Etienne turned away in a dumb rage, and the small sharp-featured Abigail got behind the back-kitchen door to dance three steps and a double shuffle all to herself.

When he had recovered his powers of speech Etienne called her the several kinds of fiend which can be defined by the French language, but this broke no bones.

"Well, dear _Senorita_," she remarked very sagely, when tasked by Concha with duplicity (after the manner of Satan reproving sin), "he never asked me, and besides, _then_ he would not have given me the six Napoleons!"

Which last proposition of the Abigail of Sarria would not have gained in credibility had it been supported by a Papal Bull.

CHAPTER XLIX

LIKE FIRE THROUGH SUMMER GRa.s.s

On the whole Rollo could not complain of his reception at the Abbey of Montblanch. His heart had indeed been at war within him as he took his way up the long zigzags of the hill road. There was the very thorn branch which had brushed off his hat as he set forth so gladsomely with his new commission in his pocket, his comrades riding staunchly by his side, and the Abbot's good horse between his knees.

Well, he had done his best. Things, after their manner, had turned out cross-grained--that was all. He had, thank Heaven, enough of Mendizabal's generous draft left in his pocket to repay the Abbot for what he had spent upon their outfit. After returning the commission, it only remained as delicately as possible to impart the disastrous news of the coming dissolution of monasteries and the date of the a.s.sumption of all conventual property by the State.

Then he would depart. Sarria and Concha were not so far off. He began to take heart even before he reached the great gate of the Abbey.

No one could have been more cordially moved to see a long-lost brother than Don Baltasar Varela, the Abbot of Montblanch, to welcome his dear, his well-beloved Don Rollo.

And his n.o.ble nephew Saint Pierre--how fared he? Then that stolid solemn Englishman--did he know that his _Priorato_ had long been shipped from Barcelona, an arrangement having been made with the Cristino custom-house?

"But the price? He has not paid it. I warrant that Mortimer knows nothing of the matter," said Rollo, excited for his friend's credit and good name.

The Abbot smiled as he answered.

"Our agent in France," he said blandly, "has received and cashed a draft from some one of the same name in England--ah, there are none like the English for business the world over! But here is a letter which has long been waiting for that young gentleman here."

"I will deliver it to him immediately, and with great pleasure," quoth Rollo.

The Abbot did not pursue the subject, but rising, said courteously, "You will excuse me for the present. You know the library. You will find my Father-Confessor there, whom I think you have met. There are also works on travel and lives of the saints in various languages, exceedingly improving to the mind. And above all you must dine with me to-night."

Thus the Abbot, with a kindness which Rollo felt deeply, put off hearing the full story of his adventures till the evening. Dinner was served in the Prior's own chamber as before, but on this occasion much more simply--indeed rather as two gentlemen might have dined at a good inn where their arrival had been expected and prepared for.

Rollo's simple heart was opened by the hospitality shown him. The beaming and paternal graciousness of Don Baltasar, the difference between what he had expected and what he found, wrung his soul with remorse for the message he had to deliver.

At last he was permitted to tell his tale, which he did from the beginning, slurring only such matters as concerned his relations with Concha. And at the end of each portion of his story the Abbot raised a finger and said smilingly to his Father-Confessor, who stood gloomily silent in the arch of the doorway, "A marvel--a wonder! You hear, Father Anselmo?"

And without stirring a muscle of his immovable countenance the ex-inquisitor answered, "I have heard, my Lord Abbot."

Then Rollo told of the plague and the strange things that had happened at La Granja, their setting out thence with the Queen-Regent and the little Princess, their safe arrival upon the spurs of Moncayo, almost indeed at the camp of General Elio. Then, with his head for the first time hanging down, he narrated the meeting with Cabrera, and that General's determination to murder the Queen-Regent and her little daughter.

"Abominations such as that no man could endure," said Rollo more than once as he proceeded to tell the tale of their delivery, of how he had despatched mother and daughter to the camp of General Elio, of their subsequent capture by Espartero, and how he, Rollo Blair, had hastened all the way from Madrid to lay the whole matter before the Prior.

"'Tis a marvellous tale, indeed, that our young friend tells--have you missed nothing?" inquired the Abbot of the Father-Confessor.

"Nothing!" said the Confessor, glaring down upon Rollo as a vulture might upon a weakly lamb on the meadows of Estramadura, "not one single word hath escaped me!"

Then Rollo delivered to the Abbot (who handed them forthwith to his reverend conscience-keeper) all his commissions and letters of recommendation. With a drooping head and a tear in his eye, he gave them up. For though he had enlisted in the Carlist cause purely as a mercenary, he had yet meant to carry out his undertakings to the letter.

When at last Rollo looked up, he found the grey eyes of the Abbot regarding him with a quiet persistence of scrutiny which perturbed him slightly.

"Have you anything more to tell me?" inquired the ecclesiastic, laying his hand affectionately on Rollo's shoulder, "you have done all that was possible for you. No man could have done more. May a continual peace abide in your heart, my son!"

"My Father," said Rollo, laying a strong constraint upon himself, "I have indeed a thing to tell that is hard and painful. The monasteries throughout all Spain are to be suppressed on the twentieth day of this month by order of the Madrid Government."

As the words pa.s.sed his lips, the bland expression on Don Baltasar's face changed into one of fierce hatred and excitement. There was forced from his lips that sharp hiss of indrawn breath which a man instinctively makes as he winces under the surgeon's knife.

Then almost instantly he recovered himself.

"Well," he said, "we cannot save the Abbey, we cannot save the Holy Church from this desecration. I have cried 'Pater mi, si possibile est, transeat a me calix iste!' But now I say 'Verumtamen non sicut ego volo, sed sicut tu!'"

Then with a curious change of countenance (the difference between a priest's expression at the altar and in the sacristy when things have gone crossly) he turned to Rollo.

"Nevertheless," he said, "I do not deny that to you we owe all thanks and grat.i.tude. Perhaps some day you shall be repaid!"

When Rollo looked round the saturnine priest had disappeared. His host and he were alone. The Abbot poured out the coffee.

"You will take some of our famous _liqueur_," he said, calmly and graciously as ever. "The receipt has been in the possession of the Abbey for well-nigh a thousand years."

It seemed a pity that so many things which had lasted a thousand years should come to an end on the twentieth day of the month. Meantime, however, he imitated the nonchalance of the Abbot. The _liqueur_ was not to be despised.

Rollo held out his gla.s.s scarcely knowing what he did. The Abbot poured into it a generous portion of the precious fluid. It was of the keen cold green known to painters as viridian--the colour of turnip leaves with the dew on them.

Don Baltasar drew a gla.s.s towards him across the table.

"I am no winebibber," he said, "my vows do not allow of it. But I will give you a toast, which, if you permit me, I will drink with you in the pure wine of the flint."

Rollo rose to his feet, and stood looking at the Prior out of his steadfast blue eyes. They touched their gla.s.ses ceremoniously, the elder, however, avoiding the gaze of the younger.

"May you be rewarded, not according to your successes, but according to your deserts!" said Don Baltasar.

They drank, and Rollo, astonished by the strange bitter-sweet taste of the _liqueur_, could only stammer, "I thank you, Prior. Indeed, you are over kind to me. I only wish I had had--better news--better news to bring you!"

And then, somehow, it appeared to the young man that a kind of waving blackness in wreaths and coils like thick smoke began to invade the room, bellying upwards from the floor and descending from the roof. He seemed to be sinking back into the arms of the Father-Confessor Anselmo, who grimaced at him through the empty eye-sockets and toothless jaws of a skull. There were at least fifty abbots in the room, and a certain hue of dusky red in the shadows of the window curtains first made him shudder to the soul and then affected him with terror unutterable.

Finally chaos whirled down darkling and mult.i.tudinous, and Rollo knew no more.

When the young man came to himself he was in altogether another place.

He lay flat on his back, with something hard under his head. His face seemed cold and wet. The place, as his eyes wandered upward, was full of shifting shadows and uncertain revealings of cobwebby roof-s.p.a.ces filled with machinery, huge wheels and pulleys, ropes and rings and hooks, on all of which the blown light of candles flickered fitfully.

To one side he could dimly perceive the outlines of what seemed like a great washerwoman's mangle. He remembered in Falkland town turning old Betty Drouthy's for hours and hours, every moment expecting that Peggy Ramsay would come in, basket on arm, the sweetest of Lady Bountifuls, to visit that venerable humbug, who had all her life lived on too much charity and who died at last of too much whiskey. Strange, was it not, that he should think of those far-off days now?

His head, too, was singing and thumping even as poor Betty's must have done many a morning after Rollo had paid her for the privilege of turning the mangle, and Peggy Ramsay secretly bestowed half-a-crown out of her scanty pocket-money upon her, because--well, because she was a widow and everybody spoke ill of her.