IV.
Magdalena returned to the hamlet pale and full of amazement. They waited in vain for Marta all that night.
On the afternoon of the following day, the village girls found a broken water-jar at the margin of the fountain in the grove. It was Marta’s water-jar; nothing more was ever known of her. Since then the girls go for water so early that they rise with the sun. A few have assured me that by night there has been heard, more than once, the weeping of Marta, whose spirit lives imprisoned in the fountain. I do not know what credit to give to this last part of the story, for the truth is that since that night nobody has dared penetrate into the grove to hear it after the ringing of the Ave Maria.
THE MISERERE
SOME months since, while visiting the celebrated abbey of Fitero and entertaining myself by turning over a few volumes in its neglected library, I discovered, stowed away in a dark corner, two or three old books of manuscript music, covered with dust and gnawed at the edges by rats.
It was a Miserere.
I do not read music, but it attracts me so that, even though I do not understand it, I sometimes take up the score of an opera and pore over its pages for hours, looking at the groups of notes more or less crowded together, the dashes, the semi-circles, the triangles and that sort of et cetera called keys, and all this without comprehending an iota or deriving the slightest profit.
After this foolish habit of mine, I turned over the leaves of the music-books, and the first thing which attracted my attention was the fact that, although on the last page stood that Latin word so common in all compositions, finis, the Miserere was not concluded, for the music did not go beyond the tenth verse of the psalm.
This it was, undoubtedly, that arrested my attention first; but as soon as I scanned the pages closely, I was still more surprised to observe that instead of the Italian words commonly used, such as maestoso, allegro, ritardando, piu vivo, à piacere, there were lines of very small German script written in, some of which called for things as difficult to do as this: “They crack—crack the bones, and from their marrow must the cries seem to come forth;” or this other: “The chord shrieketh, yet in unison; the tone thundereth, yet without deafening; for all that hath sound soundeth, and there is no confusion, and all is humanity that sobbeth and groaneth;” or what was certainly the most original of all, enjoined just under the last verse: “The notes are bones covered with flesh; light inextinguishable, the heavens and their harmony—force!—force and sweetness.”
“Do you know what this is?” I asked of the old friar who accompanied me, after I had half translated these lines, which seemed like phrases scribbled by a lunatic.