Chapter I

Many years ago, on a dark and rainy night, a pilgrim arrived at the cloister door of this abbey and begged for a little fire to dry his clothes, a morsel of bread to appease his hunger, and a shelter, however humble, till the morning, when he would resume his journey at dawn.

The lay-brother of whom this request was made placed his own meagre repast, his own poor bed and his glowing hearth at the service of the traveller, to whom, after he had recovered from his exhaustion, were put the usual questions as to the purpose of his pilgrimage and the goal to which his steps were bent.

“I am a musician,” replied the stranger. “I was born far from here, and in my own country I enjoyed a day of great renown. In my youth I made of my art a powerful weapon of seduction and I enkindled with it passions which drew me on to crime. In my old age I would use for good the talents which I have employed for evil, redeeming my soul by the very means that have brought it into danger of the judgment.”

As the enigmatic words of the unknown guest did not seem at all clear to the lay-brother, whose curiosity was now becoming aroused, he was moved to press his questions further, obtaining the following response:

“I was ever weeping in the depths of my soul for the sin that I had committed; but when I tried to pray to God for mercy, I could find no adequate words to utter my repentance, until one day my eyes chanced to fall upon a holy book. I opened that book and on one of its pages I met with a giant cry of true contrition, a psalm of David, commencing: _Miserere mei, Domine!_ From the instant in which I read those verses my one thought has been to find a musical expression so magnificent, so sublime, that it would suffice as a setting for the Royal Psalmist’s mighty hymn of anguish. As yet I have not found it; but if I ever attain to the point of expressing what I feel in my heart, what I hear confusedly in my brain, I am sure of writing a _Miserere_ so marvellous in beauty that the sons of men will have heard no other like unto it, so desperate in grief that, as its first strains rise to heaven, the archangels, their eyes flooded with tears, will with me cry out unto the Lord, beseeching _Mercy_; and the Lord will be merciful to his unhappy creature.”

The pilgrim, on reaching this point in his narrative, paused for an instant, and then, heaving a sigh, took up again the thread of his story. The lay-brother, a few dependents of the abbey, and two or three shepherds from the friars’ farm--these who formed the circle about the hearth--listened to him in the deepest silence.

“After travelling over all Germany,” he continued, “all Italy and the greater part of this country whose sacred music is classic, I have not yet heard a _Miserere_ that can give me my inspiration, not one,--not one, and I have heard so many that I may say I have heard them all.”

“All?” broke in one of the upper shepherds. “But you have not heard, have you, the _Miserere_ of the Mountain?”

“The _Miserere_ of the Mountain!” exclaimed the musician with an air of amazement. “What _Miserere_ is that?”

“Didn’t I say so?” muttered the peasant under his breath, and then went on in a mysterious tone: “This _Miserere_, which is only heard, as chance may fall, by those who, like myself, wander day and night following the sheep through the thickets and over the rocky hills, is, in fact, a tradition, a very old tradition; yet incredible as it seems, it is no less true.

“The case is that, in the most rugged part of yonder mountain chains which bound the horizon of this valley in whose bosom the abbey stands, there used to be, many years ago--why do I say many years!--many centuries, rather, a famous monastery. This monastery, it seems, was built at his own cost by a lord with the wealth that he would naturally have left to his son, whom on his death-bed he disinherited, as a punishment for the young profligate’s evil deeds.

“So far, all had gone well; but the trouble is that this son, who, from what will be seen further on, must have been the skin of the Devil, if not the Devil himself, learning that his goods were in the possession of the monks, and that his castle had been transformed into a church, gathered together a crew of banditti, comrades of his in the ruffian life he had taken up on forsaking his father’s house, and one Holy Thursday night, when the monks would be in the choir, and at the very hour and minute when they would be just beginning or would have just begun the _Miserere_, these outlaws set fire to the monastery, sacked the church, and willy-nilly, left not a single monk alive.

“After this atrocity, the banditti and their leader went away, whither no one knows, perhaps to hell.

“The flames reduced the monastery to ashes; of the church there still remain standing the ruins upon the hollow crag whence springs the cascade that after leaping down from rock to rock, forms the rill which comes to bathe the walls of this abbey.”

“But,”--interrupted the musician impatiently, “the _Miserere_?”

“Wait a while,” said the shepherd with great deliberation, “and all will be told in proper order.” Vouchsafing no further reply, he continued his story:

“The people of all the country round about were shocked at the crime; it was related with horror in the long winter evenings, handed down from father to son, and from son to grandson; but what tends most of all to keep it fresh in memory is that every year, on the anniversary of that night when the church was burned, lights are seen shining out through its shattered windows, and there is heard a sort of strange music, with mournful, terrible chants that are borne at intervals upon the gusts of wind.

“The singers are the monks, who, slain perchance before they were ready to present themselves pure of all sin at the Judgment Seat of God, still come from Purgatory to implore His mercy, chanting the _Miserere_.”

The group about the fire exchanged glances of incredulity; but the pilgrim, who had seemed to be vitally interested in the recital of the tradition, inquired eagerly of the narrator:

“And do you say that this marvel still takes place?”

“It will begin without fail in less than three hours, for the precise reason that this is Holy Thursday night, and the abbey clock has just struck eight.”

“How far is the monastery from here?”

“Barely a league and a half,--but what are you doing?” “Whither would you go on a night like this?” “Have you fallen from the shelter of God’s hand?” exclaimed one and another as they saw the pilgrim, rising from his bench and taking his staff, leave the fireplace and move toward the door.

“Whither am I going? To hear this miraculous music, to hear the great, the true _Miserere_, the _Miserere_ of those who return to the world after death, those who know what it is to die in sin.”

And so saying, he disappeared from the sight of the amazed lay-brother and the no less astonished shepherds.

The wind shrilled without and shook the doors as if a powerful hand were striving to tear them from their hinges; the rain fell in torrents, beating against the window-panes, and from time to time a lightning-flash lit up for an instant all the horizon that could be seen from there.

After the first moment of bewilderment had passed the lay-brother exclaimed:

“He is mad.”

“He is mad,” repeated the shepherds and, replenishing the fire, they gathered closely around the hearth.