Henceforth may find his teacher. He shall see
The Frenchman’s bones in glen and grove, on rock
And height where’er the wolves and carrion birds
Have strewn them, washed in torrents bare and bleached
By sun and rain, and by the winds of Heaven.”
THE BATTLE MONUMENT, BUSSACO.
It is all forgotten now, and nothing matters much, I mused, as I wandered up the dark avenue of cypress, yew, and pine that leads to the low three-arched façade of the old monastery. Before the quaint little one-storey porch, faced with designs of coats-of-arms, flowers, and scrolls in black and white mosaic, stands an ancient cross, and within the entrance is the tiny cloister and church that alone remains of the monastery. I wandered into the dim cloister full of thoughts of Bussaco’s baptism of blood, though it was all quiet and peaceful now in this humble retreat. At each corner of the cloister stands a dismantled altar, faced with coloured tiles of Talavera majolica, and the walls between the windows are hung with mouldering and tattered canvases of dead and gone Carmelites—saintly men whose bones lie beneath our feet and in the little green enclosure formed by the cloister. Around the walls on three sides are the doors of the cells, each door covered, as are the timbers of the cloister, with rough cork bark, which adds to the appearance of antiquity. One picture attracted my attention, a poor defaced painting, faded by time and weather, representing at full length a white-clad monk holding a skull in his left hand, and in his right a scroll. Something noble and dignified in the appearance of the face attracted me, and I tried to decipher the almost effaced inscription on the scroll. It was difficult, but at last I read that the monk was the “Reverend Father, Fray Luis de Jesus,” who in the world had been called the Marquis of Mancera, when the seventeenth century was young. And beneath the name this distich ran:—
“A morte me fas deixar
O que me podia danar.”