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"You have no business here," said the holy man, looking from one to the other with sullen eyes. "So far as that goes, no more have you," said Marcos. "There are no monasteries in Spain now. Sit down on that bench and keep quiet." He turned and glanced at his father. "Yes," said Sarrion, with his grim smile, "I will watch him." "Where shall I find Leon de Mogente?" said Marcos to the monk.
For he had seen a stick probably a sword-stick, such as nearly every Spanish gentleman carries in his own country fly from the hand of Don Francisco de Mogente at the moment when he was attacked, and fall into the gutter on the darker side of the street, where it lay unheeded. Where, indeed, it still remained when the friar with his swinging gait had turned the corner of the Calle San Gregorio.
"To to ?" began the notary once more, and then lapsed into a puzzled silence. He was at fault again. Mogente seemed to be failing. He lay quite still, looking straight in front of him. "The Count Ramon de Sarrion," he asked suddenly, "is he in Saragossa?" "No," answered the notary, after a glance into the darkened door. "No but your will your will. Try and remember what you are doing.
This was not a wind of heaven, but a current rushing down from the Pyrenees to replace the hot air rising from the plains of Aragon. Nevertheless, the clouds were moving towards the moon, and must soon hide it. Don Francisco de Mogente observed this, and sat patiently beneath the trailing vines, noting their slow approach. He was a white-haired man, and his face was burnt a deep brown.
But Marcos' face hardened, and he had nothing to say to this reiteration of the dead man's hope. The silence was not again broken before Leon de Mogente came in. He looked from one to the other with an apprehensive glance. His pale eyes had that dulness which betokens, if not an absorption in the things to come, that which often passes for the same, an incompetence to face the present moment.
He was made to understand, moreover, that Juanita de Mogente had been given special opportunities for prayer and meditation owing to an unchristian spirit of resentment and revenge, which she had displayed on learning the Will of Heaven in regard to her abandoned, and it was to be feared, heretic father. "Which means, my sister?"
It seemed that Francisco de Mogente was going to the Palacio Sarrion; for he passed the great door of the archbishop's dwelling, and was already looking towards the house of the Sarrions, when a slight sound made him turn on his heels with the rapidity of one whose life had been passed amid dangers and more especially those that come from behind.
He stood with humbly-folded hands and a meek face while the two men lifted Don Francisco de Mogente on to a long narrow blanket, the cloak of Navarre and Aragon, which one of them had brought with him. They bore him slowly away, and the friar lingered behind. The moon shone down brightly into the narrow street and showed a great patch of blood amid the cobblestones.
The beggars were leisurely making their way to the cathedral doors, too lazy to make an earlier start, philosophically reflecting that the charitable are as likely to give after matins as before. The Count went over the ground of the scene that he had witnessed in the fitful moonlight. Here the man who might have been Francisco de Mogente had turned on his heel.
Don Francisco de Mogente sat down on the bench provided for those that await the ferry, and, tilting back his hat, looked up at the sky. The northwest wind was blowing the Solano as it only blows in Aragon. The bridge below the ferry has, by the way, a high wall on the upper side of it to break this wind, without which no cart could cross the river at certain times of the year.
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