Leon sat down on the plain wooden bench and laid his
hand on the open book. He looked with weak eyes
at Marcos and waited for him to speak. Marcos
obliged him at once.
“I have come to see you about Juanita,”
he said. “Have you given your consent to
her taking the veil?”
Leon reflected. He had the air of a man who having
been carefully taught a part, loses his place at the
first cue.
“What business is it of yours?” he asked,
rather hesitatingly at length.
“None.”
Leon made a hopeless gesture of the hand and looked
at his book with a face of distress and embarrassment.
Marcos was sorry for him. He was strong, and
it is the strong who are quickest to detect pathos.
“Will you answer me?” he asked.
And Leon shook his head.
“I have come here to warn you,” said Marcos,
not unkindly. “I know that Juanita has
inherited a fortune from her father. I know that
the Carlist cause is falling for want of money.
I know that the Jesuits will get the money if they
can. Because Don Carlos is their last chance in
their last stronghold in Europe. They will get
Juanita’s money if they can—and they
can only do it by forcing Juanita into religion.
And I have come to warn you that I shall prevent them.”
Leon looked at Marcos and gulped something down in
his throat. He was not afraid of Marcos, but
he was in terror of some one or of something else.
Marcos studied the white face, the shrinking, hunted
eyes, with the quiet persistence learnt from watching
Nature.
“Are you a Jesuit?” he asked bluntly.
But Leon only drew in a gasping breath and made no
answer.
Then Marcos went out and closed the door behind him.
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.
