He wandered some hours from one spot to another, beside himself, now pausing to listen, now gliding with the utmost precaution over the herbage, now in frantic and desperate race.
Pushing on, pushing on through the immense gardens which bordered the river, he came at last to the foot of the cliff on which rises the hermitage of San Saturio. “Perhaps from this height I can get my bearings for pursuing my search across this confused labyrinth,” he exclaimed, climbing from rock to rock with the aid of his dagger.
He reached the summit whence may be seen the city in the distance and, curving at his feet, a great part of the Douro, compelling its dark, impetuous stream onward through the winding banks that imprison it.
Manrico, once on the top of the cliff, turned his gaze in every direction, till, bending and fixing it at last on a certain point, he could not restrain an oath.
The sparkling moonlight glistened on the wake left behind by a boat, which, rowed at full speed, was making for the opposite shore.
In that boat he thought he had distinguished a white and slender figure, a woman without doubt, the woman whom he had seen in the grounds of the Templars, the woman of his dreams, the realization of his wildest hopes. He sped down the cliff with the agility of a deer, threw his cap, whose tall, full plume might hinder him in running, to the ground, and freeing himself from his heavy velvet cloak, shot like a meteor toward the bridge.
He believed he could cross it and reach the city before the boat would touch the further bank. Folly! When Manrico, panting and covered with sweat, reached the city gate, already they who had crossed the Douro over against San Saturio were entering Soria by one of the posterns in the wall, which, at that time, extended to the bank of the river whose waters mirrored its gray battlements.
Although his hope of overtaking those who had entered by the postern gate of San Saturio was dissipated, that of tracing out the house which sheltered them in the city was not therefore abandoned by our hero. With his mind fixed upon this idea, he entered the town and, taking his way toward the ward of San Juan, began roaming its streets at hazard.
The streets of Soria were then, and they are to-day, narrow, dark and crooked. A profound silence reigned in them, a silence broken only by the distant barking of a dog, the barring of a gate or the neighing of a charger, whose pawing made the chain which fastened him to the manger rattle in the subterranean stables.
Manrico, with ear attent to these vague noises of the night, which at times seemed to be the footsteps of some person who had just turned the last corner of a deserted street, at others, the confused voices of people who were talking behind him and whom every moment he expected to see at his side, spent several hours running at random from one place to another.
At last he stopped beneath a great stone mansion, dark and very old, and, standing there, his eyes shone with an indescribable expression of joy. In one of the high ogive windows of what we might call a palace, he saw a ray of soft and mellow light which, passing through some thin draperies of rose-colored silk, was reflected on the time-blackened, weather-cracked wall of the house across the way.
“There is no doubt about it; here dwells my unknown lady,” murmured the youth in a low voice, without removing his eyes for a second from the Gothic window. “Here she dwells! She entered by the postern gate of San Saturio, – by the postern gate of San Saturio is the way to this ward – in this ward there is a house where, after midnight, there is some one awake – awake? Who can it be at this hour if not she, just returned from her nocturnal excursions? There is no more room for doubt; this is her home.”
In this firm persuasion and revolving in his head the maddest and most capricious fantasies, he awaited dawn opposite the Gothic window where there was a light all night and from which he did not withdraw his gaze a moment.
When daybreak came, the massive gates of the arched entrance to the mansion, on whose keystone was sculptured the owner’s coat of arms, turned ponderously on their hinges with a sharp and prolonged creaking. A servitor appeared on the threshold with a bunch of keys in his hand, rubbing his eyes, and showing as he yawned a set of great teeth which might well rouse envy in a crocodile.
For Manrico to see him and to rush to the gate was the work of an instant.
“Who lives in this house? What is her name? Her country? Why has she come to Soria? Has she a husband? Answer, answer, animal!” This was the salutation which, shaking him violently by the shoulder, Manrico hurled at the poor servitor, who, after staring at him a long while with frightened, stupefied eyes, replied in a voice broken with amazement:
“In this house lives the right honorable Señor don Alonso de Valdecuellos, Master of the Horse to our lord, the King. He has been wounded in the war with the Moors and is now in this city recovering from his injuries.”
“Well! well! His daughter?” broke in the impatient youth. “His daughter, or his sister, or his wife, or whoever she may be?”
“He has no woman in his family.”
“No woman! Then who sleeps in that chamber there, where all night long I have seen a light burning?”
“There? There sleeps my lord Don Alonso, who, as he is ill, keeps his lamp burning till dawn.”
A thunderbolt, suddenly falling at his feet, would not have given Manrico a greater shock than these words.
“I must find her, I must find her; and if I find her, I am almost certain I shall recognize her. How? – I cannot tell – but recognize her I must. The echo of her footstep, or a single word of hers which I may hear again; the hem of her robe, only the hem which I may see again would be enough to make me sure of her. Night and day I see floating before my eyes those folds of a fabric diaphanous and whiter than snow, night and day there is sounding here within, within my head, the soft rustle of her raiment, the vague murmur of her unintelligible words. – What said she? – What said she? Ah, if I might only know what she said, perchance – but yet without knowing it, I shall find her – I shall find her – my heart tells me so, and my heart deceives me never. – It is true that I have unavailingly traversed all the streets of Soria, that I have passed nights upon nights in the open air, a corner-post; that I have spent more than twenty golden coins in persuading duennas and servants to gossip; that I gave holy water in St. Nicholas to an old crone muffled up so artfully in her woollen mantle that she seemed to me a goddess; and on coming out, after matins, from the collegiate church, in the dusk before the dawn, I followed like a fool the litter of the archdeacon, believing that the hem of his vestment was that of the robe of my unknown lady – but it matters not – I must find her, and the rapture of possessing her will assuredly surpass the labors of the quest.
“What will her eyes be? They should be azure, azure and liquid as the sky of night. How I delight in eyes of that color! They are so expressive, so dreamy, so – yes, – no doubt of it; azure her eyes should be, azure they are, assuredly; – and her tresses black, jet black and so long that they wave upon the air – it seems to me I saw them waving that night, like her robe, and they were black – I do not deceive myself, no; they were black.
“And how well azure eyes, very large and