Chapter III

On the following day, the peaceful monks of the Abbey of Fitero, to whom the lay-brother had given an account of the strange visit of the night before, saw the unknown pilgrim, pallid and like a man beside himself, entering their doors.

“Did you hear the _Miserere_ at last?” the lay-brother asked him with a certain tinge of irony, slyly casting a glance of intelligence at his superiors.

“Yes,” replied the musician.

“And how did you like it?”

“I am going to write it. Give me a refuge in your house,” he continued, addressing the abbot, “a refuge and bread for a few months, and I will leave you an immortal work of art, a _Miserere_ which shall blot out my sins from the sight of God, eternize my memory, and with it the memory of this abbey.”

The monks, out of curiosity, counselled the abbot to grant his request; the abbot, for charity, though he believed the man a lunatic, finally consented; and the musician, thus installed in the monastery, began his work.

Night and day he labored with unremitting zeal. In the midst of his task he would pause and appear to be listening to something which sounded in his imagination; his pupils would dilate and he would spring from his seat exclaiming: “That is it; so; so; no doubt about it--so!” And he would go on writing notes with a feverish haste which more than once made those who kept him under secret observation wonder.

He wrote the first verses, and those following to about the middle of the Psalm; but when he had written the last verse that he had heard upon the mountain, it was impossible for him to proceed.

He made one, two, one hundred, two hundred rough drafts; all in vain. His music was not like the music already written. Sleep fled from his eyelids, he lost his appetite, fever seized upon his brain, he went mad, and died, at last, without being able to finish the _Miserere_, which, as a curiosity, the monks treasured till his death, and even yet preserve in the archives of the abbey.

* * * * *

When the old man had made an end of telling me this story, I could not refrain from turning my eyes again to the dusty, ancient manuscript of the _Miserere_, which still lay upon one of the tables.

_In peccatis concepit me mater mea._

These were the words on the page before me, seeming to mock me with their notes, their keys and their scrawls unintelligible to lay-brothers in music.

I would have given a world to be able to read them.

Who knows if they may not be mere nonsense?

STRANGE