He waded the stream above the cascade and descended the northern bank until he reached a lane roughly paved with boulders. The lane wound in and out between low walls: but it led at last to the foot of a mound on which rose a vast oblong church with lime-washed walls and granite quoins. The sacristan, in a very short and skimpy scarlet gown, was in the act of unlocking the doors; and, through his offices, Antonio soon found himself in the ample presence of the padre-cura.
The padre-cura received his visitor with uncertain approval. He was a hard-headed old man, whose counsels were less eagerly sought by his flock in the confession than in difficult cases of calving, or boat-caulking, or bush-vine pruning. He believed every article of the longest and latest of the creeds implicitly, and lived becomingly: but there was not a tinge of the mystic in his personality. The sight of a monk slightly nettled him. This secular priest felt that a religious must be contemptuous of his common-sense, every-day Christianity, and that he must be tacitly challenging him to a superfine and unpractical piety. Besides, the cura's friends were Liberals, and they had quieted his qualms concerning the new laws against the monasteries by assuring him, as they assured so many others of his class, that the swollen revenues of the suppressed houses would go to augment the wretched stipends of the rural clergy.
Antonio began to explain whence he had come. But the sacristan was already tugging away at the bell-rope, and the cura interrupted.
"You are not a lay-brother?" he demanded. "You are a priest?"
"I am a priest," answered Antonio.
"Then you shall say my Mass," said the cura promptly. "We will talk about your business at breakfast."
"I cannot say your Mass, Father," responded Antonio, flushing sadly. "I was ordained priest only forty-eight hours ago, and yesterday morning we were driven from the abbey. God alone knows when and where my first Mass will be said."
The old cura's heart melted towards the young monk. Unmystical though he was, he recalled the high mood of his own ordination day, the fine happiness of his own first Mass. He laid his rough hand kindly on Antonio's shoulder.
"Come," he said, "if you can't say my Mass, at least you shall serve it."
Antonio served the cura's Mass at a gilded altar, tricked out with gaudy vases of faded crimson paper roses in the very worst taste he had ever seen. But the old priest, despite the nasality of his Latin and the jerkiness of his genuflexions, said Mass with an intensity of recollection which edified the server exceedingly; and the few peasants who knelt on the boarded floor were not behind him in devotion.