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.