The tanner spluttered out a long speech, and finally dragged Antonio upstairs into a stuffy little room where his wife's mother was lying in bed with a black rosary in her thin white hand. He appealed to Antonio, in the name of the commonest decency and humanity, to avoid future prickings of conscience by giving the ridiculous price of two hundred pounds for the best farm in all Portugal, thus defrauding a dying widow of a round hundred only.
"You may take it or leave it," said Antonio. "One hundred and fifty pounds, not a vintem more, not a vintem less. Stay. The winter is coming, and the Senhora's blood needs warming. I come from a wine-lodge in Oporto. I have taken wines to England for the King himself. See. Over and above the price, I will send the Senhora ten pounds' worth of old port-wine, and God grant it may do her good."
The aged sufferer looked up at the monk in thankful astonishment. She had been a personage in her time: but deference and kindness had lately become so unfamiliar that she had expected to die without encountering them again. Clutching her beads, she mumbled at Antonio some words of gratitude and benediction.
The tanner was first greatly chagrined and afterwards a little ashamed: and, at the foot of the stairs, he agreed to his visitor's terms. It was arranged that Antonio should return at noon with a notary to complete the purchase. The cura of Navares, to whom the monk had recourse, named a trustworthy man of law: and by four o'clock the money had passed from Antonio's belt to the tanner's cash-box, the necessary documents had been signed, sealed, and delivered, and the new owner was tramping back to the farm with the keys in his pocket.
As in the cells and corridors of the great abbey, so in the low rooms of the little farm-house the Portuguese sun had counteracted the Portuguese rains, and the place was clean and dry. Some bulky chests, two heavy tables, a dresser, and two wooden bedsteads had been left behind, for the simple reason that the original cabinet-maker had constructed them inside the house, and there was no door or window wide enough for their egress. Antonio noted with satisfaction that two or three pounds would buy all he required in the way of linen, chairs, crockery, and household utensils.
Through want of irrigation the oranges on the trees were small, sour, and hard. Antonio, however, was much more interested in the vines. To an untrained eye they would have seemed a hopeless intertanglement of decaying leaves, with sparse bunches of withered currants hiding here and there: but Antonio quickly saw that skill and hard labor would reclaim them. Better still, he found a three-acre patch of light arable land which almost realized his ideal site for an entirely new vineyard of bush-vines. The wine-press, in one of the outbuildings, had seen better days: but this did not worry Antonio, as he was determined, in any case, to import a new wine-making plant from Bordeaux.
Next morning the young farmer was early in the saddle on his way to Villa Branca, ten leagues to the east. He had learned at Navares that Villa Branca was the seat of a puissant official representing the Fazenda, or Portuguese Exchequer, and that the suppressed abbeys and monasteries of the district were administered by this exalted personage. He cantered into Villa Branca with a clear proposal to make. Would the Fazenda accept an annual rent of fifty pounds for the abbey lands, at the same time giving Antonio the option of buying the whole property, at the end of ten years, for two thousand pounds? If so he, Antonio, would engage to cultivate the lands and to keep the buildings in repair.
Although his ride was ten leagues long, the monk reached the local offices of the Fazenda nearly an hour earlier than the official, who lived a hundred yards away. The waiting-room was more than half filled with high stacks of books, most of them in old calf bindings. A glance showed that these were the spoils of monastic libraries, dumped down anyhow in the Fazenda building until somebody from Lisbon should arrive to divide them between the national and municipal libraries. Antonio picked up a volume at random. It was a sequence of Lenten meditations in French; and the hand of some long dead Augustinian had filled the fly-leaves with pious annotations. Antonio was poring over this crabbed and faded script when the Personage entered the room.
Had it been his first encounter with a highly-placed civil servant, the monk would have concluded that the Personage knew his secret; that his design, as an ardent Benedictine religious, of restoring the abbey to his Order was perfectly understood; and that the haughtiness and suspiciousness of the Personage's manner were accordingly explained. But Antonio's years in the world had made him familiar with the masterfulness of the State's so-called servants and with their rudeness to the hard-working people from whom their excessive salaries were extracted. So he kept his temper, and even tried to commend his proposal by stating it in studiously respectful language.
The Personage, leaving Antonio standing against a pile of stolen books, listened with increasing impatience and scorn: and, before the monk had finished, he interrupted him to say that such a transaction was out of the question; that the Minister would not listen to it for a moment; that he, the Personage, had received no instructions from Lisbon to press forward the sale of this particular abbey; and that, when it came into the market, the reserve price would be not less than three thousand pounds, paid in cash, once for all, forthwith.