-Xix- · II

He was returning to his conference with Balmes when... Heaven help us! Now, now there could be no doubt! A shrill shriek of terror had ascended the dark spiral stairs and entered through the half-open door. What a shriek! The lamp danced in Julián’s hands... He went down, however, very fast, without feeling his own movements, as in those frightful falls we take in dreams. And he flew through the salons, traversing the long corridor to reach the region of the archives, whence the horrible cry had sounded... The lamp, swaying more and more in his trembling right hand, cast extravagant blotches of shadow upon the whitewashed walls... He was about to turn into the passage separating the archives from Don Pedro’s room, when he saw... Holy God! Yes, it was the very scene just as he had pictured it... Nucha on her feet, but flattened against the wall, her face distorted with terror, her eyes no longer dreamy but filled with mortal distraction; opposite her, her husband, brandishing an enormous weapon... Julián flung himself between the two... Nucha shrieked again...

“Oh! Oh! What are you doing! It is escaping... it is escaping!”

The hallucinated chaplain then understood what was happening, to his no small shame and confusion... Up the wall, fleeing from the light, crawled with incredible speed a spider of enormous size, a monstrous belly swinging upon eight hairy stilts. Its course was so rapid that the young master vainly tried to reach it with his boot; suddenly Nucha stepped forward, and in a voice between grave and fearful repeated ingenuously what she had said a thousand times in her childhood:

“Saint George... catch the spider!”

The ugly insect stopped at the edge of the shadow: the boot descended upon it. Julián, by a natural reaction from dissipated fear which turns into inexplicable joy, was about to laugh at the incident; but he noticed that Nucha, closing her eyes and leaning against the wall, covered her face with her handkerchief.

“It is nothing, it is nothing...” she murmured.

“A little nervous fit of weeping... It will pass... I am still rather weak...”

“A fine thing to make such a fuss about!” exclaimed her husband, shrugging his shoulders. “You were brought up with too much pampering! In all my life I never saw the like. Don Julián, did you think the house was tumbling down? Come, off to bed! Good night.”

It was long before the chaplain fell asleep. He reflected upon his terrors and admitted their absurdity; he promised himself to conquer that pusillanimity of his; but the uneasiness still lingered: the impulse had been communicated and stored in the deep convolutions of his brain. Scarcely had sleep granted him its favours when there came with it a legion of nightmares, each blacker and more oppressive than the last. He began to dream of the Pazos, of the great manor house; but, by a strange anomaly peculiar to that state, whose foundation is always notions of reality, though shuffled, dislocated, and turned upside down by the anarchic influence of the imagination, he did not see the badger’s den as he had always seen it—with its vast rectangular bulk, its spacious salons, its broad, harmless carriage-gate, its heavy, conventual aspect of an eighteenth-century building—but, without ceasing to be the same, it had altered its shape; the kitchen garden with its box hedges and pond was now a wide and deep moat; the massive walls were pierced with arrow-slits and crowned with battlements; the carriage-gate had become a drawbridge with creaking chains; in short, it was a full-fledged feudal castle, lacking not even the romantic appendage of the Moscoso banner floating from the keep; undoubtedly Julián had seen some painting or read some frightening description of those bogeys of the past which our century restores with such fond care. The only thing in the castle that recalled the present Pazos was the majestic coat of arms; but even in this there was a remarkable difference, for Julián clearly distinguished that the stone emblems had come to life, and the pine was a green tree in whose boughs the wind moaned, and the two rampant wolves turned their heads uttering mournful howls. Julián was gazing fascinated toward the top of the tower, when he saw upon it an alarming figure: a knight with visor down, encased in iron; and although not a finger of his hand was visible, with the divining gift acquired in dreams, Julián perceived through the helmet the face of Don Pedro. Furious, menacing, Don Pedro brandished a strange weapon, a steel boot, which he prepared to let fall upon the chaplain’s head. The latter made no movement to step aside, nor did the boot ever quite fall; it was an intolerable agony, a torment without end; suddenly he felt a hideous owl with white feathers alight upon his shoulder. He tried to cry out: in dreams the cry always remains frozen in the throat. The owl laughed silently. To flee from it, he leaped the moat; but this was no longer a moat, but the mill-dam; the feudal castle also changed its shape, no one knew how; now it resembled the conventional tower held in the hands of images of Saint Barbara—a structure of painted cardboard made of very square blocks of stone, at whose window appeared a woman’s face, pale and distorted... That woman put out one foot, then another... and began sliding down the window... What amazement! It was the Knave of Clubs, the very same Knave of Clubs, exceedingly dirty and greasy! At the foot of the wall the Knight of Swords was waiting for her, a strange blue beast with a tail striped with black. But shortly afterwards Julián recognized his error: what Knight of Swords! It was none other than Saint George in person, the valiant knight-errant of the celestial hosts, with his dragon beneath him—a dragon that resembled a spider, into whose tenacious mouth he plunged his spear with courage... Bright and sharp, the spear descended, pierced, pierced... The astonishing thing was that the spear-thrust was felt by Julián in his own side... He wept very softly, trying to speak and plead for mercy; no one came to his aid, and the spear had already pierced him through and through... He awoke suddenly, feeling a painful twinge in his right hand, upon which the whole weight of his body had rested from sleeping on his left side, a position favourable to nightmares.

-XX-

The dreams of nights of terror usually seem laughable as soon as the light of the new day breaks; but Julián, on leaping from bed, failed to conquer the impression of his. The ferment of an overexcited imagination still continued: he looked out of the window, and the landscape seemed to him dreary and sinister; it is true that leaden clouds with livid reflections overcast the celestial vault, and that the wind, now dull, now whistling, bent the trees with sudden gusts. The chaplain descended the spiral stairs with the intention of saying his Mass, which, owing to the bad condition of the chapel of the manor, he was accustomed to celebrate in the parish church. On returning and approaching the entrance to the Pazos, a whirlwind of dry leaves wrapped around his feet, a cold atmosphere overtook him, and the great stone badger’s den presented itself to him imposing, sullen, and terrible, with the aspect of a prison, like the castle he had seen in his dream. The building, under its awning of black clouds, with the fearful roar of the north wind scourging it, was menacing and sinister. Julián entered it with his heart in his mouth. He crossed rapidly the icy vestibule, the cavernous kitchen, and traversing the solitary salons, hastened to take refuge in Nucha’s room, where his chocolate was usually served by order of the lady.

He found her looking somewhat more pulled down than usual. To the dejection ordinarily revealed in her thin face was added a strained and startled expression, signs of great nervous tension. She held the baby in her arms, and on seeing Julián arrive, made a quick sign to him neither to speak nor to move, for the little angel was in the act of falling asleep in the warmth of the maternal bosom. Leaning over the child, Nucha breathed upon her to lull her to sleep, and with feverish movements arranged the knitted shawl that enveloped, like a cocoon around a caterpillar, that dawning life. The baby blinked two or three times, and then closed her little eyes, while her mother never ceased crooning to her a lullaby learned from the nurse, a kind of wail whose foundation was the melancholy lai... lai!, the slow, long complaint of all Galician folk songs. The singing grew lower and lower, until it concluded in the sad and affectionate pronunciation of a single letter, a prolonged e; and rising on tiptoe, Nucha deposited her daughter in the cradle very delicately and carefully, for the child was so clever—in her mother’s opinion—that she distinguished at once the cradle from the arm, and was capable of waking from the deepest sleep if she became aware of the substitution.

For that reason Julián and Nucha spoke in whispers, while the lady wielded her crochet needle knitting little shoes that looked like purses. Julián began by asking whether she had recovered from the fright of the previous night.

“Yes, but I am still feeling I know not how.”

“I have no liking for those disgusting vermin either... I had never seen them so huge until I came to the village. In town there are scarcely any.”

“Well, as for me,” answered Nucha, “I used to be very brave; but since... since the little one was born, I do not know what has come over me; it seems I have grown half foolish, and am afraid of everything...”

She broke off her work and raised her face; her large eyes were dilated; her lips slightly trembling.

“It is an illness, it is a mania; I know it, but I cannot help it, do what I will. My head is weak; I think of nothing but frightening things, terrors... You saw what shrieks I gave yesterday over that wretched spider? Well, at night, when I am left alone with the baby... for the nurse asleep is just as if she were dead; even if an eight-pounder cannon were fired at her ear, she would not stir... I would make such scenes at every step if I did not control myself. I do not tell Juncal for very shame; but I see the strangest things. The clothes I hang up always seem to me like hanged men, or corpses rising from their coffins in their shrouds; it matters not that while the lamp is burning, before I get into bed, I arrange them this way or that; they always assume those extravagant shapes the moment I put out the light and light the night-lamp. Sometimes I see headless people; at other times, on the contrary, I see their faces with every feature, their mouths wide open and making grimaces... Those caricatures painted on the screen move; and when the windows creak in the wind, as they did tonight, I begin to wonder whether they are souls from the other world lamenting...”

“Madam!” exclaimed Julián sorrowfully. “That is contrary to faith! We must not believe in ghosts or sorcery.”

“Why, I do not believe!” retorted the lady, laughing nervously. “Do you fancy I am like the nurse, who says she has actually seen the Compaña, with its procession of lights in the dead of night? Never in my life have I given credit to such foolish tales; that is why I say I must be ill, when visions and monsters pursue me... What Señor Juncal is always urging upon me: to grow strong, to make blood... A pity blood cannot be bought in a shop... do you not think so?”

“Or that... we who are healthy cannot give it to... those who... need it...”

The priest said this hesitatingly, turning crimson to the nape of his neck, for his first impulse had been to exclaim: “Señorita Marcelina, here is my blood at your disposal.”

The silence produced by so sudden an outburst lasted a few seconds, during which both speakers looked intently, abstracted and absorbed, at the landscape visible from the broad, deep window opposite. At first they did not see it; then its sombre effect penetrated, in spite of themselves, through their eyes to their very souls. There were the black mountains—hard, massive in appearance under the gloomy canopy of the stormy sky; there was the valley illuminated by the pale light of a distressed sun; there was the clump of chestnut trees, motionless at times, at others violently shaken by the gusts of the furious, unchained gale... At one and the same moment both, chaplain and lady, exclaimed:

“What a dreary day!”

Julián reflected upon the strange coincidence between Nucha’s terrors and his own; and thinking aloud, broke out:

“Madam, this house too... well, not to speak ill of it, but... it is a little eerie. Do you not think so?”

Nucha’s eyes brightened, as though the chaplain had divined a feeling she dared not express.

“Since winter set in,” she murmured, talking to herself. “I do not know what it has about it nor what air it takes on... but it does not seem the same to me... Even the walls have grown thicker and the stone darker... It may be foolishness, I know it is! but I dare not leave my room, I who used to explore every corner and go everywhere... And yet I must take a turn through it... I need to see if there are any chests in the cellar for the linen... Do me the favour to come with me, Julián, now that the baby is asleep... I want to rid my head of these apprehensions and these follies.”