VI
They found young Crowberry smoking a cigar outside the principal door of the monastery.
"Are the others inside?" Isabel asked.
Young Crowberry meditated a few moments. Then, with his hands clasped behind him, like a dame-school child repeating a lesson, he answered in an absurd monotone:
"I am Abbot of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute;
From the center right down to the say
I am free to behave like a brute."
"He is trying to make a parody on some lines by Cowper, one of our English poets who died thirty or forty years ago," Isabel explained to the bewildered Antonio. "I suppose he means the others have gone back home."
"Our respective sires have verily got them gone," said young Crowberry. And, dropping his affectation, he added, "I don't know how you managed to miss 'em, coming down from the house."
"Why have they gone away?"
"To mix a new mixture. Sir Percy has an idea."
Isabel led the way into the monastery. She entered it with a proprietary air which made the monk suspect that Sir Percy had deceived her and that she believed the place to be wholly paid for. Suspicion became certainty. He felt convinced that this was not a woman who would knowingly lend herself to Sir Percy's bargain with the Visconde.
"Show me one of the monks' cells," she commanded.
Antonio hesitated. The spectacle of a graceful girl tripping along the stern and dark corridors had already given him a slight shock. But the cells! Into whose cell could he take her? Decidedly he had no right to show her any save his own.
To his own they went. The monk could never enter the narrow room without emotion, and he was forced to go to the window to hide his anguish. What if this should prove to be his last entrance? What if Sir Percy should indeed defile and destroy the whole abbey?
"It's actually clean," said Isabel, amazed.
"What did you expect?" asked Antonio, turning round and speaking coldly.
"I've no idea. But I know I didn't expect cleanliness," she said. "Who is this bishop? They seem to have stuck his portrait up all over the place."
"He is not a bishop," put in young Crowberry. "He is Saint Benedict, the great Abbot, father of all the monks of the West."
Antonio started. The young man's tone was respectful, and it was evident that he was speaking sympathetically of matters about which he had been reading and thinking. Isabel, however, took little notice of the answer. As usual, she hardly recognized young Crowberry's continued existence. One after another she pulled out Antonio's empty drawers and opened his empty cupboards. Had she realized that the monks had been expelled only seven years before and that many of them must be still living, nothing in the world would have induced her to pry into their sancta; but it was evident that she pictured the monks of Portugal pretty much as she pictured the monks of old England. To her they were forgotten men, vanished into dust ages ago; and there could be no more indelicacy in ransacking their old haunts than in examining the sculptures of a long-empty sarcophagus.
From the cell they went to the cloister. There Isabel quickly espied the spiral staircase; and, having ascended it, she sat down on Antonio's favorite seat of cork. The quiet beauty of the scene subdued her; and not a syllable was spoken until they had retraced their steps and reached the monks' entrance to the chapel.
Before setting foot in the monastery young Crowberry had thrown away his cigar; and on the chapel threshold, with unostentatious reverence, he uncovered his head. They went in, young Crowberry leading.
No irreparable injury had been done. Only in the north-west corner of the nave was there any trace of Sir Percy's operations. He had taken down part of a creamy marble cornice which ran along the top edge of the azulejos, level with the sills of the high-placed windows. A circular saw occupied the marble's old place. On the floor were two carboys of acid, a short ladder, and half a dozen chisels, large and small.
By tacit consent none of the three mentioned this display of apparatus. Indeed, they affected not to see it. Young Crowberry still took the initiative. Standing opposite the western wall, he besought Antonio to explain the azulejos.
The ten blue-and-white pictures were worked out in tiles which encrusted the walls to a height of about fifteen feet. There was one on each side of the grand western door, and there were four on each of the north and south walls of the nave. Each picture measured about twelve feet across and was framed in decorative tile-work wherein green and yellow were added to the blue. Antonio began on the right-hand side of the western door.
"First," he said, "we have the Saint's birth. Like our divine Lord, he was born an outcast. His mother and father were on pilgrimage. Notice the Latin scroll, Non erat eis locus in diversorio: 'There was no room for them in the inn.' Through the trees you see the village of Carcavoa as it was before the earthquake, with a Gothic church and two spires."
The next picture was the one from which Sir Percy had removed the cornice; but Antonio did not change his tone.
"Second," he continued. "The Saint's boyhood. The book he is reading, in the shadow of the wayside shrine, is the 'Little Hours of the Blessed Virgin.' The scroll reads, Zelus domus tuae comedit me: The zeal of thy house hath eaten me up.' The games the other boys are playing are played in Portuguese villages to-day. The bullock-carts are unchanged also. Notice the two cats—lanky cats with long clever heads; they are Portuguese cats all over."
The third picture was pierced by the doorway which gave access to the cloisters; and the designers of the azulejos had made bold use of what might have been a disfigurement. The picture showed a small monastery. The gables, the dormer windows, the round arches, and the stumpy belfry of this little monastery were depicted in blue, on the tiles; but where there ought to have been a blue-painted doorway one saw the solid jamb and lintel of the doorway through which young Crowberry and the others had entered the chapel. The figure of the Saint was nowhere to be seen; but all the men and women in the picture were crowding hurriedly towards the doorway as if they would see the last of somebody who had passed into the cloister. Above the solid lintel chubby blue boys were painted lying on their chests and trying to look down into the building.
"The Saint," Antonio explained, "has entered a religious house. And as that religious house was this very abbey, you see the point of the doorway. On the scroll, Magister adest et vocat te: 'The Master is here and calleth thee.'"
Antonio successively pointed out the pictures of the Saint's first Mass, with blue angels helping to uphold the Chalice, and of the Saint's first miracle, with Oporto in the distance. This ended the series on the north wall. At the marble balustrade of the gilded sanctuary, he explained the stalls, the retablo, and the boldly-ribbed Gothic vaulting, at least a century older than the nave. Then he worked back along the south wall, making short comments on the Saint's shipwreck and second miracle, his preaching to prisoners, his landing in England, and his visit to the Abbey of Westminster, once Benedictine.
"Your Westminster Abbey looks strange," said Antonio. "It is before the alterations of Wren; but I admit the faults of the picture. The next one is better. It is the Saint's death at—I think you pronounce it Tyburn. The horses and most of the faces are quite English. The hurdle on which he has been drawn is broken. Notice the one-eyed man with the butcher's knife. On the scroll are the Saint's last words, the same as Saint Stephen's, Domine ne statuas illis hoc peccatum: 'Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.'"
This tenth, and last of the tile-pictures was on the left of the western door; but not until Antonio ceased speaking did he notice a small leather-covered box resting on the ground at the foot of the green and yellow border of azulejos. It was gilt-lettered P. L. K.-T. The lid was off, showing the stoppers of four chemists' bottles and some fine steel tools.
In the same instant, both Antonio and young Crowberry had the same thought. "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge." The words were grimly appropriate to Sir Percy's act of sacrilege; yet young Crowberry felt sure that Antonio had only recognized their appropriateness when it was too late. As for the monk, although his eyes met Isabel's for no more than a moment, he saw that she was wounded.
"When was the Saint hanged?" asked young Crowberry, in order to end the awkward pause. "In what reign?"
"In the reign of Isabel," Antonio answered.
Young Crowberry opened his eyes wide. The monk, however, had already realized his second mishap.
"I mean Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth, of course," he burst out. "The Portuguese for Elizabeth is Isabel. It's the same name."
But Miss Kaye-Templeman was already moving towards the cloister doorway. Antonio, suddenly losing his English, turned desperately to young Crowberry.
"You've done it this time," said the youth dolefully.
"Wait here," commanded Antonio, in Portuguese. "Don't follow."
He sprang after the lady and overtook her in the cloister, although she quickened her footsteps at the noise of Antonio's. When she saw that explanations were inevitable, she got in the first word.
"Senhor da Rocha," she said, haughtily, "I am willing—perhaps over willing—to be talked to. But I decline to be talked at. This is your gratitude for my offer of help. As for 'the reign of Isabel,' I am too dull to see the joke; but I can see the insult."
She walked on.
"Hear me one moment, I entreat," cried Antonio. "Have we not, both you and I, enough troubles, solid troubles? I have told you some of mine; and, although I do not know what they are, I can see that you have great sorrows too. For Heaven's sake let us not add to them by needless misunderstandings."
He kept level with her as she walked; but she heard him with averted eyes.
"I swear," he added, "that I was not talking at you. I swear I didn't catch sight of your father's hateful tools till I had finished speaking. As for 'the reign of Isabel,' I am a Portuguese. In Portuguese King Charles is Carlos, King Edward is Duarte, King James is Thiago, Queen Elizabeth is Isabel. Those bottles and tools upset me; and I forgot to translate the name."
When he saw that she neither vouchsafed him an answer nor paused in her walk his pride was roused.
"One minute more, and I will not trouble the Senhorita again," he said, with as much hauteur as her own. "I have offered an explanation and I have sworn that it is true. As for insults, I never give them, though I receive many. You are neither reasonable nor just. I have done."
He was turning away. But her pride broke down. She stopped and faced him, and her blue eyes suddenly shone with a rush of tears.
"Yes," she cried. "Scold me, abuse me, make me wretched. It doesn't seem natural for anybody to be kind very long. Hate the sight of me, like everybody else. Call me unreasonable. So I am. Call me unjust. So I am. If there's anything more, I'm ready."
Antonio stared at her in amazement as she clenched her fine hands and stamped one of her small feet. "All head and no heart," young Crowberry had said of this poor Isabel; and, for twenty-four hours, the monk had taken it for granted that young Crowberry was right. Yet, as she stood wet-eyed before him, she seemed to be all one big, bursting, breaking heart.
Her tears helped him like lenses to read her through and through. He discerned the tragedy of her girlhood, passed between a selfish woman and a father who was half a madman. He pictured her, dragged from place to place, from failure to failure, from humiliation to humiliation. He understood why she had builded icy barriers of pride to repel the insolent pity of those who found entertainment in her father's fiascos. And he saw, what she did not see herself, that under all her defenses and pretenses was the heart of a little child. He was filled with a yearning to comfort her; but he could only stand and gaze at her with infinite compassion.
"Yesterday," she went on, "I was happy. But to-day..."
He waited for her to say "I am miserable." But she had seen the pity in his brown velvet eyes and it stung her.
"To-day," she said, "I hate you!"