Romantic legends of Spain

by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Inspired by this hope they arrived, at last, at the base of the Gothic tower of the church, but on reaching that point a peculiar noise attracted their attention and, stopping in one of the angles, concealed among the shadows of the lofty buttresses that support the walls, they saw, to their amazement, a man emerging from a window upon the balcony of their lady’s apartments in the palace. He lightly descended to the ground by the help of a rope and, finally, a white figure, Doña Inés undoubtedly, appeared upon the balcony and, leaning over the fretted parapet, exchanged tender phrases of farewell with her mysterious lover.

The first motion of the two youths was to place their hands on their sword-hilts, but checking themselves, as though struck by a common thought, they turned to look on one another, each discerning on the other’s face a look of astonishment so ludicrous that both broke forth into loud laughter, laughter which, rolling on from echo to echo in the silence of the night, resounded through the square even to the palace.

Hearing it, the white figure vanished from the balcony, a noise of slamming doors was heard, and then silence resumed her reign.

On the following day, the queen, seated on a most sumptuous dais, saw defile past her the hosts who were marching to the war against the Moors. At her side were the principal ladies of Toledo. Among them was Doña Inés de Tordesillas on whom this day, as ever, all eyes were bent. But it seemed to her that they wore a different expression from that to which she was accustomed. She would have said that in all the curious looks cast upon her lurked a mocking smile.

This discovery could not but disquiet her, remembering, as she did, the noisy laughter which, the night before, she had thought she heard at a distance in one of the angles of the square, while she was closing her balcony and bidding adieu to her lover; but when she saw among the ranks of the army marching below the dais, sparks of fire glancing from their brilliant armor, and a cloud of dust enveloping them, the two reunited banners of the houses of Carrillo and Sandoval; when she saw the significant smile which the two former rivals, on saluting the queen, directed toward herself, she comprehended all. The blush of shame reddened her face and tears of chagrin glistened in her eyes.

THE WHITE DOE

IN a small town of Aragon, about the end of the thirteenth century or a little later, there lived retired in his seigniorial castle a renowned knight named Don Dionís, who, having served his king in the war against the infidels, was then taking his ease, giving himself up to the merry exercise of hunting, after the wearisome hardships of war.

It chanced once to this cavalier, engaged in his favorite diversion, accompanied by his daughter whose singular beauty, of the blond type extraordinary in Spain, had won her the name of White Lily, that as the increasing heat of the day began to tell upon them, absorbed in pursuing a quarry in the mountainous part of his estate, he took for his resting-place during the hours of the siesta a glen through which ran a rivulet leaping from rock to rock with a soft and pleasant sound.

It might have been a matter of some two hours that Don Dionís had lingered in that delectable retreat, reclining on the delicate grass in the shade of a black-poplar grove, talking affably with his huntsmen about the incidents of the day, while they related one to another more or less curious adventures that had befallen them in their hunting experiences, when along the top of the highest ridge and between alternating murmurs of the wind which stirred the leaves on the trees, he began to perceive, each time more near, the sound of a little bell like that of the leader of a flock.

In truth, it was really that, for very soon after the first hearing of the bell, there came leaping over the thick undergrowth of lavender and thyme, descending to the opposite bank of the rivulet, nearly a hundred lambs white as snow, and behind them appeared their shepherd with his pointed hood drawn over his brows to protect him from the vertical rays of the sun and with his shoulder-bag swung from the end of a stick.