Thanking friends and forgiving foes, the young priest pressed forward until the last houses of Navares were more than a league behind him. Only then did he sink down to rest. His halting-place was on a more northerly point of the long range of hills on which stood the monastery from which he had been cast into exile. By the stars he knew that exactly twenty-four hours had passed since his reverie on the cork bench, on the flat roof of the cloister.
The airs around him, like the airs of the night before in the monastery garden, were rich with scents of lemon-blossom and honeysuckle. The Atlantic still lay unvexed by wind: but the ocean swell, as it searched the creeks and caves, hummed heavily and wearily, like a great bee mining in the bells of flowers that held no honey.
BOOK II
THE RETURN
I
Antonio slept soundly until sunrise. When he awoke the larks were in full song. He sat up. The carpet of pine-needles around him was curiously patterned with long black stripes—the tree-trunks' shadows cast by the low, strong sun. No wind moved in the wood: but out at sea the weather seemed to have freshened, for the chaunt of the Atlantic was quicker and louder.
The monk knelt down and said his morning prayers. Then, obeying the call of the great waters, he arose and struck along the margin of a maize-field towards the shore. In half an hour he was ankle-deep in fine yellow sand. But the beach fell away too steeply and the undertow sucked too strongly for a plunge, so he turned and plodded northward.
Two miles of toilsome going brought him to a little estuary, about a furlong wide. Along the further bank sprawled a white village with a considerable tower: but none of the villagers appeared to be astir. The out-flowing tide had left a deep pool of clear water. Antonio swiftly stripped and jumped in; and only when the level of the water had so far fallen that further swimming was impossible did he emerge from his bath.
Refreshed and strengthened he turned inland and pushed up-stream until he reached a point to which the salt water never rose. There, in a cold cascade, he washed his under-garments; and while they were drying in the sun he sat under an evergreen oak, wrapped in his coarse habit, and began to recite the Divine Office. Although he had perforce left behind at Navares the bundle which contained three volumes of his breviary, he had brought away in his hand the Pars Æstiva, from which he had said the last Compline with his brethren; and, by the time his clothes were dry, he had recited the whole of Matins, Lauds, and Prime.
Having dressed himself Antonio sat down to mature his plans. He decided, first of all, to forswear false pride. Excepting one volume of a breviary and the poor clothes he sat in he was without a possession in the world. It was true that he owned a pair of brawny arms, and he was willing and eager to use them hard from morning to night: but he felt that the prime necessity was to exchange his habit for a layman's dress. It was not fitting that a monk of Saint Benedict should wander about like a mendicant friar. Accordingly, Antonio resolved to enter the village and to seek aid, for the first and last time, from the secular clergy.