Muffled in a warm new cloak which young Crowberry had forced upon him in Lisbon, Antonio bent his whole mind and soul to the ineffably sacred and glorious Work which lay before him. At last, after all these years of dogged battle, he had won the fight. At last the dead Abbot's prophecy was about to be fulfilled, and he, Antonio, was about to break the most holy Body and to hold up in the great chalice the most precious Blood.
To his dismay he found it difficult to meditate steadfastly upon God's unspeakable Gift. Try as he would, he could not concentrate an undivided mind upon the crowning mystery of faith. That his thoughts should wander a little on the morning of such an anniversary was perhaps natural; but somehow every thought led back to Isabel. He rebuked himself sharply, and forced his mind once more to pious thinkings. He called to memory the holy Francis of Assisi who died a deacon, and the holy Benedict who died a layman. If these two saints, who stood so high among all the saints of the universal Church, had never presumed to offer the Holy Sacrifice, how could he, Antonio, who had lived less than ten years in religion and more than forty in the world, dare to say this Mass?
Despite his efforts to dislodge it, the thought of Isabel neither moved nor weakened. Words which she had spoken on the last afternoon at the cascade rang like bugles through his brain. In terrible wrath and bitterness she had cried: "I will come back! You will succeed. You will regain the abbey. You will fill it with monks. But remember. I will come back. On the day of your triumph I will be there. It isn't only you Southern people who love revenge. I will be there. I will come back!"
He rose from the bench and gazed at the calm Atlantic, glittering under the first sunbeams. But he could not banish the echo of her words. Isabel was coming back! Not for revenge. Ever since the end of his second novena to Saint Isabel he had rested quietly in a firm confidence that his prayers for Isabel Kaye-Templeman had been granted, and that his great hope had been fulfilled. She was coming back, not in hatred, but in peace.
No. All this was folly, and worse. How could she come back? How could she, after twenty years, find out what was happening in a corner of distant Portugal? The very idea was madness. Nevertheless Antonio could not drive it away. He descended to his cell, but her invisible presence seemed to fill it; and it was only in the chapel that he firmly regrasped the threads of his inward preparations for the coming Sacrifice.
Eager whisperings in the nave drove him back to his cell. Lay folk from far and near were beginning to arrive. All of them had risen before daybreak, and some of them had been tramping all night. Throughout the country-side an exaggerated account of Antonio's acts and sufferings had sustained so much embellishment that he was already being venerated as a saint of heroic virtue. Had he not, simply by praying in the Navares church, caused an English lord to spring up, so to speak, out of the earth with fifty contos of reis, all in gold? Had he not cast a devil out of the shaggy, wild-eyed José? Had he not withstood the rich and beautiful Margarida? Had he not wrought the indisputable miracle of changing common wine into champagne simply by standing a bottle on its head? Had he not driven away from the azulejos the stiff Englishman with the icy, golden-haired daughter, all by a supernatural spell of holy anger? And, to crown all, was he not making a cardinal and three bishops to grow where never more than one bishop had grown before?
A little later the mere sightseers were reinforced by files of devouter worshipers whose Christian souls had glowed and burned at the tale of Antonio's faithfulness; and, by degrees, the reverential expectancy of these more earnest spirits hushed all unseemly shufflings and whisperings. According to Portuguese custom there were no seats, and everybody knelt on the floor. As the nave became more crowded the strange silence became deeper. It was broken at last by the unrestrained sobbing of the widow Joanna Quintella, who was suddenly filled with bitter remorse for having fastened upon Antonio his nickname of "the abbey miser." Her example was too much for the weaker wills, and one after another joined her in weeping.
The cardinal and the bishops, whose visit was unofficial, had stipulated that they should not be expected to make a ceremonious entrance or to bear themselves with any appearance of defiance towards the obsolescent laws against the Orders. They seated themselves without ostentation in stalls which were only distinguished from the stalls of the monks by thin cushions and kneelers stuffed with straw. There, with bowed heads, they prayed not only for Antonio and for the restored Benedictine life of Portugal, but also for a renewal of the fervor with which each one of them had said his first Mass long years before.
On the stroke of ten the sacred ministers emerged from the sacristy. As his assistant priest Antonio was accompanied by one of the new community, a young Benedictine from Brazil. A Franciscan from a restored house in Entre Minho e Douro was deacon, and the sub-deacon was the village cura. The servers were José and Brother Cypriano, last of the old lay-brethren, who had arrived the night before from Evora.
As Antonio appeared a murmur of awe escaped from the intent crowd in the nave. The monk had recovered his power of concentration, and his face was not like the face of a mortal man. But he moved forward, all unconscious that the people were not pleading with God for mercy upon him as a poor and presumptuous sinner.