The sight and (if I may so call it) the acquaintance of the mother
confirmed the view I had already taken of the son.  The family blood had
been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a
common error among the proud and the exclusive.  No decline, indeed, was
to be traced in the body, which had been handed down unimpaired in
shapeliness and strength; and the faces of to-day were struck as sharply
from the mint, as the face of two centuries ago that smiled upon me from
the portrait.  But the intelligence (that more precious heirloom) was
degenerate; the treasure of ancestral memory ran low; and it had required
the potent, plebeian crossing of a muleteer or mountain contrabandista to
raise, what approached hebetude in the mother, into the active oddity of
the son.  Yet of the two, it was the mother I preferred.  Of Felipe,
vengeful and placable, full of starts and shyings, inconstant as a hare,
I could even conceive as a creature possibly noxious.  Of the mother I
had no thoughts but those of kindness.  And indeed, as spectators are apt
ignorantly to take sides, I grew something of a partisan in the enmity
which I perceived to smoulder between them.  True, it seemed mostly on
the mother's part.  She would sometimes draw in her breath as he came
near, and the pupils of her vacant eyes would contract as if with horror
or fear.  Her emotions, such as they were, were much upon the surface and
readily shared; and this latent repulsion occupied my mind, and kept me
wondering on what grounds it rested, and whether the son was certainly in
fault.

I had been about ten days in the residencia, when there sprang up a high
and harsh wind, carrying clouds of dust.  It came out of malarious
lowlands, and over several snowy sierras.  The nerves of those on whom it
blew were strung and jangled; their eyes smarted with the dust; their
legs ached under the burthen of their body; and the touch of one hand
upon another grew to be odious.  The wind, besides, came down the gullies
of the hills and stormed about the house with a great, hollow buzzing and
whistling that was wearisome to the ear and dismally depressing to the
mind.  It did not so much blow in gusts as with the steady sweep of a
waterfall, so that there was no remission of discomfort while it blew.
But higher upon the mountain, it was probably of a more variable
strength, with accesses of fury; for there came down at times a far-off
wailing, infinitely grievous to hear; and at times, on one of the high
shelves or terraces, there would start up, and then disperse, a tower of
dust, like the smoke of in explosion.

I no sooner awoke in bed than I was conscious of the nervous tension and
depression of the weather, and the effect grew stronger as the day
proceeded.  It was in vain that I resisted; in vain that I set forth upon
my customary morning's walk; the irrational, unchanging fury of the storm
had soon beat down my strength and wrecked my temper; and I returned to
the residencia, glowing with dry heat, and foul and gritty with dust.  The
court had a forlorn appearance; now and then a glimmer of sun fled over
it; now and then the wind swooped down upon the pomegranates, and
scattered the blossoms, and set the window shutters clapping on the wall.
In the recess the Senora was pacing to and fro with a flushed countenance
and bright eyes; I thought, too, she was speaking to herself, like one in
anger.  But when I addressed her with my customary salutation, she only
replied by a sharp gesture and continued her walk.  The weather had
distempered even this impassive creature; and as I went on upstairs I was
the less ashamed of my own discomposure.

All day the wind continued; and I sat in my room and made a feint of
reading, or walked up and down, and listened to the riot overhead.  Night
fell, and I had not so much as a candle.  I began to long for some
society, and stole down to the court.  It was now plunged in the blue of
the first darkness; but the recess was redly lighted by the fire.  The
wood had been piled high, and was crowned by a shock of flames, which the
draught of the chimney brandished to and fro.  In this strong and shaken
brightness the Senora continued pacing from wall to wall with
disconnected gestures, clasping her hands, stretching forth her arms,
throwing back her head as in appeal to heaven.  In these disordered
movements the beauty and grace of the woman showed more clearly; but
there was a light in her eye that struck on me unpleasantly; and when I
had looked on awhile in silence, and seemingly unobserved, I turned tail
as I had come, and groped my way back again to my own chamber.

By the time Felipe brought my supper and lights, my nerve was utterly
gone; and, had the lad been such as I was used to seeing him, I should
have kept him (even by force had that been necessary) to take off the
edge from my distasteful solitude.  But on Felipe, also, the wind had
exercised its influence.  He had been feverish all day; now that the
night had come he was fallen into a low and tremulous humour that reacted
on my own.  The sight of his scared face, his starts and pallors and
sudden harkenings, unstrung me; and when he dropped and broke a dish, I
fairly leaped out of my seat.

'I think we are all mad to-day,' said I, affecting to laugh.

'It is the black wind,' he replied dolefully.  'You feel as if you must
do something, and you don't know what it is.'

I noted the aptness of the description; but, indeed, Felipe had sometimes
a strange felicity in rendering into words the sensations of the body.
'And your mother, too,' said I; 'she seems to feel this weather much.  Do
you not fear she may be unwell?'

He stared at me a little, and then said, 'No,' almost defiantly; and the
next moment, carrying his hand to his brow, cried out lamentably on the
wind and the noise that made his head go round like a millwheel.  'Who
can be well?' he cried; and, indeed, I could only echo his question, for
I was disturbed enough myself.

I went to bed early, wearied with day-long restlessness, but the
poisonous nature of the wind, and its ungodly and unintermittent uproar,
would not suffer me to sleep.  I lay there and tossed, my nerves and
senses on the stretch.  At times I would doze, dream horribly, and wake
again; and these snatches of oblivion confused me as to time.  But it
must have been late on in the night, when I was suddenly startled by an
outbreak of pitiable and hateful cries.  I leaped from my bed, supposing
I had dreamed; but the cries still continued to fill the house, cries of
pain, I thought, but certainly of rage also, and so savage and discordant
that they shocked the heart.  It was no illusion; some living thing, some
lunatic or some wild animal, was being foully tortured.  The thought of
Felipe and the squirrel flashed into my mind, and I ran to the door, but
it had been locked from the outside; and I might shake it as I pleased, I
was a fast prisoner.  Still the cries continued.  Now they would dwindle
down into a moaning that seemed to be articulate, and at these times I
made sure they must be human; and again they would break forth and fill
the house with ravings worthy of hell.  I stood at the door and gave ear
to them, till at, last they died away.  Long after that, I still lingered
and still continued to hear them mingle in fancy with the storming of the
wind; and when at last I crept to my bed, it was with a deadly sickness
and a blackness of horror on my heart.

It was little wonder if I slept no more.  Why had I been locked in?  What
had passed?  Who was the author of these indescribable and shocking
cries?  A human being?  It was inconceivable.  A beast?  The cries were
scarce quite bestial; and what animal, short of a lion or a tiger, could
thus shake the solid walls of the residencia?  And while I was thus
turning over the elements of the mystery, it came into my mind that I had
not yet set eyes upon the daughter of the house.  What was more probable
than that the daughter of the Senora, and the sister of Felipe, should be
herself insane?  Or, what more likely than that these ignorant and half-
witted people should seek to manage an afflicted kinswoman by violence?
Here was a solution; and yet when I called to mind the cries (which I
never did without a shuddering chill) it seemed altogether insufficient:
not even cruelty could wring such cries from madness.  But of one thing I
was sure: I could not live in a house where such a thing was half
conceivable, and not probe the matter home and, if necessary, interfere.

The next day came, the wind had blown itself out, and there was nothing
to remind me of the business of the night.  Felipe came to my bedside
with obvious cheerfulness; as I passed through the court, the Senora was
sunning herself with her accustomed immobility; and when I issued from
the gateway, I found the whole face of nature austerely smiling, the
heavens of a cold blue, and sown with great cloud islands, and the
mountain-sides mapped forth into provinces of light and shadow.  A short
walk restored me to myself, and renewed within me the resolve to plumb
this mystery; and when, from the vantage of my knoll, I had seen Felipe
pass forth to his labours in the garden, I returned at once to the
residencia to put my design in practice.  The Senora appeared plunged in
slumber; I stood awhile and marked her, but she did not stir; even if my
design were indiscreet, I had little to fear from such a guardian; and
turning away, I mounted to the gallery and began my exploration of the
house.

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.

A third day passed in vain--an empty desert of hours.  I would not lose a
chance, and loitered all afternoon in the court where (to give myself a
countenance) I spoke more than usual with the Senora.  God knows it was
with a most tender and sincere interest that I now studied her; and even
as for Felipe, so now for the mother, I was conscious of a growing warmth
of toleration.  And yet I wondered.  Even while I spoke with her, she
would doze off into a little sleep, and presently awake again without
embarrassment; and this composure staggered me.  And again, as I marked
her make infinitesimal changes in her posture, savouring and lingering on
the bodily pleasure of the movement, I was driven to wonder at this depth
of passive sensuality.  She lived in her body; and her consciousness was
all sunk into and disseminated through her members, where it luxuriously
dwelt.  Lastly, I could not grow accustomed to her eyes.  Each time she
turned on me these great beautiful and meaningless orbs, wide open to the
day, but closed against human inquiry--each time I had occasion to
observe the lively changes of her pupils which expanded and contracted in
a breath--I know not what it was came over me, I can find no name for the
mingled feeling of disappointment, annoyance, and distaste that jarred
along my nerves.  I tried her on a variety of subjects, equally in vain;
and at last led the talk to her daughter.  But even there she proved
indifferent; said she was pretty, which (as with children) was her
highest word of commendation, but was plainly incapable of any higher
thought; and when I remarked that Olalla seemed silent, merely yawned in
my face and replied that speech was of no great use when you had nothing
to say.  'People speak much, very much,' she added, looking at me with
expanded pupils; and then again yawned and again showed me a mouth that
was as dainty as a toy.  This time I took the hint, and, leaving her to
her repose, went up into my own chamber to sit by the open window,
looking on the hills and not beholding them, sunk in lustrous and deep
dreams, and hearkening in fancy to the note of a voice that I had never
heard.

I awoke on the fifth morning with a brightness of anticipation that
seemed to challenge fate.  I was sure of myself, light of heart and foot,
and resolved to put my love incontinently to the touch of knowledge.  It
should lie no longer under the bonds of silence, a dumb thing, living by
the eye only, like the love of beasts; but should now put on the spirit,
and enter upon the joys of the complete human intimacy.  I thought of it
with wild hopes, like a voyager to El Dorado; into that unknown and
lovely country of her soul, I no longer trembled to adventure.  Yet when
I did indeed encounter her, the same force of passion descended on me and
at once submerged my mind; speech seemed to drop away from me like a
childish habit; and I but drew near to her as the giddy man draws near to
the margin of a gulf.  She drew back from me a little as I came; but her
eyes did not waver from mine, and these lured me forward.  At last, when
I was already within reach of her, I stopped.  Words were denied me; if I
advanced I could but clasp her to my heart in silence; and all that was
sane in me, all that was still unconquered, revolted against the thought
of such an accost.  So we stood for a second, all our life in our eyes,
exchanging salvos of attraction and yet each resisting; and then, with a
great effort of the will, and conscious at the same time of a sudden
bitterness of disappointment, I turned and went away in the same silence.

What power lay upon me that I could not speak?  And she, why was she also
silent?  Why did she draw away before me dumbly, with fascinated eyes?
Was this love? or was it a mere brute attraction, mindless and
inevitable, like that of the magnet for the steel?  We had never spoken,
we were wholly strangers: and yet an influence, strong as the grasp of a
giant, swept us silently together.  On my side, it filled me with
impatience; and yet I was sure that she was worthy; I had seen her books,
read her verses, and thus, in a sense, divined the soul of my mistress.
But on her side, it struck me almost cold.  Of me, she knew nothing but
my bodily favour; she was drawn to me as stones fall to the earth; the
laws that rule the earth conducted her, unconsenting, to my arms; and I
drew back at the thought of such a bridal, and began to be jealous for
myself.  It was not thus that I desired to be loved.  And then I began to
fall into a great pity for the girl herself.  I thought how sharp must be
her mortification, that she, the student, the recluse, Felipe's saintly
monitress, should have thus confessed an overweening weakness for a man
with whom she had never exchanged a word.  And at the coming of pity, all
other thoughts were swallowed up; and I longed only to find and console
and reassure her; to tell her how wholly her love was returned on my
side, and how her choice, even if blindly made, was not unworthy.

The next day it was glorious weather; depth upon depth of blue
over-canopied the mountains; the sun shone wide; and the wind in the
trees and the many falling torrents in the mountains filled the air with
delicate and haunting music.  Yet I was prostrated with sadness.  My
heart wept for the sight of Olalla, as a child weeps for its mother.  I
sat down on a boulder on the verge of the low cliffs that bound the
plateau to the north.  Thence I looked down into the wooded valley of a
stream, where no foot came.  In the mood I was in, it was even touching
to behold the place untenanted; it lacked Olalla; and I thought of the
delight and glory of a life passed wholly with her in that strong air,
and among these rugged and lovely surroundings, at first with a
whimpering sentiment, and then again with such a fiery joy that I seemed
to grow in strength and stature, like a Samson.

And then suddenly I was aware of Olalla drawing near.  She appeared out
of a grove of cork-trees, and came straight towards me; and I stood up
and waited.  She seemed in her walking a creature of such life and fire
and lightness as amazed me; yet she came quietly and slowly.  Her energy
was in the slowness; but for inimitable strength, I felt she would have
run, she would have flown to me.  Still, as she approached, she kept her
eyes lowered to the ground; and when she had drawn quite near, it was
without one glance that she addressed me.  At the first note of her voice
I started.  It was for this I had been waiting; this was the last test of
my love.  And lo, her enunciation was precise and clear, not lisping and
incomplete like that of her family; and the voice, though deeper than
usual with women, was still both youthful and womanly.  She spoke in a
rich chord; golden contralto strains mingled with hoarseness, as the red
threads were mingled with the brown among her tresses.  It was not only a
voice that spoke to my heart directly; but it spoke to me of her.  And
yet her words immediately plunged me back upon despair.

'You will go away,' she said, 'to-day.'

Her example broke the bonds of my speech; I felt as lightened of a
weight, or as if a spell had been dissolved.  I know not in what words I
answered; but, standing before her on the cliffs, I poured out the whole
ardour of my love, telling her that I lived upon the thought of her,
slept only to dream of her loveliness, and would gladly forswear my
country, my language, and my friends, to live for ever by her side.  And
then, strongly commanding myself, I changed the note; I reassured, I
comforted her; I told her I had divined in her a pious and heroic spirit,
with which I was worthy to sympathise, and which I longed to share and
lighten.  'Nature,' I told her, 'was the voice of God, which men disobey
at peril; and if we were thus humbly drawn together, ay, even as by a
miracle of love, it must imply a divine fitness in our souls; we must be
made,' I said--'made for one another.  We should be mad rebels,' I cried
out--'mad rebels against God, not to obey this instinct.'

She shook her head.  'You will go to-day,' she repeated, and then with a
gesture, and in a sudden, sharp note--'no, not to-day,' she cried, 'to-
morrow!'

But at this sign of relenting, power came in upon me in a tide.  I
stretched out my arms and called upon her name; and she leaped to me and
clung to me.  The hills rocked about us, the earth quailed; a shock as of
a blow went through me and left me blind and dizzy.  And the next moment
she had thrust me back, broken rudely from my arms, and fled with the
speed of a deer among the cork-trees.

I stood and shouted to the mountains; I turned and went back towards the
residencia, waltzing upon air.  She sent me away, and yet I had but to
call upon her name and she came to me.  These were but the weaknesses of
girls, from which even she, the strangest of her sex, was not exempted.
Go?  Not I, Olalla--O, not I, Olalla, my Olalla!  A bird sang near by;
and in that season, birds were rare.  It bade me be of good cheer.  And
once more the whole countenance of nature, from the ponderous and stable
mountains down to the lightest leaf and the smallest darting fly in the
shadow of the groves, began to stir before me and to put on the
lineaments of life and wear a face of awful joy.  The sunshine struck
upon the hills, strong as a hammer on the anvil, and the hills shook; the
earth, under that vigorous insulation, yielded up heady scents; the woods
smouldered in the blaze.  I felt the thrill of travail and delight run
through the earth.  Something elemental, something rude, violent, and
savage, in the love that sang in my heart, was like a key to nature's
secrets; and the very stones that rattled under my feet appeared alive
and friendly.  Olalla!  Her touch had quickened, and renewed, and strung
me up to the old pitch of concert with the rugged earth, to a swelling of
the soul that men learn to forget in their polite assemblies.  Love
burned in me like rage; tenderness waxed fierce; I hated, I adored, I
pitied, I revered her with ecstasy.  She seemed the link that bound me in
with dead things on the one hand, and with our pure and pitying God upon
the other: a thing brutal and divine, and akin at once to the innocence
and to the unbridled forces of the earth.

My head thus reeling, I came into the courtyard of the residencia, and
the sight of the mother struck me like a revelation.  She sat there, all
sloth and contentment, blinking under the strong sunshine, branded with a
passive enjoyment, a creature set quite apart, before whom my ardour fell
away like a thing ashamed.  I stopped a moment, and, commanding such
shaken tones as I was able, said a word or two.  She looked at me with
her unfathomable kindness; her voice in reply sounded vaguely out of the
realm of peace in which she slumbered, and there fell on my mind, for the
first time, a sense of respect for one so uniformly innocent and happy,
and I passed on in a kind of wonder at myself, that I should be so much
disquieted.

On my table there lay a piece of the same yellow paper I had seen in the
north room; it was written on with pencil in the same hand, Olalla's
hand, and I picked it up with a sudden sinking of alarm, and read, 'If
you have any kindness for Olalla, if you have any chivalry for a creature
sorely wrought, go from here to-day; in pity, in honour, for the sake of
Him who died, I supplicate that you shall go.'  I looked at this awhile
in mere stupidity, then I began to awaken to a weariness and horror of
life; the sunshine darkened outside on the bare hills, and I began to
shake like a man in terror.  The vacancy thus suddenly opened in my life
unmanned me like a physical void.  It was not my heart, it was not my
happiness, it was life itself that was involved.  I could not lose her.  I
said so, and stood repeating it.  And then, like one in a dream, I moved
to the window, put forth my hand to open the casement, and thrust it
through the pane.  The blood spurted from my wrist; and with an
instantaneous quietude and command of myself, I pressed my thumb on the
little leaping fountain, and reflected what to do.  In that empty room
there was nothing to my purpose; I felt, besides, that I required
assistance.  There shot into my mind a hope that Olalla herself might be
my helper, and I turned and went down stairs, still keeping my thumb upon
the wound.

There was no sign of either Olalla or Felipe, and I addressed myself to
the recess, whither the Senora had now drawn quite back and sat dozing
close before the fire, for no degree of heat appeared too much for her.

'Pardon me,' said I, 'if I disturb you, but I must apply to you for
help.'

She looked up sleepily and asked me what it was, and with the very words
I thought she drew in her breath with a widening of the nostrils and
seemed to come suddenly and fully alive.

'I have cut myself,' I said, 'and rather badly.  See!'  And I held out my
two hands from which the blood was oozing and dripping.

Her great eyes opened wide, the pupils shrank into points; a veil seemed
to fall from her face, and leave it sharply expressive and yet
inscrutable.  And as I still stood, marvelling a little at her
disturbance, she came swiftly up to me, and stooped and caught me by the
hand; and the next moment my hand was at her mouth, and she had bitten me
to the bone.  The pang of the bite, the sudden spurting of blood, and the
monstrous horror of the act, flashed through me all in one, and I beat
her back; and she sprang at me again and again, with bestial cries, cries
that I recognised, such cries as had awakened me on the night of the high
wind.  Her strength was like that of madness; mine was rapidly ebbing
with the loss of blood; my mind besides was whirling with the abhorrent
strangeness of the onslaught, and I was already forced against the wall,
when Olalla ran betwixt us, and Felipe, following at a bound, pinned down
his mother on the floor.

A trance-like weakness fell upon me; I saw, heard, and felt, but I was
incapable of movement.  I heard the struggle roll to and fro upon the
floor, the yells of that catamount ringing up to Heaven as she strove to
reach me.  I felt Olalla clasp me in her arms, her hair falling on my
face, and, with the strength of a man, raise and half drag, half carry me
upstairs into my own room, where she cast me down upon the bed.  Then I
saw her hasten to the door and lock it, and stand an instant listening to
the savage cries that shook the residencia.  And then, swift and light as
a thought, she was again beside me, binding up my hand, laying it in her
bosom, moaning and mourning over it with dove-like sounds.  They were not
words that came to her, they were sounds more beautiful than speech,
infinitely touching, infinitely tender; and yet as I lay there, a thought
stung to my heart, a thought wounded me like a sword, a thought, like a
worm in a flower, profaned the holiness of my love.  Yes, they were
beautiful sounds, and they were inspired by human tenderness; but was
their beauty human?

All day I lay there.  For a long time the cries of that nameless female
thing, as she struggled with her half-witted whelp, resounded through the
house, and pierced me with despairing sorrow and disgust.  They were the
death-cry of my love; my love was murdered; was not only dead, but an
offence to me; and yet, think as I pleased, feel as I must, it still
swelled within me like a storm of sweetness, and my heart melted at her
looks and touch.  This horror that had sprung out, this doubt upon
Olalla, this savage and bestial strain that ran not only through the
whole behaviour of her family, but found a place in the very foundations
and story of our love--though it appalled, though it shocked and sickened
me, was yet not of power to break the knot of my infatuation.

When the cries had ceased, there came a scraping at the door, by which I
knew Felipe was without; and Olalla went and spoke to him--I know not
what.  With that exception, she stayed close beside me, now kneeling by
my bed and fervently praying, now sitting with her eyes upon mine.  So
then, for these six hours I drank in her beauty, and silently perused the
story in her face.  I saw the golden coin hover on her breaths; I saw her
eyes darken and brighter, and still speak no language but that of an
unfathomable kindness; I saw the faultless face, and, through the robe,
the lines of the faultless body.  Night came at last, and in the growing
darkness of the chamber, the sight of her slowly melted; but even then
the touch of her smooth hand lingered in mine and talked with me.  To lie
thus in deadly weakness and drink in the traits of the beloved, is to
reawake to love from whatever shock of disillusion.  I reasoned with
myself; and I shut my eyes on horrors, and again I was very bold to
accept the worst.  What mattered it, if that imperious sentiment
survived; if her eyes still beckoned and attached me; if now, even as
before, every fibre of my dull body yearned and turned to her?  Late on
in the night some strength revived in me, and I spoke:--

'Olalla,' I said, 'nothing matters; I ask nothing; I am content; I love
you.'

She knelt down awhile and prayed, and I devoutly respected her devotions.
The moon had begun to shine in upon one side of each of the three
windows, and make a misty clearness in the room, by which I saw her
indistinctly.  When she rearose she made the sign of the cross.

'It is for me to speak,' she said, 'and for you to listen.  I know; you
can but guess.  I prayed, how I prayed for you to leave this place.  I
begged it of you, and I know you would have granted me even this; or if
not, O let me think so!'

'I love you,' I said.

'And yet you have lived in the world,' she said; after a pause, 'you are
a man and wise; and I am but a child.  Forgive me, if I seem to teach,
who am as ignorant as the trees of the mountain; but those who learn much
do but skim the face of knowledge; they seize the laws, they conceive the
dignity of the design--the horror of the living fact fades from their
memory.  It is we who sit at home with evil who remember, I think, and
are warned and pity.  Go, rather, go now, and keep me in mind.  So I
shall have a life in the cherished places of your memory: a life as much
my own, as that which I lead in this body.'

'I love you,' I said once more; and reaching out my weak hand, took hers,
and carried it to my lips, and kissed it.  Nor did she resist, but winced
a little; and I could see her look upon me with a frown that was not
unkindly, only sad and baffled.  And then it seemed she made a call upon
her resolution; plucked my hand towards her, herself at the same time
leaning somewhat forward, and laid it on the beating of her heart.
'There,' she cried, 'you feel the very footfall of my life.  It only
moves for you; it is yours.  But is it even mine?  It is mine indeed to
offer you, as I might take the coin from my neck, as I might break a live
branch from a tree, and give it you.  And yet not mine!  I dwell, or I
think I dwell (if I exist at all), somewhere apart, an impotent prisoner,
and carried about and deafened by a mob that I disown.  This capsule,
such as throbs against the sides of animals, knows you at a touch for its
master; ay, it loves you!  But my soul, does my soul?  I think not; I
know not, fearing to ask.  Yet when you spoke to me your words were of
the soul; it is of the soul that you ask--it is only from the soul that
you would take me.'

'Olalla,' I said, 'the soul and the body are one, and mostly so in love.
What the body chooses, the soul loves; where the body clings, the soul
cleaves; body for body, soul to soul, they come together at God's signal;
and the lower part (if we can call aught low) is only the footstool and
foundation of the highest.'

'Have you,' she said, 'seen the portraits in the house of my fathers?
Have you looked at my mother or at Felipe?  Have your eyes never rested
on that picture that hangs by your bed?  She who sat for it died ages
ago; and she did evil in her life.  But, look-again: there is my hand to
the least line, there are my eyes and my hair.  What is mine, then, and
what am I?  If not a curve in this poor body of mine (which you love, and
for the sake of which you dotingly dream that you love me) not a gesture
that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not any look from my eyes, no,
not even now when I speak to him I love, but has belonged to others?
Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes; other men have
heard the pleading of the same voice that now sounds in your ears.  The
hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me, they
guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but reinform features and
attributes that have long been laid aside from evil in the quiet of the
grave.  Is it me you love, friend? or the race that made me?  The girl
who does not know and cannot answer for the least portion of herself? or
the stream of which she is a transitory eddy, the tree of which she is
the passing fruit?  The race exists; it is old, it is ever young, it
carries its eternal destiny in its bosom; upon it, like waves upon the
sea, individual succeeds to individual, mocked with a semblance of self-
control, but they are nothing.  We speak of the soul, but the soul is in
the race.'

'You fret against the common law,' I said.  'You rebel against the voice
of God, which he has made so winning to convince, so imperious to
command.  Hear it, and how it speaks between us!  Your hand clings to
mine, your heart leaps at my touch, the unknown elements of which we are
compounded awake and run together at a look; the clay of the earth
remembers its independent life and yearns to join us; we are drawn
together as the stars are turned about in space, or as the tides ebb and
flow, by things older and greater than we ourselves.'

'Alas!' she said, 'what can I say to you?  My fathers, eight hundred
years ago, ruled all this province: they were wise, great, cunning, and
cruel; they were a picked race of the Spanish; their flags led in war;
the king called them his cousin; the people, when the rope was slung for
them or when they returned and found their hovels smoking, blasphemed
their name.  Presently a change began.  Man has risen; if he has sprung
from the brutes, he can descend again to the same level.  The breath of
weariness blew on their humanity and the cords relaxed; they began to go
down; their minds fell on sleep, their passions awoke in gusts, heady and
senseless like the wind in the gutters of the mountains; beauty was still
handed down, but no longer the guiding wit nor the human heart; the seed
passed on, it was wrapped in flesh, the flesh covered the bones, but they
were the bones and the flesh of brutes, and their mind was as the mind of
flies.  I speak to you as I dare; but you have seen for yourself how the
wheel has gone backward with my doomed race.  I stand, as it were, upon a
little rising ground in this desperate descent, and see both before and
behind, both what we have lost and to what we are condemned to go farther
downward.  And shall I--I that dwell apart in the house of the dead, my
body, loathing its ways--shall I repeat the spell?  Shall I bind another
spirit, reluctant as my own, into this bewitched and tempest-broken
tenement that I now suffer in?  Shall I hand down this cursed vessel of
humanity, charge it with fresh life as with fresh poison, and dash it,
like a fire, in the faces of posterity?  But my vow has been given; the
race shall cease from off the earth.  At this hour my brother is making
ready; his foot will soon be on the stair; and you will go with him and
pass out of my sight for ever.  Think of me sometimes as one to whom the
lesson of life was very harshly told, but who heard it with courage; as
one who loved you indeed, but who hated herself so deeply that her love
was hateful to her; as one who sent you away and yet would have longed to
keep you for ever; who had no dearer hope than to forget you, and no
greater fear than to be forgotten.'

She had drawn towards the door as she spoke, her rich voice sounding
softer and farther away; and with the last word she was gone, and I lay
alone in the moonlit chamber.  What I might have done had not I lain
bound by my extreme weakness, I know not; but as it was there fell upon
me a great and blank despair.  It was not long before there shone in at
the door the ruddy glimmer of a lantern, and Felipe coming, charged me
without a word upon his shoulders, and carried me down to the great gate,
where the cart was waiting.  In the moonlight the hills stood out
sharply, as if they were of cardboard; on the glimmering surface of the
plateau, and from among the low trees which swung together and sparkled
in the wind, the great black cube of the residencia stood out bulkily,
its mass only broken by three dimly lighted windows in the northern front
above the gate.  They were Olalla's windows, and as the cart jolted
onwards I kept my eyes fixed upon them till, where the road dipped into a
valley, they were lost to my view forever.  Felipe walked in silence
beside the shafts, but from time to time he would cheek the mule and seem
to look back upon me; and at length drew quite near and laid his hand
upon my head.  There was such kindness in the touch, and such a
simplicity, as of the brutes, that tears broke from me like the bursting
of an artery.