I

In a Spanish city on an island in the Mediterranean, there stands

a convent of the Order of Barefoot Carmelites, where the rule

instituted by St. Theresa is still preserved with all the first

rigour of the reformation brought about by that illustrious

woman.  Extraordinary as this may seem, it is none the less true.

Almost every religious house in the Peninsula, or in Europe for

that matter, was either destroyed or disorganised by the outbreak

of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; but as this

island was protected through those times by the English fleet,

its wealthy convent and peaceable inhabitants were secure from

the general trouble and spoliation.  The storms of many kinds

which shook the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century

spent their force before they reached those cliffs at so short a

distance from the coast of Andalusia.

If the rumour of the Emperor's name so much as reached the shore

of the island, it is doubtful whether the holy women kneeling in

the cloisters grasped the reality of his dream-like progress of

glory, or the majesty that blazed in flame across kingdom after

kingdom during his meteor life.

In the minds of the Roman Catholic world, the convent stood out

pre-eminent for a stern discipline which nothing had changed; the

purity of its rule had attracted unhappy women from the furthest

parts of Europe, women deprived of all human ties, sighing after

the long suicide accomplished in the breast of God.  No convent,

indeed, was so well fitted for that complete detachment of the

soul from all earthly things, which is demanded by the religious

life, albeit on the continent of Europe there are many convents

magnificently adapted to the purpose of their existence.  Buried

away in the loneliest valleys, hanging in mid-air on the steepest

mountainsides, set down on the brink of precipices, in every

place man has sought for the poetry of the Infinite, the solemn

awe of Silence; in every place man has striven to draw closer to

God, seeking Him on mountain peaks, in the depths below the

crags, at the cliff's edge; and everywhere man has found God.

But nowhere, save on this half-European, half-African ledge of

rock could you find so many different harmonies, combining so to

raise the soul, that the sharpest pain comes to be like other

memories; the strongest impressions are dulled, till the sorrows

of life are laid to rest in the depths.

The convent stands on the highest point of the crags at the

uttermost end of the island.  On the side towards the sea the

rock was once rent sheer away in some globe-cataclysm; it rises

up a straight wall from the base where the waves gnaw at the

stone below high-water mark.  Any assault is made impossible by

the dangerous reefs that stretch far out to sea, with the

sparkling waves of the Mediterranean playing over them.  So, only

from the sea can you discern the square mass of the convent built

conformably to the minute rules laid down as to the shape,

height, doors, and windows of monastic buildings.  From the side

of the town, the church completely hides the solid structure of

the cloisters and their roofs, covered with broad slabs of stone

impervious to sun or storm or gales of wind.

The church itself, built by the munificence of a Spanish family,

is the crowning edifice of the town.  Its fine, bold front gives

an imposing and picturesque look to the little city in the sea.

The sight of such a city, with its close-huddled roofs, arranged

for the most part amphitheatre-wise above a picturesque harbour,

and crowned by a glorious cathedral front with triple-arched

Gothic doorways, belfry towers, and filigree spires, is a

spectacle surely in every way the sublimest on earth.  Religion

towering above daily life, to put men continually in mind of the

End and the way, is in truth a thoroughly Spanish conception.

But now surround this picture by the Mediterranean, and a burning

sky, imagine a few palms here and there, a few stunted evergreen

trees mingling their waving leaves with the motionless flowers

and foliage of carved stone; look out over the reef with its

white fringes of foam in contrast to the sapphire sea; and then

turn to the city, with its galleries and terraces whither the

townsfolk come to take the air among their flowers of an evening,

above the houses and the tops of the trees in their little

gardens; add a few sails down in the harbour; and lastly, in the

stillness of falling night, listen to the organ music, the

chanting of the services, the wonderful sound of bells pealing

out over the open sea.  There is sound and silence everywhere;

oftener still there is silence over all.

The church is divided within into a sombre mysterious nave and

narrow aisles.  For some reason, probably because the winds are

so high, the architect was unable to build the flying buttresses

and intervening chapels which adorn almost all cathedrals, nor

are there openings of any kind in the walls which support the

weight of the roof.  Outside there is simply the heavy wall

structure, a solid mass of grey stone further strengthened by

huge piers placed at intervals.  Inside, the nave and its little

side galleries are lighted entirely by the great stained-glass

rose-window suspended by a miracle of art above the centre

doorway; for upon that side the exposure permits of the display

of lacework in stone and of other beauties peculiar to the style

improperly called Gothic.

The larger part of the nave and aisles was left for the

townsfolk, who came and went and heard mass there.  The choir was

shut off from the rest of the church by a grating and thick folds

of brown curtain, left slightly apart in the middle in such a way

that nothing of the choir could be seen from the church except

the high altar and the officiating priest.  The grating itself

was divided up by the pillars which supported the organ loft; and

this part of the structure, with its carved wooden columns,

completed the line of the arcading in the gallery carried by the

shafts in the nave.  If any inquisitive person, therefore, had

been bold enough to climb upon the narrow balustrade in the

gallery to look down into the choir, he could have seen nothing

but the tall eight-sided windows of stained glass beyond the high

altar.

At the time of the French expedition into Spain to establish

Ferdinand VII once more on the throne, a French general came to

the island after the taking of Cadiz, ostensibly to require the

recognition of the King's Government, really to see the convent

and to find some means of entering it.  The undertaking was

certainly a delicate one; but a man of passionate temper, whose

life had been, as it were, but one series of poems in action, a

man who all his life long had lived romances instead of writing

them, a man pre-eminently a Doer, was sure to be tempted by a

deed which seemed to be impossible.

To open the doors of a convent of nuns by lawful means!  The

metropolitan or the Pope would scarcely have permitted it!  And

as for force or strategem--might not any indiscretion cost him

his position, his whole career as a soldier, and the end in view

to boot?  The Duc d'Angouleme was still in Spain; and of all the

crimes which a man in favour with the Commander-in-Chief might

commit, this one alone was certain to find him inexorable.  The

General had asked for the mission to gratify private motives of

curiosity, though never was curiosity more hopeless.  This final

attempt was a matter of conscience.  The Carmelite convent on the

island was the only nunnery in Spain which had baffled his

search.

As he crossed from the mainland, scarcely an hour's distance, he

felt a presentiment that his hopes were to be fulfilled; and

afterwards, when as yet he had seen nothing of the convent but

its walls, and of the nuns not so much as their robes; while he

had merely heard the chanting of the service, there were dim

auguries under the walls and in the sound of the voices to

justify his frail hope.  And, indeed, however faint those so

unaccountable presentiments might be, never was human passion

more vehemently excited than the General's curiosity at that

moment.  There are no small events for the heart; the heart

exaggerates everything; the heart weighs the fall of a

fourteen-year-old Empire and the dropping of a woman's glove in

the same scales, and the glove is nearly always the heavier of

the two.  So here are the facts in all their prosaic simplicity.

The facts first, the emotions will follow.

An hour after the General landed on the island, the royal

authority was re-established there.  Some few Constitutional

Spaniards who had found their way thither after the fall of Cadiz

were allowed to charter a vessel and sail for London.  So there

was neither resistance nor reaction.  But the change of

government could not be effected in the little town without a

mass, at which the two divisions under the General's command were

obliged to be present.  Now, it was upon this mass that the

General had built his hopes of gaining some information as to the

sisters in the convent; he was quite unaware how absolutely the

Carmelites were cut off from the world; but he knew that there

might be among them one whom he held dearer than life, dearer

than honour.

His hopes were cruelly dashed at once.  Mass, it is true, was

celebrated in state.  In honour of such a solemnity, the curtains

which always hid the choir were drawn back to display its riches,

its valuable paintings and shrines so bright with gems that they

eclipsed the glories of the ex-votos of gold and silver hung up

by sailors of the port on the columns in the nave.  But all the

nuns had taken refuge in the organ-loft.  And yet, in spite of

this first check, during this very mass of thanksgiving, the most

intimately thrilling drama that ever set a man's heart beating

opened out widely before him.

The sister who played the organ aroused such intense enthusiasm,

that not a single man regretted that he had come to the service.

Even the men in the ranks were delighted, and the officers were

in ecstasy.  As for the General, he was seemingly calm and

indifferent.  The sensations stirred in him as the sister played

one piece after another belong to the small number of things

which it is not lawful to utter; words are powerless to express

them; like death, God, eternity, they can only be realised

through their one point of contact with humanity.  Strangely

enough, the organ music seemed to belong to the school of

Rossini, the musician who brings most human passion into his art.

Some day his works, by their number and extent, will receive the

reverence due to the Homer of music.  From among all the scores

that we owe to his great genius, the nun seemed to have chosen

Moses in Egypt for special study, doubtless because the spirit of

sacred music finds therein its supreme expression.  Perhaps the

soul of the great musician, so gloriously known to Europe, and

the soul of this unknown executant had met in the intuitive

apprehension of the same poetry. So at least thought two

dilettanti officers who must have missed the Theatre Favart in

Spain.

At last in the Te Deum no one could fail to discern a French soul

in the sudden change that came over the music.  Joy for the

victory of the Most Christian King evidently stirred this nun's

heart to the depths.  She was a Frenchwoman beyond mistake.  Soon

the love of country shone out, breaking forth like shafts of

light from the fugue, as the sister introduced variations with

all a Parisienne's fastidious taste, and blended vague

suggestions of our grandest national airs with her music.  A

Spaniard's fingers would not have brought this warmth into a

graceful tribute paid to the victorious arms of France.  The

musician's nationality was revealed.

"We find France everywhere, it seems," said one of the men.

The General had left the church during the Te Deum; he could not

listen any longer.  The nun's music had been a revelation of a

woman loved to frenzy; a woman so carefully hidden from the

world's eyes, so deeply buried in the bosom of the Church, that

hitherto the most ingenious and persistent efforts made by men

who brought great influence and unusual powers to bear upon the

search had failed to find her.  The suspicion aroused in the

General's heart became all but a certainty with the vague

reminiscence of a sad, delicious melody, the air of Fleuve du

Tage.  The woman he loved had played the prelude to the ballad in

a boudoir in Paris, how often! and now this nun had chosen the

song to express an exile's longing, amid the joy of those that

triumphed.  Terrible sensation!  To hope for the resurrection of

a lost love, to find her only to know that she was lost, to catch

a mysterious glimpse of her after five years--five years, in

which the pent-up passion, chafing in an empty life, had grown

the mightier for every fruitless effort to satisfy it!