“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!