Garcés, who remained motionless, felt on hearing those mysterious songs the asp of jealousy stinging his heart, and yielding to an impulse stronger than his will, bent on breaking once for all the spell that was fascinating his senses, thrust apart with a tremulous, convulsive hand the boughs which concealed him, and with a single bound gained the river-bank. The charm was broken, everything vanished like a vapor and, looking about him, he neither saw nor heard more than the noisy confusion with which the timid deer, surprised at the height of their nocturnal gambols, were fleeing in fright from his presence, hither and thither, one clearing the thickets with a bound, another gaining at full speed the mountain path.
“Oh, well did I say that all these things were only delusions of the Devil,” exclaimed the hunter, “but this time, by good luck, he blundered, leaving the chief prize in my hands.”
And so, in fact, it was. The white doe, trying to escape through the grove, had rushed into the labyrinth of its trees and, entangled in a network of honeysuckles, was striving in vain to free herself. Garcés aimed his shaft, but at the very instant in which he was going to wound her, the doe turned toward the hunter and arrested his action with a cry, saying in a voice clear and sharp: “Garcés, what wouldst thou do?” The young man hesitated and, after a moment’s doubt, let his bow fall to the ground, aghast at the mere idea of having been in danger of harming his beloved. A loud, mocking laugh roused him finally from his stupor. The white doe had taken advantage of those brief instants to extricate herself and to flee swift as a flash of lightning, laughing at the trick played on the hunter.
“Ah, damned offspring of Satan!” he shouted in a terrible voice, catching up his bow with unspeakable swiftness, “too soon hast thou sung thy victory; too soon hast thou thought thyself beyond my reach.” And so saying, he sped the arrow, that went hissing on its way and was lost in the darkness of the wood, from whose depths there simultaneously came a shriek followed by choking groans.
“My God!” exclaimed Garcés on hearing those sobs of anguish. “My God! if it should be true!” And beside himself, hardly aware of what he did, he ran like a madman in the direction in which he had shot the arrow, the same direction from which sounded the groans. He reached the place at last, but on arriving there, his hair stood erect with horror, the words throbbed vainly in his throat and he had to clutch the trunk of a tree to save himself from falling to the ground.
Constanza, wounded by his hand, was dying there before his eyes, writhing in her own blood, among the sharp brambles of the mountain.
THE PASSION ROSE
ONE summer afternoon, in a garden of Toledo, this curious tale was related to me by a young girl as good as she was pretty.
While explaining to me the mystery of its especial structure, she kissed the leaves and pistils which she was plucking one by one from the flower that gives to this legend its name.
If I could tell it with the gentle charm and the appealing simplicity which it had upon her lips, the history of the unhappy Sara would move you as it moved me.