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Olalla

<h2>OLALLA</h2> ‘Now,’ said the doctor, ‘my part is done, and, I may say, with some vanity, well done.  It remains only to get you out of this cold and poisonous city, and to give you two months of a pure air and an easy conscience.  The last is your affair.  To the first I think I can help you.  It fells indeed rather oddly; it was but the other day the Padre came in from the country; and as he and I are old friends, although of contrary professions, he applied to me in a matter of distress among some of his parishioners.  This was a family—but you are ignorant of Spain, and even the names of our grandees are hardly known to you; suffice it, then, that they were once great people, and are now fallen to the brink of destitution.  Nothing now belongs to them but the residencia, and certain leagues of desert mountain, in the greater part of which not even a goat could support life.  But the house is a fine old place, and stands at a great height among the hills, and most salubriously; and I had no sooner heard my friend’s tale, than I remembered you.  I told him I had a wounded officer, wounded in the good cause, who was now able to make a change; and I proposed that his friends should take you for a lodger.  Instantly the Padre’s face grew dark, as I had maliciously foreseen it would.  It was out of the question, he said.  Then let them starve, said I, for I have no sympathy with tatterdemalion pride.  There-upon we separated, not very content with one another; but yesterday, to my wonder, the Padre returned and made a submission: the difficulty, he said, he had found upon enquiry to be less than he had feared; or, in other words, these proud people had put their pride in their pocket.  I closed with the offer; and, subject to your approval, I have taken rooms for you in the residencia.  The air of these mountains will renew your blood; and the quiet in which you will there live is worth all the medicines in the world.’ ‘Doctor,’ said I, ‘you have been throughout my good angel, and your advice is a command.  But tell me, if you please, something of the family with which I am to reside.’ ‘I am coming to that,’ replied my friend; ‘and, indeed, there is a difficulty in the way.  These beggars are, as I have said, of very high descent and swollen with the most baseless vanity; they have lived for some generations in a growing isolation, drawing away, on either hand, from the rich who had now become too high for them, and from the poor, whom they still regarded as too low; and even to-day, when poverty forces them to unfasten their door to a guest, they cannot do so without a most ungracious stipulation.  You are to remain, they say, a stranger; they will give you attendance, but they refuse from the first the idea of the smallest intimacy.’ I will not deny that I was piqued, and perhaps the feeling strengthened my desire to go, for I was confident that I could break down that barrier if I desired.  ‘There is nothing offensive in such a stipulation,’ said I; ‘and I even sympathise with the feeling that inspired it.’ ‘It is true they have never seen you,’ returned the doctor politely; ‘and if they knew you were the handsomest and the most pleasant man that ever came from England (where I am told that handsome men are common, but pleasant ones not so much so), they would doubtless make you welcome with a better grace.  But since you take the thing so well, it matters not.  To me, indeed, it seems discourteous.  But you will find yourself the gainer.  The family will not much tempt you.  A mother, a son, and a daughter; an old woman said to be halfwitted, a country lout, and a country girl, who stands very high with her confessor, and is, therefore,’ chuckled the physician, ‘most likely plain; there is not much in that to attract the fancy of a dashing officer.’ ‘And yet you say they are high-born,’ I objected. ‘Well, as to that, I should distinguish,’ returned the doctor.  ‘The mother is; not so the children.  The mother was the last representative of a princely stock, degenerate both in parts and fortune.  Her father was not only poor, he was mad: and the girl ran wild about the residencia till his death.  Then, much of the fortune having died with him, and the family being quite extinct, the girl ran wilder than ever, until at last she married, Heaven knows whom, a muleteer some say, others a smuggler; while there are some who uphold there was no marriage at all, and that Felipe and Olalla are bastards.  The union, such as it was, was tragically dissolved some years ago; but they live in such seclusion, and the country at that time was in so much disorder, that the precise manner of the man’s end is known only to the priest—if even to him.’ ‘I begin to think I shall have strange experiences,’ said I. ‘I would not romance, if I were you,’ replied the doctor; ‘you will find, I fear, a very grovelling and commonplace reality.  Felipe, for instance, I have seen.  And what am I to say?  He is very rustic, very cunning, very loutish, and, I should say, an innocent; the others are probably to match.  No, no, senor commandante, you must seek congenial society among the great sights of our mountains; and in these at least, if you are at all a lover of the works of nature, I promise you will not be disappointed.’ The next day Felipe came for me in a rough country cart, drawn by a mule; and a little before the stroke of noon, after I had said farewell to the doctor, the innkeeper, and different good souls who had befriended me during my sickness, we set forth out of the city by the Eastern gate, and began to ascend into the Sierra.  I had been so long a prisoner, since I was left behind for dying after the loss of the convoy, that the mere smell of the earth set me smiling.  The country through which we went was wild and rocky, partially covered with rough woods, now of the cork-tree, and now of the great Spanish chestnut, and frequently intersected by the beds of mountain torrents.  The sun shone, the wind rustled joyously; and we had advanced some miles, and the city had already shrunk into an inconsiderable knoll upon the plain behind us, before my attention began to be diverted to the companion of my drive.  To the eye, he seemed but a diminutive, loutish, well-made country lad, such as the doctor had described, mighty quick and active, but devoid of any culture; and this first impression was with most observers final.  What began to strike me was his familiar, chattering talk; so strangely inconsistent with the terms on which I was to be received; and partly from his imperfect enunciation, partly from the sprightly incoherence of the matter, so very difficult to follow clearly without an effort of the mind.  It is true I had before talked with persons of a similar mental constitution; persons who seemed to live (as he did) by the senses, taken and possessed by the visual object of the moment and unable to discharge their minds of that impression.  His seemed to me (as I sat, distantly giving ear) a kind of conversation proper to drivers, who pass much of their time in a great vacancy of the intellect and threading the sights of a familiar country.  But this was not the case of Felipe; by his own account, he was a home-keeper; ‘I wish I was there now,’ he said; and then, spying a tree by the wayside, he broke off to tell me that he had once seen a crow among its branches. ‘A crow?’ I repeated, struck by the ineptitude of the remark, and thinking I had heard imperfectly. But by this time he was already filled with a new idea; hearkening with a rapt intentness, his head on one side, his face puckered; and he struck me rudely, to make me hold my peace.  Then he smiled and shook his head. ‘What did you hear?’ I asked. ‘O, it is all right,’ he said; and began encouraging his mule with cries that echoed unhumanly up the mountain walls. I looked at him more closely.  He was superlatively well-built, light, and lithe and strong; he was well-featured; his yellow eyes were very large, though, perhaps, not very expressive; take him altogether, he was a pleasant-looking lad, and I had no fault to find with him, beyond that he was of a dusky hue, and inclined to hairyness; two characteristics that I disliked.  It was his mind that puzzled, and yet attracted me.  The doctor’s phrase—an innocent—came back to me; and I was wondering if that were, after all, the true description, when the road began to go down into the narrow and naked chasm of a torrent.  The waters thundered tumultuously in the bottom; and the ravine was filled full of the sound, the thin spray, and the claps of wind, that accompanied their descent.  The scene was certainly impressive; but the road was in that part very securely walled in; the mule went steadily forward; and I was astonished to perceive the paleness of terror in the face of my companion.  The voice of that wild river was inconstant, now sinking lower as if in weariness, now doubling its hoarse tones; momentary freshets seemed to swell its volume, sweeping down the gorge, raving and booming against the barrier walls; and I observed it was at each of these accessions to the clamour, that my driver more particularly winced and blanched.  Some thoughts of Scottish superstition and the river Kelpie, passed across my mind; I wondered if perchance the like were prevalent in that part of Spain; and turning to Felipe, sought to draw him out. ‘What is the matter?’ I asked. ‘O, I am afraid,’ he replied. ‘Of what are you afraid?’ I returned.  ‘This seems one of the safest places on this very dangerous road.’ ‘It makes a noise,’ he said, with a simplicity of awe that set my doubts at rest. The lad was but a child in intellect; his mind was like his body, active and swift, but stunted in development; and I began from that time forth to regard him with a measure of pity, and to listen at first with indulgence, and at last even with pleasure, to his disjointed babble. By about four in the afternoon we had crossed the summit of the mountain line, said farewell to the western sunshine, and began to go down upon the other side, skirting the edge of many ravines and moving through the shadow of dusky woods.  There rose upon all sides the voice of falling water, not condensed and formidable as in the gorge of the river, but scattered and sounding gaily and musically from glen to glen.  Here, too, the spirits of my driver mended, and he began to sing aloud in a falsetto voice, and with a singular bluntness of musical perception, never true either to melody or key, but wandering at will, and yet somehow with an effect that was natural and pleasing, like that of the of birds.  As the dusk increased, I fell more and more under the spell of this artless warbling, listening and waiting for some articulate air, and still disappointed; and when at last I asked him what it was he sang—‘O,’ cried he, ‘I am just singing!’  Above all, I was taken with a trick he had of unweariedly repeating the same note at little intervals; it was not so monotonous as you would think, or, at least, not disagreeable; and it seemed to breathe a wonderful contentment with what is, such as we love to fancy in the attitude of trees, or the quiescence of a pool. Night had fallen dark before we came out upon a plateau, and drew up a little after, before a certain lump of superior blackness which I could only conjecture to be the residencia.  Here, my guide, getting down from the cart, hooted and whistled for a long time in vain; until at last an old peasant man came towards us from somewhere in the surrounding dark, carrying a candle in his hand.  By the light of this I was able to perceive a great arched doorway of a Moorish character: it was closed by iron-studded gates, in one of the leaves of which Felipe opened a wicket.  The peasant carried off the cart to some out-building; but my guide and I passed through the wicket, which was closed again behind us; and by the glimmer of the candle, passed through a court, up a stone stair, along a section of an open gallery, and up more stairs again, until we came at last to the door of a great and somewhat bare apartment.  This room, which I understood was to be mine, was pierced by three windows, lined with some lustrous wood disposed in panels, and carpeted with the skins of many savage animals.  A bright fire burned in the chimney, and shed abroad a changeful flicker; close up to the blaze there was drawn a table, laid for supper; and in the far end a bed stood ready.  I was pleased by these preparations, and said so to Felipe; and he, with the same simplicity of disposition that I held already remarked in him, warmly re-echoed my praises.  ‘A fine room,’ he said; ‘a very fine room.  And fire, too; fire is good; it melts out the pleasure in your bones.  And the bed,’ he continued, carrying over the candle in that direction—‘see what fine sheets—how soft, how smooth, smooth;’ and he passed his hand again and again over their texture, and then laid down his head and rubbed his cheeks among them with a grossness of content that somehow offended me.  I took the candle from his hand (for I feared he would set the bed on fire) and walked back to the supper-table, where, perceiving a measure of wine, I poured out a cup and called to him to come and drink of it.  He started to his feet at once and ran to me with a strong expression of hope; but when he saw the wine, he visibly shuddered. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘not that; that is for you.  I hate it.’ ‘Very well, Senor,’ said I; ‘then I will drink to your good health, and to the prosperity of your house and family.  Speaking of which,’ I added, after I had drunk, ‘shall I not have the pleasure of laying my salutations in person at the feet of the Senora, your mother?’ But at these words all the childishness passed out of his face, and was succeeded by a look of indescribable cunning and secrecy.  He backed away from me at the same time, as though I were an animal about to leap or some dangerous fellow with a weapon, and when he had got near the door, glowered at me sullenly with contracted pupils.  ‘No,’ he said at last, and the next moment was gone noiselessly out of the room; and I heard his footing die away downstairs as light as rainfall, and silence closed over the house. After I had supped I drew up the table nearer to the bed and began to prepare for rest; but in the new position of the light, I was struck by a picture on the wall.  It represented a woman, still young.  To judge by her costume and the mellow unity which reigned over the canvas, she had long been dead; to judge by the vivacity of the attitude, the eyes and the features, I might have been beholding in a mirror the image of life.  Her figure was very slim and strong, and of a just proportion; red tresses lay like a crown over her brow; her eyes, of a very golden brown, held mine with a look; and her face, which was perfectly shaped, was yet marred by a cruel, sullen, and sensual expression.  Something in both face and figure, something exquisitely intangible, like the echo of an echo, suggested the features and bearing of my guide; and I stood awhile, unpleasantly attracted and wondering at the oddity of the resemblance.  The common, carnal stock of that race, which had been originally designed for such high dames as the one now looking on me from the canvas, had fallen to baser uses, wearing country clothes, sitting on the shaft and holding the reins of a mule cart, to bring home a lodger.  Perhaps an actual link subsisted; perhaps some scruple of the delicate flesh that was once clothed upon with the satin and brocade of the dead lady, now winced at the rude contact of Felipe’s frieze. The first light of the morning shone full upon the portrait, and, as I lay awake, my eyes continued to dwell upon it with growing complacency; its beauty crept about my heart insidiously, silencing my scruples one after another; and while I knew that to love such a woman were to sign and seal one’s own sentence of degeneration, I still knew that, if she were alive, I should love her.  Day after day the double knowledge of her wickedness and of my weakness grew clearer.  She came to be the heroine of many day-dreams, in which her eyes led on to, and sufficiently rewarded, crimes.  She cast a dark shadow on my fancy; and when I was out in the free air of heaven, taking vigorous exercise and healthily renewing the current of my blood, it was often a glad thought to me that my enchantress was safe in the grave, her wand of beauty broken, her lips closed in silence, her philtre spilt.  And yet I had a half-lingering terror that she might not be dead after all, but re-arisen in the body of some descendant. Felipe served my meals in my own apartment; and his resemblance to the portrait haunted me.  At times it was not; at times, upon some change of attitude or flash of expression, it would leap out upon me like a ghost.  It was above all in his ill tempers that the likeness triumphed.  He certainly liked me; he was proud of my notice, which he sought to engage by many simple and childlike devices; he loved to sit close before my fire, talking his broken talk or singing his odd, endless, wordless songs, and sometimes drawing his hand over my clothes with an affectionate manner of caressing that never failed to cause in me an embarrassment of which I was ashamed.  But for all that, he was capable of flashes of causeless anger and fits of sturdy sullenness.  At a word of reproof, I have seen him upset the dish of which I was about to eat, and this not surreptitiously, but with defiance; and similarly at a hint of inquisition.  I was not unnaturally curious, being in a strange place and surrounded by string people; but at the shadow of a question, he shrank back, lowering and dangerous.  Then it was that, for a fraction of a second, this rough lad might have been the brother of the lady in the frame.  But these humours were swift to pass; and the resemblance died along with them. In these first days I saw nothing of any one but Felipe, unless the portrait is to be counted; and since the lad was plainly of weak mind, and had moments of passion, it may be wondered that I bore his dangerous neighbourhood with equanimity.  As a matter of fact, it was for some time irksome; but it happened before long that I obtained over him so complete a mastery as set my disquietude at rest. It fell in this way.  He was by nature slothful, and much of a vagabond, and yet he kept by the house, and not only waited upon my wants, but laboured every day in the garden or small farm to the south of the residencia.  Here he would be joined by the peasant whom I had seen on the night of my arrival, and who dwelt at the far end of the enclosure, about half a mile away, in a rude out-house; but it was plain to me that, of these two, it was Felipe who did most; and though I would sometimes see him throw down his spade and go to sleep among the very plants he had been digging, his constancy and energy were admirable in themselves, and still more so since I was well assured they were foreign to his disposition and the fruit of an ungrateful effort.  But while I admired, I wondered what had called forth in a lad so shuttle-witted this enduring sense of duty.  How was it sustained?  I asked myself, and to what length did it prevail over his instincts?  The priest was possibly his inspirer; but the priest came one day to the residencia.  I saw him both come and go after an interval of close upon an hour, from a knoll where I was sketching, and all that time Felipe continued to labour undisturbed in the garden. At last, in a very unworthy spirit, I determined to debauch the lad from his good resolutions, and, way-laying him at the gate, easily pursuaded him to join me in a ramble.  It was a fine day, and the woods to which I led him were green and pleasant and sweet-smelling and alive with the hum of insects.  Here he discovered himself in a fresh character, mounting up to heights of gaiety that abashed me, and displaying an energy and grace of movement that delighted the eye.  He leaped, he ran round me in mere glee; he would stop, and look and listen, and seem to drink in the world like a cordial; and then he would suddenly spring into a tree with one bound, and hang and gambol there like one at home.  Little as he said to me, and that of not much import, I have rarely enjoyed more stirring company; the sight of his delight was a continual feast; the speed and accuracy of his movements pleased me to the heart; and I might have been so thoughtlessly unkind as to make a habit of these wants, had not chance prepared a very rude conclusion to my pleasure.  By some swiftness or dexterity the lad captured a squirrel in a tree top.  He was then some way ahead of me, but I saw him drop to the ground and crouch there, crying aloud for pleasure like a child.  The sound stirred my sympathies, it was so fresh and innocent; but as I bettered my pace to draw near, the cry of the squirrel knocked upon my heart.  I have heard and seen much of the cruelty of lads, and above all of peasants; but what I now beheld struck me into a passion of anger.  I thrust the fellow aside, plucked the poor brute out of his hands, and with swift mercy killed it.  Then I turned upon the torturer, spoke to him long out of the heat of my indignation, calling him names at which he seemed to wither; and at length, pointing toward the residencia, bade him begone and leave me, for I chose to walk with men, not with vermin.  He fell upon his knees, and, the words coming to him with more cleanness than usual, poured out a stream of the most touching supplications, begging me in mercy to forgive him, to forget what he had done, to look to the future.  ‘O, I try so hard,’ he said.  ‘O, commandante, bear with Felipe this once; he will never be a brute again!’  Thereupon, much more affected than I cared to show, I suffered myself to be persuaded, and at last shook hands with him and made it up.  But the squirrel, by way of penance, I made him bury; speaking of the poor thing’s beauty, telling him what pains it had suffered, and how base a thing was the abuse of strength.  ‘See, Felipe,’ said I, ‘you are strong indeed; but in my hands you are as helpless as that poor thing of the trees.  Give me your hand in mine.  You cannot remove it.  Now suppose that I were cruel like you, and took a pleasure in pain.  I only tighten my hold, and see how you suffer.’  He screamed aloud, his face stricken ashy and dotted with needle points of sweat; and when I set him free, he fell to the earth and nursed his hand and moaned over it like a baby.  But he took the lesson in good part; and whether from that, or from what I had said to him, or the higher notion he now had of my bodily strength, his original affection was changed into a dog-like, adoring fidelity. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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