The White Doe · II

Among the huntsmen of Don Dionís there was one named Garcés, son of an old servant of the family, and therefore the dearest of all their retainers.

Garcés was pretty much the same age as Constanza, and from his earliest childhood had grown accustomed to anticipating her slightest wish, and to divining and satisfying the least of her whims.

With his own hands he busied himself in his leisure moments sharpening the keen arrows of her ivory crossbow; he broke in the colts his lady was to ride; he trained her favorite hounds in the wiles of the chase and taught her falcons, which he bought at the fairs of Castile with red hoods embroidered in gold.

Toward the other huntsmen, the pages, and the lesser folk in Don Dionís’s service, the exquisite solicitude of Garcés and the esteem with which his masters distinguished him had earned him a sort of general animosity, and according to the envious, all those attentions with which he rushed to forestall his lady’s caprices laid bare a flattering and servile character. There were not lacking, however, a few who, more clever or malicious, believed they could catch in the solicitous young man’s assiduity some signs of ill-disguised love.

If indeed it was so, Garcés’s hidden affection had more than ample excuse in Constanza’s incomparable beauty. A breast of rock and a heart of ice would have been required to remain impassive day after day beside that woman so singular for her beauty and her rare attractions.

The Azucena del Moncayo they called her for twenty leagues around, and well she deserved this nickname, for she was so graceful, so white, and so fair that, like the lilies, God seemed to have made her of snow and gold.

And yet, among the neighboring lords it was whispered that the fair lady of Veratón was not as pure of blood as she was beautiful, and that despite her golden braids and alabaster complexion, she had had a gypsy for a mother. What truth there might be in these murmurs no one could ever say, because the truth was that Don Dionís had led a rather eventful life in his youth, and after fighting for a long time under the command of the Aragonese monarch—from whom he obtained, among other favors, the fief of Veratón—he went off to Palestine, where he wandered about for some years, to return at last and shut himself up in his castle of Veratón with a little daughter born, doubtless, in those remote lands. The only one who could have told something about the mysterious origin of Constanza, since he accompanied Don Dionís on his distant pilgrimages, was the father of Garcés, and he had already been dead for quite some time, without saying a single word about the matter even to his own son, who several times and with signs of great interest had asked him about it.

The character of Constanza, by turns withdrawn and melancholy or boisterous and cheerful, the strange exaltation of her ideas, her extravagant whims, her never-seen customs, even the peculiarity of having eyes and eyebrows as black as night while being white and gold like the sun, had all contributed to give fuel to the gossip of her neighbors; and even Garcés himself, who dealt with her so intimately, had come to persuade himself that his lady was something special and did not resemble other women.

Present at Esteban’s tale like the other huntsmen, Garcés was perhaps the only one who listened with true curiosity to the details of his incredible adventure, and although he could not help smiling when the shepherd boy repeated the words of the white doe, ever since he left the thicket where they had rested during the heat of the day he began to turn over the most absurd imaginations in his mind.

“There is no doubt that all that talk about the does speaking is pure apprehension on Esteban’s part, who is a complete fool,” the young huntsman said to himself, while mounted on a powerful sorrel, he followed step by step the palfrey of Constanza, who also seemed to show herself somewhat distracted and silent, and withdrawn from the throng of hunters, scarcely taking part in the sport. “But who says that in what that simpleton relates there may not be some truth?” the youth went on thinking. “Stranger things have seen we in the world, and a white doe well may be, since if credit is to be given to the country ballads, Saint Hubert, patron of hunters, had one. Oh, if I could only catch a white doe alive to offer it to my lady!”

Thus thinking and pondering Garcés passed the afternoon, and when the sun had already begun to hide behind the neighboring hills and Don Dionís ordered his people to turn about to return to the castle, he slipped away unobserved from the company and set off in search of the shepherd boy through the thickest and most tangled part of the mountain.

Night had almost completely fallen when Don Dionís arrived at the gates of his castle. Forthwith a frugal collation was prepared for him, and he sat down with his daughter at the table.

“And Garcés, where is he?” asked Constanza, noticing that her huntsman was not there to serve her as was his wont.

“We do not know,” the other servants hastened to reply; “he disappeared from among us near the glen, and to this hour we have not seen him.”

At that moment Garcés arrived, quite breathless, his brow still covered in sweat, but with the most joyful and satisfied face imaginable.

“Forgive me, madam,” he exclaimed, turning to Constanza; “forgive me if I have failed for a moment in my duty; but from where I come, riding my horse at a gallop just as I did here, I was solely occupied in serving you.”

“In serving me?” repeated Constanza; “I do not understand what you mean.”

“Yes, madam; in serving you,” the young man repeated, “for I have discovered that it is true the white doe exists. Besides Esteban, several other shepherds vouch for it as certain, swearing they have seen her more than once, and with their help I hope in God and my patron Saint Hubert that before three days are out, dead or alive, I will bring her to the castle for you.”

“Bah!... Bah!...” exclaimed Constanza with a mocking air, while the more or less disguised laughter of the bystanders formed a chorus to her words; “enough of night-time hunts and white does: mind you, the devil has taken a fancy to tempting the simple-minded, and if you persist in nipping at his heels, he will give people something to laugh at with you just as he did with poor Esteban.”

“Madam,” Garcés interrupted with a broken voice, concealing as best he could the anger produced by his companions’ derisive glee, “I have never laid eyes on the devil, and consequently I still do not know how he plays his games; but I swear to you he can do anything with me except give people cause to laugh, for I only tolerate the use of that privilege in you.”

Constanza knew the effect her mockery had produced on the enamored youth; but wishing to test his patience to the utmost, she said again in the same tone:

“And what if when you shoot she greets you with a laugh of the sort Esteban heard, or laughs right in your nose, and upon hearing her supernatural guffaws your crossbow falls from your hands, and before you recover from your fright the white doe has vanished swifter than lightning?”

“Oh!” exclaimed Garcés, “as for that, rest assured that if I were to cross her path at crossbow range, even if she made more grimaces than a jester, even if she spoke to me, not in Castilian, but in Latin like the abbot of Munilla, she would not get away without a bolt in her body.”

At this point in the dialogue, Don Dionís intervened, and with a despairing gravity through which all the irony of his words could be guessed, began to give the already harried lad the most original advice in the world, in the event that he should come face to face with the devil transformed into a white doe. At each new notion of her father, Constanza fixed her eyes on the troubled Garcés and burst out laughing like a madwoman, while the other servants redoubled their mockery with knowing glances and poorly concealed delight.

While the collation lasted, this scene was prolonged, in which the young huntsman’s credulity was, so to speak, the mandatory theme of general amusement; so that when the tablecloths were removed, and Don Dionís and Constanza retired to their chambers, and all the castlefolk yielded to repose, Garcés remained for a long space of time irresolute, doubting whether, despite his masters’ jests, he should remain firm in his purpose, or desist completely from the enterprise.

“The devil take it!” he exclaimed, emerging from the state of uncertainty in which he found himself. “A worse misfortune than has befallen me cannot befall me, and if, on the contrary, what Esteban told us is true... oh, then, how I shall relish my triumph!”

Saying this, he strung his crossbow, not without first making the sign of the cross on the tip of the bolt, and placing it upon his back, he made for the castle postern to take the mountain path.

When Garcés reached the glen and the very spot where, according to Esteban’s instructions, he was to await the appearance of the does, the moon was beginning to rise slowly from behind the nearby mountains.

Like a good hunter and one practiced in the trade, before choosing a suitable spot to lie in wait for the game, he walked back and forth for a long while examining the nearby trails and paths, the arrangement of the trees, the terrain’s features, the river’s curves, and the depth of its waters.

Finally, after finishing this meticulous reconnaissance of the place where he found himself, he crouched down on a bank beside some poplars with tall, dark crowns, at whose feet grew mastic bushes, high enough to conceal a man lying on the ground.

The river, which from the mossy rocks where it had its source came, following the windings of Moncayo, to enter the glen down a slope, glided from there bathing the foot of the willows that shaded its bank, or playing with a cheerful murmur among the rounded stones of the mountain, until it fell into a deep pool close to the place that served as the huntsman’s hiding place.

The poplars, whose silvery leaves the air stirred with a sweetest murmur, the willows that, leaning over the clear current, moistened the tips of their drooping branches in it, and the dense holm-oak groves up whose trunks honeysuckle and bluebells climbed and intertwined, formed a thick wall of foliage around the river’s pool.

The wind, agitating the leafy pavilions of greenery that cast their floating shade all around, allowed a furtive ray of light to penetrate at intervals, which shone like a silver flash upon the surface of the still and deep waters.

Hidden behind the bushes, with his ear attentive to the slightest sound and his sight fixed on the point where, according to his calculations, the does were to appear, Garcés waited in vain for a long space of time.

Everything around him remained plunged in a profound calm.

Little by little, and whether because the weight of the night, which had already passed its midpoint, began to make itself felt, or because the distant murmur of the water, the penetrating aroma of wild flowers, and the caresses of the wind communicated to his senses the sweet sopor in which all nature seemed steeped, the enamored youth, who up to that point had been entertained turning over the most flattering imaginations in his mind, began to feel that his ideas were forming more slowly and his thoughts were taking on lighter and more indefinite shapes.

After rocking for an instant in that vague space that lies between wakefulness and sleep, he finally closed his eyes halfways, let the crossbow slip from his hands, and fell fast asleep.