III
José stayed. Before February came in, he was a changed man. The unshared secret of the buried boxes had been too big and too heavy for his rustic wits, and had forced him into an unnatural attitude of taciturnity and suspiciousness. But no sooner had he shifted the burden of responsibility to Antonio's broad shoulders than his innate gaiety returned. The war, his wounds, his mother's death, and the loss of his farm had conspired to congeal José's heart and to seal his lips; and for years he had not sung a song right through. But one sunny morning, as he was working among the orange-trees, a knot in his brain seemed to slip free, and he began to pipe like a bird.
Antonio did not regret his sacrifice. José was an all-round farmer, with an eagerness for work which made him worth his weight in silver. In his native parish of Pedrinha das Areias he had learned the art of treating vines after the fashion of the growers in Collares, the famous vine-land near Cintra. In order to profit by his skill, Antonio bought, for thirty pounds, a straggling parcel of land alongside the Atlantic. There José and he planted chosen vines. The leafless canes, protruding from the sand, wore a hopeless look in winter: but they were well-rooted in the subsoil, and, when the summer suns began to burn, a covering of sand six feet thick kept the roots so moist and cool that the leaves were green and fresh long after the other vines looked parched and dry.
Antonio, however, was grateful for José not only as a farm-servant, a fellow-vintner, and a cooper. More than once, while the peasant's cheerful voice was caroling out old songs of love and war, Antonio found himself saying, "Non est bonum esse hominem solunt: 'It is not good for man to be alone.' After all, I am a monk and not a hermit."
José's quarters were in the outbuildings, where he enjoyed a bedroom much larger and more cheerful than his master's. He ate his morning meal alone: but, when the day's work was over, the two men dined together in the principal room of the farm-house. Dinner was always served ceremoniously. Even on fast-days, when it was merely an eight-ounce supper of wine and dark bread, both master and servant put on black coats and soft white collars. After dinner Antonio generally sat down to read. He subscribed to two English periodicals—a weekly paper and a quarterly review—so that, in the event of his visiting England again, he might not be out of touch with his hosts' thought and life. Meanwhile José would sit near the lamp or the window, carving one of the new bits of furniture with which he was gradually beautifying the little house. Later in the evening, a blackboard was produced and Antonio proceeded with José's education.
As a schoolmaster Antonio was unconventional. José could neither read nor write his native language: but the monk began by teaching him Latin. He taught José to form large capital letters, which came much easier than a cursive script to his rough hands. At the very first lesson the pupil learned how to write, spell, and pronounce pater and mater, and how to translate these words in the light of the Portuguese padre and madre. Within a week, having mastered the present indicative of amo and also the first and second declensions of nouns, he could print on the board Pater amat filium, with the Portuguese equivalent O padre ama o filho in the line below. Antonio omitted mention of exceptional genders or inflexions, and discreetly concealed the existence of the subjunctive mood. He did not attempt to impart the Latin of Cicero but only a rough-and-ready lingua rustica which he hoped to polish at his leisure into the language of the Missal and the Breviary.
Pride in his classical scholarship led José, one day of Lent, into an indiscretion. Upon a barn-door he carved deeply with his knife "Pater Antonius" in big letters and "Josephus" in smaller characters underneath. Antonio made him place a new panel in the door, after cutting out and burning the old one; and, at the same time, he reminded him sternly how he had sworn never to let fall the remotest hint that his master was a monk.
To guard against any fatal slip of José's tongue, Antonio forbade his servant from that hour to call him Father in any circumstances whatsoever. José's face fell, and he said dolefully:
"I'd been hoping, Father—I mean, Senhor—to make my Easter confession to your Reverence—I mean, to your Worship. Yes, and I'd been hoping that your Rever—that your Worship might be saying his Easter Mass in the abbey chapel and that I might serve it."
Antonio knew that he would only bewilder the honest fellow's mind if he attempted to explain confessors' faculties; and that it would be still worse to admit that he, though a choir-monk, had not yet said his first Mass. So he simply shook his head, and replied:
"No, José, we must fulfil our Easter duties, both of us, in the parish church. These are bad times for monks in Portugal. And remember, above all, that you must give up calling me 'Your Reverence' and 'Father.'"
Nevertheless the priest allowed the layman to share much of his religious life. Before they parted for the night they told their beads antiphonally. At dinner, when Antonio had said his Order's two-word grace before meat, Benedictus benedicat, he would edify José by relating some miracle or heroic act of the saint for the day. On the mornings of Sundays and days of obligation they tramped to the parish Mass together; and in the evenings they stole into the dim abbey and performed their pious exercises in choir.
In the autumn of that year the two men pressed seventeen pipes of rough wine. After putting aside two pipes for their own consumption they sold off the remainder for fourteen pounds. As a result of grafting upon old roots Antonio also pressed about a dozen gallons of good wine for his great experiment. This pressing he jealously cellared in a little cask, of José's making, which had been for months under daily treatment so that the wood should help rather than hurt the wine. Of course, the new vineyard on the sea-shore was too young to yield a harvest: but the plants waxed and throve exceedingly.
While Antonio was thus busied, another vintage was going forward almost under his eyes. One morning, about the middle of September, José rushed into the kitchen exclaiming that two women and three men were openly and calmly picking the grapes in the neglected vineyards of the abbey, and that they had somehow opened the outbuildings where the wine-presses and vats were stored.
Antonio paced up and down the kitchen twenty times before he could come to a decision. As the secret guardian of the abbey, he could not ignore these trespassers, who, if they were unchallenged, might easily grow bolder until they committed some act of desecration. On the other hand, there were dangers attending his interference with people who might turn out to be acting in a legal manner. He decided, however, to go up to the abbey and use his own eyes. Before setting out he slipped into his pocket a good Havana cigar, one of a boxful which had been pressed upon him in England.
The foreman of the vintagers was sitting in the shade of the monastery buildings, smoking a pipe of Brazilian tobacco.
"Good days, Senhor," said Antonio in a friendly tone. "Your Worship is luckier than I am. I made the Fazenda an offer for this vineyard, and they didn't even ask me to sit down."
"The Ministerio da Fazenda in Lisbon?" asked the foreman.
"No, in Villa Branca."
The foreman laughed a meaning laugh, Antonio changed his ground.
"We're pressing about twenty pipes down there in the valley," he said pointing out the farm. "But it's poor stuff. The vines have been neglected for years."
"So have these," the foreman grumbled. "Yet we're expected to take home wine fit for the Queen."
Antonio described his experiment in the vineyard on the sea-shore, and asked for the foreman's opinion and advice so deferentially that the man was pleased and flattered. When the monk rose to go the foreman suddenly said:
"The Senhor mustn't say I told him. But I don't wonder the chief of the Fazenda at Villa Branca bowed him out. The chief takes every grape in this vineyard every year, by his own authority, without paying a vintem to anybody. That's how Portugal is robbed. We might as well have Dom Miguel back again."
A burden rolled from Antonio's heart. So long as the Villa Branca official had an interest in snubbing off possible leasers or buyers the monastery would be safe. He readily promised never to reveal the source from which he had learned so spicy a secret; and, after deeply impressing the foreman by giving him a cigar which had truly seen both Cuba and England, he returned home.
The day Antonio received payment for the sale of his rough wine he tendered José his wages. In rural Portugal a servant's annual wages ranged from four and a half to five and a half pounds a year, with the addition of a coarse cloak every second year. Antonio offered José the price of a cloak and five pounds.
"This money," said José, holding it in his hand, "is taken from your Worship's savings—the money that's to buy back the abbey?"
"It is your own, fairly earned," the monk responded. "Mind you don't lose it. Have you a safe place to keep it?"
"Yes," said José promptly. "I shall bury it."
Antonio laughed. "You're like a fox," he said. "How many cemeteries have you?"
With some pride, José admitted, in mysterious tones, that he had three distinct and untraceable hiding-places, not counting the grave in the abbey-cloisters where he had buried the boxes. Becoming more at ease, he finally asked leave to ease his mind of an oppressive secret. Deep in a drift of sand near the new vineyard he had laid away one hundred pounds—the round remainder of moneys he had received for his horse and his farm and from a small legacy. Blushing at his own presumption, he begged Antonio to let him add this sum to the English pounds which his master was hording up for the abbey's redemption. Antonio, deeply touched, agreed to accept the money: but only on condition that José should be allowed a clear year in which to alter his mind.
Had Antonio been giving one hundred pounds instead of receiving it, José could not have been more grateful. But he had still something to ask.
"Since I saw those men and women up there in the vineyard, I'm not easy at nights," he said. "I'm thinking the boxes ought to be buried in our own garden. And, if I can have the cart and the bullock, I'll dig up everything that I've got and bring it here."
During the next dark night the two men opened the grave in the cloisters and brought away the boxes, which they reburied in a dry place within sight of José's window. The morning after, José set out in the bullock-cart, with a spade, a dark lantern, some sacking, and two empty barrels hidden under a heap of straw.
He was away two days. When he returned it was with so abashed an air that Antonio thought the hiding places had been found empty. But the lifting of the straw told a different tale. Although José had lost his farm, he had saved the household gods and heirlooms. There were two carved coffers filled with fine linen; a box of old Portuguese faience in which the Persian influence was still strong; five musty books of fusty piety; a fowling-piece, much more dangerous to the sportsman than to the game; and some great, round, solid, honest vessels of copper and pewter which shone, after José had polished them, like suns and moons.