Carmen Ariza Part 67

And yet they were not really his first introduction to that thought, for, as he pored over these books, his heart expanded with grat.i.tude to the brusque explorer whom he had met in Cartagena, that genial, odd medley of blunt honesty, unquibbling candor, and hatred of dissimulation, whose ridicule of the religious fetishism of the human mentality tore up the last root of educated orthodox belief that remained struggling for life in the altered soil of his mind.

But, though they tore down with ruthless hand, _these books did not reconstruct_. Jose turned from them with something of disappointment.

He could understand why the trembling heart, searching wearily for truth, turned always from such as they with sinking hope. They were violently iconoclastic--they up-rooted--they overthrew--they swept aside with unsparing hand--but they robbed the starving mortal of his once cherished beliefs--they s.n.a.t.c.hed the stale and feebly nourishing bread from his mouth, and gave nothing in return. They emptied his heart, and left it starving. What did it boot to tell a man that the orthodox dream of eternal bliss beyond the gates of death was but a hoax, if no subst.i.tute be offered? Why point out the fallacies, the puerile conceptions, the worse than childish thought expressed in the religious creeds of men, if they were not to be replaced by life-sustaining truth? If the demolition of cherished beliefs be not followed by reconstruction upon a sure foundation of demonstrable truth, then is the resulting state of mind worse than before, for the trusting, though deceived, soul has no recourse but to fall into the agnosticism of despair, or the black atheism of positive negation.

"Happily for me," he sighed, as he closed his books at length, "that Carmen entered my empty life in time with the truth that she hourly demonstrates!"

CHAPTER 24

Days melted into weeks, and these in turn into months. Simiti, drab and shabby, a crumbling and abandoned relique of ancient Spanish pride and arrogance, drowsed undisturbed in the ardent embrace of the tropical sun. Don Jorge returned, unsuccessful, from his long quest in the San Lucas mountains, and departed again down the Magdalena river.

"It is a marvelous country up there," he told Jose. "I do not wonder that it has given rise to legends. I felt myself in a land of enchantment while I was roaming those quiet mountains. When, after days of steady traveling, I would chance upon a little group of natives hidden away in some dense thicket, it seemed to me that they must be fairies, not real. I came upon the old trail, Padre, the _Camino Real_, now sunken and overgrown, which the Spaniards used.

They called it the Panama trail. It used to lead down to Cartagena.

_Hombre_! in places it is now twenty feet deep!"

"But, gold, Don Jorge?"

"Ah, Padre, what quartz veins I saw in that country! _Hombre_! Gold will be discovered there without measure some day! But--_Caramba_!

This map which Don Carlos gave me is much in error. I must consult again with him. Then I shall return to Simiti." Jose regretfully saw him depart, for he had grown to love this ruggedly honest soul.

Meantime, Don Mario sulked in his house; nor during the intervening year would he hold anything more than the most formal intercourse with the priest. Jose ignored him as far as possible. Events move with terrible deliberation in these tropic lands, and men's minds are heavy and lethargic. Jose a.s.sumed that Don Mario had failed in the support upon which he had counted; or else Diego's interest in Carmen was dormant, perhaps utterly pa.s.sed. Each succeeding day of quiet increased his confidence, while he rounded out month after month in this sequestered vale on the far confines of civilization, and the girl attained her twelfth year. Moreover, as he noted with marveling, often incredulous, mental gaze her swift, unhindered progress, the rapid unfolding of her rich nature, and the increasing development of a spirituality which seemed to raise her daily farther above the plane on which he dwelt, he began to regard the uninterrupted culmination of his plans for her as reasonably a.s.sured, if not altogether certain.

Juan continued his frequent trips down to Bodega Central as general messenger and transportation agent for his fellow-townsmen, meanwhile adoring Carmen from a distance of respectful decorum. Rosendo and Lazaro, relaxing somewhat their vigilance over the girl, labored daily on the little _hacienda_ across the lake. The dull-witted folk, keeping to their dismally pretentious mud houses during the pulsing heat of day, and singing their weird, moaning laments in the quiet which reigned over this maculate hollow at night, followed undeviatingly the monotonous routine of an existence which had no other aim than the indulgence of the most primitive material wants.

"Ah, Padre," Rosendo would say of them, "they are so easy! They love idleness; they like not labor. They fish, they play the guitar, they gather fruits. They sing and dance--and then die. Padre, it is sad, is it not?"

Aye, thought the priest, doubly sad in its mute answer to the heartlessly selfish query of Cain. No one, not even the Church, was the keeper of these benighted brothers. He alone had const.i.tuted himself their shepherd. And as they learned to love him, to confide their simple wants and childish hopes to him, he came to realize the immense ascendency which the priests of Colombia possess over the simple understanding of the people. An ascendency hereditary and dominant, capable of utmost good, but expressed in the fettering of initiative and action, in the suppression of ambition, and the quenching of every impulse toward independence of thought. How he longed to lift them up from the drag of their mental encompa.s.sment!

Yet how helpless he was to afford them the needed l.u.s.tration of soul which alone could accomplish it!

"I can do little more than try to set them a standard of thought,"

he would muse, as he looked out from the altar over the camellia-like faces of his adult children when he conducted his simple Sunday services. "I can only strive to point out the better things of this life--to tell them of the wonders of invention, of art, of civilization--I can only relate to them tales of romance and achievement, and beautiful stories--and try to omit in the recital all reference to the evil methods, aims, and motives which have manifested in those dark crimes staining the records of history. The world calls them historical incident and fact. I must call them 'the mist that went up from the ground and watered the face of the earth.'"

But Jose had progressed during his years in Simiti. It had been hard--only he could know how hard!--to adapt himself to the narrow environment in which he dwelt. It had been hard to conform to these odd ways and strange usages. But he now knew that the people's reserve and shyness at first was due to their natural suspicion of him. For days, even weeks, he had known that he was being weighed and watched. And then love triumphed.

It is true, the dull staring of the natives of this unkempt town had long continued to throw him into fits of prolonged nervousness. They had not meant to offend, of course. Their curiosity was far from malicious. But at hardly any hour of the day or night could he look up from his work without seeing dark, inquisitive faces peering in through the latticed window or the open door at him, watchful of the minutest detail of his activity. He had now grown used to that. And he had grown used to their thoughtless intrusion upon him at any hour. He had learned, too, not to pale with nausea when, as was their wont of many centuries, the dwellers in this uncouth town relentlessly pursued their custom of expectorating upon his floor immediately they entered and stood before him. He had accustomed himself to the hourly intrusion of the scavenger pigs and starving dogs in his house. And he could now endure without aching nerves the awful singing, the maudlin wails, the thin, piercing, falsetto howls which rose almost nightly about him in the sacred name of music. For these were children with whom he dwelt. And he was trying to show them that they were children of G.o.d.

The girl's education was progressing marvelously. Already Jose had been obliged to supplement his oral instruction with texts purchased for her from abroad. Her grasp of the English language was his daily wonder. After two years of study she spoke it readily. She loved it, and insisted that her conversations with him should be conducted wholly in it. French and German likewise had been taken up; and her knowledge of her own Castilian tongue had been enriched by the few books which he had been able to secure for her from Spain.

Jose's anomalous position in Simiti had ceased to cause him worry.

What mattered it, now that he had endeared himself to its people, and was progressing undisturbed in the training of Carmen? He performed his religious duties faithfully. His people wanted them. And he, in turn, knew that upon his observance of them depended his tenure of the parish.

And he wanted to remain among them, to lead them, if possible, at least a little way along what he was daily seeing to be the only path out of the corroding beliefs of the human mind. He knew that his people's growth would be slow--how slow might not his own be, too! Who could say how unutterably slow would be their united march heavenward!

And yet, the human mind was expanding with wonderful rapidity in these last days. What acceleration had it not acquired since that distant era of the Old Stone Man, when through a hundred thousand years of darkness the only observable progress was a little greater skill in the shaping of his crude flint weapons!

To Padre Diego's one or two subsequent curt demands that Carmen be sent to him, Jose had given no heed. And perhaps Diego, absorbed in his political activities as the confidential agent of Wenceslas, would have been content to let his claim upon the child lapse, after many months of quiet, had not Don Jorge inadvertently set the current of the man's thought again in her direction.

For Don Jorge was making frequent trips along the Magdalena river. It was essential to his business to visit the various riverine towns and to mingle freely with all grades of people, that he might run down rumors or draw from the inhabitants information which might result in valuable clues anent buried treasure. Returning one day to Simiti from such a trip, he regaled Jose with the spirited recital of his experience on a steamboat which had become stranded on a river bar.

"_Bien_," he concluded, "the old tub at last broke loose. Then we saw that its engines were out of commission; and so the captain let her drift down to Banco, where we docked. I was forced, not altogether against my will, to put up with Padre Diego. _Caramba_! The old fox!

But I had much amus.e.m.e.nt at his expense when I twitted him about his daughter Carmen, and his silly efforts to get possession of her!"

Jose shook with indignation. "Good heaven, friend!" he cried, "why can you not let sleeping dogs alone? Diego is not the man to be bearded like that! Would that you had kept away from the subject! And what did you say to him about the girl?"

"_Caramba_, man! I only told him how beautiful she was, and how large for her few years. _Bien_, I think I said she was the most beautiful and well-formed girl I had ever seen. But was there anything wrong in telling the truth, _amigo_?"

"No," replied Jose bitterly, as he turned away; "you meant no harm.

But, knowing the man's brutal nature, and his a.s.sumed claim on the girl, why could you not have foreseen possible misfortune to her in dwelling thus on her physical beauty? _Hombre_, it is too bad!"

"_Na_, _amigo_," said Don Jorge soothingly, "nothing can come of it.

Bien, you take things so hard!" But when Don Jorge again set out for the mountains he left the priest's heart filled with apprehension.

A few weeks later came what Jose had been awaiting, another demand upon him for the girl. Failure to comply with it, said Diego's letter, meant the placing of the case in the hands of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities for action.

Rosendo's face grew hard when he read the note. "There is a way, Padre. Let my woman take the girl and go up the Boque river to Rosa Maria, the clearing of Don Nicolas. It is a wild region, where tapirs and deer roam, and where hardly a man has set foot for centuries. The people of Boque will keep our secret, and she can remain hidden there until--"

"No, Rosendo, that will not do," replied Jose, shaking his head in perplexity. "The girl is developing rapidly, and such a course would result in a mental check that might spell infinite harm. She and Dona Maria would die to live by themselves up there in that lonely region.

What about her studies? And--what would I do?"

"Then do you go too, Padre," suggested Rosendo.

"No, _amigo_, for that would cause search to be inst.i.tuted by the Bishop, and we certainly would be discovered. But, to take her and flee the country--and the Church--how can I yet? No, it is impossible!" He shook his head dolefully, while his thoughts flew back to Seville and the proud mother there.

"_Bien_, Padre, let us increase our contributions to Don Wenceslas.

Let us send him from now on not less than one hundred _pesos oro_ each month. Will not that keep him quiet, no matter what Diego says?"

"Possibly," a.s.sented Jose. "At any rate, we will try it." They still had some three thousand _pesos_ gold left.

"Padre," said Rosendo, some days later, as they sat together in the parish house, "what do you think Diego wants of the girl?"

Jose hesitated. "I think, Rosendo--" he began. But could even a human mind touch such depths of depravity? And yet--"I think," he continued slowly, "that Diego, having seen her, and now speculating on her future beauty of face and form--I think he means to place her in a convent, with the view of holding her as a ready subst.i.tute for the woman who now lives with him--"

"_Dios_! And that is my own daughter!" cried Rosendo, springing up.

"Yes--true, Rosendo. And, if I mistake not, Diego also would like to repay the score he has against you, for driving him from Simiti and holding the threat of death over him these many years. He can most readily do this by getting Carmen away from you--as he did the other daughter, is it not so?"

Rosendo came and stood before the priest. His face was strained with fearful anxiety. "Padre," he said in a low voice, "I shall end this matter at once. I go to Banco to-morrow to kill Diego."

"You shall do nothing of the kind!" cried Jose, seizing his hand. "Why--Rosendo, it would mean your own death, or lifelong imprisonment!"

"And what of that, Padre?" said the old man with awful calmness. "I have nothing that is not hers, even to my life. Gladly would I give it for her. Let me die, or spend my remaining days in the prison, if that will save her. Such a price for her safety would be low."

While he was speaking, Fernando, the town constable, entered. He saluted the men gravely, and drew from his pocket a doc.u.ment to which was attached the Alcalde's official seal.