It was to the Square of Ponce de Leon we were going; and although not sure of its exact location, we remembered a fine old church near by, and that was our landmark.
It is strange indeed what a web of dreams the past weaves about its heroes, however recent their careers; but when the hand of time leads us back to the remote events of centuries gone by, we are hopelessly bewildered by the discordant wrangling between the real and the improbable.
Although the early companion of Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of Florida and the intrepid voyager on many seas, the conqueror and the first governor of Puerto Rico, and later the powerful and hated rival of Columbus’s son, Ponce de Leon’s one unrealised hope, his tireless search for the fountain whose waters were to contain the elixir of life, has so over-shadowed his actual achievements by the glamour of the legendary, that his very name has become the synonym for the stuff of which dreams are made. Standing thus as the embodiment of the unattainable, the knight errant of roseate hopes and undying aspirations, he has ever been, in spite of the irascible humour given him by history, a figure from whom none could wrest the talisman of romance.
Where are his contemporaries, where are those greater discoverers, abler rulers, better men who thronged these alluring waters during the two generations of Ponce de Leon’s eventful life? Dead, even in name, many of them, or else safely embalmed in the musty pages of some old history seldom read. But in him there was the spirit of the poet and the mystic, which ever has and ever will appeal to the imagination of mankind and through imagination attains immortality.
Thus it suggested much to us to find his statue in San Juan and to have heard some one assert with an air of authority that his bones rested in the old church hard by; all of which bore incontrovertible testimony to the fact of his having once been an actual living personality. So we two decide without saying a word to any one that we will make a pilgrimage to that church of the uneasy shades and prove for ourselves Ponce de Leon’s identity with fact.
With a feeling of affinity for the doughty old cavalier, and with half a sigh that I can never again lift my feet with the light-hearted grace of the little maid at my side, we wander on through the deserted streets until we come to the square of Ponce de Leon. It looked as it had before, only much whiter, much brighter, and oh, so silent! The church stood passively asleep; there were only the still hot rays reflected into our faces from the sun-baked pavement. The same, and yet not the same, was the empty square, for as we made nearer approach we found that the pedestal upon which before the figure of Ponce de Leon had stood with lofty bearing and haughty mien was now but a bare block of stone glaringly white in the noonday silence with naught but the inscription left.
The figure was gone! “Can it be that we have been dreaming, that it was never there?” I ask, in consternation. “No, Mother, surely not, I remember perfectly well a statue was standing there as we drove through only last evening.” With a startled tremor I wish the place were not so deserted, I wish some one would come, I dislike being so alone, and I wish that we had Daddy with us. But pulling ourselves together with a frightened glance over our shoulders, we pass the abandoned pedestal and go toward the church, unquestioningly sure of safe sanctuary within its open door. To our amazement we find it barred and locked. We try a side entrance; that too is mysteriously fast; but hearing a faint sound, as of retreating feet within, we venture a timid knock on the door. But our rappings bring no response save a hollow echo and a momentary cessation of the footsteps.
Still hesitating as to our next move, we stand there in the white glare, while a sensation of strange unreality creeps over us. Hesitating, but still unwilling to relinquish the pilgrimage without further effort, we spy an ancient iron-bound gate in the high stone wall adjoining the cathedral. We try its rusty latch and find it unlocked. We cautiously push it open. It turns heavily on great creaking hinges stiff from long desuetude, and swings to after us as with an ominous sigh.
We find ourselves in the secluded corridors of an ancient cloister. The sun still lingers on a patch of green courtyard dropped in the midst of the shadows, and up from the luminous verdure a cool fountain plays its restful measure. An ancient sun-dial speaks of the deathless tread of time, and in the deeper shade of a dark recess, on tables of venerable age, huge volumes lay, on whose yellow pages were strewn adown the wide-spread lines of the quaint Gregorian staff, the great square notes of an ancient Latin chant. Then,—