Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 03

by Unknown

Who is there that has not, once at least in his life, upturned everything about him, his papers and his receptacles, taxing his memory impatiently as he seeks some precious lost object; and then felt the ineffable pleasure of finding it after days consumed in the search, after hoping and despairing of its recovery,--spending upon some trifle an excitement of mind almost amounting to a passion? Well, stretch this fury of search through five long years; put a woman, a heart, a love in the place of the insignificant trifle; lift the passion into the highest realms of feeling; and then picture to yourself an ardent man, a man with the heart of lion and the front of Jove, one of those men who command, and communicate to those about them, respectful terror,--you will then understand the abrupt departure of the general during the Te Deum, at the moment when the prelude of an air, once heard in Paris with delight under gilded ceilings, vibrated through the dark naves of the church by the sea.

He went down the hilly street which led up to the convent, without pausing until the sonorous echoes of the organ could no longer reach his ear. Unable to think of anything but of the love that like a volcanic eruption rent his heart, the French general only perceived that the Te Deum was ended when the Spanish contingent poured from the church. He felt that his conduct and appearance were open to ridicule, and he hastily resumed his place at the head of the cavalcade, explaining to the alcalde and to the governor of the town that a sudden indisposition had obliged him to come out into the air. Then it suddenly occurred to him to use the pretext thus hastily given, as a means of prolonging his stay on the island. Excusing himself on the score of increased illness, he declined to preside at the banquet given by the authorities of the island to the French officers, and took to his bed, after writing to the major-general that a passing illness compelled him to turn over his command to the colonel. This commonplace artifice, natural as it was, left him free from all duties and able to seek the fulfilment of his hopes. Like a man essentially Catholic and monarchical, he inquired the hours of the various services, and showed the utmost interest in the duties of religion,--a piety which in Spain excited no surprise.

II

The following day, while the soldiers were embarking, the general went up to the convent to be present at vespers. He found the church deserted by the townspeople, who in spite of their natural devotion were attracted to the port by the embarkation of the troops. The Frenchman, glad to find himself alone in the church, took pains to make the clink of his spurs resound through the vaulted roof; he walked noisily, and coughed, and spoke aloud to himself, hoping to inform the nuns, but especially the Sister at the organ, that if the French soldiers were departing, one at least remained behind. Was this singular method of communication heard and understood? The general believed it was. In the Magnificat the organ seemed to give an answer which came to him in the vibrations of the air. The soul of the nun floated towards him on the wings of the notes she touched, quivering with the movements of the sound. The music burst forth with power; it glorified the church. This hymn of joy, consecrated by the sublime liturgy of Roman Christianity to the uplifting of the soul in presence of the splendors of the ever-living God, became the utterance of a heart terrified at its own happiness in presence of the splendors of a perishable love, which still lived, and came to move it once more beyond the tomb where this woman had buried herself, to rise again the bride of Christ.

The organ is beyond all question the finest, the most daring, the most magnificent of the instruments created by human genius. It is an orchestra in itself, from which a practiced hand may demand all things; for it expresses all things. Is it not, as it were, a coign of vantage, where the soul may poise itself ere it springs into space, bearing, as it flies, the listening mind through a thousand scenes of life towards the infinite which parts earth from heaven? The longer a poet listens to its gigantic harmonies, the more fully will he comprehend that between kneeling humanity and the God hidden by the dazzling rays of the Holy of Holies, the hundred voices of terrestrial choirs can alone bridge the vast distance and interpret to Heaven the prayers of men in all the omnipotence of their desires, in the diversities of their woe, with the tints of their meditations and their ecstasies, with the impetuous spring of their repentance, and the thousand imaginations of their manifold beliefs. Yes! beneath these soaring vaults the harmonies born of the genius of sacred things find a yet unheard-of grandeur, which adorns and strengthens them. Here the dim light, the deep silence, the voices alternating with the solemn tones of the organ, seem like a veil through which the luminous attributes of God himself pierce and radiate. Yet all these sacred riches now seem flung like a grain of incense on the frail altar of an earthly love, in presence of the eternal throne of a jealous and avenging Deity. The joy of the nun had not the gravity which properly belongs to the solemnity of the Magnificat. She gave to the music rich and graceful modulations, whose rhythms breathed of human gayety; her measures ran into the brilliant cadences of a great singer striving to express her love, and the notes rose buoyantly like the carol of a bird by the side of its mate. At moments she darted back into the past, as if to sport there or to weep there for an instant. Her changing moods had something discomposed about them, like the agitations of a happy woman rejoicing at the return of her lover. Then, as these supple strains of passionate emotion ceased, the soul that spoke returned upon itself; the musician passed from the major to the minor key, and told her hearer the story of her present. She revealed to him her long melancholy, the slow malady of her moral being,--every day a feeling crushed, every night a thought subdued, hour by hour a heart burning down to ashes. After soft modulations the music took on slowly, tint by tint, the hue of deepest sadness. Soon it poured forth in echoing torrents the well-springs of grief, till suddenly the higher notes struck clear like the voice of angels, as if to tell to her lost love--lost, but not forgotten--that the reunion of their souls must be in heaven, and only there: hope most precious! Then came the Amen. In that no joy, no tears, nor sadness, nor regrets, but a return to God. The last chord that sounded was grave, solemn, terrible. The musician revealed the nun in the garb of her vocation; and as the thunder of the basses rolled away, causing the hearer to shudder through his whole being, she seemed to sink into the tomb from which for a brief moment she had risen. As the echoes slowly ceased to vibrate along the vaulted roofs, the church, made luminous by the music, fell suddenly into profound obscurity.

The general, carried away by the course of this powerful genius, had followed her, step by step, along her way. He comprehended in their full meaning the pictures that gleamed through that burning symphony; for him those chords told all. For him, as for the Sister, this poem of sound was the future, the past, the present. Music, even the music of an opera, is it not to tender and poetic souls, to wounded and suffering hearts, a text which they interpret as their memories need? If the heart of a poet must be given to a musician, must not poetry and love be listeners ere the great musical works of art are understood? Religion, love, and music: are they not the triple expression of one fact, the need of expansion, the need of touching with their own infinite the infinite beyond them, which is in the fibre of all noble souls? These three forms of poesy end in God, who alone can unwind the knot of earthly emotion. Thus this holy human trinity joins itself to the holiness of God, of whom we make to ourselves no conception unless we surround him by the fires of love and the golden cymbals of music and light and harmony.

The French general divined that on this desert rock, surrounded by the surging seas, the nun had cherished music to free her soul of the excess of passion that consumed it. Did she offer her love as a homage to God? Did the love triumph over the vows she had made to Him? Questions difficult to answer. But, beyond all doubt, the lover had found in a heart dead to the world a love as passionate as that which burned within his own.

When vespers ended he returned to the house of the alcalde, where he was quartered. Giving himself over, a willing prey, to the delights of a success long expected, laboriously sought, his mind at first could dwell on nothing else,--he was still loved. Solitude had nourished the love of that heart, just as his own had thriven on the barriers, successively surmounted, which this woman had placed between herself and him. This ecstasy of the spirit had its natural duration; then came the desire to see this woman, to withdraw her from God, to win her back to himself,--a bold project, welcome to a bold man. After the evening repast, he retired to his room to escape questions and think in peace, and remained plunged in deep meditation throughout the night. He rose early and went to Mass. He placed himself close to the latticed screen, his brow touching the brown curtain. He longed to rend it away; but he was not alone, his host had accompanied him, and the least imprudence might compromise the future of his love and ruin his new-found hopes. The organ was played, but not by the same hand; the musician of the last two days was absent from its key-board. All was chill and pale to the general. Was his mistress worn out by the emotions which had wellnigh broken down his own vigorous heart? Had she so truly shared and comprehended his faithful and eager love that she now lay exhausted and dying in her cell? At the moment when such thoughts as these rose in the general's mind, he heard beside him the voice beloved; he knew the clear ring of its tones. The voice, slightly changed by a tremor which gave it the timid grace and modesty of a young girl, detached itself from the volume of song, like the voice of a prima donna in the harmonies of her final notes. It gave to the ear an impression like the effect to the eye of a fillet of silver or gold threading a dark frieze. It was indeed she! Still Parisian, she had not lost her gracious charm, though she had forsaken the coronet and adornments of the world for the frontlet and serge of a Carmelite. Having revealed her love the night before in the praises addressed to the Lord of all, she seemed now to say to her lover:--"Yes, it is I: I am here. I love forever; yet I am aloof from love. Thou shalt hear me; my soul shall enfold thee; but I must stay beneath the brown shroud of this choir, from which no power can tear me. Thou canst not see me."

"It is she!" whispered the general to himself, as he raised his head and withdrew his hands from his face; for he had not been able to bear erect the storm of feeling that shook his heart as the voice vibrated through the arches and blended with the murmur of the waves. A storm raged without, yet peace was within the sanctuary. The rich voice still caressed the ear, and fell like balm upon the parched heart of the lover; it flowered in the air about him, from which he breathed the emanations of her spirit exhaling her love through the aspirations of its prayer.

The alcalde came to rejoin his guest, and found him bathed in tears at the elevation of the Host which was chanted by the nun. Surprised to find such devotion in a French officer, he invited the confessor of the convent to join them at supper, and informed the general, to whom no news had ever given such pleasure, of what he had done. During the supper the general made the confessor the object of much attention, and thus confirmed the Spaniards in the high opinion they had formed of his piety. He inquired with grave interest the number of the nuns, and asked details about the revenues of the convent and its wealth, with the air of a man who politely wished to choose topics which occupied the mind of the good old priest. Then he inquired about the life led by the sisters. Could they go out? Could they see friends?