“Barely a league and a half,—but what are you doing?” “Whither would you go on a night like this?” “Have you fallen from the shelter of God’s hand?” exclaimed one and another as they saw the pilgrim, rising from his bench and taking his staff, leave the fireplace and move toward the door.
“Whither am I going? To hear this miraculous music, to hear the great, the true Miserere, the Miserere of those who return to the world after death, those who know what it is to die in sin.”
And so saying, he disappeared from the sight of the amazed lay-brother and the no less astonished shepherds.
The wind shrilled without and shook the doors as if a powerful hand were striving to tear them from their hinges; the rain fell in torrents, beating against the window-panes, and from time to time a lightning-flash lit up for an instant all the horizon that could be seen from there.
After the first moment of bewilderment had passed the lay-brother exclaimed:
“He is mad.”
“He is mad,” repeated the shepherds and, replenishing the fire, they gathered closely around the hearth.
II.
After walking for an hour or two, the mysterious personage, to whom they had given the degree of madman in the abbey, by following upstream the course of the rill which the story-telling shepherd had pointed out to him, reached the spot where rose the blackened, impressive ruins of the monastery.
The rain had ceased; the clouds were drifting in long, dark masses, from between whose shifting shapes there glided from time to time a furtive ray of doubtful, pallid light; and one would say that the wind, as it lashed the strong buttresses and swept with widening wings through the deserted cloisters, was groaning in its flight. Yet nothing supernatural, nothing extraordinary occurred to strike the imagination. To him who had slept more nights than one without other shelter than the ruins of an abandoned tower or a lonely castle,—to him who in his far pilgrimage had encountered hundreds on hundreds of storms, all those noises were familiar.