"They were good men. I made wine for years in an abbey vineyard, and I ought to know."
Once, strangely enough, Antonio and Mr. Crowberry ate a lugubrious luncheon in the house of a poor and proud Catholic family who had kept the faith, with occasional lapses, through the three centuries of persecution. But intermarriage and isolation had done them no good. When Mr. Crowberry introduced his lieutenant as a fellow-believer they responded uneasily. They seemed to be without a trace of the missionary spirit, and to look with alarm upon the incipient revival of Catholicism lest the mob should shout out for new penal laws. An extremely aged French priest, a refugee from the Terror, was their chaplain; and all they wished was to be left alone in a tiny Popish enclave among the surrounding Protestantism.
In the long run, however, Antonio could not judge them harshly. Five or six of the great houses he visited were called This or That Abbey, or The Other Priory, and their spacious halls had been the refectories or chapter-houses of religious orders. Often a mouldering arch or a traceried window of the monks' church had been conserved for its picturesqueness; and as Antonio lingered among these holy relics he could understand the negation of the Papacy and the denunciation of monasticism on which the Tudor aristocrats founded their fortunes and builded their houses. Early one morning as he stood beside a broken pillar which alone survived to mark the site of one of the most renowned monasteries in Britain, his heart sank at the thought of his own white chapel, fronting the Atlantic storms all neglected and forsaken. If, after three hundred years, no one had restored these waste places of Zion in England, how could he hope, single-handed, to do better in Portugal? But he remembered with joy the essential difference. Portugal had torn a limb from the Church: but she had not lost the Faith.
Amidst this whirl of distractions Antonio was secretly living his religious life with unwonted fervor. Not only did he recite the Office with close attention but he lost no opportunity of fighting on the angels' side. As the acknowledged expert of the company he told the truth emphatically about spirits, and even preached up French clarets as against the Englishman's favorite liquored port. At first these opinions disconcerted Mr. Crowberry: but, at the second hearing, he took Antonio on one side and astonished him by saying that it was the cleverest move he had ever seen in his life. Antonio, however, could endure this cynical misjudgment: for he had the satisfaction of knowing that he had frightened at least one brandy-sot out of his ugly and suicidal habit.
It was at the dinner-table of an earl that the monk perceived most sharply the contrast between his inward and his outward life. While he was donning in his room the fine clothes with which Mr. Crowberry had equipped him for the journey, he had been suddenly filled with such a sense of God's love and presence as he had never known before. Throughout the lively dinner, although he took his due part in conversation, this ecstasy endured. He seemed to be two persons in one body. Across the table he could see himself reflected in the beveled mirror of a vast mahogany sideboard. At closer quarters the mirror reflected the butler solemnly pouring champagne into tall French flutes of purest silver. In the back of the picture, brilliantly lit by many candles, Antonio could see his own reflection. He thought of the Antonio in flapping clothes who had lived for weeks in Oporto on salt fish and dark bread so that he might repay the cura's loan, and he compared him with the new Antonio, in broadcloth and fine linen. On his left sat the earl's niece, a magnificent young dame with a rope of pearls round her neck and a diamond tiara in her hair. According to a custom of Puritan England, which has always bewildered visitors from less prudish countries, she was dining in a kind of ball-dress which revealed arms and shoulders as white and shapely as a statue's. All the themes of the talk were of the world, worldly: but Antonio's whole heart remained in heaven.
Not that he was always indifferent to the charms and graces of beautiful women. On the contrary, he was generally at his best in their presence. And women, in their turn, were enchanted with Antonio, Indeed, one self-willed beauty concealed so little of her admiration for the handsome and courtly Southerner that during a tour of the greenhouses she plucked a flower which he had admired and placed it in his hand. Her look, as she did so, had meanings: but Antonio was not a gawk, and he received the keepsake with such easy tact that the affair would have ended had not the inquisitive Crowberry caught the lady's eye. From that day forward he hardly ceased rallying Antonio on his conquest. Having heard that, in Portugal, a commoner shares the title of the Duchess he marries, Mr. Crowberry began to call Antonio "Your Grace" and to paint lurid pictures of the frightful revenge shortly to be wreaked by Antonio's jilted Teresa.
On returning to London and to the Jermyn Street office Mr. Crowberry found that the news of his offer had spread, and that orders had arrived by post which would exhaust the whole shipment of wine. A little figuring showed that Antonio's plan had earned for the firm of Castro eleven hundred pounds more than the sum which would have been tardily paid by the royal household. Mr. Crowberry was radiant. He pressed upon Antonio a hundred guineas, and added that if Senhor Castro did not give him a hundred guineas more he was an even worse miser than he looked. Mr. Crowberry concluded by saying that Antonio was too good for a piggery like Oporto, and that he must stay and make his fortune in London.
Antonio shook his head. How did he know that he was not already too late, and that the abbey had not passed irrevocably into desecrating hands? Now that he had amassed his two hundred pounds his course was clear. Besides, he was home-sick. For days he had been thinking of his famous namesake, the holy Antonio, called of Padua, but properly of Lisbon, whose crowning self-mortification was to exile himself for life from beautiful Portugal.
Nevertheless, he gave way to the next request of his kindly chief. Young Edward Crowberry, a muffish youth with soft yellow hair, was to be placed for three years in the Oporto office; and, with a view to shaking him up and opening his mind, Mr. Crowberry begged Antonio to take him overland through France and Spain. He himself, he said, would go by sea and meet them at Oporto.
Landing at Boulogne one August afternoon, Antonio and his charge traveled by a fast public coach to Amiens, and there, for the first time, the monk found his dreams of a Gothic cathedral come true. From Amiens they went to Beauvais, whose overweening choir offended his religious sense. At Rouen he lingered in wonder. The cathedral, with its unstudied harmony of many styles, reminded him of the Church herself—a divine idea working itself out in history through many minds, yet never in self-contradiction. Notre Dame de Paris also impressed him deeply: it seemed bigger than Paris, bigger than France, and to be challenging both the metropolis and the nation to a truer grandeur of spirit and conduct. In the dimness cast by the thirteenth-century glass of Chartres he thought of Westminster Abbey, with its huddle of pagan monuments, and compared it with our Lady's glorious shrine, wherein not a single body, not even a saint's, lay buried. The stone embroideries of the west front of Tours recalled to him Henry the Fourth's saying that it ought to be under a glass case: and Antonio liked it the less on that account.