Glories of Spain Part 25

The cave was dark and small and belonged to a friend of Loyola's who lived to be a century old. Here he existed in great seclusion, spending seven hours of every day in prayer, and often remaining on his knees all night. It was here that he chiefly composed his "Spiritual Exercises,"

which contain so much beauty and devotion. Here also came to him the first idea of the Order of Jesus, which he afterwards founded. But it must be remarked that the Jesuit Society as framed by Ignatius Loyola was a more simple and unworldy inst.i.tution than it afterwards became.

His own rules seem to have been very pure and without guile or worldly ambition; his mind embraced only heaven and the things which concerned heaven. If Loyola were to return to earth, he would be the first to condemn many of its principles and practices and to say: "These are none of mine."

That he became spiritual as perhaps has been given to few cannot be doubted by any one who had read his writings and studied his life. We of another creed cannot be in touch with him on many points, but all must profoundly admire his absolute death to self, the perfect resignation of all his thoughts and wishes to the Divine guidance.

In Manresa, we have said that his penances amounted to fanaticism. His prayers and fastings so weakened the body, that frequently for hours and sometimes for days he would lose consciousness, and fall into death-like swoons. He retired to his cave and was tormented by a morbid recollection of his past sins. For many months he was filled with horror and knew nothing of peace of mind or spiritual consolation. He was haunted by terrible voices and visions; and it was only after body and soul had, as it were, been torn asunder, and he had gone through all the agonies of a living spiritual death, that at last peace and light, the certainty of pardon and the Divine favour, came to him.

After that his past life seems to have been placed behind him and knew him no more. He became a teacher of men; a great spiritual healer in whom the heavy-laden found comfort and encouragement; a profound reader of the human heart, to which he never ministered in vain. Perhaps one of his greatest weapons was humility, by which he placed himself on a level with all who came to him, and which enabled him to apply in the right way all the deep and earnest sympathy that was in him.

His visions, the voices he heard, the so-called miracles he witnessed, were no doubt delusions due to the highly wrought imagination and ecstatic state of the mystic; but with Loyola they did not end here.

They bore fruit. He was practical as well as theoretical: and dead as he became to self, a little of the sensible, matter-of-fact discipline of his early training must have clung to him to the last. His after life was full of activity and action. It would be difficult to say where he did not go, what countries he did not visit with practical issues, in days when men could not easily run to and fro on the earth as they do now.

Loyola died as he had lived, full of faith and hope. He had caught the malarial fever in Rome, and was not strong enough to fight against it.

In August, 1556, the end came, when he was sixty-five years old; but in everything except years he might have gone through a century of time.

His physical powers were worn out with hard work and abstinence; and perhaps the greatest miracle in connection with Ignatius Loyola was the fact that he lived long after the vital forces should have ceased to hold together. After his death the doctors found it impossible to discover what power had kept him alive during his later years, but agreed that it was nothing less than supernatural.

Thus Manresa is for ever connected with the name and fame of Ignatius Loyola the saint.

Crossing the bridge and winding through a very ancient and dilapidated part of the town, we presently reached the church, which struck us as being new and gaudy, with very little to recommend it. But we had come to see what had once been the cave, and wished we could have found it in its original state. Certainly the saint himself would never recognise it as the old earthy cavern, nine feet by six, whose mouth was concealed by brier bushes, and where he was wont to pa.s.s long days and nights in prayer and penance. The walls are now lined with marble; a light burns before the altar; some poor sculpture represents Loyola writing his book and performing his first miracle.

The view from his cave must have been magnificent even in his day. There in front of him ran the famous river, and there stood the old bridge.

Beyond it rose the rock with its hollows and gardens; and towering above were the splendid outlines of the collegiate church. Beyond all in the distance rose the chain of the Pyrenees, undulating and snow-capped; whilst in one distant spot, standing alone, cleaving the sky with their sharp outlines, appeared the peaks and pinnacles of Mons Serratus; the monastery resting half way down on its plateau, far more beautiful and perfect than it is to-day. Upon this the hermit Loyola--as he might at that time be called--would fix his eyes for hours day after day, seeking inspiration for his "Exercises," perhaps occasionally dreaming of the days when he still wore his cavalier's dress, and had not yet renounced all the pomps and vanities of the world. But as we have said, he was not a man of two minds; having put his hand to the plough, as far as we know he never turned back even with the faintest regret or longing for the pleasures deliberately placed from him.

Sebastien our guide was evidently a good Catholic, having a great reverence for Loyola, with whom he was more familiar than with Esau. He watched us narrowly as we entered the chapel, and was evidently disappointed at the little impression made upon us: expecting a drop-down-deadness of manner, when we stood before the effigy of the saint, which unfortunately only excited a feeling of irritation at the badness of its workmanship.

So we were not sorry to find ourselves once more under the skies, dark and lowering though they were. Here indeed the magnificent view, the splendid outlines of Manresa, all slightly veiled in that charming mist, might well appeal to all one's sense of the beautiful and the sublime, and raise emotions the poor votive chapel could never inspire.

As we went back into the town, for the moment it seemed very much haunted by the presence of Loyola. Pa.s.sing a picturesque little house in the centre of a small garden, Sebastien suddenly stopped in front of it and gave a peculiar call, whilst a flush of expectation rose to his face. Surprised at the movement we waited for the sequel. This quickly followed in the opening of a cas.e.m.e.nt, at which appeared the charming head of a young woman.

"Sebastien!" she cried, clasping her hands in ecstasy. "Have you come to see me?"

"Yes, since I see you now," returned Sebastien. "But I cannot come in, Anita. I am guiding these gentlemen through the town, and have to show them everything; they would be lost without me. We have just been to the chapel of the saint, where I said a short prayer for our speedy marriage. Ah! when will it be?"

"Patience, patience!" cried the fair Anita. "I am getting on well, and you must make el padrone advance you to the dining-room. Oh, it will all come right. Then we are both young and can afford to wait."

We thought it a pity so interesting a conversation should be carried on in a public thoroughfare, and at a tantalising distance, and offered Sebastien five minutes' interval if he liked to go in and pay his respects to his ladye-love. But he declined, and wafting a warm salute to the fair vision of the cas.e.m.e.nt, intimated he was again at our service.

"She is the sweetest girl in Manresa," said Sebastien quite openly, "and I am a lucky fellow to have won her. Unfortunately we are both poor. But Anita is with a dressmaker, and will soon be able to start on her own account: we shall not have much difficulty in getting on, if the padrone will only advance me--as indeed I deserve."

We congratulated Sebastien upon his good fortune and wished him promotion and success: and looking at his straight-forward open face, so singularly free from guile, we thought the fair Anita was by no means to be condoled with, however humble their prospects.

Then we made way into the upper part of the town, and presently Sebastien turned into a chapel attached to a convent.

It was a small building of no pretension, but with a marvellous repose and quietness about it. A screen divided the body of the church from the altar, and immediately before the altar, separated from us by the screen, was a strange and striking vision.

Two young girls who might have been some eighteen years old, knelt side by side at the foot of the steps, motionless as carven images and dressed in white. Their veils were thrown back, but their faces, turned towards the altar, were invisible. Their posture was full of grace, and their dress, whether by accident or design, was becomingly arranged and fell in artistic folds. All the time we looked they moved neither hand nor foot, and might have been, as we have said, carved in stone. We almost felt as though gazing upon a vision of angels, so wonderfully did the light fall upon them as they knelt: whilst in the body of the church we were in semi-obscurity.

Presently a bell tinkled, a side door opened, and two other young girls very much of the same age and dressed in exactly the same way, entered.

The two at the altar rose, made deep, graceful curtsies, and veiling their faces, pa.s.sed out of the chapel. Those who entered at once threw back their veils. In the obscurity we were not observed. We had full view of their charming faces, far too charming to become the nuns for which Sebastien said they were qualifying.

"They are White Ladies," he whispered, "and very soon will be cloistered and never see the world again. It is enough to break one's heart."

"You don't approve, Sebastien?"

"Ah, senor, I shudder at the thought. It occurs to me what a terrible thing it would be if Anita were to turn nun instead of becoming my happy wife--at least I shall do all I can to make her happy. But these poor girls--think for a moment of the humdrum life they are taking up; nothing to look forward to; no change, no pleasure of any sort. They might as well be buried alive at once and put out of their misery."

As the door opened to admit the two novices--if novices they were--we had caught sight of others in the pa.s.sage; some eight or ten, as we fancied. An elderly nun, equally dressed in white, was going amongst them, almost, as it seemed, in the act of benediction. She was evidently counselling, encouraging, fortifying those to whom she ministered. One might have thought that pa.s.sing through that doorway was renouncing an old life and taking up a new one; an irrevocable step and choice from which there was no recall and no turning back.

H. C. was taken with a lump in his throat as the young fair women unveiled and moved towards the altar. One of them was certainly very beautiful. Large wistful blue eyes stood out in contrast with the ivory pallor of her oval face, than which the spotless veil was not more pure and chaste.

It was too much for H. C.'s equanimity. He coughed and betrayed himself.

She turned hurriedly; and seeing a face that corresponded to her own in pallor, and eyes that were quite as wistful, gave him an appealing, imploring glance which seemed to say that she would be saved from her present fate.

For an instant we trembled. The case was so hopeless. There was the dividing screen. There was the nun on guard beyond the closed door.

There was the drenching rain outside. An escape in a deluge would not have been romantic--and where could they escape to? It was one of those agonising moments of helplessness that sometimes drive men insane.

H. C. grasped the screen. There was an instant when we thought he would have torn it down come what might. He looked reckless and desperate and miserable. Then we placed our hand on his arm as we had done that night at the opera in Gerona, and he calmed down.

We turned to leave the chapel. As we did so, a louder bell rang out, the door opened, and in walked the Mother-Superior at the head of her little army of novices.

They quickly grouped themselves round the altar, moved in utter silence like phantoms and subsided into graceful att.i.tudes, apparently absorbed in devotion. The sight was as charming as it was painful: for who could say how many of these young girls were voluntarily renouncing the world, or in the least realised what they were doing?

Before pa.s.sing out we gave a last look at this angelic vision. Quiet as we were we did not move exactly like phantoms. The meaning of our slight stir penetrated beyond the screen. It was too great a temptation for the fair young novice we have described. She felt that her last hope was dissolving, and she turned towards H. C. with a gaze that would have moved a stone.

Fortunately his eyes were buried in his handkerchief, or it is certain that we should never have left the chapel in the state in which we found it. The screen would have gone; the Mother-Superior defied, there would have been rout and consternation, the alarm bell rung, and perhaps--who knows?--a priest would have appeared upon the scene and married this romantic Romeo and Juliet. The novices would have turned into bridesmaids, and the Mother-Superior have given away her spiritual daughter. A lovely transformation scene indeed! Slighter currents have before now changed the course of nations.

The door closed upon us without tragic event or catastrophe. Through the deluge we waded to the hotel.

The long dining-room was now empty. The waiter brought us coffee and cognac, ordered to restore H. C.'s nervous system; we paid our bill, which was by no means as modest as the pretensions of the inn; and under the faithful and unfailing pilotage of Sebastien, departed for the railway station. The poor fellow looked melancholy.

"Oh, senor, I wish you were going to stay a week," he cried. "I did hope you would be here for at least four days."

"The fates forbid!"--horrified at the bare thought. "A week here in such weather would make one desperate, Sebastien. Remember that we have no fair Anita to turn all our thistles to roses, dull streets into a paradise."

Sebastien sighed. "To-morrow the sun will shine, senor. You would not know Manresa again under a blue sky."

"But our poet friend declares the rainy season has begun. This deluge is to last many days, if not weeks, Sebastien."

"It is a mistake," said Sebastien. "We have no rainy season. You will see that to-morrow there will be no rain, no clouds. Then if you had stayed, I am sure you would have spoken to the padrone for me, and got him to promote me to the dining-room. And then we could have been married."

Sebastien, like everyone else, was building his castles and dreaming his dreams; and it certainly caused us a slight regret that we could not help to lay them on a solid foundation. All we could do was to give him our best wishes, and tell him that if sufficiently earnest and persevering he would certainly gain the desire of his heart. It only depended on himself.

This prophecy seemed to inspire him with hope and courage; and our last reminiscence of Manresa was that of a young man, strong, handsome, fresh coloured, standing hat in hand on the platform, and begging us "with tears in his voice" to stay at least two days in Manresa the next time we pa.s.sed that way and formally pet.i.tion the landlord in a deputation of one for his promotion.[B]