II
When Isabel reached the pool with the stepping-stones Antonio was already there. He could have wished that Miss Kaye-Templeman had not suggested what might look like surreptitious meetings; but, being a Portuguese gentleman as well as a monk, he could do no other than attend her at the place she had appointed.
It was a perfect morning. The sun shone more hotly and brightly than on many a day of July, making one thankful for the shade of the trees, and for the cold spray of the waterfall. Hundreds of birds were singing, and a great Japanese medlar scented the air. Yet, after half an hour or so of uneasy talk on commonplace topics, the monk turned home again with a smarting breast.
Somehow the lady gave him a feeling that he had intruded; that he had committed an indelicacy in so swiftly taking her at her word; and that he was beginning to bore her. The afternoon, before, on the top of the steps, she had seemed sorry to see him go; but, at the stepping-stones, she seemed rather to regret his having come. While her politeness was unexceptionable, their good-comradeship appeared to be at an end.
His failure to retain her favor piqued Antonio. Like many another monk before him, he had often found pleasure in the belief that, if need arose, he could hold his own as a man of the world. Nor did the pleasantness of such a belief spring altogether from sinful pride. He had sought to hallow God's name and to hasten the coming of the Kingdom by sacrificing his share of life's delights and excitements; and he naturally preferred to think that the world he had renounced was a world in which he would have triumphed, and not a world in which he would have blundered and failed. The first eventful days which followed the arrival of all these English people at the abbey had ministered so subtly to his complacency that the awakening was all the ruder. Beneath the surface of his monkish humility the natural man began to stir proudly and imperiously towards the regaining of his dominance.
The next day was Sunday. So as to save the faces of poor Magarida and her family, Antonio avoided the ten o'clock crowd and fulfilled his obligation at the seven o'clock low Mass. This was the Mass most favored of the local Saints and Blessed Ones; but although the cura and the worshipers were full of quiet devotion the monk found it hard to keep his thoughts from wandering. Nearly all the way home Isabel tripped daintily hither and thither before his mind's eyes. He soon decided that he must not present himself again either at pool or at guest-house for a day or two; but this resolution only enhanced the dreariness of his mood.
Reaching the farm about nine o'clock he was about to prepare his lonely breakfast when José appeared with a letter. It had been brought, he said, by Sir Percy's Portuguese servant, whom José proceeded to denounce as an inquisitive minx and a saucy chatterbox. Antonio broke the seal and read:
Mrs. Baxter presents her compliments to Signor da Rocha and requests the pleasure of his company to-morrow (Sunday) afternoon, for tea. Mrs. B. trusts that Signor R. reached home yesterday before the shower.
Saturday Evening.
Underneath Mrs. Baxter's expansive script the monk saw a few infinitesimal characters, so minute that in spite of his keen eyes he was forced to hold them up to the light. At first they looked like a wavy and broken line, about half an inch long; but he deciphered them at last. They ran:
Do come. I. K-T.
"For instance," said José indignantly. "She asked me point-blank, plump out, whether your Worship is engaged to be married."
Antonio wheeled round so sharply that he almost let the paper fall. It took him some moments to realize that José was not quoting Isabel, but only Isabel's servant.
"I up and asked her, straight off, if she was engaged to be married herself," continued José. "And when she said No, I said, 'With a tongue like that I don't wonder at it.' Then she went home."
Antonio forced a laugh and turned back to light a couple of pine-cones on the hearth. But when José had set out for church he picked up the note again and read Isabel's message thrice over. Only nine letters; yet they harped and sang around him as if they had been the Nine Muses, and all his heaviness and dreariness fled away from their silver voices.
Later on, while he was conning his breviary under the orange-trees, the monk suddenly faced a question. It came to him as he recited the None psalm Quomodo dilexi legem, at the words tota die meditatio mea est. Could he truthfully say that his "meditation all day long" was still upon God? He examined his conscience.
The result was not unsatisfactory. After years of loneliness his mind surely needed the tonic of intercourse with minds of its own order. Mr. Crowberry and his son had certainly wrecked his plan of autumn meditation and study; but after all, these two were associated with the most crowded and stirring months of Antonio's career, and he could hardly be cool at their irruption into the quiet life of the farm. Again, the affair of the azulejos had distracted him greatly; but surely God had been the substratum of his long thinkings, and the firmament overarching them all. As for Isabel, he was spending time with her at Sir Percy's express request. That he should find delight in her society was proper and right. As a da Rocha, whose ancestors had fought against the Moors to establish the Portuguese kingdom and against the Spaniards to restore it, he naturally felt invigorated by his encounters with a gently bred and high-born damsel.
Although he was perfectly honest in all this inward searching, the monk, nevertheless, failed to push the probe right home. Isabel had been confided to his neighborly good-will, Isabel was intellectual, Isabel spoke his beloved English, Isabel was an aristocrat, like himself; therefore Isabel's temporary prominence in his thoughts was explained. It did not occur to him that Isabel was also the prettiest and daintiest girl he had ever seen, and that this fact might have some little to do with his interest in her. But he was not wholly to blame for the omission. Barely ten days had passed since his escape from Margarida, and Antonio was taking it for fully granted that he was eternally proof against girls as girls and women as women.
When José came in from church the monk translated Mrs. Baxter's note aloud, and stated that he would accept the invitation. He added that he would take care to pass the chapel, and, if possible, to collect the pieces of the two broken azulejos. The two men sat awhile in the garden smoking their Sunday cigars and saying little. José's peace of mind was evidently not being disturbed by Sir Percy's daughter as it had been disturbed by Senhor Jorge's. After his master had refused a plump, bouncing, rosy-cheeked, black-eyed heiress, all covered with gold, like Margarida, José did not fear his accepting a slender, icy, shell-pink, simply-garbed, unbejeweled stranger like Miss Kaye-Templeman. He would almost as soon have believed that Antonio was in danger of Mrs. Baxter.
The monk set out at three o'clock. Instead of taking his usual short cut up the bed of the torrent he followed the road through the great gates and the avenue of camellias to the monastery. He tried the door of the chapel; but it was locked. Deeply disappointed, he was turning away when Isabel came in sight, descending the steep path from the pool. She greeted him with more openness and friendliness than ever before.
"I've come to meet you," she added, "to save my own life. Whatever happens, don't let Mrs. Baxter know I wrote that little bit on her letter. She gave it to me to seal."
"It was wrong of you," said Antonio, with mock censoriousness.
"I know. Very wrong," she retorted. "But Mrs. Baxter began it. After her Mrs. B. and Signor R., surely there had to be a postscript. But tell me. Didn't I see you rattling the door of the chapel?"
"I hoped it might be unlocked," he said, a little awkwardly, "and I thought I might take the liberty of picking up those broken tiles. Perhaps they could be patched together and cemented back into their places."
The thought of the azulejos clouded her gaiety, and she did not dissemble an impatient pout. Antonio drew out his old-fashioned silver watch.
"Twenty-five minutes past three," he said. "We are too early for Mrs. Baxter."
"For Mrs. B., you mean," she answered, dismissing her impatience. "Very well, Signor R.; let us go and gather up the fragments."
From her embroidered bag she drew out a tiny handkerchief, a set of ivory tablets, and, last of all, a long thin key. The monk recognized it at once. It was of old Spanish work, damascened; and Antonio could not doubt that if the Fazenda official had been a less ignorant man he would have ordered a cheap duplicate, so as to keep the original for himself. Isabel drove it into the keyhole; and, a moment later, the well-hung door rolled back on its hinges and the afternoon sun filled the chapel with warm light.
They entered. Nothing had been touched since the moment of Sir Percy's accident. Without a word the monk stepped forward and began putting together the broken framework of the saw. After some hesitation Isabel joined him. Kneeling near his side she sorted out the shattered azulejos and succeeded fairly well in piecing them together.
"What shall we do with them?" she asked. "We have no cement. Besides, I am not sure that my father won't prefer to put them back himself. By the way, don't tell Mrs. Baxter what we've been doing."
"Give them to me," Antonio answered. And, having transferred them to a short plank, he carried the pieces off to his own cell and placed them in the cupboard. The damage to the two tiles was irreparable; but he resolved to puzzle out the secret of their manufacture and to make new ones in their stead.
"We can go now, can't we?" begged Isabel, when he returned to the chapel. There was a dutiful, almost daughterly, submissiveness in her manner which cooed to his pride more softly and winsomely than he knew.
"We can go," he said. "There will be time to take the path over the stepping-stones."
They relocked the chapel and mounted through the wood. Here and there its brown carpet of pine-needles was tawny with flecks and dapplings of mellow sunshine. In a patch of old garden, round an image of Saint Scholastica, they found autumn snowdrops, saffron, and sweet-smelling ranunculus. Overhead a blue gum-tree was in full flower, and all the while the wood hummed and thrilled with the diapason of the hidden torrent.
After they had crossed the stepping-stones Isabel halted, as if to absorb the loveliness of the rippling pool. Antonio remained silent, awaiting her good pleasure. Suddenly she said, without turning her eyes towards his:
"This is the place where I was so disagreeable yesterday morning."
He was too much surprised to reply.
"Isn't it?" she demanded.
"No," said Antonio. "It is the place, where, yesterday morning, we ... where we didn't get on together as well as before."
"It was all my fault," she persisted. "I had a silly fit of prudishness, like a young miss just home from school. All the time we were trying to talk I was wondering what you thought of me for asking you to meet me alone in a wood."
"English ways are different from Portuguese," suggested Antonio.
"Not so very different, after all," she said. "Ask Mrs. Baxter. Or, rather, take care that you don't say half a word to Mrs. Baxter about it. If you do she will swoon away with horror at the news of my brazen forwardness."
"If you will lend me your little ivory tablets," replied Antonio, "I shall be able to begin making notes of all the things I am not to mention before Mrs. Baxter."
"Be serious for a minute," she urged with a heightening of color. "Unless I can make you understand, we must not meet this way any more. If we mustn't, if we can't, I don't expect it will matter very much to you; but ... it will to me."
Her eyes met Antonio's. This time it was he who colored up and fell into confusion. The only reply he could think of was a stilted compliment.
"The Senhorita does me a great and an undeserved honor," he stammered.
"Don't," she commanded, with an impatient gesture. "When you talk like that I hate you. Be sincere. Besides, I'm not a Senhorita. If I were a Senhorita I should have jet-black hair and big sentimental eyes, and I should never walk more than a mile in my life, and I should no more dream of meeting you like this than of dancing on a boa-constrictor. Are you going to talk like that any more? If so, we'll go home this minute and you can do it on the way."
Antonio had met his match. If Isabel had been a man he could have met imperiousness with imperiousness, sarcasm with sarcasm, demand with demand, until he had established his will. But Isabel mastered him. He could only stand before her, like a refined and handsome José, awaiting orders.
"What you must understand is this," she said. "You have promised to come and talk to me now and then, while my father is in Lisbon. You've promised, and I want you to do it. I must talk to somebody sometimes, mustn't I? But I'd rather not have you at all than have any more times like Friday afternoon with Mrs. Baxter. You may think that, because she finished the story of her life on Friday, you've got the worst of it over; but you haven't. You've still to hear about the dear Marchioness of Witheringfield. Mrs. Baxter didn't know the dear Marchioness from Eve; but the tale will take an hour, all the same. Also, you've to hear how Mrs. Baxter lost the Baxter jewels, which she never possessed; and how she undermined her health nursing me through a month's fever, though it was really only a two-days' cold in the head; and how she rescued the little Viscount Datton from a burning house, which she never saw in her life. Don't think me spiteful. I simply can't stand it. Of course, you must put up with Mrs. Baxter once in a while; but, speaking generally, if you're coming any more to talk to me, I want you to talk to me here, at this pool, in the mornings."
"If I come here, to this pool, in the mornings," asked Antonio, who had recovered himself, "how do you know that I shan't inflict on you a string of histories as long as Mrs. Baxter's?"
Although he did not mean to fish for a compliment, his ears expected some pleasing reply; and he was a little crestfallen when she replied brusquely:
"Perhaps you will. Only don't you see, they will be histories I haven't heard fifty times already. Come to-morrow morning. Now we ought to be going. It must be close on four o'clock."