VII
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.
"I see what you mean," she said hastily, trying to push back her crowding fears. "It's interesting, it's wonderful, I suppose it's beautiful in a kind of way; but what has it to do with us? You're not a monk any longer. You can't be. You say it isn't the cowl that makes the monk; and surely, it isn't mere bricks and mortar that make a monastery. The old abbey down there is an empty shell. Your Abbot is dead. Your brethren are dead too, or in perpetual exile. The Order has come to an end. You may play at being a monk; but you are free."
Antonio began to explain the Solemn Vows. But she interrupted him scornfully.
"Circumstances alter cases," she said. "Besides, hadn't you better ask your conscience if you are not really worshiping your vows, worshiping your consistency, instead of worshiping God? God will be poorly worshiped by making yourself miserable—yourself and ... and me."
Her voice so softened on the last two syllables that the monk's lips could not frame an argumentative retort. Yet she must be answered. Although he did not look at her, he could feel that the irons of her ordeal were already glowing too hot for her endurance. Something had to be done. At last he said:
"Without intending it you have told me, a scrap at a time, the story of your life. May I tell you the story of mine?"
Her sorrowful eyes lit up gratefully. "Tell me every word," she said.
In the simplest language he could command, Antonio told her all. He began by stating quite baldly the fact of his noble lineage. Then he described briefly his childhood in Lisbon and at Cintra, and his first sight of an Englishman in the person of a fair-haired young captain who had been wounded at the battle of Bussaco. He told of his 'teens in Madeira, and of the drowning of his parents and sisters on their way thither to join him; of his appointment to a scandalous sinecure in the gift of the Government, and of his retreat from a position which he could do nothing to reform; of his excursion into French scepticism; of his religious vocation and of his struggles against it; and of his life in the monastery up to the day of his ordination to the priesthood.
To the narrating of these events Antonio devoted barely a quarter of an hour. When, however, he began to tell of the monks' expulsion he let himself go; and thenceforward his warmth of tone and liveliness of language made Isabel realize vividly every scene he described. With kindling eyes he told her of the dying Abbot's prophecy; of his halt at the deserted farm on the afternoon of the exodus, and of his resolve to win back the monastery for Saint Benedict's family; of his bitter hour in the granary at Navares; of his tramp northward; of his hard life in Oporto; of his never-to-be-forgotten months in England and France and Spain; of his return to the abbey; of his snub at Villa Branca; of José; of Margarida; and of young Crowberry's mysterious candle in the guest-house window.
"The rest you know," he said.
Throughout his recital he had gazed at the rocks, the sky, the trees, the water; but, as he ended, he glanced nervously at Isabel, hungering for her sympathy yet expecting her scorn. To his amazement she slipped from her place at his side, sank down on her knees beside him, seized both his hands in hers, and said:
"Poor Antonio! You poor Antonio. My poor Antonio!"
Her voice was tenderer than a mother's crooning over a wounded child. Tears were brimming her eyes and flowing down her cheeks as she gazed up into the monk's face. Then her voice broke. She bowed her head abruptly and tried to hide her face in her hands. But she did not let Antonio's hands go; and her tears laved the wounds torn by the thorns of her rose.
Antonio could have endured her contempt; but this outburst of a pitying woman's love, the first he had known for five-and-twenty years, almost broke his heart. Thrice he devised words of consolation; thrice they were stifled in his throat. He could only sit and watch the conclusive rise and fall of her shoulders as the sobbing shook her frame. Once she controlled herself enough to look up and moan:
"Why, oh why, must we be so unhappy?"
The monk knew that an answer was not expected; so he sat silent. But later on, when some calmness had returned to her, she put the question again.
"Why must we be so unhappy? If God can do everything, why has he made a world that goes so badly? Why has he made the easy things sins and only the hard things virtues? Why has he made his creatures so inclined to anger him or forget him? It seems mad. It seems almost diabolical. I've never met a wicked man or a foolish woman who could be foolish enough or wicked enough to make a world like this if they had the power. Why is God worse than we are?"
"You do not mean what you say," he answered, soothing her. "You know you are not putting it fairly. You—"
"I know, I know," she interrupted. "I am shallow, I am unjust, I suppose I'm almost blasphemous. Forgive me if I've hurt you. Only, your God is so terrible. I believe in Him; but I'm frightened. He is nothing but grandeur and majesty. He will have no rebellion, He insists on everybody's homage all the time."
"He is Love, everlasting Love," said Antonio warmly, "and if any words of mine have made you doubt it, may He forgive me. I see the world's unbelief, first and foremost, as Love rejected; and if I am a monk it is in the hope that my whole life's prayers may perchance be one poor drop of balm poured into Love's wounds. But these matters are too weighty to be talked of like this. The origin of evil, the mystery of free-will—you have raised the problems that none can solve."
"Let us leave them alone," she pleaded. "I hate them. Deep down in my heart, I do not disbelieve. Before you had half finished your story, my pride was broken. Yes, when you pictured the chapel on the night you returned, and the moonlight lingering on the crown of Jesus, I knelt with you in spirit before that altar and words came back to my lips that I hadn't said since I was a child."
In exceeding thankfulness he was about to speak; but she hurried on.
"Antonio," she said, "if you send me away, perhaps you will think of me as a temptress—a woman raised up by the devil to blandish you aside from your holy purpose, and to lure you into trampling upon your vows. Promise you will never think of me like that. Kneeling here on my knees, I swear before God that I am not ... that."
She paused. Then, with her head bent so that he could not see her face, and in low tones, she added slowly:
"I have only wanted to be near you—to be with you, to spend all the rest of my life listening to you, helping you. Heaven knows there has never been for a moment anything ... anything base in my love. I know what most people mean by love and I loathe it. Tell me you don't misunderstand. Say you believe me. Promise you'll never think of me like that."
"I promise," said Antonio, deeply moved. And, try as he would, he could say no more.
After a long time she raised her head abruptly and challenged his eyes. By the pallor which blanched her cheeks he divined her question, and he knew that the bitterest moment of his life was come.
"So there is no room for me?" she asked in low, vibrating tones. "No room for Isabel as well as for your Bride? You send me away?"
He tried to be cool; but the flame of her pure heart's yearning so scorched him that he cried out:
"No, I do not send you away. It is not my will; it is God's. He knows, Isabel, He knows that all the sacrifices I have ever made and all the trials I have ever borne are as a few grains of dust compared with this. I do not send you away. But you must go. Our spirits are willing to take high and holy vows, here and now; but we are flesh and we are weak. You must go. You must. You will."
She arose slowly and stood upright. Instantly he did the same. He seized her hand; but before he could speak, she said quietly:
"I will go. After this, unless miracles happen, you will only see me with Mrs. Baxter or with my father. But, before I go, do me one little kindness. I promise that, so long as I live, it shall be a secret between us. I know your heart. Once, only once, let me hear you say that you love me."
Antonio knew that he loved her indeed, with a love whereof he had no cause to be ashamed, and that he must speak the three little words she craved. He began to frame a prudent preface which should precisely qualify them and empty them of all their association with profane passion. But his knightly blood stirred in time and saved him. Besides, he knew that he might safely speak the words and trust Isabel not to abuse them. He bent to her ear and said simply:
"I love you."
For a long moment she stood with closed eyes and did not stir. Then she gently freed her hand and moved away. Antonio followed her. Wherever the paths were wide enough they walked side by side; but although the way was long they did not speak. Here and there in the wood there were low boughs to be held aside, and once the monk had to lift her bodily across a little brook; but he did all these things as a matter of course, without a word. When the guest-house gleamed through the trees, Antonio halted and would have uttered the few sentences he had been arranging in his brain; but she silenced him with a gentle gesture and walked across the broad path, up the sunny steps, and through the wide-open doorway, without a glance behind.