For a moment his mind turned the question over in a numb, impersonal way. Then he came back with a rush to himself and, in a single moment, his chalice of agony welled up and brimmed over. He flung himself down on his knees and stretched out desperate hands and hungry arms across the narrow bed.
Although long minutes passed his dry-eyed, stony anguish remained. But at last his inward, spiritual man spoke. Was he committing a grievous sin? Was he breaking, in spirit, a vow which he was only keeping in the letter? Had he forsaken the Creator for a creature?
Slowly, but very surely, his conscience framed the answer. No, he had not sinned. In all his desire of her there was still nothing of the carnal mind. He was racked and scorched by anguish, not because he had lost her love, but because he had been forced to break her heart by refusing her his own. She was a child, a poor lonely child with neither man nor woman to love her, nor any God to console her; and he, Antonio, had flung her back into a still blacker frost and sharper famine, to pine and wither without love and without faith. Yet, in all this, he had simply obeyed God. He had obeyed the God who commanded Abram to offer up Isaac, the God who "spared not His own Son, but freely gave Him up for us all."
The moonbeam softly faded from the chamber. But Antonio did not move. His weary limbs and exhausted brain could resist no longer; and, still kneeling against her pillow with his arms outstretched across her bed, he fell asleep.
II
When the monk awoke day was dawning. For a while memory failed him. But as soon as he understood that he was in Isabel's room he leaped up and hastened downstairs.
He knew that he ought to go straight home. But his feet, despite their soreness, turned towards the stepping-stones. He retraced the path by which she had left him, hardly thirty-six hours before. Past the cypresses, through the mimosas, he went; and before the sun rose he was standing in the icy spray of the thunderous waterfall. He longed to plunge into the crystal pool; but her invisible presence abashed him, and with an ever-sharpening pain he hurried away.
As he regained the farm, he found José burning some dead leaves. Why could he not tear down these clinging memories of Isabel from his heart, as José could tear down ivies from the trees, and fling them a-top of the glowing, fuming pyre? The gust of pale, acrid smoke which nipped his nostrils was bitter-sweet.
After a dip in the brook he drank some of the sham coffee and forced down a hunk of coarse bread. But when he faced his routine he found that he could neither work nor pray. The black and red letters in his breviary danced impishly before his eyes; and when he took up a pen to write out some accounts he marked the paper with more blots than figures. Both door and window were wide open to the morning breeze; yet the room suffocated him.