BOOK VI "ITE, MISSA EST"

I

Having charged José to place himself at the disposal of Mrs. Baxter, Antonio took the road for Villa Branca about an hour after sunrise. Utter weariness had brought a few hours' sleep to his eyelids; but he felt unrested and unrefreshed. By the time he reached Santa Iria fatigue compelled him to hire a horse.

While his mount was a-saddling the monk sat musing outside the wine-shop. What was Isabel doing? Of what was she thinking? Had she slept? Was she truly hating him at last? Would she come once more to the cascade?

In answer to this last question he could hardly restrain himself from leaping on the half-ready horse and galloping off like a whirlwind to her presence. At the moment of his leaving the farm-house, two hours before, this all-day expedition to Villa Branca had seemed the height of prudence; but he suddenly saw it as the depth of cowardice and brutality. She would come to the cascade, in vain; and, later on, she would learn from José's lips how he had turned tail and run away. Antonio cringed and burned. A moment later, however, he knew that he had done right. She would not be at the cascade.

"To-morrow," he said to himself, with a dull pain gnawing in his cold and heavy heart, "I shall see her for the last time. She will make no sign. She will say good-bye as if there has been nothing between us. Blessed Mother of God, help us to the end!"

He took out Sir Percy's letter and perused it once more to distract his thoughts. He read:

Dear Senhor da Rocha,—

A post just to hand apprises me of your gentility to my daughter and her governess. The fact that I fully expected such courteous behavior on your part does not diminish my gratitude in respect of it; and I beg you to believe in the sincerity of my regret that I shall be unable to present my acknowledgments in person.

I indulge the hope that a proposal which I am about to make may not be unacceptable to you. From our mutual friend Mr. Austin Crowberry I learn that you wished to purchase the abbey domain, but that your offers were unacceptable to the Minister of Finances.

I have paid a deposit of £500 to the chief of the Fazenda at Villa Branca, and am engaged to pay £300 on New Year's Day and the balance (£2500) in five half-yearly instalments. As I have become closely associated with an enterprise which will involve my residing alternately in Lisbon and London, I should find it convenient to transfer to yourself my whole bargain as regards the abbey. That is to say, I forfeit the £500 already paid and leave you to find £2800 on the dates above referred to. I also ask your acceptance of the larger articles of English furniture recently placed by me in the guest-house, and I have instructed Jackson, my man, to bring away personal luggage only.

As my movements are erratic, perhaps you will indulge me by completing the business with my agents, Messrs. Lemos Monteiro and Smithson, Rua do Carmo, Lisbon, who have written to Villa Branca preparing the officials for your visit. Failing your approval I will make other arrangements; but, meanwhile, I beg that you will add to your unfailing kindness by taking care of the keys, and that you will believe me to be

Your obliged and obedient servant, Percival Kaye-Templeman.

Once in the saddle, with the well-beloved music of horse-hoofs in his ears, Antonio found it easier to abstract his mind from bitter thoughts. He applied his whole brain to problems of finance. Two thousand five hundred pounds in two years and a half. At first it had staggered him; but he was going to take the risk. His own and José's hard cash hoardings would pay the New Year's Day instalment nearly twice over. By mortgaging the farm and the sea-sand vineyards, and by pledging his personal credit he could pay the July five hundred and keep two or three hundred towards the instalment due the following January, making up the balance from the year's wine-sales. Fifteen hundred pounds would remain payable; and this sum he hoped to raise in due course by a bold stroke involving a mortgage on the abbey itself.

The chief of the Fazenda received his visitor effusively. This time the monk was not required to lean against a pile of stolen books. He sat in the chief's own chair and was offered wine of the chief's own stealing. As three hundred pounds of Isabel's money had stuck to the chief's fingers the great man was more than willing to accept Antonio in Sir Percy's place; for he had just learned that the Englishman would be unable to meet his obligations, and he was mortally afraid of a reopening of the transaction in Lisbon. He even threw out mysterious hints as to further concessions which might be arranged. Antonio listened attentively. His conscience allowed him to plan the outwitting of the Portuguese Government as regards money which was not honestly theirs. But as soon as he perceived that the official was bent on more pickings for himself the monk became obtuse. He was not willing to assist any man in the work of more completely damning his soul; and, although Antonio clearly foresaw that he was making an enemy and preparing sore troubles for himself in the future, he steadfastly held out against temptation.

The autumn day was drawing to its twilight when Antonio, having given up his horse at Santa Iria, trudged up the path to his own door. Half the way home Isabel had queened his whole mind. On leaving Villa Branca he had sought to preoccupy himself with the most complicated arithmetic; but, little by little, Isabel had reclaimed her empire. As he mounted the doorstep his heart thumped heavily. Had she written? Had she sent a message by José? Or, most terrible and beautiful possibility of all, would he find her sitting in the house, as in her rightful place?

He entered. There was no Isabel enlightening the dim and cheerless room. He hurried to the table whereon, José was accustomed to leave the letters. There was nothing. His heart chilled and shrank. Still, there was to-morrow. Yes. He was certain to see her to-morrow.

José stamped in noisily and handed Antonio two keys.

"They have gone," he said.

So sharp a blade of anguish pierced his soul that Antonio let the keys fall on the brick floor.

"Gone?" he echoed. "Who? When? Why? Where?"

"The English senhoras," answered José. "They started about three o'clock, to Lisbon."

Antonio sank down upon a coffer. He had used up the last of his strength in tramping from Santa Iria, and he had eaten nothing all day.

"I don't understand it very well," continued José. "I reached the guest-house at half-past eight. I thought they weren't to leave until to-morrow. I worked under the Senhor Jaxo. He didn't hurry himself at all. Joanninha brought us cold meat and white bread and strong wine. Joanninha is the cook. She has the longest tongue, your Worship, in Portugal. She made me angry, talking about your Worship."

"About me? How?" asked Antonio. He felt sick and faint.

"She heard me say that your Worship would attend the senhoras to-morrow morning. She said: 'Where is his Excellency to-day? I suppose he's gone to see Senhor Jorge's Margarida.' I said: 'No, his Worship has something better to do. He has gone to Villa Branca to mind his own business, and it would be a good thing if everybody else would do the same.' There was an English servant in the room, called Ficha. She's maid to the Senhorita Isabel. Joanninha translated to her what I'd said, and they both laughed, and I was very angry."

"What has this to do with the senhoras going away in such a hurry?" asked Antonio. But, even as he finished putting the question, his own fears supplied the answer.

"It's nothing to do with the senhoras hurrying away at all," said José humbly. "I beg your Worship's pardon for repeating such nonsense. All I know is that some bells rang and the Senhor Jaxo went out, and when he came back he was in a great rage. Joanninha told me that the Senhorita Isabel had decided to go to her illustrious father at once, and that nobody dared oppose her."

"Did you see the senhoras? Were they well?"

"I think they were well, because I heard them quarreling," José answered. "The dark senhora, the old one, has a temper that made me tremble, your Worship. They went away, the senhoras and the servants in two old shut-up carriages, but they are going to hire a better carriage on the way. I saw the old senhora, when she handed me the keys. She sent you a long message, but I don't think Joanninha could translate it properly. So I asked would she write, but she didn't. They locked all up and gave me the keys. Then they went away. They didn't say when they will come back. I think, your Worship, that they are all mad."

"José," said his master, after a long silence, "I have eaten nothing all day. Let me break my fast. Afterwards I have something to tell you. Prepare me what you can while I change my clothes."

He climbed the steep and narrow stairs painfully. His cold tub revived him, and his old clothes gave him ease. But, as he lifted his worn cloak from its hook, the wound in his heart burst open afresh. He remembered how often Isabel had sat, in all her daintiness, upon that same cloak's clean but rusty folds; and how, on her own confession, she had "cried and cried and cried like a baby" at the sight of its threadbareness.

By the time he descended José had grilled two small trout and was placing a bottle of good white wine upon the table. Antonio's heart was wrung anew at the thought of the simple fellow's unfailing devotion. Isabel had come and had gone; but José remained, loving and serving his strange master with a dumb love passing the love of women. The monk forced his faithful disciple to sit down at table with him and to take his fair share of the dainty fish and the animating wine. When they had finished eating and drinking he said:

"José, I have been a good deal in and about the guest-house and the abbey since we saved the azulejos, and many strange things have happened. The end of it all is this. Here are the keys of the guest-house. Upstairs, in the green box, I have all the keys of the abbey. To-day, as you know, I have been to Villa Branca. We are in legal possession of the abbey domain, and everything in it. Within three years we must raise three thousand pounds. With God's help it can be done. The English people will never come back."

He closed his eyes wearily. When he half-opened them he saw José by the light of the one candle, bowing his head and silently repeating thankful prayers. The monk quailed. For himself, as well as for José, this ought to be a night of praise and rejoicing. Yet Antonio found it the darkest hour of his life. The abbey keys seemed no more than a few bits of metal. Or, if they were more than bits of metal, they were the keys of a prison, the keys which were locking Isabel outside his life.

He took his candle and went to bed. But, despite his weariness, he could not sleep. Where was she? In what rough inn, amidst what discomforts and indignities, was she lying? If he jumped up at once and tramped southward until he could find a horse, when would he overtake her? To-morrow, he calculated, about noon. He imagined himself thundering after her chariot, like a highwayman in a picture. He pictured her pretty alarm, her radiant joy, her gracious forgiveness, their ecstasy of reunion.

Suddenly the monk remembered with a shock that he had not said all his Office. Busy or idle, sick or well, glad or sad, he had never failed to recite it before. He still had None, Vespers, and Compline to say. Lighting the candle and opening his breviary he began to repeat the holy words. But he had not uttered half a dozen sentences before he shut the book with a snap.

Half an hour later he arose, put together all the keys, and went down stairs. The new moon had not set, and its brightness lured him forth from his narrow room into the peace of the night. As a matter of course he took the path to the abbey.

Although the ruts of wheels, her wheels, made him shiver he did not turn back. He opened the chapel with the long key she had so often handled, and sitting down in his old stall, he tried to say the rest of None; but a white form, her form, hindered him, and a soft, glad voice, her voice, cried: "Antonio, Antonio, Antonio—what a beautiful name!" He groped his way to his own cell, and he could almost see and hear her opening his cupboards. He hastened through the cloisters and escaped into the wood by the secret door.

Some dead leaves fled before him, their tripping sound was no lighter than the fall of her elfin feet. The moon suddenly peeped at him through a clearing; and he saw her moon-white shoulders. The chirrup of a brimming brook struck upon his ear; and he seemed to be carrying her once more in his arms, while she murmured: "Listen, Antonio, all the world is singing."

He knew that the guest-house must tear his wound wide open, and that he ought to hurry home to the farm; but an irresistible influence drew him on. He reached the broad path. He stood under the casement whence she had flung the white rose. It was still ajar.

He turned the key in the lock and entered the ghostly and silent house. There was enough moonlight in the salon to show him the blue ottoman whereon she had so often sat. He hurried out of the room with a heart ready to burst.

At the foot of the stairs he paused. They led to her chamber. Could he bear to cross its threshold, to lean out of the window as she had leaned out after the thunder, and to look at the bed where she had lain sobbing for his sake? He knew he could not bear it. But his intellect had ceased to govern him and he ascended the stairs.

A broad moonbeam lit up every corner of her chamber. Like a man dazed he lurched to the window. There were the roses and there were the thorns. He turned to gaze at her couch. The fine linen had been taken away; but there was the place where she had lain, there was the pillow which her golden head had pressed. What had her last night been? Had she hated him or did she love him still? Had she cursed God or had she prayed?

For a moment his mind turned the question over in a numb, impersonal way. Then he came back with a rush to himself and, in a single moment, his chalice of agony welled up and brimmed over. He flung himself down on his knees and stretched out desperate hands and hungry arms across the narrow bed.

Although long minutes passed his dry-eyed, stony anguish remained. But at last his inward, spiritual man spoke. Was he committing a grievous sin? Was he breaking, in spirit, a vow which he was only keeping in the letter? Had he forsaken the Creator for a creature?

Slowly, but very surely, his conscience framed the answer. No, he had not sinned. In all his desire of her there was still nothing of the carnal mind. He was racked and scorched by anguish, not because he had lost her love, but because he had been forced to break her heart by refusing her his own. She was a child, a poor lonely child with neither man nor woman to love her, nor any God to console her; and he, Antonio, had flung her back into a still blacker frost and sharper famine, to pine and wither without love and without faith. Yet, in all this, he had simply obeyed God. He had obeyed the God who commanded Abram to offer up Isaac, the God who "spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all."

The moonbeam softly faded from the chamber. But Antonio did not move. His weary limbs and exhausted brain could resist no longer; and, still kneeling against her pillow with his arms outstretched across her bed, he fell asleep.

II

When the monk awoke day was dawning. For a while memory failed him. But as soon as he understood that he was in Isabel's room he leaped up and hastened downstairs.

He knew that he ought to go straight home. But his feet, despite their soreness, turned towards the stepping-stones. He retraced the path by which she had left him, hardly thirty-six hours before. Past the cypresses, through the mimosas, he went; and before the sun rose he was standing in the icy spray of the thunderous waterfall. He longed to plunge into the crystal pool; but her invisible presence abashed him, and with an ever-sharpening pain he hurried away.

As he regained the farm, he found José burning some dead leaves. Why could he not tear down these clinging memories of Isabel from his heart, as José could tear down ivies from the trees, and fling them a-top of the glowing, fuming pyre? The gust of pale, acrid smoke which nipped his nostrils was bitter-sweet.

After a dip in the brook he drank some of the sham coffee and forced down a hunk of coarse bread. But when he faced his routine he found that he could neither work nor pray. The black and red letters in his breviary danced impishly before his eyes; and when he took up a pen to write out some accounts he marked the paper with more blots than figures. Both door and window were wide open to the morning breeze; yet the room suffocated him.

At last a plan formed in Antonio's brain and he did not delay its execution. Stuffing a piece of bread in his pocket he sought out José and said:

"To-morrow my hard work will begin. To-day I am going to Navares. After to-night I will not leave you so much alone."

He set out, striding northward with long strides. Every stride was a symbol of his renunciation; for he knew that by this time Isabel would have left her inn and that every moment was taking her farther southward to Lisbon. On he pressed. As landmark after landmark came in sight a flood of old memories diluted his bitter potion of new-brewed sorrow. He lived over again the afternoon of his dusty march from the monastery amid a throng of monks and soldiers and the evening of his solitary return. But not for long. An hour before the white houses of Navares shone in the morning sun Isabel had once more become the sole tenant of his mind.

The doors of the Navares' corn-factor's granary, where the monks had held their council, were wide open; but Antonio did not pause to look inside. As on the night of his flight, he hurried through the town and only rested when he came to the knoll where he had bivouacked twice before. Thence, after munching a little bread, he took the short cut through the maize-fields to the village of the old cura; for the old cura's grave was the goal of his hasty pilgrimage.

By an irony of fate a rustic wedding had drawn the whole population to the church and churchyard. Their mirth so mocked the pilgrim's mood that he had a mind to go away. But he mixed with the throngs until his resentment at their gaiety was turned to thankfulness for the excess of human joy over human sorrow. At last a horn was blown from the door of a neighboring barn, and the crowd swept out of the churchyard like stampeding buffaloes.

The plain grave of the old cura lay in a sheltered corner on the north side of the chancel. Pious hands had brightened it with a yellow and purple nosegay that very morning. Antonio did not kneel down. He simply uncovered his head and strove to pray. For five minutes it was like chewing chaff. Some devil whispered in the monk's ear that his errand was not only silly, but in doubtful taste. The old cura was a saint, no doubt; but what had so rough a diamond to do with so soft and lustrous and exquisite a pearl as Isabel? Thus spake the devil, but Antonio refused his ear. Knowing that prayer comes with praying, he prayed on.

Not until he had replaced his hat on his head and was about to go were his prayers answered. But when the answer came, it was an answer indeed. It almost struck him down, like the great light which struck down Saul on the way to Damascus, and he was forced to lean against the church wall. It was an answer which both healed the worst of his grief and showed him the most of his duty in a single flash. It thrust into his hand a golden key to the whole mystery of Isabel, past and future.

Like a man whose shoulders have suddenly been eased of a burden he swung out homewards, holding his head high. Without knowing it, he talked to himself aloud, uttering broken phrases of hope and thankfulness. Yes, he had found the key, the master-key to all that had happened. As he strode along he recalled his association with Isabel from the beginning, and there was no lock his key did not fit.

Even the problem which had tried his faith most sorely was solved. In confiding to him her story of the mysterious influence which he had begun to exercise over her, four years before she saw his face, Isabel had declared that their lives were interfused in an irresistible destiny. She had spoken of this as a fact more undeniable than the sun and moon. She evidently believed with her whole soul that God's hand had brought them together. Yet Antonio, all through her pleading, had remained more persuaded than ever that the selfsame God had called him to the celibate life. And the apparent impossibility of reconciling these two equally clear, equally honest convictions had kindled a fiery ordeal for the monk's faith. The only way out of it seemed to be that all inward illumination was a delusion—totum corpus tenebrosum, "the whole body full of darkness"—and that perhaps there was no Divine Enlightener at all. But this wonderful new thought which had come to him at the old cura's grave explained everything. He thrust it into the most complicated wards of his spiritual doubts, and it turned as smoothly as the damascened key was wont to turn in the lock of the chapel. The doors of Isabel's soul rolled open before his eyes, and a bright light shone into the furthest cranny.

As for his duty to her in the present and in the future, he understood it no less certainly than he understood her chaste love for him in the past. And, as soon as this duty was plain, he made haste to begin doing it; for it was a duty of prayer, of specific, faithful, heroic, loving, unceasing prayer. He prayed as he walked, with increasing exultation.

So rapt was he by his holy work that Antonio hardly noticed the difference between the dusty, lonely road and the cobbled streets of noisy Navares. He pressed southward without a pause. Was he not going home? After a day and a night of banishment had not the farm once more become the tranquil home of his body, and had not the chapel once more become the rapturous home of his soul? He strode the last long league of his homeward journey as if it had been the first; and when he met José at the gate his face was shining like an angel's.

True to his word, Antonio rose early the next morning and threw himself body and soul into hard work. Now that the abbey domain had come under his care, there were hundreds of things to be done. As the sunny and well-drained slopes were exceptionally suitable for the culture of a profitable amber-colored wine, Antonio decided to double the area of the monk's old vineyard immediately. In order to effect this extension and to repair the damage done by seven years' neglect, it became necessary to engage nearly a score of helpers, half a dozen of whom would have to be retained in permanent employ. José, with one resident laborer, continued to live at the farm, while the monk quietly resumed occupation of his own cell in the monastery.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Antonio dined at the farm with José; and on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, José dined with his master beside the stream in the monastery kitchen. At these week-night meals, the conversation was usually a review of the day's operations and a debate as to the work of the morrow; but on Sundays, when dinner was eaten ceremoniously in the guest-house, such topics were not mentioned, and the talk was of the great world's doings as chronicled in Antonio's English paper, of Portugal's troubles, and, above all, of churchly and holy things.

Not only during these Sunday talks, but also throughout their work-a-day intercourse, José was conscious of a change in Antonio. Hitherto, the monk had simply accepted the shaggy fellow's dumb affection; but, after the day of his visit to the old cura's grave, he began to show that he requited it as well. The last remains of his aloofness vanished, his speech grew gentler, and he became more watchful of José's health and comfort. Nor was the monk's manner changed towards José alone. In all things and to all persons he was more tender and less cold.

On the long winter evenings the two men busied themselves with blue pigments and white glazes, until they succeeded in fabricating tolerable copies of the two broken azulejos. When this was achieved, they began a series of experiments, with a view to distilling a new liqueur from eucalyptus. By rashly gulping down a mouthful of the first pint, José almost burned out his tongue. Nevertheless, they persevered; and, in the long run, the monkish talent for cordial-making enabled Antonio to mollify the harshness of the fiery elixir, and to render it palatable. In January they shipped samples to agents in fever-cursed regions of Spanish America, and offered to supply the liqueur in bulk at a high price.

Meanwhile, Antonio was waxing stronger in faith, and hope, and love. Every day he recited the whole of his Office in his old stall, sometimes with José's assistance, sometimes alone. He began also to hear Mass in the village church every Wednesday and Friday, and to say the whole rosary every Sunday afternoon. In meditating on the fifteen Mysteries, he habitually applied them to the case of Isabel; and, somehow, these thinkings never became trite or stale. In pursuance of his plan for Isabel's well-being, he redoubled his prayers, and offered half his Mass-hearings and communions with the same intention.

The winter passed and the spring came; and still he had not heard a word from her or about her. Sometimes a memory of her would suddenly overwhelm him. When he dined at the farm with José there seemed to be always three persons, not two, at the table. He felt that she was sitting at his right hand, where she had sat when he gave her the painted bowl; and so strong was his sense of her presence that he would often halt in the midst of a sentence, as if to ask her pardon for the dryness of the talk. After the morrow of her flight, he never visited the stepping-stones, although he repeatedly gave José minute instructions for the conserving of the pool's beauties. As for Isabel's chamber, he locked it up, and never re-entered it. Yet, in spite of this reverence for everything she had touched, he never moped or repined. He confided Isabel, as he had confided the fate of the abbey, to the might and love of God.

When July came, he made a novena in honor of Saint Isabel, the holy queen of Portugal, whose silver shrine was the glory of the Poor Clare's great convent opposite Coimbra, on the heights above the Mondego. And in August he received a long letter from young Crowberry. Seven of its eight pages were concerned with England's theological and ecclesiastical affairs: but in the midst of the page devoted to personal matters, the young man had written:

Of course, you know that Isabel has taken her father to live at Weymouth. I never see them; but I hear they are both well, and that Sir Percy has become quite reasonable and docile. Have they told you how she put her foot down and sent away that Excellent Creature, Mrs. Baxter? If she hadn't pulled up Sir Percy I'm told he would have died. Now, what did you really and truly think of Isabel? Did you see much of her, or did she sulk? Tell me when you write.

Antonio wrote a long letter in reply; but he did not tell young Crowberry what he really and truly thought about Isabel, nor did he so much as mention her name. His novena was answered. It was enough for him to know that Sir Percy lived, and that she was well.

The grape-harvest in September was a good one, and it was only by cutting an hour from his sleep-time that the monk could fill full his appointed measures of work and prayer. Then came October, with its vintage of memories. On the anniversary of Senhor Jorge's serao Antonio could be serene; for Margarida had just been happily married to a handsome and honorable young man of Leiria, the son of a prosperous builder. But with the approach of the anniversary of his first meeting with Isabel he grew troubled; and, to divert his thoughts, he departed hurriedly for Lisbon, where he had business to transact with the shippers of his wines and cordials. In Lisbon he learned that a journey to England would be to his advantage. But England meant Isabel; so, on the anniversary of her flight from the guest-house, he turned his back on the capital and hastened home.

By mortgaging his farm the monk succeeded in paying the third instalment of the abbey's price. He faced the New Year with less than twenty pounds of ready money, and with the obligation to find five hundred by the first of July. A request for a more flexible arrangement was flung back at him by the Fazenda official with vindictive contempt. As the spring advanced, Antonio laid his plan for the immediate outright purchase of the abbey on a fifteen hundred pound mortgage before four separate persons; but without exception they either could not or would not entertain it. In these circumstances he felt bound to cut down his gifts to village charities and his bounties to the hangers-on of the countryside. As a result, José came home one day with a black eye, received while he was punishing three village loafers for calling the Senhor da Rocha a skin-flint and a miser.

By May-day Antonio's sales of stock and the pledging of his credit had brought him in only three hundred pounds, and there was nothing left that he could pawn without crippling himself hopelessly in the near future. But he was not cast down. He was doing his utmost, and he calmly left the rest with God.

III

Very early one morning, at the end of May, Antonio heard light footsteps passing his cell. Although he sprang up immediately from bed he could not open his door in time to see the intruder's face or form. He caught no more than half a moment's glimpse of a slender and darkly garbed figure disappearing round the angle of the corridor.

Having scrambled into his clothes, he started in pursuit. The light tap-tap of shod feet on the stones told him that his visitor was making for the chapel. The monk, who was barefooted, followed noiselessly.

Peeping into the chapel through the little door amid the azulejos, Antonio saw a tall spare man kneeling before the altar. Even if his back had not been turned to Antonio it would have been impossible to see his face, because he was hiding it in his hands. The stranger wore a long black cloak, uncomfortably thick and heavy for the torrid Portuguese summer. But it was plain that he did not find it too warm. With long, thin, death-pale hands, he drew its folds more closely round his body; and, as he did so, the familiar movement revealed his identity to Antonio.

It was Father Sebastian.

Antonio hurried forward and knelt at his side. But Sebastian did not move, nor did he cease praying for four or five minutes; and when at last he turned towards Antonio it was without the slightest sign of surprise. Rising painfully, he left the altar and made a gesture, inviting Antonio to follow him.

As Sebastian had stood next to Antonio in juniority among the choir-monks, the stalls of the two men were side by side. Sebastian sat down in his old place and Antonio did likewise. The chapel was dim; but the younger man could see that the elder's body had wasted almost to a skeleton. Yet there was nothing repellent about him. The bloom on his cheeks and the fire in his eyes had the solemn beauty of a sunset in an autumnal forest. When he began to speak his voice was so soft and sweet that it seemed to come from some far-off holy height.

"To-day, Father Antonio," he said, "completes the ninth year since you sat on the cloister roof and heard the hoofs of the horsemen who had come to thrust us from this house. And, this morning, it is just nine years since you were raised to the priesthood. I asked our Lord to give me strength for the journey, so that I might spend this anniversary with you. He has heard me."

"Who told you that I was here?" Antonio asked.

Sebastian did not reply. But there was that in his eyes which gave Antonio a sufficient answer. Here was a saint who walked in the light.

"Nine years," mused Sebastian aloud. "And you have not yet said your first Mass."

"No," replied Antonio. "But God is good. Every year He enables me to send a little cask of wine for the altar to a poor church in England. Six days a week I work amid wine; and is not wine the matter of His great Sacrament? It consoles me to know that although I cannot say Mass, I can serve His table. Although I cannot, like Mary, his mother, bear Him in my hands, I can be like those other Marys at the sepulcher. Emerunt aromata ut venientes ungerent Jesum: 'They brought sweet spices that they might anoint Jesus.'"

"He is not a God of the dead, but of the living," said Sebastian, in sweet, far-off tones. "We do not offer a dead Christ. Say rather that you are like that favored unknown to whom He sent two disciples saying, Ubi est diversorium ubi pascha cum discipulis meis manducem: 'Where is the guest-chamber where I may eat the Passover with My disciples?' But come. Our time together is short, and there is much to say. First of all, I have brought your breviary which you charged me to keep."

He pointed to a package lying on the Prior's seat. Antonio rose and took it with joyful gratitude. When he returned to his stall he said:

"Suffer my questions first. Whence do you come? Where have you lived these nine long years?"

"For a few months I was with the English fathers in Lisbon," Sebastian answered. "They were kind; but when it became plain that the Portuguese Benedictine congregation must come to an end, I crossed Spain and sought asylum at the Montserrat, where men used to believe the Holy Grail was treasured. There was much work for me to do there in the School of Music; and I found strength to do it, for we lived like eagles high up in the pure air, three thousand feet above the sea. But Madrid followed the example of Lisbon. Greedy eyes were cast on our possessions. They accused us of being Carlists, just as in Portugal they accused us of being Miguelistas: and only eighteen months after leaving this abbey, I was again an exile. Since then I have dwelt in three religious houses; and every one of them has been suppressed."

"Can it be," asked Antonio uneasily, "that the Orders are themselves to blame, as men say? Here we dwelt in simplicity and piety, living by our own labor and feeding the poor. But was this house an exception? Had the majority of other monks indeed sunk into gluttony and sloth?"

"In every monastery from which I have been driven," said Sebastian, "our evictors poured regrets and compliments upon us. It was always the misdeeds of 'others,' for which we had to suffer. But whenever I questioned an exiled community, I found they had received the same compliments. Those mysterious 'others' have still to be found. According to the statesmen, all religious houses individually are fountains of light and blessing to their neighbors; but collectively they are a dark curse on the nations."

"Unbelieving men are determined to mulct us of all we have," said Antonio, "and therefore they must needs invent crimes to suit our punishment. They hang us first and indict us afterwards."

"They oppress us," agreed Sebastian, "in the great and sacred name of liberty. But the avarice of godless men is the mainspring of it all. I have seen five houses confiscated 'for the good of the People'; and in not one case have the People received a third of the plunder. But enough of this. Tell me your own story."

"Where is the Prior?"

"He is dead. He died in Belgium."

"The Cellarer?"

"He is dead. He died in Brazil."

"Father Isidoro?"

"He is dead. He died in Spain."

With a sinking heart, Antonio named the choir-monks one by one; and, after each name, Sebastian answered: "He is dead." Father Sebastian believed that Brother Cypriano was still alive; but, of the Fathers, only he and Antonio were left.

"Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine," murmured Antonio.

"Et lux perpetua luceat eis," Sebastian responded.

"To-morrow morning," added Sebastian, "will be the anniversary of the Abbot's last Mass. If our Lord will give me strength I shall say Mass at this altar once more."

After a pause, Antonio began to relate his history from the moment of his quitting the council at Navares. Every fact that threw light on his operations for regaining the abbey he stated with precision. But he did not mention Margarida, and he referred to Isabel only as Sir Percy's moneyed daughter. When he had finished, Sebastian looked at him with steadfast pitiful eyes and said:

"These have been great sacrifices and cruel hardships for the sake of our Lord, and they will not be in vain. But you have not told me all. My brother, I feel that you have kept silence concerning your most costly sacrifice, your bitterest ordeal. Why not tell me all?"

Antonio's pride rebelled. The desire to ease his heart by pouring out its hoard of solitary grief was strong; but his gentleman's instincts of reticence were stronger. For some time he remained silent. But an inward voice sternly bade him speak; and he spoke.

He told the short tale of Margarida. Then he unfolded the whole case of Isabel, glossing over nothing. He scrupulously added an account of his actions and feelings on the night and morrow of her flight. When he had finished he sat with bowed head and waited for Sebastian's judgment. But Sebastian remained silent.

"You do not speak," said Antonio. "Perhaps I have given you the impression that my ordeal was carnal, and that this English maiden was a direct emissary of Satan. If you think so, I have spoken blunderingly indeed."

"Satan exists and he is busy enough," returned Sebastian. "But in trying to find the cause of any strange thing that happens I have learned to think of Satan last. Nearly all our temptations arise from our own self-love and carelessness. Many other temptations are God's provings and perfectings of our spiritual mettle. Satan is not omnipresent and his angels are only a shrunken legion. But have patience. Let me think."

He resumed his meditation. At last he turned and said:

"This was not a temptation from the devil. Neither did it spring from corruptness in your heart or in hers. I am persuaded that our Lord's work is somehow in it all. Perhaps you will never know in this world what work it is; but that is not your affair."

"Sometimes," said Antonio slowly, "it troubles my conscience. As I told you just now, I didn't hold out to the very end. I gave way within my heart; but when I opened my eyes she had vanished."

"You do wrong to be troubled," said Sebastian. "You held out to the bitter end of the trial God had appointed you. When you told this Isabel finally to go, she went. That was the end. All that happened afterwards was mere reaction."

"The next day," persisted Antonio, "I did not say my Office. My heart bled for her as it never bled for the Abbot, or for you, Sebastian, or for this place."

"It bled for her, not for yourself," Sebastian explained. "In profane love, the lover who thinks he is grieving for the beloved is only grieving over his own loss of her, over his own short bereavement, or over his own humiliation and discomfiture. With you, Antonio, it was not so. You did not wish to take; you wished to give."

"Do not make me out a saint when I know I am a sinner," said Antonio, almost sharply. "If she had been old, and tart, and ugly, would my heart have bled for her all the same?"

"Perhaps not," Sebastian retorted. "But, if she had been old and ugly, neither would there have been much virtue in giving her up. Do not complain of her beauty. You had heroic work to do, and her beauty helped you to do it better. In England there are Puritans who would say that these azulejos and these gilded carvings must hinder us from doing the Work of God."

"I do not follow you," said Antonio.

"Tell me," Sebastian asked abruptly, "how you stand with the payments you have bound yourself to make."

Antonio drew from his breast an account over which he had pored and pored for a month without making the adverse balance a vintem less. Sebastian conned it attentively from beginning to end. Then he said:

"Follow me to my old cell and bring me paper and ink."

He rose with so much difficulty that Antonio had to support him; but once fairly on his feet he moved quickly over the pavement. At the door of the cell Antonio left him; but before he had finished cutting a new quill and replenishing the sand-sprinkler in his own room, Sebastian rejoined him. Sitting down painfully at the tiny table he swiftly wrote a very short letter. Without reading it over he folded it, sealed it with a small brass seal which he drew from his pocket, and addressed it to a Spanish nobleman in a small town of the Asturias.

"Let this be despatched at once," he said. "There is no time to lose."

"A post leaves Navares in three days," replied Antonio. "José shall take the letter there this morning."

"It is well," said Sebastian. "And when this José returns, let me see him as soon as he is rested."

The cell was brighter than the chapel, and Antonio perceived that his friend was become almost as insubstantial as a ghost. He called to mind a passage from a new English poet about a man who, having wasted to a shadow, was ready to be resumed into the Great Shadow, the shadow and blackness of death. But Sebastian seemed rather to be a pure white flame, waiting to be drawn into the Great Light.

"You have not broken your fast," cried Antonio in shame and alarm. "You must eat. I have good wine. You must rest. You must sleep. When the heat is over we will talk again, and you shall see José."

"It has been meat and drink and rest and sleep to see you again, Father Antonio, and to hear what you have told me," the other answered. "But you are right. I must sleep. I will obey your orders."

At breakfast Sebastian ate and drank nothing save an ounce or two of bread and an egg beaten up in white wine. When the meal was over he declined Antonio's pressing offer of a comfortable bed from the guest-house, and lay down on the straw mattress in his own cell. There he soon fell into so profound a sleep that he did not hear Antonio drenching the window with bucketful after bucketful of water to counteract the blazing heat.

At night José, wearing his best coat and his most diffident manner, dined with the two monks in a corner of the refectory. Sebastian, with bright eyes and glowing cheeks, did most of the talking. He praised the wine and the food, although he touched little of either; and throughout the repast he was full of an eager cheerfulness such as Antonio had never seen in him before. After dinner he drew from José an exact account of his mental and spiritual state: for Antonio had told him of the poor fellow's desire to become a monk.

"José," he demanded, at the end of his questioning, "You have learnt Latin. Can you translate, Irascimini: et nolite peccare?"

"I can, Father," answered José proudly. "It means, 'Be angry and sin not.'"

"So it does. You did well to be angry with the greedy and lazy good-for-nothings who spake evil of Father Antonio. But you did ill to thrash them and to come home with that black eye. Go on being angry with sin; but learn to love sinners."

"Can't I be a monk, Father? May I not have the habit?" pleaded José, in consternation. "I am glad I thrashed them; but I'm sure I shan't need to thrash them again."

"The habit is a comfort and a help," Sebastian replied, "but we must not give it you to-night. Live as you have been living, in the love of our Lord and in obedience to Father Antonio. For the present you can wear no habit more acceptable to God than the coat in which you do your daily duty about the farm. Do not hang your head. I foresee that an abbot will once more rule within these walls, and that you, José will die as one of his family. Have patience."

A sudden change came over Sebastian as he ceased speaking. The hectic bloom faded from his cheeks, and the heavy lids drooped over his preternaturally bright eyes. A moment later he sank forward against the table. Antonio and José sprang at once to his help. He had swooned. They made haste to bear him bodily to his cell. It was an easy task; for beyond the weight of his cloak there seemed to be hardly anything to carry. After they had laid him on his bed and dashed water from the torrent in his face, he revived and said faintly:

"Thanks, thanks, thanks, I am well. Leave me. I shall say mass to-morrow at five o'clock. Leave me."

He fell into another unnatural sleep. But Antonio did not leave him. All through the short warm night he watched and prayed. At last the dull chant of the Atlantic was drowned under the glittering trills of near blackbirds. Day dawned. The sun rose above Sebastian's Spain; and the sleeper awoke.

He answered the traditional Benedicamus Domino with so ringing a Deo gratias that Antonio thought a miracle had happened. Sebastian looked stronger and healthier than ever before. Even José, who had been sleeping heavily on the corridor floor, was aroused by Sebastian's two words.

They repaired to the chapel. There Father Sebastian heard the confessions of his two companions. Without delay he proceeded to the sacristy. Antonio followed him and began to lift from its drawer one of the less costly vestments which had never been taken away. It was green and gold, as appointed in the Ordo for that day. But Sebastian, having bidden him replace it, drew forth a black chasuble, simply embroidered with a plain white cross. Antonio felt justly rebuked. When the Abbot was dead, and the Prior and all the fathers save two, surely it was meet that the survivor's Mass should be a Mass of requiem.

From his pocket-case, Sebastian took the unconsecrated wafers which he had brought from Lisbon. He finished his vesting and preparation and they re-entered the chapel. José was kneeling devoutly on the lowest step of the sanctuary. Outside, hundreds of birds were in full boisterous song.

Father Sebastian went to the foot of the altar and began to say Mass. He uttered the words quickly and clearly, and made the genuflections without difficulty. Indeed, Antonio, as he poured water over the white and fleshless fingers at the psalm Lavabo, marveled more than ever at the miracle of his friend's sudden strength. At the commemoration of the dead, the intensity of Sebastian's recollection seemed to make the whole chapel thrill and throb, like a bed of reeds in a wind.

After he had given the most holy Body to Antonio and to José, Sebastian concluded the Mass and returned to the sacristy with a firm tread. He laid aside the sacred vestments and came back to his old stall in order to make his thanksgiving. Antonio, also in his old stall, knelt at Sebastian's side.

The ascending sun cleared the top of the hill and shone into the chapel. The diadem of the Holy Child blazed with glory. In all the trees happy birds redoubled their songs.

Half an hour passed. José, arising noisily, made Antonio open his eyes. But Father Sebastian knelt without moving against the sloping book-board. José clattered out. Still Father Sebastian did not move. Antonio waited, revering his friend's ecstasy of communion with his Lord. He waited long. But meanwhile a broad sunbeam had been working westward; and at last it poured its burning gold upon the bended head.

Antonio was stepping softly forward to screen his friend from the fierce ray when a sudden instinct bade him kneel down and look into Sebastian's face. But Sebastian's wide-open, rapturous eyes did not gaze into Antonio's; nor were they beholding any earthly thing. So beautiful was the sight that Antonio's exclamation was more a shout of joy than a cry of fear. Into his mind there rushed the words of Isaias which had been Sebastian's favorite scripture in the old days, Regem in decore suo videbunt oculi ejus: "His eyes shall see the King in His beauty; they shall behold the land which is very far off."

Antonio and José buried the body of Sebastian that night on the sunny side of the cloister, between the third and fourth pillars, just under the tile-picture of Enos, with its legend, Ambulavit cum Deo et non apparuit, quia tulit eum Deus: "He walked with God and was no more seen, for God took him."

IV

On the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, just thirty days after Sebastian's death, Antonio heard Mass in the village church. Forty-eight hours were left to him before his payment to the Villa Branca Fazenda became due. In the strong-box at home he had only three hundred and twelve pounds towards his debt of five hundred. Nothing had been received from Sebastian's friend in Spain, although sufficient time had elapsed for a reply to reach the farm. Nevertheless, Antonio rose from his knees at the end of Mass and took his way homeward with a serene spirit.

From the point where he and José had seen the ruts of young Crowberry's wheels nearly two years before, the monk heard thumping hoofs. He gazed down the road and saw an advancing cloud of dust. A few moments later he made out the milk-white Branco which had succeeded coal-black Negro as the Navares' post-horse. Thomé, the postman, drew rein and handed Antonio two letters.

The first was from young Crowberry. It ran:

Dear Friend da Rocha.

You will be sorry to hear that my father died last week, suddenly. I know you will pray for him; and I hope you will pray for me too.

Strange to say, Sir Percy also passed away last week, two days after my father. I saw it in the papers, but I know no details. At Christmas my father saw him at Weymouth, and he seemed well.

As our affairs are tangled, I have much to do. Write to me soon. My thoughts turn to you very often nowadays. Tell me how you do, all round. I remain, your sincere friend. Edward Crowberry.

The second letter contained a draft for two hundred pounds payable at sight in Navares. Antonio regarded it without emotion. Even the fact that it was unaccompanied by a single line of writing from the sender did not stir him. He had fully expected that the money would arrive in due time from somewhere, and it was no surprise to find it in his hand. A single thought filled every corner of his mind. Isabel was a thousand miles away, sunk in deepest sorrow, with none to comfort her.

Thomé slapped Branco's neck noisily so as to arouse Antonio from his reverie and to remind him that the postage had not yet been paid. Although it was not the first time he had seen a man tear open a bulletin of death at the roadside in the full blaze of noon, Thomé was sympathetic. But business was business. In his turn every man had to die; but meanwhile Thomé had to live. Antonio took the hint and gave the man his money.

When José saw the draft, half an hour later, he so far forgot a would-be monk's decorum as to execute a rustic dance. The next minute, without being conscious of any incongruity, he said:

"Father I knew this money would come. I knew it this morning, at Mass. What did the Introit say? Nunc scio vere quia misit Dominus angelum suum, et eripuit me: 'Now I know verily that the Lord hath sent His angel and hath delivered me.' I knew. Deo gratias."

"Deo gratias," echoed Antonio. But his eyes were dull and there was no ring of exultation in his tone. He arose and went to his cell; but she seemed to be there, opening the cupboards and searching sadly for what she could not find. He ascended to the roof of the cloister: but restlessness dragged him down again. Wandering out into the open-air his feet turned of themselves towards the guest-house. He meant to go no further than the steps where she had said, "Promise that I may see you again," and where he had carried her like a child in his arms; but he soon opened the door and made his way to the salon. The sight of the blue ottoman quickly drove him out again, and he mounted the stairs until he stood outside her chamber. The little key was in his pocket, for he never allowed it to go out of his sight. He fumbled for it and touched it. But it seemed to burn him. He hurried down the stairs and out of the house.

Striding along the broad path he returned to the abbey and entered the chapel. As he sat down in his old place a sudden thought came to his help. This was the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, the twenty-ninth of June; and on the eighth of July all Portugal would be celebrating the feast of Saint Isabel, Portugal's holy Queen. There was just time, neither a day too much nor a day too little, for the nine days of his novena. He clutched at the coincidence like a drowning man at a straw; and although in less perilous moments he might have called it a straw, indeed, he found in it a plank to buoy up his sinking soul.

There and then he began his nine day's pleading for the Saint's intercession. In deep humility he made use of a little ill-printed pamphlet, bought by José years before for a vintem at a village fair. Outside this penny chap-book one saw a rough woodcut of the Holy Queen, with a crown on her brow and a scepter in her hand. Inside one found a sequence of pious exercises for the novena, set forth in the simplest and shortest words of the vernacular. Antonio could have extemporized more dignified prayers; but he believed in the communion of saints and chose to link himself with the child-like faith of the poor and humble.

On the last of June he tramped into Navares to cash the Spanish draft, and on the first of July he rode into Villa Branca to pay away his money. All the way out and home, on both the days, he prayed. Every morning of the nine he heard Mass at the village, and on three mornings he communicated as well. He besought José to pray for a special intention; and, breaking through his reserve, he asked some of the village Saints and Blessed Ones to do the same.

Meanwhile the work in vineyard and distillery had grown heavy. Throughout his novena he devoted six hours of the twenty-four to sleep and meals, four to Mass, Office, and prayers, and all the rest to account-keeping and manual labor. The resultant exhaustion of his bodily strength seemed to sharpen his spiritual senses. On the fourth day, as he and José were saying Lauds, Antonio could hardly resist the belief that Sebastian's voice was joining in the holy Work. When Lauds were finished and he was busy among the vines, he decided that his overstrained nerves had been wrought upon by his knowledge that Sebastian's grave was only a few yards away, just outside the cloister doorway. The next morning, however, his inward ear seemed to hear afar off a vast babble of deep voices, as if all the generations of Saint Benedict's sons throughout thirteen hundred years were reciting Lauds together.

On the sixth and seventh and eighth mornings this mighty murmur of deep voices reverberated persistently in his ears, like the echoes of distant Niagaras and Atlantics. On the ninth morning, after his Mass and communion, he heard it again; but this time there was a difference. While he was beseeching the Isabel in heaven to pray for the Isabel on earth, an ineffable harmony filled the ears of his soul. Blending with the deep voices he heard voices that were high and sweet and clear, like woodbine and sweet honeysuckle and roses intertwining among the sturdy trunks and branches of an ancient forest. It was as if all the generations of Saint Benedict's daughters had added their songs to the songs of all Saint Benedict's sons.

The tide of harmony ebbed slowly away. But it left behind it a strange peace in Antonio's soul; even as the tides of ocean bathe the burning sands and leave them clean and cool. The peace which filled him passed his understanding, and he did not try to explain it. Rising up quietly, he gave the little book back to José and went about his work.

October came again; but this time Antonio did not run away. Until the Indian summer ended he was quieter than usual; but he met its memories without bitterness. The door of Isabel's room was still kept locked; he still avoided the stepping-stones, and every night and morning he remembered her in his prayers; but she had receded from the foreground of his life.

November and December were crowded with money troubles. The sales of the farm and sea-sand wines increased every year, and there was a constant demand for the two liqueurs: but Antonio's customers soon perceived that he was not a hard man, and they imposed upon him by taking excessive credit. His business needed capital; but every development had to be paid for out of revenue. Worst of all, a further instalment of five hundred pounds fell due on New Year's Day.

There was young Crowberry; but, after what he had said about his father's confused affairs, the monk did not think it fair to ask him for a loan. There was also Sebastian's Asturian nobleman; but loyalty to his dead friend restrained Antonio from requesting the Spaniard's further help. In his difficulty he wrote to Senhor Castro and followed up the letter by presenting himself in person at the old Castro cellars in Oporto early in December.

Senhor Castro, who had grown old and liverish, did not want to be troubled. He admitted that Antonio's English journey had firmly established the Castro fortunes; but, although he was a rich man, he gave proofs that all his money was invested beyond immediate recall. In the long run, Antonio crossed the bridge of boats from Gaia empty-handed.

He searched for the cobbler, his old landlord; but the whole family had gone to Brazil. Twice or thrice during his heart-wearing stay in the city he was cheered by the best of greetings in the worst of Portuguese from Gallegos to whom he had been kind nine years before. These Gallegos, however, did not help him to raise five hundred pounds. They were the Gallegos who had failed; for the Gallegos who had succeeded were all returned into Galicia with their savings.

A few days before Christmas the monk clinched a bad bargain with a small firm of so-called Anglo-Portuguese bankers, who were really common money-lenders in bankers' clothing. The head of the firm hailed from Hamburg and his partner was a Portuguese Jew. These plausible rascals agreed to lend Antonio a thousand pounds on unconscionable terms. Although the nominal interest was only seven per cent., one extra and another made it over twenty. For sending a clerk to attend the transfer at Villa Branca they required forty pounds, although his expenses could not exceed twelve. The conditions as to repayment were harsh. As security, the usurers required a first mortgage on the abbey, a second mortgage on the farm, a note of hand from Antonio, and a hold on the receipts from wine. The monk's heart sank as he signed the fatal parchment; but he espied the gleam in the Hamburg man's eye too late.

On New Year's Day, Antonio had a moment of brightness when the abbey passed finally out of the control of the Fazenda official; but he soon found that he had exchanged a whip for a scorpion. Before the moneylender's clerk returned to Oporto he confided vexatious instructions to the most unprincipled of the Villa Branca attorneys, who rarely allowed a month to pass thereafter without sending for Antonio on some frivolous pretext. Whenever this objectionable person and his still more objectionable wife desired a Sunday jaunt they drove over to the farm or the abbey, sponging on Antonio's hospitality and poking inquisitorial noses into everything. One day the pair brought two char-à-bancs full of their kindred to celebrate the senhora's birthday by a picnic at the stepping-stones; and when Antonio very courteously begged that the good things might be drunk and eaten in some other part of the domain, the attorney promptly became his active enemy.

Years passed. In spite of a hundred obstacles the wines and liqueurs made steady progress, and Antonio seemed to be within reach of his goal. Having ground out to the usurers nearly two thousand pounds in legal costs, interest, and repayment of principal, he owed them less than two hundred. A debt on his farm still remained; but the Navares' mortgagee was a reasonable man who was willing to wait. The monk reckoned that one more prosperous year would release him from the moneylenders' clutches and that, two years later, both the farm and the abbey would be his.

But Portugal's honest, hardworking men and women were once more being brought to the brink of ruin by the politicians. The minister, Costa Cabral, having been created Count of Thomar, sought to repay Queen Maria da Gloria by measures of excessive royalism; and immediately all the turbulent spirits in the country were let loose. Some rough-and-ready poet dashed down a Portuguese Marseillaise, in which an imaginary "Mary of the Fountain" was hymned as a Joan of Arc raised up to save the fatherland. In Villa Branca and Navares, Antonio often heard the lads singing:

Suddenly the Septembrists took arms. Under the Viscount Sa da Bandeira there broke out the insurrection called by some the Mob-war and by others the war of Maria da Fonte. Cabral fell, and the Marshal Saldanha filled his place. To end the bloodshed and disorder foreign Powers intervened.

On the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, exactly four years after Antonio began his memorable novena to Saint Isabel, the Convention of Granada was signed and a general amnesty was declared. The good news reached the farm on Saint Isabel's day, and Antonio hoped against hope that the dates were good omens. But within two years Cabral was once more in power; and, two years later, Saldanha and his soldiers once more turned him out.

One morning Thomé and Branco, both grown old, brought a letter to announce the bankruptcy of the Lisbon shippers to whom Antonio had entrusted the collection of his accounts. The news came barely a week before a further payment of one hundred pounds fell due to the moneylenders. Antonio immediately hired a fast horse and hastened to Oporto. In answer to his request, the Jew and the German blandly offered to renew his bonds on terms so outrageous that the monk walked out of their office. But only three days remained, of which one was a holiday. He called at Senhor Castro's house to find the master dead.

On the face of it, to raise a sum of two hundred pounds on property worth three thousand was an absurdly easy task, and Antonio counted on being able to wash his hands of the moneylenders within twenty-four hours. But owing to the political unrest an acute financial crisis prevailed in Oporto. Money was scarce and lenders were shy. Antonio's security was scores of leagues away, and there was no time to inspect it; nor could the title be easily investigated, as the deeds were in the money-lenders' hands.

On his last day of grace the monk presented himself again at the so-called bank and stated that he would accept the hard terms offered. He was received with a volley of abuse.

"What?" roared Senhor Neumann. "You have the impudence to come here again? After all our kindness the other day, what did we get? Nothing but ingratitude and insults. Get out. We're sick of the whole business. I'm determined to be done with it once for all. If you've brought our money, pay it and don't argue. If not, we foreclose the mortgage, and I shall write to Villa Branca to-night."

"You are quite right, Neumann," said Senhor Mual. "We were talked to like dirt. Senhor da Rocha could not have turned his back on us more offensively if we had been downright extortioners or common money-lenders. But don't be too hard on a man in a hole."

"I shall write to Villa Branca to-night," persisted the German. "I like business to be pleasant. What did the Senhor come here for at all, if he didn't mean to be straightforward? I like business to end as pleasantly as it begins. I like dealing with gentlemen."

Antonio bit his tongue. Senhor Mual spoke again; and once more Senhor Neumann retorted. At last their trite play-acting came to its usual end with the German loudly exclaiming:

"Very well, very well, have your way. We're a brace of soft-hearted old fools. Every scamp that comes along can get round us; it'll serve us right if we both die in the Misericordia."

Antonio signed fresh papers and hurried back to José. He spent three days writing English and Spanish and Portuguese letters to his customers in the Americas, unfolding new offers of discounts and a proposal for cash-payments against bills of lading. The result was the loss of half his Latin patrons, whose business could only be conducted on credit. Concurrently with these disasters the Lisbon Government kept on demanding larger and larger taxes; and Antonio never caught sight of the old white horse Branco without a shrinking of heart.

The monk fought on. To save a pound or two a year he gave up his English papers. But crisis followed crisis, and before long he owed Neumann and Mual almost as much as he had borrowed from them in the first instance. The two scoundrels played with him like anglers playing a pike. Sometimes they gave him so much line that he seemed to be regaining the deep broad flood of freedom. For a year at a time their letters would be friendly and the Villa Branca persecution would cease; but whenever the debt fell below three hundred pounds they struck sharply and began winding the firmly hooked fish pitilessly back to the bank. They knew how to enmesh him in widespread nets of petty litigation; and, although Antonio was far cleverer than the attorney, his cleverness availed him nothing. The affidavits of his opponents were invariably perjurious, but the monk scorned to swear falsely in reply, even on the most trifling point. Had he possessed money to carry appeals into the higher courts he might have obtained justice; but he never succeeded in going further than the Villa Branca court of first instance, where local corruption smiled at the maxim that Truth is mighty and must prevail.

Throughout these trials Antonio constantly advanced in the love of God and his neighbor. Although he could not give money, he gave his time and strength and knowledge to the help of the weak and harassed around him. A new cura came to the village, who soon discerned the spirituality of his mysterious parishioner and insisted on his enjoying the great consolation of serving at Mass. Meanwhile the monk kept up the daily recitation of the Divine Office in his old stall. Very often he was cheered by hearing again with his inward ear the vast, sweet chant of all Saint Benedict's sons and daughters. In spite of his troubles he was nearly always cheerful; and he would often echo the words of Saint Paul and say, In omnibus tribulationem patimus: "We suffer trouble on every side, but we are not in anguish, we are perplexed, but not in despair, we suffer persecution, but we are not forsaken, we are cast down, but we are not destroyed."

One morning, when he was dressing for an iniquitous law-suit, Antonio noticed that his hair at the temples had begun to turn gray. The next moment he remembered that it was the eve of his birthday, and that on the morrow he would be fifty years old.

V

Late one December night, as he lay in his lonely cell, a furious gale aroused Antonio from sleep. Something was groaning and creaking outside. He sat bolt upright and listened until he became certain that the great iron cross which formed the finial to the chapel roof had worked loose.

The monk sprang up and ran out into the rain. Scaling the chapel wall by means of a swaying ladder, he found to his dismay that the cross was within an ace of falling. There was no time to run down to the farm for help, nor even to return to the abbey for tools. The only action that could avail was to stand with his whole weight on the last ridge-stone and to hold up the cross against the wind with his whole strength.

Antonio took the cross in his arms. The sou'-wester, roaring like a thousand lions, thrashed him with stinging thongs of cold rain and did its best to hurl him down, cross and all. But he held on. Time after time the ridge shook like a bog under his feet, and the great finial tugged at his arms like a captured beast striving to escape. His hands bled through gripping the sharp edges of the iron. Once or twice, during the first half-hour, he was on the point of relaxing his grasp; but a great thought put endurance into his heart and strength into his arms. He thought of his Lord, cleaving to the cross on Calvary with an intensity of love which fastened Him there more securely than the iron nails. He thought of the darkness which was over all the land from the sixth to the ninth hour. Hitherto the monk had thought of that darkness as a mere absence of light; but, as he clung to the iron, with the brutal tempest howling and roaring and screaming, with the roofs and the trees whining and moaning, and with the icy darts of rain wounding him like thorns, he understood that it was a darkness reeling with all the sin of the world and envenomed with the hot panting of all hell's devils. With blood on both his hands and pains like red-hot needles in both his feet Antonio thanked God for this livelier sense of his Savior's passion, and he repeated the words of Saint Paul, Mortificationem Jesu in corpore nostro circumferentes: "Bearing about in our bodies the dying of Jesus."

Towards dawn, when the world seemed to be rocking under him and he was ready to faint, Antonio recalled that other night of storm when, in the chapel below, Isabel had nestled in his arms. Her presence seemed to be with him once more. It was as though her white slender hands were helping his to uphold the thick black iron, and as though her soft, sweet tones were murmuring encouragement in his ear. The gale and the rain bellowed and spat, but Isabel's voice softly drowned their din. Erat cum bestiis, et angelus ministrabat illi: "He was among wild beasts, and an angel ministered unto him."

José, hurrying to the abbey before sunrise to report serious damage among the sea-sand vines, arrived just in time to save both the cross and his master. Having driven in a wedge, he made haste to help Antonio down and to coax him into bed. To bed the monk went; and in bed he remained for a week, consumed by fever and tortured by nightmares. He seemed to be holding the lockless, boltless door of the chapel against the two usurers and the chief of the Fazenda and the Villa Branca attorney. He, Antonio, was holding it shut by fiercely pressing knees and thighs and arms and hands, and shoulders and brow against the oak while his enemies charged at it like roaring waves at a cliff.

When the monk arose from bed his magnificent health was gone. He suffered from headaches, and could no longer walk to the neighboring towns or do much manual labor. To employ his enforced leisure he advertised himself in two or three English and French papers as a private tutor wishing to receive one or two boarder-pupils for instruction in the classics, modern languages, and commercial routine; but there was no response.

Happily this illness befell during one of Antonio's periods of relief from the usurers' persecution. He knew, however, that such calms always heralded storms; and therefore he determined to use what health and strength remained to him in a grand effort to break out of the usurers' power. His debt, or rather their claim, stood at about nine hundred pounds. By selling the mortgaged farm and sea-sand vineyards, and also the whole plant, stock, and good-will of the wine and liqueur business as a going concern, Antonio could pay off the nine hundred and turn his back on Neumann and Mual forever. In the event of local lenders clamoring for the liquidation of the floating debts which he had incurred on the strength of his personal credit, he would be able to satisfy them by mortgaging the abbey timber and part of the domain with a Navares mortgagee. Then, although his health was enfeebled and José was no longer young, he would set himself to the task of clearing off the last debts by branding his amber-colored wine and pushing it in England.

Although so many miracles had been vouchsafed to him, both in his spiritual and in his temporal affairs, Antonio continued to employ all his energy and prudence. He maintained his old policy of doing the best he could and leaving the rest to God; but, until he had done his utmost, he would have felt it irreverent to expect a miracle. He would plan his campaign and dispose his forces and post his safeguards as if everything depended on his own arm and his own brain; and then, but only then, he would fall down in deepest humility and demand the divine help as if everything depended upon God. Accordingly he went about his new operations with so much circumspection that it was high summer before he saw his way to act decisively.

A payment of two hundred pounds to the usurers was almost due. It was payable through the Villa Branca attorney. Antonio had over a hundred in notes at the abbey, and he reckoned that the foreign drafts in the hands of his banker at Navares would yield at least a hundred and twenty more. As traveling fatigued him he made up his mind to combine the Navares and Villa Branca journeys in one. At Navares he would cash his drafts and open his negotiations for the sale of the farm and the wine-business; and thence he would ride over the hills to Villa Branca and pay away his two hundred.

There was no hitch at the Navares bank. The drafts realized one hundred and thirty-one pounds. With a thankful heart Antonio placed the paper money in his pocket-book and stowed it safely away in his belt of English leather. But before he was ready to go two men pushed the door open and strode hastily to the counter.

"It has come?" demanded the elder.

"No. Nothing," said the banker. "But I expect another post to-night."

The younger man staggered back as if he had been struck. As soon as he turned Antonio knew him. He was Margarida's brother, Luis. Senhor Jorge had been dead two years, and Luis was the head of the house. The elder man Antonio recognized as Margarida's husband, the builder's son from Leiria, who had set up business on his own account in Navares. Not wishing to intrude into their trouble, the monk tried to slip out unobserved. But Luis saw his face and hurried towards him with a cry of joy.

"It is the Senhor da Rocha," he cried. "Theophilo, you are saved."

"We shall see," said Theophilo quietly.

"Let us go to the Campo," suggested Antonio. "There we can talk quietly."

They walked along the shady side of the street until they came to the deserted public garden. Under an old lime-tree they sat down, beside a plashing fountain, and the monk waited for the others to speak.

"It is a matter of money," stinted Theophilo, "and it is not with my consent that Luis troubles your Worship about it."

"Before my father died," Luis began, "he called me to him and said: 'Luis, you and your brothers and sister have health and a little wealth, but I can't expect that you won't have troubles. When troubles come, be men and fight them as I have fought mine. But, if ever they are too strong for you, go to Manoel da Rocha up at the old abbey. We have seen little of him, through a misunderstanding that was no fault of his; but I know his worth. Tell him your trouble and he will help you out.' Those were my father's very words; and that's why I stopped your Worship at the bank."

"Your father was one of the best men I ever met," said Antonio. "May he rest in peace. Tell me your trial; and if I can help you I will."

"It is not easy to tell," faltered Luis. "If we cannot raise a conto of reis by three o'clock Theophilo must go to prison. My mother and Margarida will die of disgrace."

"Luis has not told your Worship," broke in Theophilo proudly, "that if I go to prison I go for another's crime. Before God, I am innocent. In an accursed hour I became the friend of Victor Sequeira, the treasurer to the municipal council. When I began business he lent me a few milreis. Last year he persuaded me to endorse some bills. He swore it was a matter of form. The bills have been protested, and I am responsible. On Monday I found that Sequeira ran away last week and that the bills were fraudulent, and that I cannot clear myself of complicity in the swindle. For my wife's sake they gave me four days to find the money. The time expires at three o'clock. We have pledged everything; but we still need a conto of reis. That is the tale. Luis has made me tell it. We have no right to expect that your Worship is interested in such a miserable affair."

"I am interested, I am grieved most deeply," said Antonio, in great agitation. "I know what it is to suffer terribly through signing papers in a hurry. But ... a conto of reis! Two hundred and twenty English pounds!"

"It is a great sum," answered Luis simply. "But if your Worship had it, he would lend us the money. It is only for a few hours. The bank expects a post to-night. Theophilo has written to his father, and the money will come."

"Senhor Theophilo," said Antonio, who had become very pale, "at this moment I have two hundred and thirty-eight pounds in my belt. I meant to sleep here to-night, at the hospedaria, and to go on Saturday to pay the money away at Villa Branca. To settle my debt there is more than life or death to me."

Theophilo curled his lip.

"Your Worship is scornful," added Antonio. "If your Worship were not too well-bred he would say that I am telling a tale such as men nearly always tell when they are asked for a loan of money. No doubt Luis here partly thinks the same. Everybody in the village knows that I make a great deal of money and that I spend no more than a peasant. Everybody knows that I'm called the abbey miser and that I give away hardly a pound a year."

They remained silent.

"But everybody doesn't know," the monk continued, "that for more than fifteen years I have been in the grip of Oporto money-lenders. Everybody doesn't know that I have paid thousands of pounds—yes, thousands—in costs and interest, and that I still owe nearly as much as the original loan. I was going to Villa Branca to pay them nearly a conto of reis, and I had set my whole heart on getting out of their power. If I must renew this part of the debt it will be on ruinous terms, and I have no longer the health to go on fighting."

"I have stated already," declared the proud Theophilo, "that Luis has troubled your Worship without my consent. If I must go to prison ... well, to prison I must go, as better men have gone before me."

"Not so fast," said the monk. "Humanly speaking, is it certain your father will send the funds? Have you recent knowledge of his financial position? Can he disengage money from his business at such short notice? If I let you have the use of my conto of reis till to-morrow night, is there a risk of my losing it?"

"None!" cried Luis. But Theophilo, having reflected, said:

"I thank the Senhor. I shall not trouble him. There is a risk. An Englishman, from one of their great cities called Scotland, is contractor for works at Figueira da Foz. He has farmed out his contract to my father, and he is treating him unfairly. Your Worship, there is a risk."

Antonio sat staring at the fountain. In spite of the great heat he felt cold. At three o'clock Senhor Jorge's son-in-law and Margarida's husband must be thrown into a felon's prison for a crime not his own, in default of one conto of reis. And he, Antonio, had a conto of reis in his belt. By lending this proud and honest man the money he could perform a work of mercy which would pluck six men and women out of an inferno of despair and raise them to a paradise of thankfulness.

But there was a risk, a grave risk. Judging by his experience of Portuguese mercantile concerns, Antonio could indulge only a faint hope of Theophilo's receiving the money from Leiria before it was due at Villa Branca. And in that event—

The Navares clock struck two. Theophilo sprang to his feet.

"Adeus, Senhor," he said, "and thanks."

"No!" cried Antonio, plunging after him and gripping his arm. "I have not refused. An hour remains. Give me thirty minutes. This is a terrible affair. Stay here. In half an hour I will return."

Without awaiting an answer he hurried away. Quitting the Alameda by a side gate, he dived into a sunless alley and pushed at the door of the church of the Santa Cruz. It swung inwards. He hastened along the broad nave until he came to the brazen grille which barred the chapel of the Santissimo. There he sank down on the plank floor and, stretching despairing hands to the Presence on the altar, he cried out in agony, Domine, quid me vis facere: "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?"

The answer came swiftly. It was as though a voice, a strong Man's voice, yet a voice even sweeter than Isabel's, said in his ear:

"Antonio, lend Theophilo your conto of reis."

Of all the supernal voices which had ever spoken to him, this was the nearest and the clearest. If the brazen grille had opened and an angel had come forth proclaiming it with the voice of a trumpet, Antonio could not have been more sure that his Lord was bidding him lend Theophilo the money. Yet he could not, all in a moment, accept the answer. Horror, kindling almost to anger, filled his soul.

So this was to be the end. For fifteen years he had been slaving to fill the pockets of infamous extortioners; and now he was to take the price of freedom and pay it away to replace the plunderings of a runaway swindler. A hideous thought, more foul and hideous than the blankest atheism, rushed into his mind. It was a thought about God. That God existed Antonio could not doubt; nor could he question that God intervened, as the Christians believe, in men's and women's lives. The Christians said that He was all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. But perhaps the truth was, after all, that He was all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-mocking.

Antonio could grant that a work of mercy to men should take precedence of a work of praise towards God. But if God had intended him for works of mercy, why had He called him into a contemplative Order, and why had He suffered him to go on finding a dozen contos for usurers while he was refusing pence to honest men? And Isabel, his breaking of the heart of Isabel—how did that supreme deed fit into the sorry scheme? Yes, God had mocked him. He had made the world, and all the men and women in it, as a puppet-show to divert His eternal boredom. He had sat lounging on the arch of heaven for five-and-twenty years watching his, Antonio's, toil and strife just as a lazy lout lolls on the grass watching ants working hour after hour at the ant-hill which he intends to kick to pieces before he goes home.

The monk did not deliberately think these thoughts. They swept thunderously over him like a tidal wave drowning a lowland coast. For a moment they roared in his ears and took away his wits. But as he came to the surface he rallied all the forces of his soul and struck out desperately to regain his rock of faith. God was no mocker. He was Love, all Love; and the thick blackness of this new and dreadful ordeal was only a shadow cast by the eternal Light. Nevertheless, Antonio all but failed to resist the sucking undertow of fresh doubts and to maintain his foothold amidst the battering surf of despair.

Close beside him, on an altar to the right of the grille, rose a statue of the Blessed Virgin, crowned with a golden crown and robed in the blue velvet robe of an eighteenth-century Portuguese princess. To her Antonio cried out for help. When words of his own refused to come he poured forth the words of Saint Bernard's prayer Memorare. For a prolonged while no help came, and he crouched on the planks, shrinking from the heavy stripes which God had appointed him. He remembered the ruined abbeys of England. Doubtless stronger and wiser men than he had labored to restore them to the Church and to her Orders; but three hundred years had passed, and so far as Antonio knew, not one monastic house had been rebuilt upon the old foundations. Perhaps it was the divine will that the Orders, renouncing the world, should never be too long rooted in this acre or that; and perhaps it was ordained that they must renew their vows to the Lady Poverty in hovels and barns and caves. But, in that case, why had God bidden him waste his life in separation from the exiled brethren of his Order? He gazed through the grille as if he would demand the answer. But the ears of his soul heard no word save:

"Antonio, lend Theophilo your conto of reis. Antonio, lend Theophilo your conto of reis."

Not yet could he submit. The smoldering rebellion in his heart was quickening for a burst of flame. At last his eyes rested on the faded gilt legend running along the pedestal of the Virgin's blue-robed image, Ecce ancilla Domini, fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word." To Antonio this brief scripture recalled more than the pearly moment when the Virgin of virgins, despising the evil tongues of men and looking steadfastly into the deep, dark eyes of sorrow, surrendered herself to the will of God; for it recalled also the fiery hour when he himself, in the same words, had finally accepted the monastic life. With the memory of old battles and old victories there rushed upon him new graces.

"Ecce servus Domini," he cried in sudden triumph, "fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum!" And, having prostrated himself with loving reverence before his Master, he rose up and sped back to the Campo, where Theophilo was striding up and down.

"Senhor Theophilo," said the monk, "I will lend you my conto of reis."

Theophilo stared at him in amazement. So sure had he felt of Antonio's refusal that he would not have remained in the Campo had there been any other quiet and open place wherein to spend his last hour of freedom. He resisted; flushed; seized the monk's hand and dropped it the same moment; and at last began to stammer incoherent protests and thanks.

"But I will lend it," continued Antonio, "only on one condition."

"On any condition you like," cried Theophilo, beside himself with joy. "If it's a hundred per cent, I don't mind. I'll work like a slave to pay back every vintem and still I shall be your Excellency's debtor."

"I ask harder terms than a hundred per cent," explained the monk quietly. "My condition is this. Pledge me your word that if your father's money does not come in time to settle my own debt in Villa Branca you will never reproach yourself on my account. Promise that you will believe me when I say that, although I shall be happier to-morrow night with your father's conto of reis, I shall not be miserable without it. Promise to believe that, if your father fails us, I shall have no grievance against him or against Luis or against you."

Theophilo could only stand stock still, staring and breathing hard. The clock struck half-past two.

"Quick!" urged Antonio. "There's no time to lose. See, here is the conto of reis. Pledge me your word that you will obey my condition, and the money is yours."

"Your Worship cannot mean this," broke in Luis. He had leaned against Antonio expecting to find him a broken reed, and he could hardly believe that this oak-like sturdiness was not a delusion.

"I mean every word," Antonio answered. "Come, take the money. I trust you to remember the terms."

He drew a few notes from the pocket-book and pressed all the rest into Theophilo's hand. The young builder clutched them eagerly; but a moment later he sought to thrust them back.

"No," he groaned, "I cannot, I must not. My father will fail me and you will curse us!"

"Come," answered Antonio gently, "I will tell you a secret. I have a Friend. While you sat by this fountain I went and asked His advice. I have asked it many and many a time, and He has never misled me yet. He told me to lend you this conto of reis. If the post does not bring a conto in its place, do not grieve. It is between my Friend and me. Go."

They looked at him wonderingly; but he hastened away. From the far side of the garden he saw them stand a whole minute irresolute. Then Luis seized Theophilo's arm and they walked off quickly into the town. As for Antonio, he returned to the church of Santa Cruz, and there, in a corner, he began to say his Office. He recited it without rapture, but with a quietness of mind which was better than ecstasy.