Little Daughters of the hamlets roundabout, ye wild lilies who bloom happy in the shelter of your humbleness, if on the morning of the Patron Saint of this locality, coming down into the valley of Montagut to gather clovers and daisies to deck his shrine, conquering the fear which the sombre monastery, rising on its rocks, strikes to your childish hearts, ye have ventured into its silent and deserted cloister to wander amid its forsaken tombs, on whose edges grow the fullest-petaled daisies and the bluest harebells, hearken to me!
Thou, Noble Knight, perchance by the gleam of a lightning flash; thou, Wandering Shepherd, bronzed by the fierce heat of the sun; thou, Lovely Child, still besprent with drops of dew like tears, all ye would have seen in that holy place a tomb, a lowly tomb. Formerly it consisted of an unhewn stone and a wooden cross; the cross has disappeared and only the stone remains. In this tomb, whose inscription is the motto of my song, rests in peace the last baron of Fortcastell, Teobaldo de Montagut, whose strange history I am about to tell.
I.
While the noble Countess of Montagut was pregnant with her firstborn son, Teobaldo, she had a strange and terrible dream. Perchance a divine warning; mayhap a vain fantasy which time made real in later years. She dreamed that in her womb she had borne a serpent, a monstrous serpent that, darting out shrill hisses, now gliding through the short grass, now coiling upon itself for a spring, fled from her sight, hiding at last in a clump of briers.
“There it is! there it is!” shrieked the Countess in her horrible nightmare, pointing out to her servitors the brambles among which the nauseous reptile had sought concealment.
When the servitors had swiftly reached the spot which the noble lady, motionless and overwhelmed by a profound terror, was still pointing out to them with her finger, a white dove rose from out the prickly thicket and soared to the clouds.
The serpent had disappeared.
II.
Teobaldo was born. His mother died in giving him birth; his father perished a few years later in an ambuscade, warring like a good Christian against the Moors, the enemies of God.
From this time on the youth of the heir of Fortcastell can be likened only to a hurricane. Wherever he went, his way was marked by a trail of tears and blood. He hanged his vassals, he fought his equals, he pursued maidens, he beat the monks, and never ceased from oaths and blasphemies. There was no saint in peace, no hallowed thing, he did not curse.