In spite of his self-possession the Prior started. Of this contingency he had certainly never thought. He came a step nearer to the young man, and spoke with astonished urgency.
"You destroyed the proofs? You? Every one of them?"
"Every one."
A sudden white change passed over Padre Cristoforo's face. His lips locked themselves together until they looked like a single line; his eyes flashed ominously beneath his heavy brows. In his anger he did, as he was privileged to do to any inferior member of his community, forgetting that Dino Vasari, with his five-and-twenty years, had passed from under his control, and was free to resent an offered indignity. But Dino had laid himself open to rebuke by adopting the tone of a penitent. Thence it came that the Prior lifted his hand and struck him, as he sometimes struck an offending novice—struck him sharply across the face. Dino turned scarlet, and then white as death; he sank a little lower, and crushed his thin fingers more closely together, but he did not speak. For a moment there was silence. The waiting monks, the passing pupils who saw the blow given and received, wondered what had been the offence of one who used to be considered the brightest ornament of the monastic school, the pride and glory of his teachers. His fault must be grave, indeed, if it could move the Prior to such wrath.
Padre Cristoforo stood with his hand lifted as if he meant to repeat the blow; then it fell slowly to his side. He gathered his loose, black robe round him, as though he would not let his skirts touch the kneeling figure before him—the scorn of his gesture was unmistakable—and hastily turned away. As he went, Dino fell on his face on the marble pavement, crushed by the silence rather than the blow. Monks and pupils, following the Prior, passed their old companion, and did not dare to speak a word of greeting.
But Dino would not move. A wave of religious fervour, of passionate yearning for the old devotional life, had come across him. He might die on the pavement of the cloister; he would not be sorry even to die and have done with the manifold perplexities of life; but he would not rise until the Prior—the only father and protector that he had ever known—bade him rise. And so he lay, while the noon-day sunlight waxed and waned, and the drowsy afternoon declined to dewy eve, and the purple twilight faded into night. If the hours seemed long or short, he could not tell. A sort of stupor came over him. He knew not what was going on around him; dimly he heard feet and voices, and the sound of bells and music, but which of the sounds came to him in dreams, and which were realities, he could not tell. It was certainly a dream that Brian and Elizabeth stood beside him hand-in-hand, and told him to take courage. That, as he knew afterwards, was quite too impossible to be true. But it was a dream that brought him peace.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
BY LAND AND SEA.
At night the Prior sent for him. Dino's hearing was dulled by fatigue and fasting: he did not understand at first what was said. But, by-and-bye, he knew that he was ordered to go into the guest-room, where the Prior awaited his coming. The command gave Dino an additional pang: the guest-room was for strangers, not for one who had been as a child of the house. But he lifted himself up feebly from the cold stones, and followed the lay-brother, who had brought the message, to the appointed place.