sudden accesses of suspicion, mingled spluttering appeals to their
fidelity with imprecations and horrible menaces. The cells and casements
of the castle on the hill had been already filled with prisoners. The
commission was charged now with the task of discovering the iniquitous
conspiracy against the Citizen-Saviour of his country.

Their dread of the raving tyrant translated itself into a hasty
ferocity of procedure. The Citizen-Saviour was not accustomed to wait. A
conspiracy had to be discovered. The courtyards of the castle resounded
with the clanking of leg-irons, sounds of blows, yells of pain; and
the commission of high officers laboured feverishly, concealing their
distress and apprehensions from each other, and especially from their
secretary, Father Beron, an army chaplain, at that time very much in
the confidence of the Citizen-Saviour. That priest was a big
round-shouldered man, with an unclean-looking, overgrown tonsure on the
top of his flat head, of a dingy, yellow complexion, softly fat, with
greasy stains all down the front of his lieutenant's uniform, and a
small cross embroidered in white cotton on his left breast. He had a
heavy nose and a pendant lip. Dr. Monygham remembered him still. He
remembered him against all the force of his will striving its utmost to
forget. Father Beron had been adjoined to the commission by Guzman Bento
expressly for the purpose that his enlightened zeal should assist them
in their labours. Dr. Monygham could by no manner of means forget the
zeal of Father Beron, or his face, or the pitiless, monotonous voice in
which he pronounced the words, "Will you confess now?"

This memory did not make him shudder, but it had made of him what he was
in the eyes of respectable people, a man careless of common decencies,
something between a clever vagabond and a disreputable doctor. But
not all respectable people would have had the necessary delicacy of
sentiment to understand with what trouble of mind and accuracy of vision
Dr. Monygham, medical officer of the San Tome mine, remembered Father
Beron, army chaplain, and once a secretary of a military commission.
After all these years Dr. Monygham, in his rooms at the end of the
hospital building in the San Tome gorge, remembered Father Beron as
distinctly as ever. He remembered that priest at night, sometimes, in
his sleep. On such nights the doctor waited for daylight with a candle
lighted, and walking the whole length of his rooms