"I went because I wanted to," she answered. "But come back to the point. Is it true about Margarida?"
He had gradually become aware of a new sympathy between them. All the resentment and distrust faded out of his heart. His gaze sought hers; and not until he could look down into her eyes did he answer:
"It is not true. It never was. It never will be."
The last syllable had hardly sped clear of his lips when the monk was struck dumb by the truth. It flashed from Isabel's radiant eyes like a flaming sword into his heart. A moment later she had turned away her face; but she could not hide the magic roses, the great crimson roses, which sprang to full bloom upon her cheeks. He knew her secret; and she knew that it was known.
To cover her trouble and confusion, she moved to find her little gloves and the embroidered bag. Antonio stooped down before her and was the first to pick them up; but she snatched them almost roughly out of his hand.
"We've stayed too long," she said. "I must go."
In a twinkling she had crossed the stepping-stones and was in full flight for home. No wood-nymph pursued by a god of old ever flew with more gazelle-like grace; and the ravine seemed shorn of nearly all its beauty when the trees hid her from Antonio's eyes.
On Monday morning, although he had business in Navares, Antonio was early at the pool. Throughout a sleepless night his moods had wavered from bitter self-reproach to laborious self-justification. But, amidst all the waverings, one decision stood firm. He must see Isabel at once. He must not run away. He must not tolerate, either on his part or on hers, any spurious delicacy, any eluding of a thorough understanding.
Try as he would Antonio could not wholly close his eyes to the grim humor of the situation. Within the narrow space of three weeks two young and handsome heiresses had thrown themselves at his, a monk of Saint Benedict's, head. But, while this oddity brought a bitter smile to his lips, he was not able to take pleasure or pride in events which were bringing pain and humiliation to others. The feeling uppermost in his heart was one of shame and sorrow for his indiscretion and weakness in meeting Isabel so secretly and so often.
About half-past ten she came, looking pale and rather frail. But she had nerved herself for the ordeal before her, and she was calm and self-controlled.
"I knew you would come," she said quietly. "Yet I feared you wouldn't. Early this morning I nearly sent Jackson down to the farm with a note; but I didn't want people to talk."
"I came nearly an hour ago," the monk replied. His tones were so grave and his manner so solemn that a flush of resentment rose to her cheek.
"Don't make things worse than they are," she cried angrily. "Aren't they difficult enough already? You won't help matters by looking and speaking as if you've come to a funeral."
Antonio could not retort that he was indeed standing by a graveside and that he had come to drop a farewell tear upon their dead happiness. He waited for her next words.
"We're obliged to talk out our talk whether we like it or not," she continued, turning her back upon him and tearing at the fronds of a young mimosa. "I'm not an actress. I can't pretend that I don't know what we both know perfectly well. You can; but I can't. If I left it all to you, I suppose you'd tell me some more about the Emperor Pedro, or about sea-sand grapes. You'd be perfectly polite and, as you imagine, perfectly considerate; and you'd go back to the farm at twelve o'clock."
"I came here," answered Antonio, "expressly to talk and to listen without a moment's false delicacy or a shade of pretense."
"Thank you," she said, with a tinge of irony.
Her slender white fingers were still wantonly busy with the mimosa. The monk racked his wits desperately for an opening sentence. He would have preferred the easier task of facing Senhor Jorge and Donna Perpetua and Sir Percy and Mrs. Baxter and the Visconde de Ponte Quebrada and Queen Victoria's Comptroller and the Fazenda official all combined. Words refused to come. But it fell out that his dumbness was all for the best.
"Listen," said Isabel, without turning around. "You don't expect me to find this interview very delightful, do you? You'll admit that it's easier for me to talk about usurpers and bunches of grapes than about ... than about all this. I'll tell you what I've done. Perhaps I've done wrong, as usual; but I can't help it. I'm going to give you a letter—I mean a paper, a scribble. Some things are so much easier to write than to say. After I've given it to you I'm going away for a walk. I shall come back in half an hour. You may open my little bag. It is in there."
Antonio loosened the cords of the silken pouch with respectful hands. It contained the damascened key of the chapel, a tiny lump of shining felspar picked up from the path, a pair of fine gloves, two or three small coins, and a folded paper. As he drew the paper forth, a snapping of twigs made him look up. Isabel was breaking her way through the trees.
His hand trembled as he unfolded the document. It was a quarto sheet filled from top to bottom with Isabel's fine writing. The monk glanced down the hill to make sure that she had come to no harm; and as soon as he caught sight of her walking quickly along one of the woodland paths, he sat down on a warm boulder and began to read these lines:
Four years ago you and Mr. Austin Crowberry visited the Earl of Oakland. You dined at Castle Oakland, and stayed all the next day.
The Countess of Oakland is my aunt. I hardly ever see her, because my father quarreled with the Earl nearly twenty years ago. But the Earl has a niece, Lady Julia Blighe, whom I met in London a few days after you went away. Perhaps you remember her. She is a little over-magnificent, and wears too much jewelry at once; but people go mad over her, and some say she is the most beautiful woman in England.
You made a most extraordinary impression on Lady Julia. She admitted giving you a flower. I grew tired of hearing about you—nearly bored to death. At first she caused me to picture you as a beautiful Byronic hero, with a Great Grief or a Dark Secret; and I detest all that sort of trash and gush. But one day, while she was chattering, a miracle happened. I can't describe it. Perhaps it was like someone throwing wide a door that had always been shut, or setting free a bird or animal that had always been caged. All in one moment you became the most important fact in the world. Why? How? I don't know. I thought I knew you through and through. Often I could have said to Lady Julia: "No. That's all wrong. You know nothing about him."
I can't explain it. I am simply telling you the fact. From that time you haunted me. I became absolutely certain that our lives, some day, would meet; more certain than I am of the sun's existence and the moon's. When Mr. Crowberry told me of the plan for buying this place, and my becoming your neighbor out in these wilds, I ought to have been overwhelmed by the astonishing coincidence; but it seemed as natural and inevitable as the sunrise.
At the first moment—no, not the first—I mean, the second moment of our meeting at your farm, I was mortified because you tried to look at me before I could look at you. Why did you do it? It was unkind. I had been thinking of you for four years; but you, if you thought of me at all, couldn't have thought of me more than four days. Yet, although you were in such a hurry to beat off my eyes, I saw in an instant that you were exactly as I had imagined you. Oporto and the Douro were not in the least like the engravings they showed me in England: but you were my dream come true. And all the time I sat on your right hand at dinner, I felt as if I had known you for years and years. You are not as clever as I expected; but you are gentle, and I am not one bit afraid of you.
We nearly quarreled about monks and about the azulejos, did we not? Still, it was only on the surface. You think I make too little of religion; I think you make too much: but we have agreed quite amicably to differ. Deep down in our hearts we are at one.
Since the day my father went to Lisbon I have been happy, for the first time in my life. You left me to make all the approaches; but I was very, very happy until Fisher mentioned Margarida. Last night I ached and burned with shame, because I had let fall the veil from my heart. But this morning I am glad and thankful.
You are not like other men. And I think I am not wholly like other women. As soon as you have read this paper we are going to tear it into thousands of pieces. So I will be bold. Mine is not the only secret that is out. I know you love me, my friend, my only friend in the world.
Antonio paused in his reading. For a moment he felt an immense relief at learning that he was not to blame. But he reminded himself that his blamelessness did not help Isabel one whit. Here was a mystical passion, an inscrutable supernatural love. No one could explain its beginning, no one could foretell its end. Only by a great effort did he resume the reading of the paper. It continued:
So much for the past. Now for the present and the future. What are we to do? Don't be hurt, dearest friend, if I write bluntly about practical matters.
There is a difference in our stations. I suspect that your blood is really nobler than mine and that your escutcheon is less tarnished; but, from the point of view of my friends, this will be a misalliance. Don't be angry. I mention it only to bid you disregard it. I have pondered it well and it weighs less than a sparrow's feather. I am nothing to the people in England; and they shall be nothing to me. Tell me, though; was it this that held you back from wooing me? I believe it was; and that is why the advances came from my side. But, after this, remember! You must court me, woo me. If I command it, you must crick your neck for me, as if I were a Senhorita.
And now about my father. You may fear that it will be a blow to him. Certainly it will amaze him and disconcert him. But if you were not in the case, my friend, I should have to amaze him and disconcert him some other way. So long as I and Mrs. Baxter and Jackson are with him, he doesn't realise the flight of time. He thinks of me as a little girl, and of himself as a man of forty who must needs be up and doing. He has fought his hard fight and he deserves his rest. More. He needs it. The Navares doctor says he will go out like a candle in a gale if he does not surrender. Whatever you may think, I love my father; and, even for your sake, I would not leave his side if it were not wholly for his good. God knows I am honest in this and in every word I have written.ISABEL.
Mechanically refolding the sheet, Antonio rose to his feet and drew a deep breath. In a few minutes Isabel would return. She would steal as shyly as a young deer through the branches. She would expect him to spring towards her, to clasp her in his arms, to murmur proud words of possession, to lavish in her ears his long-hoarded treasure of love-words, to press kisses on her hands, her cheeks, her eyes, her hair. Like a terrifying tocsin her words clanged in his brain: "My friend, my only friend in the world, you love me!"
He turned his gaze towards the Atlantic. But the day was growing sultry. Thunder was in the air and mists hid the great waters. He dared not look into the woods lest he should espy the slender figure tripping towards him. And somehow he could not lift up his eyes and his heart to heaven. In this cruel issue his inborn instincts of a courtly gentleman wore down his acquired habits of piety, until it savored of a coarseness or of a lapse from honor to breathe a word of this rare ladye's secret, even into the pitiful ears of God's saints and angels. Thus earth and sea and sky alike failed him. He closed his eyes.
Suddenly a rosy light and a delicious perfumed warmth seemed to suffuse his body and soul. Of course. His way was plain. God had frozen his cry for help upon his lips because it was no longer God's will that he should mortify his manhood in dogged fidelity to obsolete vows. He had vowed his vows in the belief that the Order would continue, and that he would live and die in its midst, upheld by its hourly discipline and devotion. He had not left the Order: the Order had left him. For seven years he had labored to restore it, and he had failed. He was free.
Free. Free to be as other men, free to hail the most wonderful and beautiful of maidens, free to exult over her, free to receive her marvelous love and to give it back a thousand-fold. He opened his eyes, and involuntarily held out his arms.
With bent head Isabel was picking her way up the slope. Her exquisite hands held her pretty dress of sprigged muslin clear of the thorny undergrowth. Sunbeams played with her golden ringlets. Antonio watched her with a sense of intoxication. This lovely girl was his, body and spirit, all his.
She drew nearer until he could see the blue of her large eyes, the peach-bloom of her soft cheeks. Then, with the suddenness of an earthquake, the greatest miracle of his life befell.
Hundreds of times in the past, especially at seasons of abounding faith and high ecstasy, he had prayed that the Blessed Virgin would fly to his relief if ever he should weaken in this most perilous of his vows. "Pray for me, O Mother of mothers, O Virgin of virgins!" he had cried again and again. "Pray for me whenever I cannot, or will not, pray for myself." And, as Isabel parted the branches behind the mimosa, those hundreds of old prayers were answered. Celestial fire and supernal power filled his whole being so suddenly and mightily that he was conscious of a physical pang, of a roaring in his ears like rushing winds and resounding waters, of a great brightness before his eyes.
The heat of conflict and the flush of victory had wrought so great a change in Antonio's expression that Isabel started when they came face to face. But she interpreted his transfiguration as an ecstasy of love and joy; and her blue eyes suddenly shone with a radiance as wonderful as his own.
Before her proud and happy gaze Antonio's cheeks grew pale. It was as if a pet lamb were looking up to him for a caress, when all the time he was gripping a butcher's knife behind his back. It was as if some smiling friend were holding out to him an exquisite vase full of lilies and roses which he must straightway dash into pieces. Isabel seemed so frail, so soft, so white, so trustful, so lamb-like; and her love was surely the most fragrant and beautiful thing in all the world.
"You are coy," she said laughing gaily. "And you have turned as pale as a swooning heroine in an English novel. I suppose you're going to say, 'Give me time: this is so sudden!'"
Although Antonio remained silent, no doubt of his love crossed her mind. Had she not read love in his eyes, time after time? She took it for granted that he was merely tongue-tied because of the strangeness of the situation.
"You have read it?" she asked, drawing the folded paper from his unresisting hand. "Every word?"
He bowed assent. For a minute or two her slender fingers busied themselves tearing the document first into ribbons, then into small squares, and finally into tiny shreds. After she had mixed the shreds well together she ran to the lower end of the pool and threw them, one small handful at a time, into the swirling rapids.
"You are tired," said Antonio when she returned. "The day is sultry. Later on there will be thunder. You have walked a long way. You must sit down."
Isabel seated herself on the flat boulder. But although there was room at her side the monk remained standing. She pouted unconsciously and darted two furtive glances at his eyes. The first glance was only a glance of slight disappointment and of shy reproof; but the second was a glance of sudden anguish and sickening fear. The silence lengthened until she could bear it no longer.
"Speak to me!" she commanded indignantly. "Why do you stand there saying nothing? I suppose you despise me?"
"Isabel," he said, calling her by her name for the first time, "you know I don't despise you."
He spoke her name in a voice so strangely sweet that her ears tingled and her heart leaped. And when his brown velvet eyes looked into hers with sorrowful tenderness all her pride broke down.
"Then why are you so cruel?" she cried. "Why do you make it so hard for me? Haven't I humiliated myself enough? You are cruel. Why do you not tell me that you love me?"
The supernal grace and might which had miraculously fulfilled Antonio's body and soul enabled him to triumph over temptation; but they did not deliver him from anguish. The sword which was about to rend the heart of Isabel scorched him as it circled downward for its dreadful work. Her coming ordeal was already his; and he stood in the midst of it as in a burning fiery furnace.
Isabel sprang up and faced him. Their eyes were less than a yard apart. Antonio's continued silence was sufficient answer; but she fought fiercely against the truth. Clasping her white hands desperately against her breast, she challenged him in short, panting sentences.
"This is horrible, too horrible," she began, "I tell you it is too horrible. You can't, you daren't look me in the eyes and say you don't love me!" And when he still delayed to speak she raised her voice and commanded sharply: "Answer!"
He looked her in the eyes with immeasurable sadness, and answered:
"I do not love you in the way you mean."
"The way I mean? What is the way I mean? Either you love me or you don't. There are no two ways in love." She spoke hotly and with scorn.
"In the paper you've just torn up," he replied, "you called me your dearest friend in the world. In that sense, I love you. In all the world, you are my dearest friend."
"And no more? Not an atom more?"
He hesitated.
"Come," she said bitterly. "You are trying me too far. If this is some subtlety, some finesse, let us save it until another day. For the last time, I ask you: Can you stand up here in the sight of the God you believe in, and say that I am no more to you than your dearest friend?"
It came home to Antonio that he could not, with perfect truthfulness, say that she was his friend and no more. Yet how was he to evade her question? Plainly the cruel, hateful moment had come for striking the fair vase to pieces, for driving the butcher's knife into the white lamb's heart. He raised his head and resumed the mastery over her by a single movement of his inextinguishable will.
"My dearest friend in the world," he said gently. "If I am to blame for the smallest fraction of this wonderful and terrible thing which has come to pass, I crave your pardon here and now with all my heart, and I will ask God's pardon every day until I die. But ... for God's sake, let us forget. Let yesterday and to-day be as if they had never been. How a woman like you could ever waste one thought of love on a man like me neither of us can explain."
She heard him with wildly staring eyes.
"You offer me," he concluded, "a gift beyond all price. But I must turn my back, I must close my eyes, I must stop my ears. I am pledged to another Bride."
They were the words he had used to Senhor Jorge. But, this time, he uttered them proudly; for he had meditated upon them often since the serão. He knew that they were not a mean verbal quibble, and that they enshrined the foremost fact of his life. As they left his lips the spiritual world was as real and near as the cascade, as real and near as the mossy boulder, as real and near as Isabel.
His delicacy moved the monk to turn away without even the briefest glance at the effect of his declaration upon Isabel. But she did not desire his consideration. Something magnetic in her anger compelled him to raise his eyes. He saw that she too had moved away.
"Another Bride?" she repeated slowly, barbing every syllable with scorn. "Another Bride? Indeed. What an entirely enviable young woman!"
For a few moments her sarcasm sustained her. With her hands hanging easily at her side she stood haughtily erect, smiling a scornful smile. But it did not last. Without warning she ran towards him and cried, with a break in her voice:
"It isn't true!"
"It is true," said the monk, very gently.
"It is not true!" she went on, stamping her foot. "It isn't. It can't be. If it were true you would have told me before. You'd have dropped a hint, you'd have talked about her. I tell you it isn't true. If it were true you'd have told me when you denied the talk about Margarida. You are a man. You are not a cur and a brute."
"This is unjust," cried Antonio. "How could I tell you yesterday, after Margarida? You ran away home like the wind. And why should I drop hints? Surely they would have been a great impertinence. How should I dream that you, an English lady, with a proud old name, would ever think so of me, a wine-merchant's clerk?"
"Then why did you make love to me fifty times?" she retorted.
"Fifty times? Made love? This is madness. On my honor and conscience I have not breathed a word of love to you even once."
"Who said you'd breathed words? I didn't. But you've made love with your eyes. Over and over and over again you have looked at me as if I was as much to you as you were to me, and as if you and I were the only beings in the world."
"I swear you are mistaken, utterly mistaken," cried Antonio.
Isabel had ceased to listen. She clenched her hands together once more against her breast and stood gazing towards the mists which hid the Atlantic. When she spoke again it was not to Antonio. She seemed rather to be thinking aloud, with quick impassioned utterance.
"So this is the end," she began. "Yet how long it has been in coming! I have been happy for ten days—ten whole days. When was I ever happy for three days and nights before? But it's over now. What a memory to carry to my grave—the memory of this end! I've made a fool of myself. I've made myself cheaper than dirt. I've pressed myself on a man who won't have me."
Antonio took a step forward; but, without paying him the smallest attention, she continued:
"It's happened to other women, no doubt. But the other women weren't so hungry and thirsty for a little happiness as I was. They didn't have mothers who died the day they were born. They didn't have fathers who forget their very existence for months and months at a time. They've had homes, they've had friends, they've had all the lesser love. But I ... I have had nothing, from anybody, anywhere, ever."
She laughed a laugh like iron against iron. The monk could endure it no longer. He sprang to her side. For the first time, he touched her hand. She snatched it free as if he had burnt it, and looked at him fiercely.
"Go away," she cried, "I hate you!"
"No," he said. "I won't go away till you are less unhappy, and till you forgive me."
His gentle compulsion mastered her. She allowed him to lead her back to the boulder. This time he sat down at her side. As he did so she bent her head. Tears came into her eyes. Suddenly she covered her face with her hands and wept without restraint.
Antonio, sitting so near to her that he could have encircled her with his arm, suffered as bitterly as Isabel. The momentary temptation to trample on his vow no longer had the slightest power over him; but his whole heart yearned to end her grief, or, at the least, to comfort her. She was so like a sobbing, heartbroken child that it seemed inhuman to sit beside her without drawing her head to his shoulder or even stroking her hands. Yet he knew that it would be more inhuman still to rise up and move away.
She overcame her sobs at last; and, turning upon him eyes like April skies, she demanded abruptly:
"This Bride? What is she like?"
"Let us not talk of her now," said Antonio, as soon as he could command his words. "Surely it is better not."
"Is she like Margarida?"
"No."
"Prettier?"
"For Heaven's sake," he pleaded, "do not ask these questions?"
"Answer me at once. Is she prettier than I am? In England they call me pretty. I suppose I'm ugly to a Portuguese. I suppose she's a hundred times more beautiful than I am."
"There are different kinds of beauty," said Antonio.
"Is she clever?"
Antonio considered well. Then he replied:
"In Her case I should not use the word 'clever.' But, I entreat you, ask me no more."
He rose to his feet with a look which silenced her. A moment afterwards she too sprang up. Stepping quickly to the pool, she dipped her little handkerchief in the laughing water and tried to bathe away the traces of her tears. When she sailed back towards him she came proudly.
"This ought to be the end," she said. "I ought not to see you alone again. But I don't forbid you to come just once more. Perhaps I shall be here to-morrow morning. I don't say I shall, and I don't say I shan't."
Her steady gaze commanded an answer: but it was only by a huge effort that Antonio succeeded in replying:
"You have spoken truly. We ought not to meet alone again."
"No, we ought not. Most decidedly we ought not," she flashed back scornfully. "But we will!"
And without another word or glance she hastened away.
Isabel could not sleep. In order to postpone the hour of solitude she had sat up late talking to Fisher, practising Portuguese with Joanninha, and writing letters to her few friends in England. Finally she had astounded Mrs. Baxter by asking to be told all about the early life of the callous young Viscountess Datton and by listening without a murmur to the details which the Excellent Creature multitudinously invented. But the moment came when Mrs. Baxter's love of bed overbore her love of hearing herself talk. She rang the bell and Jackson came in, yawning, with the candles.
When Isabel lay down she set the whole power of her will to the barricading of her mind against the day's cruel memories. But it was all in vain. Every word she had spoken to Antonio, every syllable of his replies, vibrated afresh in her ears, scorching them with shame. Twice or thrice she clenched her fist as if she would strike some invisible enemy or revenge herself on the author of her loss and humiliation. Sometimes her cheeks burned crimson: sometimes she felt all the blood ebb from them. Her spiritual anguish brought in its wake a physical pain, sickening and hardly bearable, like the pains after the first shock of a dizzy fall or a brutal blow. She seemed to be aching all over; and more than once she moaned aloud.
Even without her shame and grief Isabel could hardly have slept. All through the afternoon and evening the air had been growing sultrier and sultrier. Not once in England, not even during brazen August, had she known such a stifling heat. Both her windows stood wide open; but they seemed to be admitting fiery vapors rather than life-giving airs. Even the fine linen sheet was too hot and heavy to be endured. She flung it aside and lay with nothing to cover her save a plain night-robe of the thinnest Indian silk. At first she tossed from side to side; but so much exertion soon exhausted her, and she lay still, gasping for breath.
At length the heat became unendurable. She rose and went to the window. Two or three miles away, over the woods, over the abbey, beyond Antonio's farm, the surly Atlantic was growling his muffled growl through the sultry air. Quite near at hand the shrunken torrent was rumbling down through the underwoods. Isabel listened. The airy ocean and the seaward-hurrying brook seemed to invite her, and to be beckoning her with cool hands. She leaned out, fain to be a little nearer.
There was no moon, and the stars could not pierce the stagnant clouds. Yet the night was not solidly dark. The outlines of the taller trees could be traced against the sky, and the pavement which surrounded the guest-house glimmered like white limestone.
Isabel was suddenly filled with an overmastering desire to break her prison walls and to walk free under the open sky. Apart from its bitter associations she would have lacked courage to visit the pool and the cascade in the dead of night; for the narrow path thither wound in and out of somber thickets. But the broad way, broad enough for a carriage, which ran down from the guest-house to the abbey, and thence, through the avenue of camellias, to the principal gate had no terrors for a soul almost untroubled by superstitious fears. It seemed to the half-stifled, heart-sick Isabel that if she could escape from the house unheard by Jackson and Mrs. Baxter she might find life and healing in those ampler spaces. She did not admit to herself that the broad path and, especially, the paved space in front of the abbey attracted her because they were rich in unembittered memories of hours with Antonio. Room, more room; air, more air: she thought she wanted nothing besides.
Having dressed herself swiftly in her lightest garments she threw over her hair a black lace mantilla which she had bought in Oporto, thrust her shoes and stockings into her little bag and crept barefoot to the door. It creaked a little when she closed it behind her; but the steady sequence of sounds which continued to come from the bedroom of Mrs. Baxter proved that the Excellent Creature had heard nothing. Isabel turned away with a shrug of distaste, and descended the stairs. There was no need to listen for the snoring of Jackson, who could have gone on sleeping restfully if she had clattered about the corridor in clogs.
The two bolts of the front door were not very hard to draw back, and the latch was easily lifted. On the top step, where she had talked thrice with Antonio, Isabel drew on her stockings and shoes. Then she closed the door behind her, latched it softly, and stole on tiptoe out of earshot down the path.
It was not much cooler in the open than in her chamber. Still, she was glad that she had exchanged her narrow cell for freedom. Besides, the far-stretching woods and the vast heavens were more in scale with her immeasurable sorrow. She walked on quickly, eager to hasten away from her hateful prison. The path was cheerful because it led down to the open lowlands and the refreshing sea.
Midnight, to Isabel's mind, usually held no more terrors than noonday. But when a vague shape confronted her under a tree she started violently. Some gossip of Joanninha's awoke in her memory—some ridiculous village story about a ghostly monk who haunted the domain on dark nights. Advancing boldly upon it she found that the vague shape was only a dead trunk clothed in creepers. She tried to laugh; but the laugh would not come, and suddenly she knew what was meant by fear.
Her instinct was to turn and run home. But the path behind her, backed by the enormous mass of the mountain, looked like a tunnel bored through coal, while the path ahead of her led towards Antonio and José, towards the soft lights and faint voices of the sea. Daring neither to go back nor to stand still, she hurried on until her foot struck a slab of stone.
She had reached the paved space in front of the abbey. The western gable of the chapel hulked up high into the gloom, like the poop of a man-o'-war aground. Upon the warm stone steps, with her back to the door, she sat down until she had regained all her breath and lost nearly all her fears. Isabel saw no reason why she should not sit there until dawn. She hid her face in her hands, and tried to sleep.
A growling in the east aroused her. It was no louder than the Atlantic's growling in the west. Isabel knew that it was thunder; but it seemed to be so far away that she was not alarmed. What surprised her was its long protraction. Unlike the intermittent din of an English thunderstorm it rumbled on unceasingly, until Isabel could almost have believed that she was listening to the echoes of an Armageddon raging among the burnt, far-off hills of Spain. Suddenly, however, a blaze of lightning showed her the terrified Atlantic's ashen face. She had never dreamed of such lightning before. Flash trod upon flash so eagerly that there was a continuous dance of light. The half-seconds of dimness between seemed more positive than the lightning. They were like the convulsive twitchings of a great eyelid over a terrible eye; and Isabel thought she saw flashes of darkness rather than flashes of light.
From the neighborhood of the stepping-stones came a shattering noise, as sharp as a pistol-shot and as loud as an exploding magazine. Immediately, afterwards, as if obeying a preconcerted signal, a fearful cannonading and fusillading began to rage on every hand. Armageddon had swept westward.
Isabel sprang up and huddled back into the scanty shelter of the shallow doorway. So long as there was no rain she welcomed the gigantic grandeur of the thunder, and the cold, pitiless beauty of the lightning. But the rain's herald did not delay to blow his blast. Isabel could not see them; but she felt a swirl of dust and dead leaves rush past her in obedience to his command. Gritty atoms clung to her lips. At the same moment ten thousand trees began to rock and moan in pain; and a warm drop fell upon Isabel's hand.
Down rushed the rain. At first it struck straight down from heaven, but, after a few seconds, it smote the wood slantwise, like millions of thin javelins hurled from a height. The thunder never ceased crackling, banging, booming; and the lightnings were so bright that the tree-trunks stood like smoke-blackened men wielding brilliant scimitars amidst the flying javelins.
Isabel was greedily watching the strife when the wind veered, and a battery of rain discharged its whole broadside full at her face. The gust lasted only a moment; but, when it had passed, her thin dinner-dress was wet all over. She knew that there would be fifty gusts all as bad as the first or worse, and that she must either enter the chapel or be drenched to the skin.
She drew the key from her bag. The lightnings served her for a lantern as she drove the steel into the keyhole; but before she could turn it in the lock another burst of cold rain smacked rudely at her bare shoulders. At length she pushed back the door. The lightnings seemed to leap into the chapel the moment she opened it, like a pack of eager dogs rushing in before their master. Swifter than greyhounds the cold white-and-blue radiance flashed over the cold white-and-blue of the azulejos, and then licked back into the dark.
In her retreat from the rain Isabel had forgotten supernatural terrors. But as soon as she was fairly over the threshold Joanninha's ghost-story rushed anew into her mind, and she was thankful for the lightnings which had shown her that the place was empty. Yet she dared not shut herself up in the chapel; so she resolved to stand just inside.
Without any warning a third gust sucked the great door out of her weak hand. The oak fell to, with a bang, which was nearly drowned in a sharp clap of thunder. Isabel leaped back to reopen it, and tugged at the handle with all her might. But the bolts and springs of the lock had done their work. And the key was outside.
Isabel did not lose her head. As soon as she had recovered from the first shock, the good blood of her old English stock thrilled in her veins. Here was an adventure. Antonio instantly flew into her thoughts, as usual. To-morrow she would meet Antonio. To-morrow she would tell him, this contemptuous Antonio, how she had passed a night of thunder and lightning in a haunted chapel. To-morrow Antonio should be made to realize what sort of a woman he was flouting. To-morrow Antonio would hang his head at the thought of his dull, superstitious, spiritless Portuguese bride.
Propping herself against the wall she took stock of the situation. The chapel was dry; and although her dress was wet it was not wet enough to give her a cold. In four or five hours it would be daylight, and she would have courage to find the spiral staircase. Once on the flat roof of the cloister she would be able to see Jackson and the other servants searching for her. Jackson and the servants and Antonio. They would be sure to send first thing for Antonio.
The warmth with which she pictured Antonio's arrival ebbed away when she suddenly remembered that she was leaning against the blue-and-white tile-painting of the Saint's death at Tyburn. With a little shiver she crossed over to the azulejos representing the Saint's birth. Meanwhile, the rain was still lashing the glass, and the thunder was making a din like the toppling of crags into cañons. What troubled her most was the jeweled crown on the head of the image above the altar. The bluish-white lightning seemed to have an affinity for the bluish-white stones, and several times Isabel felt sure that the brilliance lingered among the points of the diadem after it had fled from the rest of the chapel.
Once she could have sworn that some one entered through the cloister doorway, and that footsteps sounded upon the pavement; but the thunder was loud at the time, and she decided that she had only heard its reverberations. None the less, the fright weakened her nerve. All in a moment she felt weary, chilly, hungry, and so utterly miserable that she nearly cried. She pulled herself up in time and tried to brace up her nerves by chewing the bitter bark of irony. "This is one of my lucky days," she said to herself. "From this morning onward it has been wholly delightful. What a good grateful girl I ought to be!"
An ear-splitting clap of thunder put an end to her soliloquy. So awful was the crash that Isabel listened shuddering for the noise of falling walls and roofs. Not one stone or slate gave way; but she heard a sound a thousand times more fearful. It was a voice, a mumbling voice which seemed to prolong the worn-out rumblings of the thunder; a voice deep and rich; the voice of a man; a voice somewhere in the chapel.
Her heart nearly stopped beating. She strained terrified eyes into the furthest darkness. And she did not strain them in vain. In close succession four or five white beams of lightning lit up the choir.
A monk, in black, was kneeling before the altar.
Isabel's piercing scream was louder than the thunder and the rain. She collapsed in a heap on the pavement. But she did not swoon. Struggling to her feet she dashed herself desperately against the massive door. It stood like a rock. Moaning wildly, she dragged at the lock with both hands. It did not yield a hair's-breadth. A moment later she heard footsteps; and turning round she had one lightning vision of the black monk hurrying towards her. She shrieked again and made a dash in the direction of the cloister doorway. Before she could reach it another white flash showed her the black monk only an arm's length away. As the flash passed she struck a mad blow into the darkness and, hitting nothing, she stumbled and fell forward. But two strong, unghostly arms caught her just in time; and instead of striking the cold stones she found herself upheld by something soft and warm.
Without waiting for the lightning to reveal his face, Isabel knew that she was in the arms of Antonio. Never in her life before had she yielded to any man's caress, save the rare and shamefaced kisses of her father. Yet Antonio's arms seemed to be her natural place, like its nest to a bird. For a few seconds she did not think of identifying the black monk. She believed that the black monk had been on the point of striking her dead, and that some grand magic of love had conjured up Antonio to stand between them in the nick of time. Trembling like a leaf and panting like a runner after a race, she pressed and clung to him, as a terrified child clings to its mother in the dark.
"You are Isabel?" said Antonio. He had known from her first scream that it was she; but he thought it might comfort her to hear his voice speaking her name.
"Yes. I am Isabel," she murmured. And although a sharp memory of the plighted Bride bade her banish herself at once from his clasp she abandoned herself more than before to the warmth and softness of his gentle strength.
"You are safe, quite safe," he said; for she was still trembling all over. "There is no ghost. It was only I."
No ghost? Only he? What did it mean? Isabel roused her deliciously drowsing wits. No ghost. Only he. She opened her eyes. But the chapel was filled full with darkness, and she could not see his face.
A moment afterwards a prolonged blazing of huge lightnings made the place brighter than day. The azulejos, the high windows, and the gilded carvings shone out like blue and white and yellow fires. Isabel could see Antonio's anxious eyes gazing down into her own. And she had time to see much more. She saw his Benedictine habit; she saw that he and the black monk were one and the same man.
She leaped away from him in terror. But terror did not endure. At the touch of his reassuring hand seeking her arm in the gloom, a light as bright as the lightning's blazed within her and a thunderbolt of overwhelming joy swept her off her feet. With a great cry of gladness she flung herself once more against his breast.
"It's true, it's really true?" she clamored. "Speak. Answer me at once. You're not deceiving me? Your Bride is not a real woman after all?"
"You have surprised my secret, and I trust you to keep it," he answered. "When the monks were here they knew me as Father Antonio."
"Antonio, Antonio, Antonio—what a beautiful name!" she cried. "Come, Father Antonio, tell me. Your Bride is only Religion, or the Church, or the Virgin, or something like that?"
Her tone dismayed the monk even more than her words shocked him; and he remained silent.
"You cannot deny it," she exulted. Another flash of lightning silenced her; but the radiant eyes and glowing cheeks on which it shone were more eloquent than her words. And as soon as the swift darkness closed over them her words rang in it like New Year's bells at midnight. "You don't deny it, you can't, you daren't," she sang. "Your Bride is all a mere sentiment, like the azulejos; a romance; an ideal."
"First of all," demanded Antonio, "how did you come here to-night?"
"God sent me. I believe there's a God, at last."
He moved a little, so as to loosen her clasp. But, in her almost hysterical rapture, she did not perceive the movement.
"You are wet through," he said. But she only answered:
"What does it matter?"
"Quick!" he commanded. "There is a lull in the rain. You must go home this moment."
"I won't," said she. "We will stay here."
"Isabel," he retorted sternly, "we will not stay here. You are mad. The storm has driven you out of your senses. Or perhaps it was the ghost you thought you saw. You must go home this instant. What if you have been missed? What if your servants should find us here? What will Mrs. Baxter say? And what shall I say to your father?"
Until he spoke his last sentence Isabel heard him unmoved; but at the thought of her father the arms which held Antonio weakened. Very slowly she let him go. None the less, she sought to argue. The monk, however, enforced his will. Gripping her arm he marched her almost roughly to the west door, and fumbled for the lock.
"It's no use," she said. "The key is outside. We must stay here."
His only answer was to take her arm again and to lead her through the smaller doorway into the cloister. At the moment of their emerging from the chapel a shaft of lightning lit up a bubbling lake of muddy water, under which lay drowned the cloister garden. Two sides of the cloister itself were also under water.
"I am frightened," she said, with genuine fear, as Antonio drew her into a gloomy corridor. He could feel her shrinking back and trembling; so he threw his arm around her waist and hurried her on. As they passed through the kitchen the uproar of the torrent reminded Antonio of the night of his fight with José. But he did not pause. He threaded passage after passage, room after room, until he had worked round to the little door with the Reading monk's secret lock. His fingers searched among the hidden levers, and at last the door stood open.
Frequent lightning still swept sea and land; but the thunder had dragged its great guns northward and was pounding over Navares. The rain had ceased. The monk, however, did not hurry Isabel over the threshold; for the overarching trees were pouring down water like an aqueduct cracked by an earthquake. He considered earnestly.
"Come," he said, with an abruptness which startled her. "I must wrap you in this cloak."
With much tucking and folding he contrived to wrap his habit about her slender body and to adjust the mantilla over her fragrant hair.
"Now, I suppose, I'm a nun," she laughed.
The speech would have stung him had he not remembered her behavior in his cell, twelve days before, and her evident persuasion that monks and nuns were only picturesque archaisms, with no serious existence outside the pages of novelists and the dreams of pious sentimentalists. But he did not give her time to expand her flippancy.
"Let us go," he said.
They went. For about twenty paces the paved causeway which led to the little door gave them dry foothold. Thenceforward, however, the paths to the guest-house had become rushing streams. Even without the aid of the lightning one could see gleaming water everywhere. Isabel glanced down dolefully at her feet.
"We can't," she said.
"We must," he insisted.
"Look at my shoes," she moaned.
Antonio considered again. Then he asked:
"You will let me carry you?"
"If we can't wait," she answered, after a long pause, "and if you're sure there's no other way ... you may carry me."
He stepped down from the causeway and bent his back so that she could seat herself upon his shoulder.
"You must hold fast," he said.
Very shyly she slipped round his neck a soft arm which trembled. Antonio straightened himself up and plashed forward. Once or twice he came to dips in the path where the water was higher than his knees, but the young giant stamped through the whirlpools like another Saint Christopher. On they went, guided by the flickering lightning. At length they reached the main path. It was hardly ankle deep in water. He quickened his pace, until the guest-house loomed in sight. Then he gently set Isabel down on a boulder away from the drip of the trees and released her from the clumsy habit, which he folded up and laid on another great stone.
"You left the door unlocked?" he whispered.
"Yes."
"For Heaven's sake don't speak so loud. Better still, don't speak at all. I'm going to carry you as softly as I can to the steps. Don't breathe a word on the way. And don't open the door until I am back under the trees. I shall wait to see that you are safe. Now!"
"No, no, not yet," she whispered.
"Yes. Now. This moment. You are mad."
"I know. But, Antonio, promise. To-morrow morning. At the cascade."
"I promise," he said.
Once more he lifted her up: but this time, as the distance was so short, he carried her in his arms like a child. He did not look at her; but he knew that she was strangely light with a fairy lightness, that her shoulders were snow and her hair pure gold, and that she was as fine and delicate as a lily. Before he took his first stride towards the guest-house he paused, straining his ears for any sound within. Around him, in the woods, a hundred little streams went bubbling and tinkling. Here and there thankful birds were piping their peace-pipes after the din of the battle. The chant of the Atlantic, freshened by the breeze, was loud and glad.
"Listen, Antonio," she murmured. "All the world is singing."
Gripping her as if he would choke her next words before she could speak them, the monk crossed the path. Twelve strides sufficed him for their journey. At the foot of the steps he put her down; and, before she could whisper Good-night, he was speeding noiselessly back to the great stone.
As soon as she had entered the guest-house and closed the door he made haste to put on his habit; for the air had grown cold. Then he shrank into the dripping trees and waited. By this time the clouds were gone and the stars were shining.
Isabel appeared at the window and beckoned imperiously. He stole softly forward and saw her hand moving like a white butterfly among the creepers clustering round the casement. She broke off a half-blown rose which had not been shattered by the storm and threw it to Antonio. He caught it deftly; but his fingers closed too tightly on its thorns, and when he re-entered the abbey to exchange his habit for his old cloak he saw that the white flower was flecked and veined with blood.
It was Isabel who arrived first at the pool. She found the stepping-stones impassable. A cypress had been struck by lightning, and the wind and rain had torn millions of autumn leaves from the other trees. But the storm was over, the mists and stifling heats were gone, and the clear sunshine was tempered by a pleasant breeze.
When Antonio joined her the roar of the swollen cataract was so enormous that he had almost to shout in her ear.
"We must go somewhere else," he said. "Here we can't hear ourselves speak. And the ground is too wet. Come."
She followed as he led the way up the mountain. Reaching a point where the torrent was pent within a resounding gorge they leaped easily to the other side. Then they descended, slanting away from the water, until they came to a stone platform which supported a small ruinous chapel. It was one of the oldest shrines in the domain; but Antonio could not remember the time when it had contained an image or an altar.
"You have hurt your hand," she said. "What has cut it?"
"The thorns of a rose," he answered quietly.
His curtness disappointed Isabel. After her painful experience of his perverse obstinacy the morning before, she could not expect him to be converted from his folly or cured of his religious mania all in a moment, and she had come prepared for vigorous debate. But his cold self-possession and, above all, his avoidance of her eyes, dismayed her.
"Of course, you've thrown the rose away?" she asked.
"No, I have not thrown it away."
"Why?"
He spread his cloak on a carved stone bench for her to sit on, and did not answer.
"Why?" she repeated. "I want Father Antonio to explain. Are monks allowed to treasure up dead flowers? You'll be asking next for a tress of my hair."
He maintained his grim silence. Embarrassment and injured pride colored her cheeks a warm red; but she was determined to make him speak.
"I mean," she added, "that you won't ask for a lock of my hair at all. You'll expect me to go down in the dust and offer it you on my knees, and to coax you and implore you for days and days until you condescend to accept it. Your Majesty is a true Lord of Creation. He leaves me to do all the wooing."
This time Antonio looked at her fairly and squarely. She sat down and faced him with a pout on her lips and a toss of the head. In her heart she felt sure of victory; and she yearned to get over the preliminary skirmishes as soon as possible.
"Begin, your Reverence," she said. "Preach at me. Excommunicate me. Do your worst. I am ready."
"Ought I to begin," he asked, "by craving pardon for trespassing last night in the chapel?"
"No, you ought not. It wouldn't be sincere; because you believe the chapel is more yours than mine. And, most decidedly, you oughtn't to begin as if we are mortal enemies. Why are your tones as sharp and cold as icicles? And why do you glare at me as if you hate me?"
"I hate nobody," he replied. "But I hate this talk which we are compelled to have."
"Then let us make haste and be done with it. Explain. I want to know why you pretend to be still a monk, when you're really a farmer?"
"I pretend nothing," said Antonio firmly. "You will keep my secret. You will not name it even to your father. Above all, you will hide it from your servants, and from the chief of the Villa Branca Fazenda. I am, and I shall be till I die, a monk of the Order of Saint Benedict."
"Monks have been abolished in Portugal for years and years," she objected.
"You mean that monks have been exiled and monasteries suppressed. Monks cannot be abolished. Men can pull down blinds and put up shutters and sit in darkness; but they cannot abolish the sun."
"Choose some other illustration," she begged. "Surely it is monks who put up shutters and draw down blinds and shut out the light."
She proceeded to rattle off half a dozen well-worn objections to the monastic life. Her words were her own; but underneath their freshness and liveliness Antonio recognized the stock tirade against monks and nuns which he had heard twenty times in England. He listened patiently till she had finished. Then he said:
"We are not thinking of the same thing. Such monks and nuns as you are scorning do not exist. They are figments of your controversialists. They are stuffed figures, set up like skittles to be knocked down again. May I speak quite candidly?"
"Speak quite candidly, or do not speak at all," she answered.
"And personally?"
"The more personally the better."
"Then listen. You remember our first Wednesday—the day you and I and young Crowberry went all through the monastery?"
"You mean the day you brought me the little blue bird with the orange-colored tail?"
"You remember," continued Antonio, "how I showed you a monk's cell. That cell was mine. I lived in it for seven years. You pulled open all the drawers and looked inside the cupboard."
Isabel flushed crimson, and demanded indignantly:
"How did I know it was yours?"
"You didn't know it was mine," he answered gently. "Still, it was certainly somebody's. For a moment, as you peeped and rummaged, I was distressed and disappointed. How could I reconcile it with your delicacy? But I soon found the answer. I understood that you thought of monks as you might think of your British Druids or of the Crusaders or of the Incas of Peru or of the Andalusian Moors—men that have lived and breathed once, men that were picturesque, men that figure well in romances, but, most of all, men that are utterly dead and gone and done with. Perhaps it is natural for you so to think. Your England has been without monks, save in holes and corners, for three hundred years."
She was on the point of asking what all this might be leading to, when he added:
"Again, last night, when I wrapped you in my habit, you laughed and said: 'Now I suppose I am a nun.' You no more intended to make fun of holy things than a bird intends sacrilege when it darts into a church and knocks down candles and vases with its wings. But you said it, all the same."
"I don't deny saying it," she retorted; "I know perfectly well that I am coarse and wicked enough to say anything."
"I am not blaming you, Isabel," he said gently. "You are not coarse and you are not wicked. We are at variance on the greatest of issues; but may God forbid that we should quarrel."
The softness with which he spoke her name disarmed Isabel; and the fountains of lovingkindness which overbrimmed his words quenched the fire of wrath in her breast. To make sure that he was forgiven Antonio gazed at her with eyes so full of the old searching tenderness that a lump rose in her throat, and she looked away.
"No, I am not blaming you, Isabel," he continued. What I mean is this. You find it impossible to take all these things seriously. You think I enjoy dressing up in a monk's cowl and reciting a monk's Latin Office in a monk's stall, pretty much as other men enjoy putting on crowns and ermine and going to masques as princes and kings. You don't see that the mere cowl is very little more than nothing, and that a monk's faith and hope and love are nearly everything. You cried out in the chapel last night: 'So your Bride is only Religion, or only the Church, or only the Virgin.' Yes 'Only.' You said 'only.' And I am not quibbling on a mere word. You meant that a mortal bride—such a bride, for example, as Margarida—would be more real, more important, more entitled to my lifelong loyalty."
He ceased. After pondering a little she raised her eyes and said:
"In the main you are right. I'm afraid my vague notions of monks are not worth the trouble; but you have analyzed them correctly. In England we have some people who want to revive medieval tournaments with mailed men and horses, and lists, and queens of beauty, all complete. To me a modern monastery is practically the same thing, except that it's less interesting and more useless."
"I do not know enough of your mind," he said slowly. "After all, monasticism is not the whole of the Church. The Church is wider and older than her religious orders. Do you object only to monasticism in particular? Or are you equally impatient of the Church in general?"
"By the Church," she answered, "no doubt you mean Roman Catholicism. If so, I'm not a fair judge. I was educated with a bias against it, and I am gradually finding out that I was taught a great deal which was unfair and much that was untrue. But I will answer you as frankly as possible. Don't be hurt. I love the Church as I love a ruin in a landscape; but I should not love her if somebody should accomplish the impossible, and put her in a thorough state of repair."
Springing up she stepped to the tumbledown shrine and laid her hands on the mossy shafts of its ivy-hung portal.
"Be honest," she said. "Is not this little chapel far more beautiful in decay than ever it was when the roof didn't leak and these creepers were not allowed to twine about it? If I could wave a wand and bid every beauty-spot of moss vanish from the walls and make all the stones dead-white and all the angels sharp and true, would you love it as you do now? And it's the same, the very same, with the Church. When she was mistress of Europe, she was gaunt and hard and repellent. But she is marvelously picturesque in her decay. I don't know what our poets and painters and romancers would do without her."
"I still read English papers, and I know what you mean," said Antonio. "There is a fashion growing up among your poets of making free with the holiest things. They affect the reverence and simplicity of medieval believers when, in reality, they are robbing altars and looting sacristies to fill a property-box with theatrical properties. Chalices, censers, copes, chasubles, dalmatics, miters, pyxes; bishops, abbots, nuns, monks, friars, acolytes; crypts, stained glass, pointed arches, carven canopies—I see that all these are no more to them than stage backgrounds, stage puppets, stage dresses, stage tricks."
"It makes the poems and paintings much more gorgeous, anyhow," she interrupted.
"No doubt," said Antonio sternly. "Just as the palaces and harems of the Turks were more gorgeous after they had sacked the Holy Places. Let the Church be persecuted more than ever in your country, and I do not fear for her; but I tremble at the thought of your cleverest men taking her name in vain and praising her with their lips, while they are still obstinate pagans in their hearts and lives. Out of such blasphemy I foresee the birth of monstrous sins."
"Until this morning," retorted Isabel, grievously disappointed in him, "I thought you were no worse than over-pious, and a little over-sentimental about your religious memories. I could never have believed that you would be bigoted and narrow-minded. Your prophecy only makes me shudder. I repeat that the beautiful decay of the Church is bringing more beauty into art; and I believe that more beauty in art will bring more beauty into life. Yet you say it will give birth to monstrous sins."
For a long time Antonio did not reply. When he spoke his tone was so much altered that Isabel thought he accepted his defeat in argument.
"Look at this," he said, pointing to a stone which lay near his foot. It had been a gargoyle on the shrine, but must have fallen to the ground before Antonio was born. Even if the shallow carving had not been almost rubbed away by the hand of time Isabel could hardly have made out its outlines through the silken mosses and tiny ivies which covered it.
"It was part of the shrine once," he said. "I admit it looks more beautiful broken off and lying here in decay. I've never noticed it before. It ought to be in the porch. It isn't heavy. Will you help me to carry it?"
They stooped down together. The unclouded sun had already dried both the gargoyle and its mossage and leafage. Isabel took her fair share of the work, and between them they easily lifted the stone from the ground. But they had not borne it twenty inches towards the shrine before she let go and sprang clear, with a scream. The gargoyle struck upon a knob of rock and smashed into three pieces.
Antonio's glance followed Isabel's. She was gazing with horror at the long black grave from which they had wrenched the stone. It was a nest of centipedes. The creatures writhed this way and that, like the letter S, incalculably multiplied and gone mad. Some of them were bright scarlet, some were sickly yellow. Beyond them, half of a long worm, bald and clammy, lay across the slimy track of some hidden slug. A scurrying ear-wig touched it, and the worm disappeared as if by magic into the earth. Meanwhile two horny beetles were shouldering their way through the stubby grass.
The monk had hardly realized the success of his too vivid allegory when he saw that Isabel had snatched up her skirts and fled. He grabbed his cloak and leaped after her; but although he was almost immediately at her side, she continued her flight without recognizing his existence. After two or three minutes a swollen tributary of the torrent brought her to a halt.
"I am so sorry," he said, very humbly. "I never thought it could be so horrible as that."
"You're sorry too late," she cried. "I know you love me; yet you're always acting as if you despise me. It's your chief delight to humiliate me. Religion ruins you. Till we get to religion your heart is tenderer than a woman's; but, when religion comes in, I believe you'd burn me at the stake and feel proud of it."
Great tears came into her eyes; but before he saw them he had already recognized how thoughtless and unkind he had been in luring her to lift the gargoyle. The sight of the tears completed his repentance.
"With my whole heart I ask pardon," he pleaded, "although what I did was almost unpardonable. I didn't think; but it was selfish and brutal to score a point like that. Isabel, try to forgive me."
Whenever he spoke her name and looked into her eyes she became as clay in his hands. But Antonio did not know it. He took her silence to mean anything but pardon; and therefore his tone was humbler than ever as he added:
"We cannot part like this, Isabel. These rocks are dry and warm to your feet. We shall find no better spot."
He spread his cloak for her once more, and sat down at her side. Two or three minutes passed without a word. Then she said:
"If I am all wrong about monks, I am willing to be put right. What are monks for? Why do they exist?"
Antonio hesitated. There were so many gaps in her knowledge and in her sympathy. How could he explain the topmost flowering of churchly life to one who knew so little of the root and the trunk and the branches? At last he replied:
"You have spoken of painters and writers. Is it not true that both painting and writing have advanced almost entirely through the diligence of professional writers and painters? How soon the amateur slips back without the example of the professional to steady him! In our wars we have always found that a few professional soldiers can stiffen citizen levies who would otherwise run away. Monks, so to speak, are the professional Christians, devoting their lives to piety and the pursuit of perfection. I don't mean that they are professional like your English clergy. Monks are not professional shepherds. I might say that they are professional sheep, a professional flock, exemplifying, as Christians in the world can hardly do, blamelessness, simplicity, and obedience at every moment to their divine Shepherd's voice."
He paused; but Isabel made no comment.
"In comparing monks with professionals," he said uneasily, "I know I am putting it on rather a low level."
"So I thought," she said. And with a leap of his heart, he understood that she was not outside the range of Christian spirituality.
"Then we will put it higher," he continued eagerly. "Grant for a moment that Christianity is true. Grant that the everlasting God, Who carved these hills and poured out yonder Atlantic, once imprisoned Himself in space and time and became a mortal man. Grant that before He died for us, He begged for our lifelong love and trust, and for our daily praise and prayer, and good deeds and obedience and self-denial. Grant that He told us how this present life of ours is only a short road leading into a boundless life to come. For the moment you will grant all this?"
She bowed her head.
"Granting it, what do we find?" he asked. "We find the vast majority of men and women, including those who profess to believe His words, living for themselves instead of for Him. 'Seven times in a day have I sung praises unto Thee,' said the Psalmist, who died so long before our Lord was born; yet millions of Christians do not truly praise God seven times in their lives. They rarely think of Him save in time of trouble or in the hour of death. The monk is a man who throws all his poor weight into the other scale, striving to redress the balance. In union with the one Mediator he prays for those who will not pray. He offers praises in the stead of those who will not praise. The scoffer twits him with his unnatural life; but it is not more unnatural to give God all one's thoughts than it is unnatural to give Him none."
"Not more unnatural, perhaps," objected Isabel, "but it is unnatural enough, all the same."
"It may be so. But the monk is born into an unnatural state of things. If no man gave God too little, perhaps we should have no need of monks to give Him what men call too much. Perhaps so: perhaps not. I don't decide. Some monkish writers have seemed to say that even if all men were saints it would still be good for a few to detach themselves from the whirl of life and to offer God more perfect praises; just as there have been theologians to teach that, even if man had not sinned, God would still have been made Man, so as to perfect our humanity. But let such subtleties pass."
"Whether I agree with it or not, I see what you mean," said Isabel. "But is a monk no more than this?"
"He is much more," replied Antonio, "so much more that if we sat here all day we should hardly understand how much. But I will mention one thing more. Not only do the masses of Christians hold back their love and service from God; they also outrage His goodness and dim His glory every hour of every day."
"But monks can't mend that matter," protested Isabel. "I'm no theologian and I'm a double heretic; but I've always been told that my right can't atone for your wrong. One man can't redeem another."
"No," said Antonio, "but one man's prayers may drive another in penitence to the Redeemer. 'We are members one of another.' You love science. Let me prophesy. Science will teach us some day how subtly mind is intertwined with mind, and how mightily a thought or an aspiration can leap from one soul to another. There is enough of sin and shame in Christendom to make the angels weep; but God alone knows how much more there would be if faithful nuns were not pushing that black bulk back, all night and all day, with white hands of prayer."
Isabel desisted from further debate. But no sooner was the stress of argument eased in her brain than a millstone of fear settled heavily upon her heart. Up to that moment she had felt sure of her power as a living and beautiful woman to triumph over Antonio's shadowy Bride. Although his cool greeting had annoyed her, and although she was still a trifle ruffled by the affair of the gargoyle and the centipedes, she had found zest in his monkish coyness. Like many a huntress before her she had deemed the quarry's elusiveness charming so long as she was confident that in the long run he would be caught. But, all in a single moment, her eyes were opened both to the solemn grandeur of Antonio's religion and to the startling energy of his whole-hearted, whole-minded belief in it. The shadowy Bride suddenly towered like an impassable, immeasurable, resplendent Jungfrau across Isabel's path.