Gabriela Cunninghame Graham

“ He often wondered afterwards whether he had heard it in a dream, or if it was only the soughing of the wind, or a voice borne from Eternity, so faint, so diaphanous that uttered no sound, woke no responsive echo in his brain. It might have been the breath of the wind. It might have been the very breath of the Holy Ghost. "Juan," it seemed to say — and it might have been the breath of the wind — "Juan Perez, thou hast sinned greatly, but much shall be forgiven thee. Great is my love, deeper than a mother's. Be your sins scarlet, yet they shall be whiter than snow! ”

“ A great pity, a supreme tenderness for the other man who had also suffered, not as he was about to do, for his own sins, but for the sins of the world, thrilled through his soul with a spasm of pain. His mother's eyes seemed to shine down on him from the canvas, swept away the next moment as if by a swift river. She too had suffered for his sins. She had thought of him, the son who had killed her, even in her death throes. Perhaps if she had been alive, his death, if not his life, might have been different. ”

“ He could have sworn that he still smelt the dust of it in his nostrils, and saw the magpie which had flown across the track when he returned to Toro after his mother s death. The innate egotism that lies in us all, making each one think himself the pivot of the world, arose within him in an intense revolt. That the sun should rise on the morrow and sparkle on the yellow cornfields, or that the morrow should again waken over them soaked in rain, as if he had never been, seemed to him unnatural, monstrous, in credible. ”

“ None so handsome, none with so fine an air as he in Toro. When he came back to them, a young man of twenty fresh from the schools of Salamanca, the old people trembled with joy at the sight of him. It was true that they had paid his debts at cards, that they had condoned a thousand scandals, but they had put it down to the hot blood of youth — youth was ever thus blood which would calm down and yet do honour to its honourable ancestry. ”

“ Now there was a certain Brother Matthias in this convent — the hardest, bitterest zealot in the community, whom even his own partisans looked at with dread. Of his birth little was known, for all are equal in Religion, but the knotted joints of his hairy hands, the hair which bristled black against his low furrowed brow, were those of a peasant. No arm so strong or merciless as his to wield the discipline on recalcitrant shoulders (neither, it is fair to state, did he spare his own) . The more Blood the more Religion; the more Blood the more Heaven. ”

“ For a brief moment the Prior of Toro became again that Count of Trevino who had led the troops of his noble house to victory on more than one occasion, and whose gallant doings even then were not quite forgotten in the court and world of Spain. The habitual respect of the lowly-born for a man of higher station and finer fibre asserted itself. He stood before his Prior pale and downcast, like a frightened hound.
"Listen," the prior continued. "Oh you, my brother, of little charity. What you call zeal, I call malice. To you has been given your talent. It led you to these convent walls. ”

“ If a mother cannot condone her children s crimes, whatever they may be, who else shall do so? When the old hidalgo looked on the dead face of the wife of his youth, stamped with so lasting an expression of pain that death itself was powerless to efface it his soul burnt with a resentment almost as deep as the grief which bowed him to the earth. ”

“ Fray Juan de la Misericordia de Dios is still remembered in the annals of the Monastery of Toro. Thrice was he prior, and when the Bishop of Salamanca preached his funeral sermon, he described him as a man sent from God, so great the consolation he had administered to souls, so boundless his compassion for the poor. It was in his time that the miracle-working picture was restored once more to its old place over the High Altar, and in any great and poignant distress, the inhabitants of Toro to this day betake themselves to the Good Christ of Fray Juan de la Misericordia de Dios. ”

“ But we cannot escape from ourselves, even in the cloister. There he felt the fires of an ambition that untoward circumstances had chilled in his youth. The longing to leave some tangible record of a life that he knew had been useless, fell upon him and consumed him. ”

“ It felt the priest s voice strike against its surface when he sanctified the sacrifice ; the shuffle of the monks feet as they took their places in the choir above, the echo of their coughs, the slamming of the doors were the familiar records of its life. ”

“ A few old pictures of saints — he recognised them as old acquaintances from the time he had come there with his mother; they burnt themselves into his brain now. If there was some remembering faculty in man that lived after the extinction of the body, he felt that he should know them again through all Eternity. There was one picture, half hidden in a dusky corner almost under the beams, that roused his curiosity. It must have been placed there since — life still presented problems to solve. He rose and stood before it, shading his eyes. "A fine picture," he muttered ”