The day Antonio received payment for the sale of his rough wine he tendered José his wages. In rural Portugal a servant's annual wages ranged from four and a half to five and a half pounds a year, with the addition of a coarse cloak every second year. Antonio offered José the price of a cloak and five pounds.
"This money," said José, holding it in his hand, "is taken from your Worship's savings—the money that's to buy back the abbey?"
"It is your own, fairly earned," the monk responded. "Mind you don't lose it. Have you a safe place to keep it?"
"Yes," said José promptly. "I shall bury it."
Antonio laughed. "You're like a fox," he said. "How many cemeteries have you?"
With some pride, José admitted, in mysterious tones, that he had three distinct and untraceable hiding-places, not counting the grave in the abbey-cloisters where he had buried the boxes. Becoming more at ease, he finally asked leave to ease his mind of an oppressive secret. Deep in a drift of sand near the new vineyard he had laid away one hundred pounds—the round remainder of moneys he had received for his horse and his farm and from a small legacy. Blushing at his own presumption, he begged Antonio to let him add this sum to the English pounds which his master was hording up for the abbey's redemption. Antonio, deeply touched, agreed to accept the money: but only on condition that José should be allowed a clear year in which to alter his mind.
Had Antonio been giving one hundred pounds instead of receiving it, José could not have been more grateful. But he had still something to ask.
"Since I saw those men and women up there in the vineyard, I'm not easy at nights," he said. "I'm thinking the boxes ought to be buried in our own garden. And, if I can have the cart and the bullock, I'll dig up everything that I've got and bring it here."
During the next dark night the two men opened the grave in the cloisters and brought away the boxes, which they reburied in a dry place within sight of José's window. The morning after, José set out in the bullock-cart, with a spade, a dark lantern, some sacking, and two empty barrels hidden under a heap of straw.
He was away two days. When he returned it was with so abashed an air that Antonio thought the hiding places had been found empty. But the lifting of the straw told a different tale. Although José had lost his farm, he had saved the household gods and heirlooms. There were two carved coffers filled with fine linen; a box of old Portuguese faience in which the Persian influence was still strong; five musty books of fusty piety; a fowling-piece, much more dangerous to the sportsman than to the game; and some great, round, solid, honest vessels of copper and pewter which shone, after José had polished them, like suns and moons.