But Leon only drew in a gasping breath and made no answer.
Then Marcos went out and closed the door behind him.
[
CHAPTER XIV]
IN THE CLOISTER
Marcos and Sarrion went back to Pampeluna in the dusk of the winter evening, each meditating over that which they had seen and heard. Leon had become a Jesuit. And Juanita was worse--infinitely worse than alone in the world.
Marcos needed no telling of all that lay behind Leon's scared silence; for his father had brought him up in an atmosphere of plain language and wide views of mankind. Sarnon himself had seen Navarre ruined, its men sacrificed, its women made miserable by a war which had lasted intermittently for thirty years. He had seen the simple Basques, who had no means of verifying that which their priests told them, fighting desperately and continuously for a lie. The Carlist war has always been the war of ignorance and deceit against enlightenment and the advance of thought. It is needless to say upon which side the cassock has ranged itself.
The Basques were promised their liberty; they should be allowed to live as they had always lived, practically a republic, if they only succeeded in forcing an absolute monarchy on the rest of Spain. The Jesuits made this promise. The society found itself in the position that no promise must be allowed to stick in the throat.
Sarrion, like all who knew their strange story, was ready enough to recognise the fact that the Jesuit body must be divided into two parts of head and heart. The heart has done the best work that missionaries have yet accomplished. The head has ruined half Europe.
It was the political Jesuit who had earned Sarrion's deadly hatred.
The political Jesuit has, moreover, a record in history which has only in part been made manifest.