Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (431 page)

All morning I went from one door to another, and entered spacious and faded chambers, some rudely shuttered, some receiving their full charge of daylight, all empty and unhomely.  It was a rich house, on which Time had breathed his tarnish and dust had scattered disillusion.  The spider swung there; the bloated tarantula scampered on the cornices; ants had their crowded highways on the floor of halls of audience; the big and foul fly, that lives on carrion and is often the messenger of death, had set up his nest in the rotten woodwork, and buzzed heavily about the rooms.  Here and there a stool or two, a couch, a bed, or a great carved chair remained behind, like islets on the bare floors, to testify of man’s bygone habitation; and everywhere the walls were set with the portraits of the dead.  I could judge, by these decaying effigies, in the house of what a great and what a handsome race I was then wandering.  Many of the men wore orders on their breasts and had the port of noble offices; the women were all richly attired; the canvases most of them by famous hands.  But it was not so much these evidences of greatness that took hold upon my mind, even contrasted, as they were, with the present depopulation and decay of that great house.  It was rather the parable of family life that I read in this succession of fair faces and shapely bodies.  Never before had I so realised the miracle of the continued race, the creation and recreation, the weaving and changing and handing down of fleshly elements.  That a child should be born of its mother, that it should grow and clothe itself (we know not how) with humanity, and put on inherited looks, and turn its head with the manner of one ascendant, and offer its hand with the gesture of another, are wonders dulled for us by repetition.  But in the singular unity of look, in the common features and common bearing, of all these painted generations on the walls of the residencia, the miracle started out and looked me in the face.  And an ancient mirror falling opportunely in my way, I stood and read my own features a long while, tracing out on either hand the filaments of descent and the bonds that knit me with my family.

At last, in the course of these investigations, I opened the door of a chamber that bore the marks of habitation.  It was of large proportions and faced to the north, where the mountains were most wildly figured.  The embers of a fire smouldered and smoked upon the hearth, to which a chair had been drawn close.  And yet the aspect of the chamber was ascetic to the degree of sternness; the chair was uncushioned; the floor and walls were naked; and beyond the books which lay here and there in some confusion, there was no instrument of either work or pleasure.  The sight of books in the house of such a family exceedingly amazed me; and I began with a great hurry, and in momentary fear of interruption, to go from one to another and hastily inspect their character.  They were of all sorts, devotional, historical, and scientific, but mostly of a great age and in the Latin tongue.  Some I could see to bear the marks of constant study; others had been torn across and tossed aside as if in petulance or disapproval.  Lastly, as I cruised about that empty chamber, I espied some papers written upon with pencil on a table near the window.  An unthinking curiosity led me to take one up.  It bore a copy of verses, very roughly metred in the original Spanish, and which I may render somewhat thus —

Pleasure approached with pain and shame,
Grief with a wreath of lilies came.
Pleasure showed the lovely sun;
Jesu dear, how sweet it shone!
Grief with her worn hand pointed on,
      Jesu dear, to thee!

Shame and confusion at once fell on me; and, laying down the paper, I beat an immediate retreat from the apartment.  Neither Felipe nor his mother could have read the books nor written these rough but feeling verses.  It was plain I had stumbled with sacrilegious feet into the room of the daughter of the house.  God knows, my own heart most sharply punished me for my indiscretion.  The thought that I had thus secretly pushed my way into the confidence of a girl so strangely situated, and the fear that she might somehow come to hear of it, oppressed me like guilt.  I blamed myself besides for my suspicions of the night before; wondered that I should ever have attributed those shocking cries to one of whom I now conceived as of a saint, spectral of mien, wasted with maceration, bound up in the practices of a mechanical devotion, and dwelling in a great isolation of soul with her incongruous relatives; and as I leaned on the balustrade of the gallery and looked down into the bright close of pomegranates and at the gaily dressed and somnolent woman, who just then stretched herself and delicately licked her lips as in the very sensuality of sloth, my mind swiftly compared the scene with the cold chamber looking northward on the mountains, where the daughter dwelt.

That same afternoon, as I sat upon my knoll, I saw the Padre enter the gates of the residencia.  The revelation of the daughter’s character had struck home to my fancy, and almost blotted out the horrors of the night before; but at sight of this worthy man the memory revived.  I descended, then, from the knoll, and making a circuit among the woods, posted myself by the wayside to await his passage.  As soon as he appeared I stepped forth and introduced myself as the lodger of the residencia.  He had a very strong, honest countenance, on which it was easy to read the mingled emotions with which he regarded me, as a foreigner, a heretic, and yet one who had been wounded for the good cause.  Of the family at the residencia he spoke with reserve, and yet with respect.  I mentioned that I had not yet seen the daughter, whereupon he remarked that that was as it should be, and looked at me a little askance.  Lastly, I plucked up courage to refer to the cries that had disturbed me in the night.  He heard me out in silence, and then stopped and partly turned about, as though to mark beyond doubt that he was dismissing me.

‘Do you take tobacco powder?’ said he, offering his snuff-box; and then, when I had refused, ‘I am an old man,’ he added, ‘and I may be allowed to remind you that you are a guest.’

‘I have, then, your authority,’ I returned, firmly enough, although I flushed at the implied reproof, ‘to let things take their course, and not to interfere?’

He said ‘yes,’ and with a somewhat uneasy salute turned and left me where I was.  But he had done two things: he had set my conscience at rest, and he had awakened my delicacy.  I made a great effort, once more dismissed the recollections of the night, and fell once more to brooding on my saintly poetess.  At the same time, I could not quite forget that I had been locked in, and that night when Felipe brought me my supper I attacked him warily on both points of interest.

‘I never see your sister,’ said I casually.

‘Oh, no,’ said he; ‘she is a good, good girl,’ and his mind instantly veered to something else.

‘Your sister is pious, I suppose?’ I asked in the next pause.

‘Oh!’ he cried, joining his hands with extreme fervour, ‘a saint; it is she that keeps me up.’

‘You are very fortunate,’ said I, ‘for the most of us, I am afraid, and myself among the number, are better at going down.’

‘Senor,’ said Felipe earnestly, ‘I would not say that.  You should not tempt your angel.  If one goes down, where is he to stop?’

‘Why, Felipe,’ said I, ‘I had no guess you were a preacher, and I may say a good one; but I suppose that is your sister’s doing?’

He nodded at me with round eyes.

‘Well, then,’ I continued, ‘she has doubtless reproved you for your sin of cruelty?’

‘Twelve times!’ he cried; for this was the phrase by which the odd creature expressed the sense of frequency.  ‘And I told her you had done so — I remembered that,’ he added proudly — ’and she was pleased.’

‘Then, Felipe,’ said I, ‘what were those cries that I heard last night? for surely they were cries of some creature in suffering.’

‘The wind,’ returned Felipe, looking in the fire.

I took his hand in mine, at which, thinking it to be a caress, he smiled with a brightness of pleasure that came near disarming my resolve.  But I trod the weakness down.  ‘The wind,’ I repeated; ‘and yet I think it was this hand,’ holding it up, ‘that had first locked me in.’  The lad shook visibly, but answered never a word.  ‘Well,’ said I, ‘I am a stranger and a guest.  It is not my part either to meddle or to judge in your affairs; in these you shall take your sister’s counsel, which I cannot doubt to be excellent.  But in so far as concerns my own I will be no man’s prisoner, and I demand that key.’  Half an hour later my door was suddenly thrown open, and the key tossed ringing on the floor.

A day or two after I came in from a walk a little before the point of noon.  The Senora was lying lapped in slumber on the threshold of the recess; the pigeons dozed below the eaves like snowdrifts; the house was under a deep spell of noontide quiet; and only a wandering and gentle wind from the mountain stole round the galleries, rustled among the pomegranates, and pleasantly stirred the shadows.  Something in the stillness moved me to imitation, and I went very lightly across the court and up the marble staircase.  My foot was on the topmost round, when a door opened, and I found myself face to face with Olalla.  Surprise transfixed me; her loveliness struck to my heart; she glowed in the deep shadow of the gallery, a gem of colour; her eyes took hold upon mine and clung there, and bound us together like the joining of hands; and the moments we thus stood face to face, drinking each other in, were sacramental and the wedding of souls.  I know not how long it was before I awoke out of a deep trance, and, hastily bowing, passed on into the upper stair.  She did not move, but followed me with her great, thirsting eyes; and as I passed out of sight it seemed to me as if she paled and faded.

In my own room, I opened the window and looked out, and could not think what change had come upon that austere field of mountains that it should thus sing and shine under the lofty heaven.  I had seen her — Olalla!  And the stone crags answered, Olalla! and the dumb, unfathomable azure answered, Olalla!  The pale saint of my dreams had vanished for ever; and in her place I beheld this maiden on whom God had lavished the richest colours and the most exuberant energies of life, whom he had made active as a deer, slender as a reed, and in whose great eyes he had lighted the torches of the soul.  The thrill of her young life, strung like a wild animal’s, had entered into me; the force of soul that had looked out from her eyes and conquered mine, mantled about my heart and sprang to my lips in singing.  She passed through my veins: she was one with me.

I will not say that this enthusiasm declined; rather my soul held out in its ecstasy as in a strong castle, and was there besieged by cold and sorrowful considerations.  I could not doubt but that I loved her at first sight, and already with a quivering ardour that was strange to my experience.  What then was to follow?  She was the child of an afflicted house, the Senora’s daughter, the sister of Felipe; she bore it even in her beauty.  She had the lightness and swiftness of the one, swift as an arrow, light as dew; like the other, she shone on the pale background of the world with the brilliancy of flowers.  I could not call by the name of brother that half-witted lad, nor by the name of mother that immovable and lovely thing of flesh, whose silly eyes and perpetual simper now recurred to my mind like something hateful.  And if I could not marry, what then?  She was helplessly unprotected; her eyes, in that single and long glance which had been all our intercourse, had confessed a weakness equal to my own; but in my heart I knew her for the student of the cold northern chamber, and the writer of the sorrowful lines; and this was a knowledge to disarm a brute.  To flee was more than I could find courage for; but I registered a vow of unsleeping circumspection.

As I turned from the window, my eyes alighted on the portrait.  It had fallen dead, like a candle after sunrise; it followed me with eyes of paint.  I knew it to be like, and marvelled at the tenacity of type in that declining race; but the likeness was swallowed up in difference.  I remembered how it had seemed to me a thing unapproachable in the life, a creature rather of the painter’s craft than of the modesty of nature, and I marvelled at the thought, and exulted in the image of Olalla.  Beauty I had seen before, and not been charmed, and I had been often drawn to women, who were not beautiful except to me; but in Olalla all that I desired and had not dared to imagine was united.

I did not see her the next day, and my heart ached and my eyes longed for her, as men long for morning.  But the day after, when I returned, about my usual hour, she was once more on the gallery, and our looks once more met and embraced.  I would have spoken, I would have drawn near to her; but strongly as she plucked at my heart, drawing me like a magnet, something yet more imperious withheld me; and I could only bow and pass by; and she, leaving my salutation unanswered, only followed me with her noble eyes.

I had now her image by rote, and as I conned the traits in memory it seemed as if I read her very heart.  She was dressed with something of her mother’s coquetry, and love of positive colour.  Her robe, which I know she must have made with her own hands, clung about her with a cunning grace.  After the fashion of that country, besides, her bodice stood open in the middle, in a long slit, and here, in spite of the poverty of the house, a gold coin, hanging by a ribbon, lay on her brown bosom.  These were proofs, had any been needed, of her inborn delight in life and her own loveliness.  On the other hand, in her eyes that hung upon mine, I could read depth beyond depth of passion and sadness, lights of poetry and hope, blacknesses of despair, and thoughts that were above the earth.  It was a lovely body, but the inmate, the soul, was more than worthy of that lodging.  Should I leave this incomparable flower to wither unseen on these rough mountains?  Should I despise the great gift offered me in the eloquent silence of her eyes?  Here was a soul immured; should I not burst its prison?  All side considerations fell off from me; were she the child of Herod I swore I should make her mine; and that very evening I set myself, with a mingled sense of treachery and disgrace, to captivate the brother.  Perhaps I read him with more favourable eyes, perhaps the thought of his sister always summoned up the better qualities of that imperfect soul; but he had never seemed to me so amiable, and his very likeness to Olalla, while it annoyed, yet softened me.