As the country-seat of my uncle’s prospective father-in-law was situated on high ground, I could see it from the very cove where I landed. To be more exact, all that I could see clearly was the square, turreted tower and the windows, stained red and gold by the setting sun. The rest of the building was hidden by a mass of verdure, probably a group of trees. Anyhow, I could see enough to guide me on my way. I left my valise in the village, saying that I would send after it on the following day, and went on.
I was ascending the sloping path, whipping with my cane the rustling corn and bushes, whence the startled butterflies flew; when, at a turn of the road, I was greatly surprised to see a man sitting on a rock. My surprise may seem strange at first, but the fact is the man was a friar. For the first time in my life I was looking at a friar in flesh and blood. I was astonished, as if I had thought that friars were no longer to be met with, except in the canvases of Zurbarán or Murillo.
All the knowledge I had of a friar’s dress was derived from pictures I had seen in the museum, or from having seen Rafael Calvo, once, in the Duke of Rivas’s drama, _Don Alvaro_, or _The Force of Destiny_. I perceived that the friar seated on the rock was a Franciscan. His coarse gown fell in statuesque folds over his limbs, his hood had fallen on his shoulders, and in his hand was one of those coarse felt hats, with the brim looped up like a French abbé’s, with which he was fanning his brow, wet with perspiration, breathing heavily all the time. Soon, putting his hat on the ground, turning his elbows out, and resting his open hands on his knees, he remained plunged in thought.
I observed him with eager curiosity, imagining that by the simple fact of his being a friar, his mind must be filled with strange or sublime thoughts.
He lifted his right hand, and thrusting it into his left sleeve, took out an enormous blue-and-white checked handkerchief from a kind of pocket formed in the folds of the sleeve, and blew his nose vigorously. Then he arose, took up his hat, and began to go on, just as I came up to him.
I did not know whether to come close to his side, or to fall back, or to pass on simply wishing him good afternoon. Without any known cause, that man attracted, interested and fascinated me. I had two antagonistic ideas about friars: on one side was the friar of the cheap chromos after Ortego--a gluttonous, drunken, dissolute creature, a man without any sense of decency looking out from under his cowl; on the other, was the friar of novels and poems,--gloomy, mystical, visionary, with his mind enfeebled by fasting, and his nerves shaken by abstinence; fleeing from womankind, avoiding men; dyspeptic, assaulted by temptations and scruples. And I was eager to know to which of the two classes my friar belonged.
