“The Miserere of the Mountain!” exclaimed the musician with an air of amazement. “What Miserere is that?”
“Didn’t I say so?” muttered the peasant under his breath, and then went on in a mysterious tone: “This Miserere, which is only heard, as chance may fall, by those who, like myself, wander day and night following the sheep through the thickets and over the rocky hills, is, in fact, a tradition, a very old tradition; yet incredible as it seems, it is no less true.
“The case is that, in the most rugged part of yonder mountain chains which bound the horizon of this valley in whose bosom the abbey stands, there used to be, many years ago—why do I say many years!—many centuries, rather, a famous monastery. This monastery, it seems, was built at his own cost by a lord with the wealth that he would naturally have left to his son, whom on his death-bed he disinherited, as a punishment for the young profligate’s evil deeds.
“So far, all had gone well; but the trouble is that this son, who, from what will be seen further on, must have been the skin of the Devil, if not the Devil himself, learning that his goods were in the possession of the monks, and that his castle had been transformed into a church, gathered together a crew of banditti, comrades of his in the ruffian life he had taken up on forsaking his father’s house, and one Holy Thursday night, when the monks would be in the choir, and at the very hour and minute when they would be just beginning or would have just begun the Miserere, these outlaws set fire to the monastery, sacked the church, and willy-nilly, left not a single monk alive.