, and later the powerful and hated rival of Columbus’s son, Ponce de Leon’s one unrealised hope, his tireless search for the fountain whose waters were to contain the elixir of life, has so over-shadowed his actual achievements by the glamour of the legendary, that his very name has become the synonym for the stuff of which dreams are made. Standing thus as the embodiment of the unattainable, the knight errant of roseate hopes and undying aspirations, he has ever been, in spite of the irascible humour given him by history, a figure from whom none could wrest the talisman of romance.
Where are his contemporaries, where are those greater discoverers, abler rulers, better men who thronged these alluring waters during the two generations of Ponce de Leon’s eventful life? Dead, even in name, many of them, or else safely embalmed in the musty pages of some old history seldom read. But in him there was the spirit of the poet and the mystic, which ever has and ever will appeal to the imagination of mankind and through imagination attains immortality.
Thus it suggested much to us to find his statue in San Juan and to have heard some one assert with an air of authority that his bones rested in the old church hard by; all of which bore incontrovertible testimony to the fact of his having once been an actual living personality. So we two decide without saying a word to any one that we will make a pilgrimage to that church of the uneasy shades and prove for ourselves Ponce de Leon’s identity with fact.
With a feeling of affinity for the doughty old cavalier, and with half a sigh that I can never again lift my feet with the light-hearted grace of the little maid at my side, we wander on through the deserted streets until we come to the square of Ponce de Leon. It looked as it had before, only much whiter, much brighter, and oh, so silent! The church stood passively asleep; there were only the still hot rays reflected into our faces from the sun-baked pavement. The same, and yet not the same, was the empty square, for as we made nearer approach we found that the pedestal upon which before the figure of Ponce de Leon had stood with lofty bearing and haughty mien was now but a bare block of stone glaringly white in the noonday silence with naught but the inscription left.
The figure was gone! “Can it be that we have been dreaming, that it was never there?” I ask, in consternation. “No, Mother, surely not, I remember perfectly well a statue was standing there as we drove through only last evening.” With a startled tremor I wish the place were not so deserted, I wish some one would come, I dislike being so alone, and I wish that we had Daddy with us. But pulling ourselves together with a frightened glance over our shoulders, we pass the abandoned pedestal and go toward the church, unquestioningly sure of safe sanctuary within its open door. To our amazement we find it barred and locked. We try a side entrance; that too is mysteriously fast; but hearing a faint sound, as of retreating feet within, we venture a timid knock on the door. But our rappings bring no response save a hollow echo and a momentary cessation of the footsteps.
Still hesitating as to our next move, we stand there in the white glare, while a sensation of strange unreality creeps over us. Hesitating, but still unwilling to relinquish the pilgrimage without further effort, we spy an ancient iron-bound gate in the high stone wall adjoining the cathedral. We try its rusty latch and find it unlocked. We cautiously push it open. It turns heavily on great creaking hinges stiff from long desuetude, and swings to after us as with an ominous sigh.
We find ourselves in the secluded corridors of an ancient cloister. The sun still lingers on a patch of green courtyard dropped in the midst of the shadows, and up from the luminous verdure a cool fountain plays its restful measure. An ancient sun-dial speaks of the deathless tread of time, and in the deeper shade of a dark recess, on tables of venerable age, huge volumes lay, on whose yellow pages were strewn adown the wide-spread lines of the quaint Gregorian staff, the great square notes of an ancient Latin chant. Then,—
“On a sudden, through the glistening
Leaves around, a little stirred,
Came a sound, a sense of music which was rather felt than heard.
Softly, finely it inwound me;
From the world it shut me in,—
Like a fountain falling round me—”
My hand is held close and with wide eyes Little Blue Ribbons asks if she may drink at the fountain. Half-refusing, half-assenting, we are about to draw near, when from out an opening door, whence seemed to come the music, there appeared a figure bent in contemplation and wrapped in the shadows of the past. It was so like the statue on the square without that the one at my side gasps, “It is he, Mother, what shall we do?” and shrinking spellbound, I hold the dear little hand, glad to feel the human warmth of its pressure. With dread and yet with fascination I watch the lone, sad, weary figure, as it were the phantom of old age eternally unreconciled to the flight of youth. I watch while it moves eagerly toward the fountain to lean forward and drink deep, deep, with an insatiable thirst; and then with a hopeless sigh it paces back and forth among the shadows.
A bell clangs out the hour of one, and the great wooden gate swings open of itself, while we two, much affrighted, slip unnoticed behind the columns of the corridor into “the twilight gloom of a deep embrasured window” which for long years had been sealed from the light by the gray masonry of the ancient church.
Even as we look the silent figure has vanished, and we are left there with only the sound of the plaintive, ever murmuring fountain.
Awed and silent, we creep from our hiding-place and drag open the unwilling gate and once again we are out in the dazzling sunlight.
There—wonderful to relate—on its pedestal was the statue as it stood the day before, with outstretched hand and far-away look, scanning the distant horizon where to his ever disappointed eyes was just lifting the palm-fringed shore of that mythical island of Bimini, where at last flowed the long-sought fountain of youth.
Lest the unhappy shade again returning should seek sudden vengeance for our bold espionage, we took our flight toward the Plaza, nor stopped to breathe until again we found refuge in the crowded shops.