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:

Maria of the Fountain Has a sword in her hand, To slay the false Cabrals, The traitors to their land.

Forward! brothers, forward! Forward! be our cry; On! for holy Freedom To conquer or to die.

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.

Towards four o'clock two men entered the nave and knelt before the brazen grille. They did not discover Antonio; but, from his obscure corner, he could see their faces as they rose from their knees, and he knew that they had guessed Who was his Friend.

VI

The post arrived at six o'clock; but it brought no letter from Theophilo's father. Luis, with a pale face came to the hospedaria after dinner and broke the news falteringly. Glancing through the window, Antonio saw Theophilo pacing up and down outside. The monk put on his hat and walked into the street.

"Senhor, this is terrible," moaned Theophilo. "There is nothing."

"It is terrible indeed," answered Antonio, smiling. "At half-past two you make me a promise, and at half-past six you break it. Come, remember. Cheer up."

They walked beside him with downcast eyes.

"Come," he said again. "This will never do. Tell me. Does Donna Margarida know what you have been passing through?"

"Thank God, she does not, and she never shall!" cried Theophilo.

"Very well. Let us go to your home and hear some music and be gay. I'm a country booby, and when I visit the town I want to see some life. It is dull in the inn."

Theophilo became voluble in apologies for his negligence. He despatched one of the stable-boys hot-foot to warn the Senhora of their approach and followed with Antonio and Luis. In ten minutes they reached a garish new house, faced all over with colored tiles.

Margarida received her old flame with slight chilliness. Although she had turned thirty-five her good looks were not greatly diminished. With her sat Perpetua, Jorge, Lucia, and Juliana, her four black-eyed children, who were struck dumb by the advent of the handsome stranger. At first the proceedings were dull and frigid enough to remind Antonio of his first visit to Margarida's home. But Luis and Theophilo, in reaction from their days of stress and terror, soon became almost hysterically gay. The guitars came out; and when everyone was tired of singing and strumming _fados_ Antonio devoted himself to the little Jorge and his three tongue-tied sisters. He gradually wooed them out of their shyness by telling them a tale of the buried city of Troja, at the mouth of the Sado. By the time he was half through a revised version of the Three Hunchbacks of Setubal the audience had begun to be more tongue-free than himself; and when he made Perpetua hold the candle so that his clenched left fist and his right-hand fingers and knuckles threw upon the wall a shadow of a long-eared rabbit nibbling a cabbage as big as itself, the house rang with shouts of laughter.

The children were sent to bed at nine, wailing bitterly at their banishment. Theophilo took the guitar and played softly, so as not to keep them awake. He had a sympathetic touch and his music soothed Antonio. Sitting in a great chair, the monk looked round the room and wondered. His conto of reis had gone. In forty hours it would be too late to pay the attorney, and the usurers could be trusted so to foreclose the mortgage as to swindle him out of nearly all he had. Yet, somehow, he was happier than he had been for many a day. For a short while he asked himself if it were not callous to gaze so calmly at the wreck of his life's work. Ought he not to be aching and smarting and bleeding as he had ached and smarted and bled for Isabel? Did he truly care as deeply for the abbey and for the Order as he had cared for her?

All these probings left him unpricked. His contentment obstinately refused to be ruffled. Breaking his rule, he drank two glasses of sweet wine and ate a whole broa of Margarida's making. When he rose to go Margarida's manner was perceptibly less aloof, and she begged him to come again. At the street door Theophilo said:

"Your Excellency has heaped kindness upon kindness. How shall I ever repay him?"

"By permitting me to visit his house again to-morrow night," answered Antonio; "your Worship will have become my creditor. Adeus."

He worked his hand free from Theophilo's iron grip and returned to the hospedaria, where he fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. Next morning, after Mass, he did not lose a moment in opening negotiations for the raising of an immediate conto of reis on his encumbered assets. But Luis and Theophilo, in pledging all they possessed, had almost exhausted the ready-money resources of Navares. Late in the after noon Antonio thought he was succeeding; but the existence of the Oporto usurers' second mortgage on the farm blocked the way. At four o'clock he gave up the struggle and went to Santa Cruz to say his Office. At half-past five he sat down in the hospedaria to dine.

Just after the soup tureen had been placed on the table a tremendous noise arose from the street. Every dog in Navares was outside, barking his hardest, and the iron shoes of a spirited horse were hammering on the cobbles. The Gallego waiter rushed downstairs to welcome the guest. Doors banged, hostlers shouted, buckets clanked, a horse neighed. The inn cat, which Antonio had been nursing, leaped from his knee and rushed downstairs to the lobby whence the prolonged wail of a badly scratched dog immediately ascended.

The monk, alone at the table, filled his gaudy plate with vegetable soup and began to eat. The stranger came upstairs to his room amidst a babble of welcoming voices. Through the thin wall Antonio could hear him drop his heavy boots on the bare floor. A cheerful splashing followed. The Gallego waiter, hurrying in with a dish of bacalhau, white cabbage, and hard-boiled eggs, excitedly explained to Antonio that the newcomer was an Englishman; and, five minutes later, a plumpish, rather florid man, with a clean-shaven face and soft yellow hair, strode into the room calling out an order for green wine.

Antonio rose and found himself face to face with young Crowberry. But, somehow, he could not feel in the least degree surprised.

"Good evening, Teddy," he said quietly. "Welcome to Navares."

Young Crowberry jumped. He stared blankly across the soup at the gray-haired man with the gentle voice. Then he flung himself forward against the table so impetuously that a brown water-pot was overturned and an empty glass jumped down to the floor with a crash.

"Da Rocha! By Jove! Da Rocha!" he cried, wringing the monk's hand. "Man, I've come all the way from England to find you. Why the deuce did you drop writing? And what do you mean by growing gray hairs? How's José and all the little Josés, and the champagne and all the little champagnes, and the orange brandy? Have you pawned the spoons? Da Rocha! By Jove!"

"Come round and sit beside me," said Antonio.

As the deluge from the overturned water-pot had soaked the cloth all round him the monk bade the waiter remove his cover and young Crowberry's to the little table by the window.

"And ask him to bring green wine," said young Crowberry. "Quarts, Gallons, Buckets, Hogsheads, Bottomless pits. I'm as thirsty as the devil."

When orderly conversation became possible, the monk was able to puzzle out a mystery which had pained him. By comparing notes and sifting dates they found that one letter from Antonio must have gone down in the wreck of the mail-boat _Hortensia_, and that another letter had reached England while an unsatisfactory sub-tenant was occupying young Crowberry's chambers. After this misunderstanding had been righted the monk proceeded to draw out his friend's recent history. He found that young Crowberry, in his own phrase, had made three fortunes, of which he had lost two and three-quarters in financing foreign railway companies by whom he had been employed.

"But what does it matter?" demanded young Crowberry. "I've a quarter of a fortune left, and I'm hoping it'll be enough for my scheme. The man I'm trying to get in with isn't greedy."

"Explain," asked the monk.

"I'm hoping to buy a share of a snug little business and settle down," young Crowberry answered. "A wine business. I was born among bottles, and a cellar's better than a tunnel. That's why I've come to Portugal. I've invested four thousand pounds in British Funds for miscellaneous purposes, and to-morrow I'm going to offer my remaining five thousand to a man named da Rocha for a partnership."

Antonio heard him without visible emotion. For a long minute he gazed quietly into the street. At last he said:

"Edward, you asked me half an hour ago if I had pawned the spoons. They were pawned two years ago, to pay a Jew twenty per cent interest on a loan I'd repaid twice over. But it's a long story. Drink your coffee. Then we will go to your room."

In young Crowberry's room Antonio disclosed his secret. He began with his brief experiences as a youth in Lisbon. Rapidly and vividly he described his brief skepticism, his vocation to the religious life, his noviciate, his full profession, his ordination, his expulsion from the abbey, and his vow at the farm. Omitting only the affairs of Margarida and Isabel, he brought the history right down to that very day and to the moment of his failing to raise money in replacement of Theophilo's conto of reis. He slurred lightly over every passage in the narrative which might sound like self-praise, and sought rather to exhibit himself as a blunderer who ought to have attained his end years and years ago. He wound up by saying simply:

"It is our Lord who has sent you here to-day. If you have it with you, I will borrow a conto of reis and we will ride over to Villa Branca together in the morning. On the way we will talk about the partnership. My maximum price for a half-share will be a thousand pounds."

"My minimum offer is five thousand," said the engineer firmly. "Remember that I'm hoping to foist myself upon you till death do us part. I have wound up all my affairs in England. Meanwhile here is a conto of reis."

Some one knocked loudly at the door. It was the Gallego announcing that two senhores wished to see the Senhor da Rocha at once. The senhores, treading on the Gallego's heels, turned out to be Theophilo and Luis. They pressed into the room, but fell back at the sight of a stranger.

"You may speak freely, Theophilo," said Antonio. "This is the Senhor Crowberry. He knows my affairs. Tell me what you want. My own trouble is over. Senhor Crowberry has brought me a conto of reis."

"And here it is," put in Crowberry, opening his pocket-book. "I don't know how much a conto may be; but if it's less than two thousand pounds, help yourself."

"No," cried Theophilo. "We want nothing. Senhor da Rocha, I have wonderful news. Sequeira has come back. He had mixed the town money up with his own, but he is not a thief. He has just come back from Lisbon, and he has repaid me every vintem of what Luis and I paid to the municipal chamber yesterday. See. Here are the notes. Seven contos and two hundred milreis."

"And a special post has arrived from Leiria," added the radiant Luis, "with a conto from Theophilo's father. Theophilo, show it to their Excellencies."

"How many contos are here?" asked Crowberry, spreading out his notes.

"At the present exchange, you have at least twelve," said Antonio. "A conto is a million reis of our money and more than two hundred pounds of yours, at par."

"So we've twenty million reis altogether," Crowberry chuckled. "Let's change 'em into coppers and swim in 'em to see what it's like. Hasn't any gentleman got a conto or two more? I once knew a duke who overlooked a whole threepenny-bit for a week. It was in the lining of his old coat."

Luis and Theophilo stared at the Englishman with open mouths. They could not understand a word he said, but this made him the more marvelous. From Crowberry they shifted their wonder to Antonio. He seemed to have called down from the skies a familiar sprite who handed out millions as coolly as one boy giving another a few screws of newspaper for the tail of his kite.

"Put back your money, all of you," commanded Antonio. "Theophilo, give me your father's conto and we are square. And have I your leave to present my friend to Donna Margarida?"

The whole party made haste to the tiled house, where Jorge and his sisters hailed Antonio with shouts of joy. They were shy of young Crowberry at first; but, having asked ten minutes' leave of absence, the Englishman slipped out to a confeitaria and returned laden with so exciting a load of candied oranges, Elvas plums, Coimbra marzipan, and Spanish chocolate that Antonio's star was eclipsed for half an hour. The guitars and the sweet wine came out once more. Later on young Crowberry began to tease poor Margarida with such exaggerated compliments, in bad Portuguese, that Antonio was forced to kick his heel and to explain in hurried English that Navares was neither London nor Paris. But Theophilo did not take offense, and the visit was entirely a success.

On the way home Antonio asked:

"Do you hear anything of Miss Kaye-Templeman and Mrs. Baxter?"

"The widow Baxter is now the widow Lamb," answered Crowberry. "Lamb was a master-tanner. He survived the wedding six months. That's all I know. As for Isabel, I've heard nothing for years and years and years. After her father died she went to live with Lady Julia Blighe. By the way, you never told me what you really and truly thought of her."

Antonio turned the subject.

"When you say," he demanded, "that you are planning to live and die with me, what do you mean? If you are looking for a rural life, with the sports of a country gentleman, England is the only place to find it. If it's wine that interests you, I'm sorry; because you drink too much already. What do you mean?"

"I am not looking for the sports of a country gentleman," said Crowberry. "As for wine, you are mistaken. I drink a glass or two a day of the lightest at meals, and I never touch port or spirits. Da Rocha, I will tell you what I mean. Perhaps you were pained in my bedroom when I did not show great astonishment at hearing that you are Father Antonio, a monk of Saint Benedict."

"I was not pained. But I wondered."

"Father Antonio, I guessed your secret years ago. I guessed it on the voyage home from Lisbon. I guessed that you were working to regain the abbey. From what Sir Percy told my father, I believed you secured it after we went away. I imagined that you had resumed the cloistered life and that this was why you didn't write to your old friends in the world."

"But you came out, this time, to become my partner as a wine-grower," objected Antonio.

"Yes and No. I came out with money to buy vineyards and to work for my living as you have done. I meant to buy them as close to the abbey as I could. I meant to seek you out and to ask you ... to tell you..."

"Go on," said Antonio, taking his arm as they walked, "To ask me what? To tell me what?"

"To tell you that the burning desire of my soul," broke out the other ardently, "is to become a monk, like you. To ask you for your prayers and for your help. And when I saw you standing over your soup, still in a layman's dress, I didn't alter my mind."

Antonio remembered the vision of young Crowberry's future which had unrolled itself before him while the youth and he sat side by side on the cloister roof the day before Sir Percy failed to tear down the azulejos. In reverent thankfulness he listened to this older Crowberry without interrupting him again. But the Englishman misinterpreted his silence, and added hastily:

"Let me be plain. I don't claim to have the highest and holiest vocation. Some would say there is cowardice in what I want to do. I am running away from the world. The truth is that so long as I am in the world I cannot love and praise God. Whenever I have a pit and a gallery to play to, I am a rattle, a gas-bag, a mountebank. In spite of myself I jest about the holiest things, thus injuring others as well as myself. I want to work hard with my hands, to rise early, to sleep and eat roughly, and to learn to pray. Let people call me a coward if they please. I'm nearly forty. I've made my money, and I'm standing aside to let needier men make theirs. Besides, I hate railways. They will do more harm than good."

Antonio was still mute.

"When a middle-aged man in my country has made a competency," young Crowberry continued, "he either remains in business to make money which he does not need, or he retires and lives a life of selfish and expensive pleasure. A few, a very few, devote themselves to philanthropy or politics, and I honor them for it; but it has been breathed into my soul that I am to help mankind by prayer. Da Rocha, you are silent. You are shocked. You think that, instead of rising up early to pray, I ought to rise up early to go hounding and shooting the poor beasts and birds who have as much right to their lives as I have to mine."

"I have been silent," rejoined Antonio, "only because I could not speak for thankfulness. Nearly twenty years ago I knew that you would become a priest, and I hoped that you might become a monk."

"You consent? I may be your pupil?" cried the Englishman.

"I consent. You may be my helper, my fellow-laborer. You have much to learn and much to unlearn. Listen. This very night your training shall begin. Resolve that you will never again say you are as thirsty as the devil. The rest we will talk of to-morrow."

Antonio smiled kindly as he spoke. Young Crowberry noticed that the monk's expression was full of a solemn sweetness which had not been visible in the old days. At the same moment he became conscious of Antonio's broken health. The monk walked rather slowly and leaned heavily on the layman's arm. They did not speak another word till they reached the inn door.

Next morning, when Antonio awoke, he found young Crowberry standing over him with a bowl of Brazilian coffee and goat's milk, a newly-baked roll of white bread, and, rarest delicacy of all, a pat of butter. Protest was useless. A quarter of an hour later the sprucest barber in Navares appeared and shaved Antonio with the skill of a German. At seven o'clock horses began stamping outside; and, at five minutes past, Antonio and the Englishman were seated in a well-hung carriage behind a pair of bays.

"Does the Jehu understand English?" asked young Crowberry, cutting short Antonio's remonstrances against all this luxury. "No. He doesn't." "Good. Then, most reverend and illustrious Father, listen to me. One month from this date I, the most irreverend Senhor Teddy Crowberry, will begin to be your most docile servant. I shall obey you in all things. You shall be my Lord Abbot till one of us dies. But, for this month, your Reverence will obey me. Argument is useless. If I spend five guineas a day for thirty days, remember that I hope to live on fivepence a week for the following thirty years."

"A month! It is impossible," cried Antonio. "Besides, José expects me back to-night."

"I think he doesn't. An old ruffian on a white horse has taken him a letter from me. I was nearly asking him to send on your shirts to the inn at Villa Branca; but, if your Excellency will forgive my disgusting rudeness, I couldn't feel sure that you had a shirt to send. From Villa Branca we shall go to Oporto and punch the heads of those Jews. We shall wind up all your affairs there. Thence we shall go to Braga and see the Archbishop. After that, back to Coimbra, and to Lisbon to see the Patriarch and the Pope's Nuncio, and perhaps to Evora. See what a lot I know! I've been thinking it all over and over and over in the night. You are the only Benedictine left in Portugal, and we shall have to get these big pots to help us. Pah! How the sun does blaze. I'm as thirsty as an archbishop."

Young Crowberry had his way. After the Villa Branca attorney had been paid, Antonio was driven to the principal inn and served with such a luncheon as he had not eaten for twenty years. The next day, Sunday, after the military Mass, the monk ate a still more elaborate meal and whiled away the hour of digestion by reclining on the shaded balcony looking at the promenaders in the Passeio and listening to the band. In the cool of the evening they set out in a luxurious chariot towards Oporto. Three days were spent on the journey.

It was a triumphal progress. One of young Crowberry's first acts on arriving at an inn was to send forward a mounted messenger, with full instructions, to the next halting-place. As these couriers bruited it in every wayside wineshop that a bountiful Englishman was on the road, Antonio's chariot was attended by troops of brown-footed, brown-eyed, black-haired children who threw flowers at the travelers and trotted alongside the wheels pleading for "five little reis"--the Portuguese farthing. Instead of _cinco reis_ young Crowberry flung out tostões, or fivepenny pieces, such as most of the youngsters had never handled on their own account before, and the chariot rolled on amidst pæans of joy.

In Oporto, where Antonio had supported life on a few pence a day, the travelers put up at a French-managed hotel and drank dry champagne from Reims. Emboldened by this lively draught, young Crowberry dealt with Neumann and Mual to such purpose that they thankfully accepted three hundred pounds in full discharge of Antonio's outstanding obligations. With the abbey deeds in Antonio's valise the travelers took the direct road for Lisbon, where the archbishops and bishops, as peers of the kingdom, had assembled for the opening of the Cortes. Here and there along the route young Crowberry pointed out the cuttings and embankments for the projected railway. In Coimbra they rested two days and read up every book they could find in the University library which bore upon the case before them.

Young Crowberry was for a theatrical burst upon the whole bench of bishops in Lisbon; but the prudent Antonio sought out his own diocesan and confided to him the whole story. The prelate heard him attentively and with growing emotion. He told Antonio that the Dominicans and Franciscans had already recovered certain houses in Portugal, and that the Government, having got its money, was winking at the return of the Orders. He bestowed upon the monk a fervent blessing and bade him return the next day.

Within forty-eight hours Antonio was received by three-fourths of the Portuguese hierarchy, and by the Papal Nuncio as well. His tale brought tears to the eyes of all, not excepting a political bishop who was supposed to believe that Portugal would be better off without the religious Orders than with them. The Nuncio dispatched a special memorandum to Rome, and three of the bishops wrote long letters to Benedictine abbots abroad, including an abbot-president, asking for their counsel.

Young Crowberry's deportment among these dignitaries left a little to be desired. At his entrance he would kneel and kiss the ring of a suffragan with disconcerting ardor, and the next minute he would begin to tell the Primate of the Spains a funny story in execrable French. On the whole, however, young Crowberry was better liked for his worldliness than for his piety. His dinner at the Bragança Hotel made a deep impression upon those ecclesiastics who were not too dignified to assist at it; and when their magnificent month drew to a close the Englishman and Antonio left Lisbon with the knowledge that they had committed no grave blunders and that they had made a host of powerful friends.

José received the Senhor Crôbri warmly. Within two days of the Englishman's arrival at the abbey the mortgages on the farm and the sea-sand vineyards were cleared off and the silver spoons came back from pawn. On Saint Isabel's Day both José and young Crowberry were assigned to cells in the monastery; and from that morning community life was solidly established and the work of God was regularly performed in choir. At Christmas, with Antonio's permission, another novice arrived in the person of an English clergyman who had been young Crowberry's closest friend.

Months passed. Twice Antonio received ecclesiastical notables at the abbey and twice he was bidden to Lisbon. At length it was found possible to form a small cosmopolitan community of monks from Brazil, Spain, Bavaria, and Belgium. As the sole link between Portugal's old and new Benedictine life, and as the savior of the abbey for his Order, every one looked towards Antonio as the new Abbot. But he set his face like a flint against the plan.

"My Lord," he said to the Nuncio, who had been expressly charged to impart to him the blessing of Pio Nono, and to inquire what boon Antonio most desired, "ask the Holy Father to intercede with those who would make me Abbot against my will. For more than twenty years I have dwelt in the world, buying and selling, and I am not fit to guide the simplest monk in the religious life. Suffer me to obey my Master's word. I hear Him saying, _Vade, recumbe in novissimo loco_."

"Father Antonio stops his ears too soon," observed the German Abbot-President who was assisting at the interview. "In the same verse of the Gospel he will find also _Amice, ascende snperius_. But let him be consoled. The anniversary of his ordination, and of his expulsion from the house he has saved, is drawing near. On that day let him say his first Mass; and after he has said it, let all things be set in order."

VII

On the day of his first Mass Antonio rose at dawn and climbed the spiral stairway to his bench on the roof of the cloister. A cardinal, three bishops, and two abbots were sleeping within the abbey walls, and a duke and his duchess were up at the guest-house. The monk yearned for solitude after a distracting week, and the cell was too narrow for his expanding and aspiring soul.

Muffled in a warm new cloak which young Crowberry had forced upon him in Lisbon, Antonio bent his whole mind and soul to the ineffably sacred and glorious Work which lay before him. At last, after all these years of dogged battle, he had won the fight. At last the dead Abbot's prophecy was about to be fulfilled, and he, Antonio, was about to break the most holy Body and to hold up in the great chalice the most precious Blood.

To his dismay he found it difficult to meditate steadfastly upon God's unspeakable Gift. Try as he would, he could not concentrate an undivided mind upon the crowning mystery of faith. That his thoughts should wander a little on the morning of such an anniversary was perhaps natural; but somehow every thought led back to Isabel. He rebuked himself sharply, and forced his mind once more to pious thinkings. He called to memory the holy Francis of Assisi who died a deacon, and the holy Benedict who died a layman. If these two saints, who stood so high among all the saints of the universal Church, had never presumed to offer the Holy Sacrifice, how could he, Antonio, who had lived less than ten years in religion and more than forty in the world, dare to say this Mass?

Despite his efforts to dislodge it, the thought of Isabel neither moved nor weakened. Words which she had spoken on the last afternoon at the cascade rang like bugles through his brain. In terrible wrath and bitterness she had cried: "I will come back! You will succeed. You will regain the abbey. You will fill it with monks. But remember. I will come back. On the day of your triumph I will be there. It isn't only you Southern people who love revenge. I will be there. I will come back!"

He rose from the bench and gazed at the calm Atlantic, glittering under the first sunbeams. But he could not banish the echo of her words. Isabel was coming back! Not for revenge. Ever since the end of his second novena to Saint Isabel he had rested quietly in a firm confidence that his prayers for Isabel Kaye-Templeman had been granted, and that his great hope had been fulfilled. She was coming back, not in hatred, but in peace.

No. All this was folly, and worse. How could she come back? How could she, after twenty years, find out what was happening in a corner of distant Portugal? The very idea was madness. Nevertheless Antonio could not drive it away. He descended to his cell, but her invisible presence seemed to fill it; and it was only in the chapel that he firmly regrasped the threads of his inward preparations for the coming Sacrifice.

Eager whisperings in the nave drove him back to his cell. Lay folk from far and near were beginning to arrive. All of them had risen before daybreak, and some of them had been tramping all night. Throughout the country-side an exaggerated account of Antonio's acts and sufferings had sustained so much embellishment that he was already being venerated as a saint of heroic virtue. Had he not, simply by praying in the Navares church, caused an English lord to spring up, so to speak, out of the earth with fifty contos of reis, all in gold? Had he not cast a devil out of the shaggy, wild-eyed José? Had he not withstood the rich and beautiful Margarida? Had he not wrought the indisputable miracle of changing common wine into champagne simply by standing a bottle on its head? Had he not driven away from the azulejos the stiff Englishman with the icy, golden-haired daughter, all by a supernatural spell of holy anger? And, to crown all, was he not making a cardinal and three bishops to grow where never more than one bishop had grown before?

A little later the mere sightseers were reinforced by files of devouter worshipers whose Christian souls had glowed and burned at the tale of Antonio's faithfulness; and, by degrees, the reverential expectancy of these more earnest spirits hushed all unseemly shufflings and whisperings. According to Portuguese custom there were no seats, and everybody knelt on the floor. As the nave became more crowded the strange silence became deeper. It was broken at last by the unrestrained sobbing of the widow Joanna Quintella, who was suddenly filled with bitter remorse for having fastened upon Antonio his nickname of "the abbey miser." Her example was too much for the weaker wills, and one after another joined her in weeping.

The cardinal and the bishops, whose visit was unofficial, had stipulated that they should not be expected to make a ceremonious entrance or to bear themselves with any appearance of defiance towards the obsolescent laws against the Orders. They seated themselves without ostentation in stalls which were only distinguished from the stalls of the monks by thin cushions and kneelers stuffed with straw. There, with bowed heads, they prayed not only for Antonio and for the restored Benedictine life of Portugal, but also for a renewal of the fervor with which each one of them had said his first Mass long years before.

On the stroke of ten the sacred ministers emerged from the sacristy. As his assistant priest Antonio was accompanied by one of the new community, a young Benedictine from Brazil. A Franciscan from a restored house in Entre Minho e Douro was deacon, and the sub-deacon was the village cura. The servers were José and Brother Cypriano, last of the old lay-brethren, who had arrived the night before from Evora.

As Antonio appeared a murmur of awe escaped from the intent crowd in the nave. The monk had recovered his power of concentration, and his face was not like the face of a mortal man. But he moved forward, all unconscious that the people were not pleading with God for mercy upon him as a poor and presumptuous sinner.

To make a way to the sanctuary the acolytes had almost to push through the people; and at one point the procession was brought to a momentary halt. Instantly a handsome woman, whom Antonio remembered as one of the belles of Senhor Jorge's serão, held up a puzzled, big-eyed child and said, in eager tones loud enough for the monk to hear:

"Look, little one, look! It is a saint that is passing by!"

At the same moment a rough young farmer bent forward and clumsily kissed the hem of Antonio's chasuble. The monk recoiled and almost let the sacred vessels fall. The man's touch and the woman's words had cut him like knives. A saint! He, Antonio the hard, the proud, a saint! All the selfishness of his life rose up before him. His long coldness to José; his persistent aloofness from the life of the village which he ought to have shared and uplifted; his whipping and driving of Isabel with whips of rebuke and argument when he ought to have led her with silken cords of sympathy; his repeated refusals of charity when a little more fasting and a little more labor would have enabled him to feed the hungry; his self-esteem; his want of meekness under opposition and insult--these, all these, were the solid facts of his life, standing up as gaunt and huge as monstrous rocks with only one poor shrunken runnel of love trickling down between. A saint! If the sacred vestments had not been hanging from his shoulders he would have cried, "No, good people, no! Pray for me. I am the poorest sinner of you all."

The crucifer cleared a passage through the kneeling, murmuring, weeping people, and the procession moved on, picking a way among the broad-brimmed hats and wallets of provisions which lay on the pavement. After making five or six yards of progress it came to a halt again. His pious preoccupation could not wholly blind Antonio's eyes to the picturesqueness of the sight. The many-colored kerchiefs of the women, the rich olive skins and glossy black hair of the children, and the bright waistbands of the men were made ten times more sumptuous by the cool, monotonous background of blue-and-white azulejos. Here and there a knot of shepherds, in sheepskins, knelt with their long staves rising up like spears above the heads of an army. Two or three fans moved languidly, like gaudy flowers swaying in a breeze. Straight ahead, beyond the black monks and the purple prelates, rose the high altar, with the Virgin and her Child enthroned above the soft flames of six tall candles, set in candle-sticks of burnished gold.

As the procession resumed its march Antonio's glance was suddenly seized by a sight which almost made him stumble. Close to the wall, beside the cloister doorway, knelt Isabel. Her form was enveloped in an exquisitely fine dust-cloak of silver-gray, and a black lace mantilla covered her head. Yet, even before he saw her face, he knew that it was she. The cherubs in the azulejos above the doorway seemed to be looking down upon her curiously, as if they found in her something different from common clay. Her gaze was fixed upon the ground.

Recovering his self-control by a supreme effort, Antonio advanced to the sanctuary and made the due obeisances. Then he knelt down before the altar. No one wondered that his silent prayer was long; for was he not a saint and was not this his first Mass? The silence was profound from one end of the chapel to the other.

But Antonio's prayers were not what the onlookers thought. Isabel had come back; and, according to his practice, it was necessary to face the fact squarely in the light of common prudence. For nearly twenty years he had cherished one great hope concerning her until it had become a belief. For nearly twenty years he had given thanks to Saint Isabel for her miraculous intercession. But it was possible that, for nearly twenty years, he had been hugging a delusion.

"On the day of your triumph I will be there." So she had spoken; and she was keeping her word. "It isn't only you Southern people who love revenge." So she had stormed on; and perhaps it was for revenge that she was come. With a sickening of heart Antonio suddenly remembered reading in the Villa Branca paper a sordid story of a passionate woman in Sicily who had murdered a virtuous young priest on the steps of the altar. He remembered also young Crowberry's account of the throwing of a bomb at the new Emperor Napoleon in Paris. So far as he knew, such deeds were un-English; and, although Isabel was imperious, he could not credit her with a smoldering Latin vindictiveness leaping up into a fiery blaze of showy crime. Yet, after all, he knew so little of women, so little of the new hysteria which men told him was rife in the world.

What ought he to do? For himself and for his own life he did not care. His work was done; and if God willed that he should add the poor offering of his own blood to the infinite worth of the immaculate Host, he was ready to pour it forth. But what if there should be scandal, or, worse still, sacrilege? Or what if some desperate deed should wreak pain or death upon the innocent people? Ought he to rise from his knees, and to implore the prelates to grant him immediate audience in a place apart? With the whole might of his soul he besought Saint Isabel to intercede for him and to show him God's will.

A child in the nave let fall a rosary of copper beads. At the noise of the metal on the stone Antonio rose up. An inward voice bade him say his Mass and leave the rest with God. Making the sign of the cross, he invoked the Triune Name and said, in a clear voice, "_Introibo ad altare Dei_."

At the Confiteor his earnestness was so terrible that the subdeacon shrank back, understanding for the first time the blackness and foulness and meanness of the smallest sin against the eternal holiness and majesty and love. Even in the nave, where it was impossible to hear Antonio's voice or to see his face, the poignancy of the monk's Confiteor made itself felt. Like ripe corn bowing before a wind, the most hardened and careless bent lower and yearned forward in an anguish of contrition for forgotten sins; and when Antonio pronounced the words _indulgentiam, absolutionem et remissionem_ the whole chapel respired one great sigh, as if a merciful king had just ended the suspense of a culprit condemned to death. At the Gloria all hearts soared up like birds to hymn the good God in the heights.

After the first Gospel one of the bishops arose to preach. He recited for a text the words of Isaias, _Dicam aquiloni, Da, et austro, Noli prohibere. Affer filios meos de longinquo, et filias meas ab extremis terrae_: "I will say to the north, Give, and to the south, Hold not back. Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth." His magniloquent exordium was worthy of the bishop's reputation as the most eloquent preacher in the Peninsula. In stately periods he began to show how north and south had indeed given their sons to rebuild the Benedictine Order in Portugal. But, at such a moment, his eloquence jarred. He himself was the first to become convinced of its discordance; and, suddenly changing the key, he humbly asked the prayers of all on Antonio's behalf and went back to his place.

The Creed, which young Crowberry and his clerical friend had been brought up to regard as a penitential chain dragging at the human intellect, was sung more triumphantly than a battle-song or a national anthem, with all the eagerness of enthusiastic faith. When Antonio turned and said _Orate, fratres_, even the sightseers prayed.

At last Antonio began the Canon. At the commemoration of the living, Isabel was the chief burden of his prayer. Having prayed for her, he thrust her from his mind and pressed on to the supreme moment of the Consecration. Spreading his hands over the oblation, he raised his eyes to the ivory figure of the Crucified. As he gazed, scales fell from his eyes. He saw, as he had never seen before, the everlasting sacrifice which lay behind and around the cross of Calvary. He saw behind the Victim who hung dying for three hours on the first Good Friday, the _Agnus qui occisus est ab origine mundi_, "The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." He saw the _Sacerdos in tetemum_, "The Priest for ever," _semper vivens ad interpellandum pro nobis_, "ever living to make intercession for us." He understood that the unutterable miracle of which he, Antonio, was about to become the instrument was not a stroke of strange magic, but a gracious overflow of that everlasting intercession. From books he had known these things with his mind; but now he knew them with his whole soul. His priestly instrumentality, like the rod of Moses, was about to strike the Rock; but the bright stream waiting to gush forth was the everlasting love of the Redeemer, flowing onward in its fullness whether Mass was said or not. Yet the children of Israel had died of thirst had not Moses raised his rod; and it was through him, Antonio, a weak and unworthy priest on earth, that men were about to receive the supreme bounty of the _Pontifex qui consedit in dextera sedis magnitudinis in cœlis_, "the High Priest who sitteth on the right hand of the Majesty in heaven."

When he elevated the sacred Host, Cypriano was ready to ring the sacring bells; but awe stayed his hand. From the cardinal in his purple down to the poorest hind in his sheepskin, all adored the God of God and Light of Light. Every heart cried, _Verbum caro factum est_: "The Word is made flesh and is dwelling among us, and we are beholding His glory."

Antonio pronounced the words _Simili modo_ and took the cup. At last God was fulfilling the old Abbot's prophecy: "I see Antonio standing before the high altar. I see him holding up our great chalice. I see him offering the Holy Sacrifice for us all." He raised the great chalice, with the blood-red rubies, which José had saved from the Viscount. Once again Cypriano tried to ring the sacring bell; once again the general awe restrained him. In deepest reverence all adored the precious Blood. Then burst forth the thankful cry _Benedictus_: "Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord."

Very solemnly and intently Antonio made the memento of the dead, especially of the dead Abbot and the fathers and brethren of the old community. He had said the Pater Noster thousands and thousands of times before; but as he stood before the altar every one of its petitions ascended from his lips without a trace of formalism or staleness. And when the time came for him to receive the celestial Bread, his _Domine, non sum dignus_: "Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof," was not merely a devout reading of seemly words from the printed missal; it was an uttering forth of his inmost soul.

The sacrifice was consummated. He took the ablutions and covered the chalice. When the deacon had sung _Ite, missa est_, men and women who had never tried to sing the response before joined the choir of monks in thundering out a mighty _Deo gratias_. Then the prelates knelt to receive Antonio's blessing. The lordly cardinal was the first to kneel. He knelt as if he were the meanest altar-boy rather than a prince of Holy Roman Church, and all the others made haste to follow his example. The monk, in deepest humility, blessed the people.

Antonio's thanksgiving was less prolonged than his brethren expected. But when they crowded round to escort him to the place of honor in the refectory he begged most earnestly that the meal might proceed without him. To the fervid protests of the cardinal and the foreign abbots he responded that from the morrow onwards he would re-enter the path of unquestioning obedience; but, for the remainder of this one day he humbly sought leave to go and come as might seem him good.

As soon as he had wrung out a reluctant consent Antonio slowly crossed the cloister garden. Two or three of the new monks sprang forward to attend him; but he waved them aside and went on, with slow steps and bent head. A bell clanged, and they melted away. He quickened his pace until he gained the door with the secret lock; and, before the echoes of the bell had ceased humming in the still air, he was standing on the causeway outside the cloister.

Not since the night of the thunderstorm had he walked along those moss-grown slabs. At the end of the causeway, where he had lifted Isabel upon his shoulder, he hesitated a short moment. Then he stepped down and followed a woodland path until the soft thunder of the cascade boomed upon his ear. The earth under his tread was sweet and bright with thousands of May flowers, and the May birds sang as they had sung on the May morning of Sebastian's last Mass.

Not for twenty years had Antonio set foot within a furlong of the stepping-stones. But José had obeyed his orders to the letter. A few gaps in the trees had been filled up, but otherwise nothing was changed. As he climbed the path the dull pounding of the tumbling water drowned the crooning of the stream at his feet, and at last he caught the silvery flash of the cascade through the trees, like a great fish struggling in a basket of reeds. And the flash of the cascade was not all Antonio saw. He saw as well a fine silver-gray cloak thrown down on a flat boulder; and standing beside it, a nun of the Order of the Visitation.

VIII

"I knew that you would come," said Isabel quietly as Antonio emerged from the bushes.

"I knew I should find you here," Antonio answered, more quietly still.

It seemed no more than a few feverish months since their parting. The boulder, the stepping-stones, the pool, the cascade, the rapids, the palms, the mimosas, the tree-ferns, the cypresses--all seemed unchanged. He raised his eyes and gazed steadily at Isabel. Time had not filched away her loveliness. Indeed, the nun's head-dress served even better than the golden ringlets of old to frame her beautiful features and to heighten both the blueness of her eyes and the whiteness of her brow. Like her father before her, she held herself as erect in middle-age as in youth. If some of the girlish bloom had gone, the loss was more than made good by new charms of womanly tenderness and Christian peacefulness.

"You see I have kept my word," she said, speaking easily and quite naturally. "On the day we parted, did I not say that I would come back? I have come."

"Yes," echoed Antonio, like a man in a dream. "You have come."

"When you saw me," she added, with a smile, "perhaps you thought I had come to shoot you or to stab you; or to set the chapel on fire, bishops and abbots and all."

Not for a moment had he lowered his gaze from her face. Merely to behold her again and to hear her voice, whatever her words might be, was happiness enough. The accord between them was so perfect that there was no need for questions, answers, news, explanations, reminiscences, plans, greetings, farewells. But she was waiting for him to speak; and at last, in the same dreamy tone as before, he pointed to her nun's dress and said:

"This wonderful thing came to pass, did it not, on the eighth of July, twenty months after you went away? That day was the feast of Saint Isabel of Portugal. It was also the last day of a novena I had been making to this very end. On that day, as I sat in the chapel, I heard women's voices, far-off and sweet, chanting the Divine Office; and I knew that this miracle had come to pass."

"You were not mistaken," she said, in low tones. "I awoke to my vocation on the eighth of July, the year but one after I left this place."

Minutes passed before either of them spoke again. Not that time and distance had been able to estrange them. They were one in heart and mind as they had never been before. But Isabel's mood had swiftly become attuned to Antonio's. It was enough to be at his side on their old battle-field and to know how perfect was their peace. For a long while they stood speechless with the great light of the Atlantic sparkling before their eyes and the great music of the cascade resounding in their ears. Antonio was the first to break the silence.

"Happiness is not the principal thing," he said, still gazing at the sea. "But I should like to know that you are happy."

"I am happy," she answered in a firm voice. "Entirely happy."

"For that," he said simply, "I thank God."

Another silence followed, longer than the other. At last she said:

"You are weary. You must sit down. Our time together is very short, so let me say what I ought to say."

They sat down on the boulder.

"That afternoon you sent me away," she began, "I went home with hatred and vengeance in my heart. I hated you and I hated God. I did not sleep; but, until dawn, neither did I shed a single tear. My hatred was like a terrible joy. It filled me so full that it left no room for grief. But when the sun shone upon my white roses and all the birds began to sing, my hatred snapped like a dry reed, and I threw myself on the bed and wept until I thought I should die.

"Gradually hope returned. I knew that you loved me; and I told myself that you would come to the cascade and that you would fall on your knees and implore my pardon. I even decided what I would wear, and I chose out a turquoise-blue ribbon for my hair because I thought you had admired it.

"Happily I had some pride left. I didn't go to the Cascade. But I bound my hair with the turquoise-blue ribbon all the same, and waited for you to come to the house.

"You know you never came. Instead, your man José appeared. I heard chaff flying backwards and forwards between himself and the servants. Fisher repeated some of it to me; and I learned that you had started at sunrise on a long day's journey.

"That was the last unendurable blow. You had run away lest I should summon you again to the cascade, or burst into your farm, or do some other shameless thing. It stung me to the quick. I became in a single moment as hard and cold as iron in a frost, and as bitter as poison. I pictured you coming up the next morning to say a ceremonious Good-bye--coming up all cool and self-possessed and hateful. It was too much. I decided to join my father at once. I enforced my will like a tyrant; and, before you came back, we were gone."

She paused. Antonio's human heart was breaking to tell her how he had passed that night kneeling on the floor beside her bed. But he held his peace; and Isabel went on:

"In one point you did me immediate good. I put down my foot boldly, and insisted that we should leave Portugal at once. As soon as we landed in England I sent Mrs. Baxter away. But I grew more hard and bitter every day. At last, partly from distraction, partly out of prudence, I mastered enough of business to go through my own and my father's affairs. One evening I made a cruel discovery. It was only a matter of five hundred pounds; but it overwhelmed me. I found that this abbey had never been in any sense mine. From my father I found out his plan concerning the azulejos; and from old Mr. Crowberry I found that you knew how things stood all along. Then I remembered some of my words to you, and my frozen heart melted at the sudden knowledge of your chivalry. Even when I threatened to burn the abbey down you held your tongue."

It puzzled Antonio that she should make so much of so little.

"Not chivalry," he protested quietly. "How else could I have behaved? Leave it. Come, tell me, Isabel, what first drew you to the religious life."

"I am telling you as fast as I can," she retorted, with all the old quickness and spirit. "From that day I ceased to glower at the memory of you in sullen hate. I began to be almost impersonally interested in your conduct, your ideals, your character. The theme engrossed me all day long. I recalled everything you had told me of the years before we met. I lived again through every moment of the fortnight we were together. And it became plainer and plainer that I could only explain you in one way. You were too healthy, too clear-eyed, too much of a man to be a fanatic; yet you were breathing your every breath under the sway of a supernatural idea. Against my will I was forced to admit that the idea must be true."

She paused again, weighing her words. Then she added:

"Of course, I knew that men have seemed to do wonderful things under the sway of ideas that are only delusions. Your idea was not a delusion. No man can get out of a delusion one atom more than he has put into it; but I saw that the idea--I mean, the supernatural reality--which dominated your cool brain was a reality from which you drew a mysterious something--a something quite beyond your own self, quite beyond your own nature. I had felt it, time after time, in your presence. It was not an illusion. It was there, indisputably there.

"What could this something be? I strove to square it with a dozen theories in turn, and I gave it twenty names; but not one would fit. At last, it occurred to me that after all, your own account of it might be true. Antonio ... you can hardly understand. In England faith is weak. There we have nearly all been taught the greater Christian verities; yet it smote me like a thunderbolt from heaven when I suddenly explained your life on the theory that the whole Christian gospel is truer than the stars. At the most I had believed that its truths had been realities in Palestine eighteen hundred years ago, and that the devout memory of them helped us and ennobled us to-day, like a stirring tale that is told. But, in one overwhelming revelation, I saw it as the eternal life of men. I can't find words. I saw it as something more vital than the air, something nearer to us than our own selves. I saw it as an unquenchable light, with the sun blinking in it like a farthing candle at noonday. And I saw your life, Antonio, reflecting that light and burning in the midst of it like a gem."

He bent his head as if in pain; but she finished her speech.

"Yes, I understood your life at last," she said very softly. "It was the _vita abscondita cum Christo in Deo_, 'the life that is hid with Christ in God.'"

"God knows," he rejoined solemnly, "that I am not aping humility when I say that my life has been wilful and sinful and proud. Speak of such a life no more, I entreat. Speak of yourself. Tell me how you became a nun."

"As soon as I had accounted for your life," said Isabel, "I was faced by a still harder riddle. How was I to account for my own life; and especially, for the way my life had become intertangled with yours? At the first glance I seemed to have been thrown across your path merely to try you. I seemed to be merely a single rung in your ladder to perfection. But, to be candid, I was not humble enough to rest satisfied with that. Surely I had some rôle of my own. To be simply another person's trial, another person's springboard to heaven, was not enough for a whole life.

"Throughout one black week my new-found faith suffered an almost total eclipse. I rebelled in loathing against God for sacrificing me in the cause of your monkish perfection. Why should he have chosen me for so dreadful a work instead of some woman who had had her share of happiness? His cruelty seemed devilish.

"My doubts grew until they broke of their own weight. One day, soon after my poor father died, I had been bitterly recalling what seemed to be the cruelest fact of all--the fact that, for four years before I saw your face, I had lived in the supernatural persuasion that you were my destiny and that your life needed mine. Suddenly it flashed upon me that a man and a woman may be predestined to commingle their lives on some basis other than conventional love and marriage. I knew that my love for you was not such love as I saw among the lovers and the married people around me; and that from ordinary marriage I had always recoiled.

"It was on the strand of a beautiful English bay, with white cliffs running out miles into the blue water, that I worked out this new thought to the logical end. It was the eighth of July. At about eleven in the morning I held the key in my hand. Antonio, I did not love you less; but my new faith rushed back a million fold and I loved God so much more that at last I saw my love for you in its true light. I saw it as the means to an end. I saw that you had been sent to me, as Saint Philip was sent to the treasurer of Queen Candace, to make me a Christian. You, a monk, were raised up to make me a nun.

"I saw much more. I saw that, for years and years, I had been fighting for happy human relationships. I, for whom God's love had reserved this richer bliss, had cried out, year after year, for a father, a mother, a sister, a brother, a friend. My bitterest cry, Antonio, had been for you; but God knows that I had cried out for you less as a husband than as a comrade and a most dear friend. On that July morning I saw why our Lord had refused me the lower good to grant me the higher, and how He had sorely wounded me that His balm might more sweetly heal me."

Isabel ceased. Her long speech had been growing less and less easy until she could not utter another word. The nun thought that the cause was in herself. Why had she not confined herself to reciting the precise words with which she had come prepared? Or why had she not taken the still better course of throwing all her preparation to the winds and of pouring out her heart to Antonio in whatever words might come? Why had she muddled fragments of a set speech with a nervous impromptu?

She did not know that the cause of her failure was in the listener. Although her story told Antonio that his dearest prayer had been superabundantly answered, the old wound in his heart was bleeding afresh. For half a moment, with an exquisite spiritual jealousy which was beyond his will, he was jealous of his Lord. Throughout the long years of his growing love of God his chaste love of Isabel had never died; and he could not bear the thought that perhaps this love was no longer requited. He tried to speak; but his tongue was tied. Antonio's heart sank. What was this mystery? How was it that their accord was broken at the very moment when it should have been most perfect?

When the pause had become intolerable Isabel ended it. She began speaking quickly and nervously. The forced lightness of her tones contrasted almost painfully with her grave earnestness of a few minutes before.

"Your question is answered," she said. "I have told you how I became a nun. I did not rush into a convent, like a damsel of romance, out of chagrin at a disappointment in love. My disappointment, if we may use the word, was only the means of opening my eyes to a vocation as real as your own."

Only! Antonio could see that their wonderful love had accomplished all she said. But was it only that, and nothing more? Again he strove to speak; again he failed; and again it was Isabel who ended the pause.

"For three or four months," she said, in an even more matter-of-fact tone than before, "I lived with Lady Julia Blighe. I entered the convent at Christmas. Probably you, a monk of Saint Benedict, can hardly take the convents of our Order seriously. Our chant is made easy, all on three notes. We have flowers in our rooms. Each nun has a silver spoon. I have always been a coward when it came to physical hardships."

"I know your Order and I revere it," protested Antonio, finding speech at last. "You are not a coward. The inward mortification is harder to practise than the outward. I know that the poor people used to call your nuns 'the holy Maries.' But tell me how you are employed."

"I teach in the school," she answered. "That is why I am here to-day. Let me explain. We have had in our care three sisters from the Beira Alta, daughters of a Portuguese Marquis. Their education is finished. I brought them out to Oporto and handed them over to their parents last week. Before I left England I told our Mother Superior all about you, save your name, and it is with her consent that I have come here to-day. But I believed that your monks had been restored years and years ago. I expected to see you for half an hour in a monastery parlor. A sister of the Third Order of Saint Dominic is traveling with me on her way to bring back some pupils from Lisbon. We reached your little town, Navares, last night. There we heard this news. The people could talk of nothing else."

The hardness went out of her tone, and her voice faltered as she added softly: "They told me, Antonio, that this would be your first Mass. They told me how you have fought and what you have suffered."

The blue eyes which looked at him so wistfully as she spoke were the blue eyes which had brimmed with tears twenty years before when she had "cried and cried and cried like a baby" at the sight of his worn-out cloak and had sobbed: "Poor Antonio! You poor Antonio! My poor Antonio!" His heart broke at the sight. After twenty years she had come back. Amidst the old sights and sounds she was sitting hardly an arm's length from him. Isabel had come back. But in less than one little hour they must stand up for the last parting and he would never see her in this world any more. And meanwhile a frosty monster of false reserve was devouring their tiny store of golden moments one by one.

Antonio sprang to his feet.

"Isabel," he said desperately, "you think I didn't care. You think I never loved you. Listen. The night you went away I was ready to drop down with fatigue and hunger after riding and tramping from sunrise to sunset over the mountains. But how did I spend that dreadful night? I spent it in your chamber, kneeling on the floor against your bed, drinking deep of such anguish for you as I pray God you have never tasted for me. How did I spend the next day? Only by miracle upon miracle was I held back from thundering after you on the fleetest horse in the country-side. Hour after hour that day I tramped, tramped, tramped north, forgetting God and thinking only of you, till I came to a saint's grave."

She rose hastily and raised one slender white hand, as if to ward off his burning words. But he would not be put to silence.

"Call me a sentimentalist, a madman, an apostate, anything you will," he cried. "But here is the sheer truth. Whenever I sat down to eat and drink at the farm you were there, invisibly but undeniably there, sitting at my right hand. Whenever I went into my cell I heard you searching in the cupboard for something you could not find. You haunted these woods all night and all day. To enter the guest-house was like being dragged into a chamber of torture. More. Believe me or not, as you will. To-day is the first time for twenty years that I have set foot on these stones, or set eyes on yonder cascade, or touched this boulder with my hand. Isabel, in memory of you I have charged José to tend this place like a shrine; but I behold it now for the first time since I stood here, at sunrise, the day after you went away."

His words burst from him like a stampede of eager, bright-eyed creatures suddenly released from long captivity. It was as though he would storm and batter down the gates of her heart and reclaim his ancient place. She recoiled from him.

"No more, no more!" she cried. "I did not come for this. Antonio, in God's name, no more!"

"It is in God's name," he retorted, "that I must and will say more. Isabel, when you went away I did not know I loved you. I thought my grief was no more than an aching, bleeding wound of sympathy, of pity. But, little by little, I came to know that I loved you. Not with profane love. I came to believe that our Lord had vouchsafed to me a love such as unfallen man would have had for unfallen woman, and I believed that you, Isabel, loved me with as holy a love in return. It was not a love which weaned me from the love of God. It was a way of loving God more, and of loving Him more perfectly. I even learned to thank God for our separation; because I knew my human weakness and I knew how swiftly this love of you, which was also a love of God, might be changed into a deceitful love of self. But to-day what do I find? That your love for me was only a delusion, a phase, a stage, a means to another end--that, and that only."

He strode up and down, as if he would shake from his shoulders this last and heaviest of his griefs. But when he reached the spot where he had pronounced his final answer twenty years before he heard a step at his side and felt a light touch on his hand.

"No, Antonio," she said "No. Not that and that only."

He started violently. She was facing him, with downcast eyes and with the rose-pink of girlhood once more glowing in her cheeks. Her voice was low and sweet.

"Antonio," she said very slowly, "how strange it all is, and wonderful! You sent me away in autumn, when the sun made haste to set and the storm had torn the leaves from the trees. I have come back in the spring, amidst thousands of birds and millions of flowers. I have come back in the sunshine to find that you loved me even more than I loved you."

Her voice died away so gently that Antonio could not be sure whether the headlong waterfall and the delirious birds had not robbed him of some sweet saying. At last she spoke again and said:

"Yes, Antonio, you loved me more than I loved you. But do not think that I loved you little or lightly. Above all, do not fear that my love is dead. Antonio, I will tell you what I had never meant to tell anybody in this world."

He waited a long time before she began her confession. To help her he bent his gaze upon the ground. At last he heard her speaking, so softly that he had to strain his ears to listen.

"I, too," she said, "cherished such a love. But I am no theologian. Although my love of you had awakened my love of God, I thought it was wrong to go on cherishing it after its work was done. For years and years I thrust it away as a snare. I so crowded my waking hours with prayer and labor and study that no time was left for other thoughts. But, time after time--not thrice, or ten times, but five hundred--my nights have been rosy with the same wonderful dream. In my dream I seem to have entered into the bliss of heaven, and to be moving in the fullness of the love of God, as in a soft glory of life-giving golden light. At the beginning of my dream it is always a churchly heaven, pillared and domed, with holy chants drifting hither and thither like clouds of incense and with clouds of incense mounting upward like holy chants. But, little by little, it changes. The dim dome widens and brightens into a blue sky, with the smoke of the incense sailing in it like pearly clouds; and the stark pillars soften into tree trunks crowned with cool foliage and hung with clinging roses. Instead of rolling organs I hear the surf of a summer sea breaking on soft sand, and instead of the chants I hear the birds, and thousands of brooks ringing like little bells. Cool grass, gay with wild flowers, spreads itself in the place of golden streets and marble pavements. But, all the time, the same holy light is over it all, like the light before a summer sunset among green hills. Then I become conscious that the heaven I am walking in is not some strange unhomely land high above the stars. _Video cœlum novunt et terram novam_: 'I see a new heaven and a new earth,' and I know, with sudden joy, that I am walking in this beautiful world, made new, purged of evil and pain, and wholly conformed to the mind of God.

"My dream unfolds always in the same way. Gradually I see that the woods in which I am walking are woods I have walked in before. The voices of the sea and the brooks are good to hear, because they are the voices of old friends. At last I push past a mimosa, on fire with golden flowers like a burning bush, and I halt on the margin of this pool. I wait, with the cascade rumbling at me like thunder and flashing at me like lightning. I turn round; and, without hearing your footfall, I find you at my side. Then we wander off together, sometimes down deep ravines, sometimes up through pines to brown moorlands purple with heather, sometimes along the banks of lakes and rivers, or along the sea-shore, with the holy light always over us and with God's love nearer to us than our own souls. That is my dream."

After pausing a little, she added:

"At first I thought my dream was a snare. I say again that I am not a theologian. Still, I tried to puzzle out if such dreams were against sound doctrine. At first I feared they were. But I came to see that the words of our Lord, 'In the resurrection they neither marry nor are married,' referred to marrying of an earthly kind. Many another scripture came to my mind; and many another thought came to comfort me. Our Mother, the Blessed Virgin crowned in heaven--is she not a woman still? And do we not think of this saint or of that as still a man or still a woman, as the case may be? Is the life hereafter to be a blank Nirvana? Will it be less richly personal than the life we are living now? But these are only my own poor thoughts, worth less than nothing. I rest rather in two great scriptures. _In domo Patris mei mansiones multœ sunt_: 'In my Father's house are many mansions.' And again, 'Eye hath not seen, nor hath the ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man what things God hath prepared for those who love Him.' But let me be plain to the end. My dreams are beyond my control; and, when I am awake, I do not willingly dwell on these thoughts."

The big bell of the monastery, vocal once more after seven-and-twenty years of silence, struck twelve. The monk and the nun listened to the strokes without speaking. Before the last echoes died away Brother Cypriano rang the Angelus.

"_Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariœ_," said Antonio, with bowed head. And Isabel responded:

"_Et concepit de Spiritu sancto_."

When the pious exercise was finished she said:

"It is time to go."

"No," cried Antonio, suddenly perceiving that she had picked up her cloak and mantilla. "You must not go."

"I must go," she said, smiling gently. "Antonio, things are changed indeed. In the old days your great aim was to drive me away."

"You must not go," he said, with the utmost energy. "The Duchess of Ribeira Grande is at the guest-house, with servants. There is room for you and for your friend the Dominican sister. You need rest, until to-morrow. You must not go."

She shook her head, still smiling gently, and held out her hand.

"Good-bye, Antonio," she said.

He took the hand; but instead of grasping it and letting it fall he held it, and said once more:

"Until to-morrow you must not go."

She began to disengage her fingers. Antonio gripped them fiercely and pleaded not only with his voice, but with his eyes.

"Isabel," he said, "one room at the guest-house is still yours. It can be made ready for you and for your friend to-night. It is your old room, with the white roses. I have suffered no one to enter it for twenty years."

This time she left her hand in his. The monk's voice, his brown velvet eyes, his clasp, and the rush of old memories were too much for her. She trembled a little; and suddenly a rain of tears fell upon Antonio's hand.

"Antonio," she sobbed, "I must go. Now. Don't ask me again. But, before I go, there is one thing more to tell you."

For many moments her weeping would not let her speak. At last she whispered between her sobs:

"That little bowl. The bowl you gave me, with the blue-and-orange bird. Do not despise me. When the time came, I felt I could give up the whole world, except that. For two months I turned a deaf ear to God, all because I couldn't give up ... that."

The exceeding bitterness of the memory made her sob afresh. When she could speak again, she said:

"Antonio, I will tell you where the little bowl is to-day. It has been made into a lamp. I had it encased in brass, so that it cannot break, and plated over with the purest silver. It hangs in a little church, in a slum near the London docks. It burns before the image of Saint Antonio."

Antonio could not speak. He forgot that he was still holding her hand, and she did not remember that she had not taken it away. After a long time she murmured, almost inaudibly:

"Antonio ... one night I gave you a rose."

He released her white fingers. Then he drew forth his breviary and placed it in her hand. She took it wonderingly; but he averted his eyes. Isabel gazed at the worn volume. She could see that there was some kind of a book-marker, marking the Office of the day. She opened the book and saw a pressed white rose, flecked and veined with faint blood-red.

She looked at it a long, long while. Then she shut the book and gave it back to Antonio. Without another word he wrapped the thin wrap about her form and helped her to arrange the mantilla on her shoulders. When the moment of parting came she simply gave him her hand, like a proud English lady; and he, like a courtly Portuguese gentleman, bent over it and lightly kissed her finger-tips.

She went away by the path she had taken on their last afternoon, twenty years before. Antonio, strangely calm, watched her as she pressed up the steep way. He was conscious that she still walked with willowy, girlish grace. He remembered how he had watched her that other afternoon, and how he had wondered if she would turn round and look back.

The two cypresses hid her from his sight. He breathed a quiet prayer for herself and for him. But he did not close his eyes; for they were fixed on the one point where she would reappear. His being was filled full with such peace and bliss as he had never known.

She reappeared. She turned round. She waved her hand. She was gone.

As soon as Antonio re-entered the porch of the monastery the Fathers thronged forward pressing him to break his long fast. But he shook his head and trudged on, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left. In the cool cloister he paused a moment upon the slab which covered the body of Sebastian. Then he turned into the narrow doorway and climbed, with dragging steps, to his old seat on the flat roof. One of the younger monks tried to follow; but José and Cypriano barred his passage. The two sturdy fellows, eyeing one another jealously, stood guard on either side of the gloomy opening, like two genii keeping the door of a cave.

Antonio sat down on the bench of cork. At the same moment a carriage rolled out through the principal gate of the abbey. He knew that it was bearing Isabel to rejoin her friend at Navares. Down the dusty hill it went; past the farm; and onwards until it was no more than a tremulous black spot against the whiteness of the road. As it approached the pine-woods some plate of burnished brass in the harness caught the light and blazed at Antonio for a moment, like a tiny sun. Then the shadow engulfed it, and he saw it no more.

Very calmly and with perfect concentration of mind Antonio resumed his devout thanksgiving for his first Mass. God had enabled him to rebuild His broken altar and to offer upon it the Holy Sacrifice. In the dazzling refulgence of that immense grace his sufferings and hardships were no more than grains of dust dancing in a sunbeam. The chief events of his past re-enacted themselves before him, like a stage show, and he saw that his life had been an unbroken pageant of divine mercy, full of glittering lights and rich shadows. He recalled all that God had done in him, and _vidit quod esset bonum_; "he saw that it was good."

When the monk's thanksgiving was finished Isabel reclaimed his mind. The strange peace which had descended upon them both, as she gazed at their white rose, abode with him still. There was no rebellion in his soul, no ache in his heart. The whole history of their love unrolled its bright length before him, like a holy scroll illuminated in blue and blood-red and gold, and he found nothing written therein that he would have altered or erased. _Vidit quod esset bonum_. It was good, all good, to the end.

He sat and pondered upon their wonderful love. At first he was confident that Isabel and he, he and Isabel, were the lovers of lovers, the supreme lovers of all time. But humility brought him a larger thought. Surely, before Isabel and he were born, there had been men and women loving as purely and as grandly. And surely there would be men and women loving as grandly and as purely after he and Isabel were dead.

Compared with all this love, of all these lovers in all the past and all the present, surely the shining of the sun was as darkness? He closed his eyes that he might behold the greater light. And, in that surpassing radiance, he seemed to be reading the deepest secrets of eternity and to be solving the riddle at the inmost heart of the universe. He saw innumerable loves ever ascending, like golden mists, out of the love of God. He saw those innumerable loves returning into the love of God again, like rivers into the sea. And with every return of love he saw the love of God growing richer and sweeter, like a fruit ripening in the sun. It seemed as if even God himself were waxing greater and as if, in the act of creation, the Creator took as well as gave. Without creation God must still have been perfect; but even God could rise from the lower perfection to the higher. Without creation the eternal Word was like a trumpet blown on an illimitable plain: but, with creation, the Word was like that same trumpet resounding and reverberating amidst re-echoing hills. God had need of man. God was Love, a pure white ray of love, and humanity was a prism turning this way and that and breaking the whiteness into the fairest colors. All love was one. Antonio's love for Isabel, Isabel's love for Antonio, was a drop flung forth from the bottomless ocean of the love of God to shine like a gem in the sunlight.

No. Not like a mere grain of spray which leaped free and sparkled for a moment and then fell back to lose its identity for ever. Rather was it like the immortal soul of a new-born babe, a something suddenly existing, a something with no past, but with an everlasting future, a something with an eternal identity which even God himself could not destroy. God would no more revoke and destroy His emanations of love than He would revoke and destroy His emanations of being. Innumerable loves would chime for ever in noblest harmony with the love of God, like brooks murmuring with the sea--_vox turbœ magnœ, vox aquaram multarum et vox tonitruorum magnorum_: "a voice of a great multitude, a voice of great waters, a voice of mighty thunderings."

The monk rested awhile in this thought. He knew it was the thought of Isabel's dream. But suddenly a white light blazed in his soul. Isabel vanished as if she had never been. All the human love he had been cherishing fell from him, like a dying torch from the grasp of a man who strides forth out of a cave into the blinding light of a summer noon. Antonio was caught up into an ecstasy of the pure love of God.

When he opened his eyes at last and gazed upon the Atlantic he knew that he was weary. The hands were weary that had labored so roughly for his Lord. The feet were weary that had tramped so many a league in dust and heat; and the brain was weary that had puzzled and worried and planned till it could puzzle and worry and plan no more. But it mattered not at all. Was not the day's work done? There was plenty of time to sleep. Ranging over wood and meadow and stream, Antonio's gaze came to rest in the little clearing between the ending of the orange-groves and the beginning of the vineyards; and he looked with longing at the white cross which rose tall and slender above the monks' graves.

Peace filled earth and heaven. His tired eye-lids drooped over Antonio's eyes. The airs around him were rich with scents of lemon-blossom and suckle. The Atlantic lay unvexed by wind; and the ocean swell, as it searched the creeks and caves, hummed no louder than a heavy-laden honey-bee lumbering home.

THE END