Our Lady of the Pillar

by Eça de Queirós

In 1474, a year abounding in divine favours for all Christendom, when King Henry IV. reigned in Castile, there came to live in the city of Segovia, where he had inherited a dwelling-house and garden, a youthful knight of untainted lineage and comely appearance named Don Ruy de Cardenas.

This house, which had been bequeathed to him by his uncle, an Archdeacon and Master of Canon Law, lay at the side and in the silent shadow of the Church of Our Lady of the Pillar; and facing it, across the square, where the three spouts of an ancient fountain sang their song, stood the dark and grated palace of Don Alonso de Lara, a nobleman of great wealth and surly manners, who, in a ripe and grey old age, had espoused a young lady famed throughout Castile for her white skin, her hair the colour of the sun’s rays and her neck like that of a royal heron.

Now Don Ruy, at his birth, had had Our Lady of the Pillar for Godmother, and ever remained her devout and loyal servitor, though, as he was a man of high spirit and gay, he loved arms, the chase, gallant regales, and even, now and then, a noisy night in a tavern with cards and tankards of wine. Love, and his convenient nearness to the holy place, had led him to adopt the pious practice since his arrival in Segovia of visiting his divine Godmother each morning at the hour of Prime and begging in three Ave Maria’s her blessing and graces. Again, as darkness came on, even after a hard run over field and mountain with harriers or falcon, he was wont to return and murmur sweetly a Salve Regina at the Vesper salutation; while, every Sunday, he bought of a Moorish flower-woman in the square a spray of jonquils or pinks or simple roses, and spread them with tenderness and gallant care in front of Our Lady’s altar.

Now to this venerated Church of the Pillar came also each Sunday Donna Leonor, the famous and beautiful wife of the Lord of Lara, accompanied by a surly attendant with eyes harder and wider open than those of an owl, and by two powerful lackeys, who guarded her on either side like towers. So jealous was Don Alonso, that he only permitted this fugitive visit because his confessor had strictly enjoined it on him, and for fear of offending Our Lady his neighbour, and he greedily noted their every step and their loitering from between the iron bars of a latticed window.

Donna Leonor spent the whole of the lingering days of the lingering week secluded in the grated mansion of black granite; and all she had for recreation and air, even in the summer heats, were the depths of a dark green garden surrounded by such lofty walls that nothing could be seen emerging from them save here and there the top of some melancholy cypress. But this short visit of hers to Our Lady of the Pillar sufficed for Don Ruy to fall madly in love with her on the May morning when he saw her kneeling before the altar in a radiance of sunlight, haloed by her golden hair, with her long lashes hanging over a Book of Hours, her rosary falling from between her delicate fingers, all elegant, gentle and white, with the whiteness of a lily blooming in the shade, looking yet whiter amid her black lace and the black satin gown that broke round her graceful form in hard folds over the chapel flags, the ancient flags of burying-places. When, after a moment of confusion and delicious wonder, he knelt, it was less to the Virgin of the Pillar, his divine Godmother, than to that mortal apparition; her name and life he knew not, but only that he would give his life and name for her if she would yield herself for so uncertain a price.

Murmuring in a graceless prayer the three Ave Maria’s with which he saluted Mary each morning, he picked up his sombrero, lightly descended the resounding nave, and stopped in the porch, waiting for her among the leprous beggars who were lousing themselves in the sun. But when, after a lapse of time, during which Don Ruy felt his heart beat with unaccustomed anxiety and fear, Donna Leonor passed and paused to moisten her fingers in the marble holy-water stoup, either from timidity or inattention, she did not raise her eyes to him under her drawn veil. With her attendant of the staring eyes glued to her side, and between the two lackeys as between twin towers, she leisurely crossed the square, stone by stone, enjoying, doubtless, as prisoners do, the expanse of air and the free sun that bathed it, and Don Ruy was astonished when she penetrated into the sombre arcade, with its stout pillars which supported the palace, and she disappeared through a narrow door all covered with iron-work. This then was the famous Donna Leonor, the lovely and noble lady of Lara.... Then commenced seven drawn-out days which he spent seated at his stone window-seat gazing at that black door, with its thick covering of iron-work, as if it were the door of Paradise, and an angel would issue from it to give him tidings of Eternal Bliss. At last the lingering Sunday came, and as, bearing a bunch of yellow carnations for his divine Godmother, he passed through the square at the hour of Prime, when the bells were ringing, he crossed Donna Leonor coming out, white, sweet, and pensive, from between the pillars of the dark arcade like a moon from between clouds. The carnations almost fell from his hands in the delightful agitation with which his breast heaved more strongly than a sea, and his whole soul fled from him in tumult in a look that devoured her. And she too raised her eyes to Don Ruy, but eyes reposeful and serene, without a gleam of curiosity or even of consciousness that they were exchanging glances with other eyes so inflamed and darkened by desire. The young knight abstained from entering the church from the pious fear of not giving to his divine Godmother the attention which would, he knew, be all taken up by her who, though only human, was already mistress of his heart and deified there.

He waited eagerly at the door among the beggars, parching the carnations with the heat of his trembling hands, and thinking how long-drawn-out was the rosary she was saying, and, as soon as Donna Leonor began to descend the nave, he felt within his soul the sweet rustling of the thick silks she dragged over the stone slabs. The white lady passed by, and the same absent look, heedless and calm, which she cast over the beggars and the square, she let fall over him, either because she did not comprehend that youth who had suddenly turned so pale, or because she did not yet distinguish him from things and forms which were of no account to her.

Don Ruy moved away, sighing deeply, and, once in his room, devoutly placed before the image of the Virgin the flowers which he had not offered at her altar in the church. His whole life then became one long complaint at finding such coldness and cruelty in that woman, unique amongst women, who had taken hold of his light and wandering heart and made it serious. With a hope which he clearly foresaw would prove deceptive, he began to pace round the lofty garden walls; or, muffled in his cloak, leaning against a corner, spent slow hours contemplating the bars of the lattice windows, black and thick like those of a prison. The walls did not part asunder, nor did a single ray of hopeful light issue from the gratings. The whole mansion was like a sepulchre where lay an insensible creature, and behind the cold stones there was also a cold breast. To give vent to his feelings he composed with pious care, during watchful nights over parchment, lamentable verses which failed to relieve him. Before the altar of Our Lady of the Pillar, on the same slabs where he had seen her kneeling, he rested his knees and stayed without words of prayer, in bitter-sweet musing, hoping that his heart would be calmed and solaced under the influence of Her who calms and solaces all. But he always rose up more miserable, and with only the feeling of how cold and hard were the stones on which he had knelt. The whole world seemed to him to contain nought save severity and coldness. On other bright Sunday mornings he met Donna Leonor, and her eyes always remained heedless, and as though unmindful; or, when they crossed his, they were so innocent and free from all emotion that Don Ruy would have preferred them offended and darting anger, or haughtily averted in proud disdain. Certain it was that Donna Leonor knew him now, but she also knew the Moorish flower-woman squatted before her basket beside the fountain, or the poor who loused themselves in the sun before Our Lady’s porch. Nor could Don Ruy any longer think that she was cruel and cold. She was only royally remote, like a star that revolves and glitters high above, unconscious that below, in a world it cannot discern, eyes it does not suspect are contemplating it, adoring it, and intrusting it with the government of their fortune and destiny. Then Don Ruy thought, 'She will not, I cannot; it was a dream that is ended, and may Our Lady keep us both in her favour!’ And being a very discreet knight, as soon as he recognised that she could not be moved from her indifference, he neither sought her nor even raised his eyes any more to the gratings of her windows, nor did he even enter the Church of Our Lady when, casually, from the porch, he espied her kneeling with her graceful golden head bent over her Book of Hours.

II

The old attendant, whose eyes were more wide-open and harder than those of an owl, hastened to tell the Lord of Lara how a bold youth of comely appearance, a new tenant in the old house of the Archdeacon, continually crossed and recrossed the square, and posted himself in front of the church to throw his heart, through his eyes, at Donna Leonor. Very bitterly did the jealous nobleman know it already, for when, falconlike, he watched from his window the graceful lady on her way to church, he had observed the pauses and darted looks of that gallant youth, and had pulled his beard with rage. Ever since then, in truth, his most intense occupation had been to hate Don Ruy, the Canon’s impudent nephew, who had dared to raise his low desires to the great Lady of Lara. He now had him continually spied upon by a retainer, and knew whereever he went and stayed, the friends with whom he hunted or amused himself, and even the men who cut his doublets and furbished his sword—in fact, every hour of his life. And he watched Donna Leonor more closely still, her every movement, her most fugitive moods, her silences, her conversations with her attendants, her distractions over her embroidery, her habit of musing under the trees in the garden, her demeanour and colour when she returned from church. But Donna Leonor showed such unaltered serenity in the tranquillity of her heart, that not even the most fault-fancying jealousy could discover a blemish in her snow-white purity. Thereupon Don Alonso’s rancour was turned with redoubled asperity against the Canon’s nephew for having coveted her purity, her bright sun-coloured hair, and her royal heron’s neck, which were his alone and the rich delight of his life. And when he paced the sombre gallery of his mansion, resonant with its vaulted roof, wrapt in his fur-trimmed jerkin, the point of his grizzled beard thrust out in front, his thick tangled hair bristling backwards, and his fists clenched, he was always ruminating the same gall: 'He has attempted her virtue, he has attacked my honour, he is guilty on two counts and deserves a double death.’ But something like terror was mixed with his rage when he learned that Don Ruy no longer awaited Donna Leonor in the square, nor amorously watched the walls of his great house, nor entered the church when she was praying there on Sundays, and that he kept himself so entirely foreign to her that, one morning, when he was standing close to the arcade, and must distinctly have heard the door through which she was about to appear creak and open, he had remained with his back turned, without moving, laughing with a stout knight who was reading to him from a parchment. Such well-affected indifference could only serve, for sure, thought Don Alonso, to hide some very evil purpose! What was the clever deceiver plotting now? Everything in the ill-tempered fidalgo became intensified—jealousy, rancour, vigilance, regret for his hoary and ugly old age. In the calm of Donna Leonor he suspected art and stratagem, and straightway forbade her visits to Our Lady of the Pillar. On the accustomed mornings, he ran to the church to say the rosary and carry the excuses of Donna Leonor—‘who cannot come’ (he murmured, bowed before the altar), 'for the reason you know, most pure Virgin.’ He carefully visited and strengthened the black bolts of every gate of his mansion, and at night loosed two mastiffs in the shadows of the walled garden. At the head of his great bed, next to the table which carried his lamp, reliquary, and a cup of wine hot with cinnamon and cloves to invigorate his forces, there always shone a long, naked sword. But with all these precautions he scarcely slept, and at every moment raised himself up in alarm from between the deep pillows, and clawed Donna Leonor with rough and eager hands that bruised her neck, to hiss very low in his torment, 'Say you love me only.’ Afterwards, when dawn came, he perched himself up to watch, like a falcon, the windows of Don Ruy. He never caught sight of him now, either at the church door at the hour of Mass, or returning on horseback from the country at the ringing of the Angelus; and perceiving that he had disappeared from his customary haunts and turns, he suspected his presence all the more in Donna Leonor’s heart. At length, one night, after he had trodden the gallery flags for a long while, secretly revolving suspicion and hatred, he cried out for his steward, and ordered packs and saddle animals to be got ready. He would leave early at daybreak with Donna Leonor for his property at Cabril, two leagues distant from Segovia! The departure did not take place at dawn, like the flight of a miser who goes to hide his treasure far away, but was carried out with solemnity and at leisure. The litter stood waiting long hours before the arcade with its curtains open, whilst a stable-boy led the fidalgo’s white she-mule, with her Moorish caparisons, up and down the square, and on the garden side, under the sun and the flies, a troop of he-mules laden with trunks fastened with iron rings kept the narrow street in wonder with the jingling of their bells.