At this point the dazzling brightness blinded the pilgrim’s eyes, his temples throbbed violently, there was a roaring in his ears, he fell senseless to the ground and heard no more.
III.
On the following day, the peaceful monks of the Abbey of Fitero, to whom the lay-brother had given an account of the strange visit of the night before, saw the unknown pilgrim, pallid and like a man beside himself, entering their doors.
“Did you hear the Miserere at last?” the lay-brother asked him with a certain tinge of irony, slyly casting a glance of intelligence at his superiors.
“Yes,” replied the musician.
“And how did you like it?”
“I am going to write it. Give me a refuge in your house,” he continued, addressing the abbot, “a refuge and bread for a few months, and I will leave you an immortal work of art, a Miserere which shall blot out my sins from the sight of God, eternize my memory, and with it the memory of this abbey.”
The monks, out of curiosity, counselled the abbot to grant his request; the abbot, for charity, though he believed the man a lunatic, finally consented; and the musician, thus installed in the monastery, began his work.
Night and day he labored with unremitting zeal. In the midst of his task he would pause and appear to be listening to something which sounded in his imagination; his pupils would dilate and he would spring from his seat exclaiming: “That is it; so; so; no doubt about it—so!” And he would go on writing notes with a feverish haste which more than once made those who kept him under secret observation wonder.
He wrote the first verses, and those following to about the middle of the Psalm; but when he had written the last verse that he had heard upon the mountain, it was impossible for him to proceed.