III.
When the knight recovered consciousness, he cast a wandering glance about him, crying: “I thirst! I die! I burn!” And in his delirium, precursor of death, from his dry lips, through which whistled the difficult breath, came only these words of agony: “I thirst! I burn! Water! Water!”
The Moorish girl knew that there was an opening from that vault to the valley through which the river flows. The valley and all the heights which overlook it were full of Moslem soldiers, who, the fortress now surrendered, were vainly seeking everywhere the knight and his beloved to satiate on them their thirst for destruction; yet she did not hesitate an instant, but taking the helmet of the dying man, she slipped like a shadow through the thicket which covered the mouth of the cave and went down to the river bank.
Already she had dipped up the water and was rising to return to the side of her lover, when an arrow hissed and a cry resounded.
Two Arab archers who were on watch near the fortress had drawn their bows in the direction in which they heard the foliage rustle.
The Moor’s daughter, mortally wounded, yet succeeded in dragging herself to the entrance of the vault and down into its depths where she joined the knight. He, on seeing her bathed with blood and at the point of death, recovered his reason and, realizing the enormity of the sin which demanded so fearful an expiation, raised his eyes to heaven, took the water which his beloved offered him and, without lifting it to his lips, asked the Moorish girl: “Would you be a Christian? Would you die in my faith and, if I am saved, be saved with me?” The Moor’s daughter, who had fallen to the ground, faint with loss of blood, made a slight movement of her head, and upon it the knight poured the baptismal water, invoking the name of the Almighty.
The next day the soldier who had shot the arrow saw a trace of blood on the river bank and, following it, went into the cave where he found the dead bodies of the cavalier and his beloved, who, ever since, come out at night to wander through these parts.
THE GNOME
THE young girls of the village were returning from the fountain with their water-jars on their heads; they were returning with song and laughter, a merry confusion of sound comparable only to the gleeful twitter of a flock of swallows when, thick as hail, they circle around the weather-vane of a belfry.
Just in front of the church porch, seated at the foot of a juniper tree, was Uncle Gregorio. Uncle Gregorio was the patriarch of the village; he was nearly ninety years old, with white hair, smiling lips, roguish eyes and trembling hands. In childhood he had been a shepherd; in his young manhood, a soldier; then he tilled a little piece of fruitful land inherited from his parents, until at last his strength was spent and he sat tranquilly awaiting death which he neither dreaded nor longed for. Nobody retailed a bit of gossip more spicily than he, nor knew more marvellous tales, nor could bring so neatly to bear an old refrain, proverb or adage.