My aged guide then told me the legend which I now pass on to you.
I.
Many years ago, on a dark and rainy night, a pilgrim arrived at the cloister door of this abbey and begged for a little fire to dry his clothes, a morsel of bread to appease his hunger, and a shelter, however humble, till the morning, when he would resume his journey at dawn.
The lay-brother of whom this request was made placed his own meagre repast, his own poor bed and his glowing hearth at the service of the traveller, to whom, after he had recovered from his exhaustion, were put the usual questions as to the purpose of his pilgrimage and the goal to which his steps were bent.
“I am a musician,” replied the stranger. “I was born far from here, and in my own country I enjoyed a day of great renown. In my youth I made of my art a powerful weapon of seduction and I enkindled with it passions which drew me on to crime. In my old age I would use for good the talents which I have employed for evil, redeeming my soul by the very means that have brought it into danger of the judgment.”
As the enigmatic words of the unknown guest did not seem at all clear to the lay-brother, whose curiosity was now becoming aroused, he was moved to press his questions further, obtaining the following response:
“I was ever weeping in the depths of my soul for the sin that I had committed; but when I tried to pray to God for mercy, I could find no adequate words to utter my repentance, until one day my eyes chanced to fall upon a holy book. I opened that book and on one of its pages I met with a giant cry of true contrition, a psalm of David, commencing: Miserere mei, Domine! From the instant in which I read those verses my one thought has been to find a musical expression so magnificent, so sublime, that it would suffice as a setting for the Royal Psalmist’s mighty hymn of anguish. As yet I have not found it; but if I ever attain to the point of expressing what I feel in my heart, what I hear confusedly in my brain, I am sure of writing a Miserere so marvellous in beauty that the sons of men will have heard no other like unto it, so desperate in grief that, as its first strains rise to heaven, the archangels, their eyes flooded with tears, will with me cry out unto the Lord, beseeching Mercy; and the Lord will be merciful to his unhappy creature.”
The pilgrim, on reaching this point in his narrative, paused for an instant, and then, heaving a sigh, took up again the thread of his story. The lay-brother, a few dependents of the abbey, and two or three shepherds from the friars’ farm—these who formed the circle about the hearth—listened to him in the deepest silence.
“After travelling over all Germany,” he continued, “all Italy and the greater part of this country whose sacred music is classic, I have not yet heard a Miserere that can give me my inspiration, not one,—not one, and I have heard so many that I may say I have heard them all.”
“All?” broke in one of the upper shepherds. “But you have not heard, have you, the Miserere of the Mountain?”