“Indeed, as you say, Captain, a great wine. But we had a greater.”
“Impossible, by God,” swore Butler, with a hiccup.
“You may say so; but it is the truth. We had a greater; a wonderful, clear vintage it was, of the year 1798—a famous year on the Douro, the quite most famous year that we have ever known. Mr. Bearsley sell some pipes to the monks at Tavora, who have bottle it and keep it. I beg him at the time not to sell, knowing the value it must come to have one day. But he sell all the same. Ah, meu Deus!” The steward clasped his hands and raised rather prominent eyes to the ceiling, protesting to his Maker against his master’s folly. “He say we have plenty, and now”—he spread fat hands in a gesture of despair—“and now we have none. Some sons of dogs of French who came with Marshal Soult happen this way on a forage they discover the wine and they guzzle it like pigs.” He swore, and his benignity was eclipsed by wrathful memory. He heaved himself up in a passion.
“Think of that so priceless vintage drink like hogwash, as Mr. Bearsley say, by those god-dammed French swine, not a drop—not a spoonful remain. But the monks at Tavora still have much of what they buy, I am told. They treasure it for they know good wine. All priests know good wine. Ah yes! Goddam!” He fell into deep reflection.
Lieutenant Butler stirred, and became sympathetic.
“‘San infern’l shame,” said he indignantly. “I’ll no forgerrit when I... meet the French.” Then he too fell into reflection.
He was a good Catholic, and, moreover, a Catholic who did not take things for granted. The sloth and self-indulgence of the clergy in Portugal, being his first glimpse of conventuals in Latin countries, had deeply shocked him. The vows of a monastic poverty that was kept carefully beyond the walls of the monastery offended his sense of propriety. That men who had vowed themselves to pauperism, who wore coarse garments and went barefoot, should batten upon rich food and store up wines that gold could not purchase, struck him as a hideous incongruity.
“And the monks drink this nectar?” he said aloud, and laughed sneeringly. “I know the breed—the fair found belly wi’ fat capon lined. Tha’s your poverty stricken Capuchin.”
Souza looked at him in sudden alarm, bethinking himself that all Englishmen were heretics, and knowing nothing of subtle distinctions between English and Irish. In silence Butler finished the third and last bottle, and his thoughts fixed themselves with increasing insistence upon a wine reputed better than this of which there was great store in the cellars of the convent of Tavora.
Abruptly he asked: “Where’s Tavora?” He was thinking perhaps of the comfort that such wine would bring to a company of war-worn soldiers in the valley of the Agueda.