Antonio

by Ernest Oldmeadow

With eyes at rest upon the dreaming sea the young Antonio recalled some of the hours he had spent sitting upon this same cork bench. All of them had not been hours of peace. Antonio remembered March nights of storm, when mountainous waves uplifted white crests in the cold shine of a racing moon. He remembered August dusks, when the thunder pounded and boomed like great guns, or like enormous breakers on a sandy shore, while the lightning unsheathed its blinding blade, bright and jagged as a scimitar. He remembered December gales, with the pine-trees cowering and creaking before the blast; and January floods raging down the mountain. But, most vividly of all, Antonio recalled his hours of inward strife and tempest. He remembered that long night's vigil when he wrestled and prayed against a sudden temptation to renounce the religious life and go back to the warm, sweet world. And he remembered those many, many hours of less sultry, more nipping and stinging tempest when all the arguments against religion in general, and against monasticism in particular, went on bursting like hailstones about his head. Thrice during his novitiate and once more on the very eve of his full profession a tornado of doubt had well-nigh swung him off his feet and hurled him back into the world. But on this May night, within him and without, there was peace.

Peace. Better still, there was peace at last in Antonio's beloved fatherland, in beautiful Portugal. For more than five-and-twenty years the garden of the West had lain under the blight of war. At the bidding of Wellington had not the peasantry laid waste their fields, so that there should be neither a blade of grass nor a cob of maize for Napoleon's horses and men? And after Napoleon was flung back had not the ancient kingdom sunk to be a mere colony of Brazil, with Englishmen lording it amid the ruins? Worse still, had not the fratricidal strife of the Absolutists and the Constitutionalists soaked Portugal's hill-sides with her best blood? But now the civil war was ended. Napier, the amazing Englishman, had done his work, and Dom Miguel's cause was lost. At Evora Monte, with the coming of May, the faithful remnant of sixteen thousand Miguelistas had broken their swords across their knees and dashed their muskets to pieces against the stones at the news of their betrayal by a selfish and ungrateful master.

During the long siege of Oporto the echoes of the bugles had often resounded in Antonio's cell, challenging him to imitate many a monk of bygone ages and to exchange the cowl for the helmet. This was one of the most frequent shapes in which his doubts assailed him. He was young, he was ardent, he loved his country; and sometimes a flush of shame would burn his cheek as he heard of some desperate sortie from the beleaguered city. To be praying in a cloister at such a time was a good work: but, so long as the battles were actually raging, was it not a work for women, like preparing lint? Once, indeed, he went so far as to approach the abbot for leave to interrupt his monastic life while he struck a good blow for Portugal: but the abbot confounded him by demanding sadly on which side Antonio felt it his duty to fight. To the old man's question the young one could give no clear answer. His political sympathies were with sterling liberalism: but he had read enough history and seen enough of the world to know that those who preach mostly of liberty often tolerate others' liberty least, and that both the constitutionalism of Dom Pedro and the absolutism of Dom Miguel were mere passwords of opportunists rather than sincere utterances of convictions and principles. In response to his silence and confusion the abbot charged him, under obedience, to dismiss the idea of soldiering from his mind: but whenever tidings of fresh carnage on the banks of the Douro reached the monastery Antonio's heart bled anew. That Portuguese should have helped to slay the thousands of Frenchmen whom Massena had flung at the ridges of Bussaco was a thing for which Massena's master was alone to blame: but the shooting down of Portuguese by Portuguese was a different thing. And so it was with a brimming heart that Antonio, as he sat on his cork bench under the mild stars, thanked God for peace at last in Portugal.

Peace. Best of all, peace seemed to have begun even for the Church and for her religious Orders. It was true that the victorious Liberals had decreed the expected confiscation of the military Orders' rich possessions: but, instead of heeding the firebrands from France and suppressing the religious Orders altogether, the new Government had contented itself with closing the smaller houses and distributing their old inmates among the larger monasteries. And, it was true that the State was seeking to impose vexations upon the Church: but it seemed probable that patience and charity and prudence on the Church's part would soon make the crooked straight, and that the Portuguese family would once more dwell in harmony and peace.

Peace. From the peace of the sea Antonio's eyes wandered at last to the peace of the earth. Roving over wood and meadow and stream, his gaze came to rest at last in a little clearing between the ending of the orange-groves and the beginning of the vineyards. This was the monks' cemetery. It was three hundred years old, and the bones of nearly all the men who had lived and breathed and walked in the cloister under his feet lay beneath its pleasant turf and flowers. In the midst of the clearing a tall and slender cross glimmered pale through the dusk.

There was not a trace of morbidity in his mood; yet Antonio beheld God's acre with more of longing than of shrinking. On so soft and gracious a night even a pagan would have found something alluring in the thought of death. After the day's glare the dimness was like a veil for tired eyes, and the scented air was like caressing arms, wooing one to everlasting rest. Antonio was no pagan and no voluptuary. He wanted to live strenuously for God, according to the Holy Rule: but it was good to feel that whenever the body should be worn and weary even unto death, there would be this plot of hallowed earth for its repose. With his eyes upon the pale cross Antonio looked through it into his future. He pictured himself living his life, as the hundreds of dead men in the cemetery had lived theirs, in the cell, in the chapel, and in the cloister, studying the divine mysteries, ever advancing toward perfection, praying for those who would not pray for themselves, rendering to God some of the praise and worship whereof the careless deprive Him, and striving, as it were, to redress the balance of the world. He saw himself giving his keen mind, his eager spirit, his young strength, his whole manhood to the divine office, so that the praising of God should not all be left to the weak, the simple, the aged, and to the fearful souls in the shadow of death. He knew full well that the world did not understand such a sacrifice, and that the mass of men were so entirely blind to the monastic ideal that they would look on him either as a cowardly shirker of life's duties or as a fanatical abstainer from its joys. But he had long ago learned to despise the judgments of the world. His sacrifice was acceptable to his Lord and it was the groundwork of his spirit's peace. It was as though Antonio heard from the midst of the stars His voice saying, Pacem relinquo vobis, pacem meam do vobis: non quomodo mundus dat, ego do vobis—"Peace, I leave with you. My peace I give to you; not as the world giveth give I to you."

Humility made haste to stifle the beginning of pride. This sacrifice of his—what was it, after all? What great merit was there in yielding back to God his body, soul and spirit? They were God's own, and at any moment he could revoke them. Antonio brought his mind back firmly to the stupendous happenings of the morning, and to the scene in the chapel when the bishop laid hands upon his head. He, Antonio, with all his unworthiness was a priest at last, and very soon he would be called upon to offer that ineffable Sacrifice, compared with which his own was nothing worth. He, Antonio, would soon stand before the altar, offering up the Lord and Maker of all these stars and seas and mountains, the very God of very God, for the dead and for the living.

For the dead. Still gazing at the pale cross, he vowed to remember in his first Mass the faithful departed whose dust lay beneath its pitiful arms. And for the living. A league away two lights still beamed from the windows of a farm-house, and, far out at sea, the mast-head lamp on a fisherman's boat twinkled like another star. They reminded him of the toiling men and women whose cheerful labor is the Te Deum most beloved of heaven, and he vowed more heartily still that he would always exercise his priesthood in spiritual communion with these obscure saints. And, from them, his charity widened to all Portugal. Portugal had reeled long enough under the shocks of war, even as her cliffs had seemed to reel and shudder under the enormous assault and battery of winter storms: and Antonio yearned over her, almost as if he already held the chalice in his hand, praying with his whole heart that this May night, with the soft waters nestling to Portugal's side and crooning a lullaby, might be an earnest of his country's abiding peace.

He rose from the bench and sought the stone stairway. Less than a mile from the monastery gate two lanterns were bobbing violently up and down on the road, as if they were being carried by galloping horsemen. Antonio strained his ears, and made out the clattering of many hoofs and a faint clink of steel.