Carmen Ariza Part 37

"There is only one man here to be afraid of," he resumed; "and that is Don Felipe Alcozer; although he may never return to Simiti." He reflected a few moments. Then:

"Now, Padre, let us have some understanding about interests in the mine, should Rosendo find it. The mine will be useless to us unless we work it, for there is no one to buy it from us. To work it, we must have a stamp-mill, or _arrastras_. The Antioquanians are skilled in the making of wooden stamp-mills; but one would cost perhaps two thousand _pesos oro_. n.o.body here can furnish so much money but Don Felipe. I will arrange with him for a suitable interest. And I will fix all the papers so that the t.i.tle will be held by us three. Rosendo is only a _peon_. You can pay him for his trouble, and he need not have an interest."

Jose breathed easier while this recital was in progress. So Don Mario believed Rosendo to have gone in search of the lost mine, La Libertad!

Good; for Cartagena would soon get the report, and his own tenure of the parish would be rendered doubly sure thereby. The monthly greasing of Wenceslas' palm with what Rosendo might extract from the Guamoco sands, coupled with the belief that Jose was maintaining a man in the field in search of Don Ignacio's lost mine, rendered Cartagena's interference a very remote contingency. He almost laughed as he replied:

"Rosendo will doubtless prospect for some months, Don Mario, and I am sure we shall have plenty of time to discuss any arrangement of interests later, should occasion arise. But this is the Sabbath day.

So let us not talk business any further."

When the afternoon heat began to wane, Jose left the Alcalde and returned to his cottage. Since the service of the morning he had been fighting a constantly deepening sense of depression. An awful loneliness now gripped his heart, and dank gloom was again sweeping through the corridors of his soul. G.o.d, what a sacrifice, to remain buried in that dismal town! His continuance in the priesthood of an abjured faith was violative of every principle of honesty! The time would come when the mask of hypocrisy would have to be raised, and the resultant exposure would be worse then than open apostasy now!

He entered his dreary little abode and threw himself upon a chair.

There had been no reaction like this for days. He looked out into the deserted street. Mud hovels; ragged, thatched roofs; lowly _peones_ drowsing away life's little hour within! There was scarcely a book in the town. Few of its inhabitants could even read or write. Culture, education, refinement--all wanting. Nothing but primal existence--the barest necessities of real life. He could not stand it! He had been a fool all his years! He would throw everything to the winds and go out into the world to live his life as it had been intended he should live it. He would send his resignation to the Bishop to-morrow. Then he would hire Juan to take him to Bodega Central; and the few _pesos_ he had left would get him to Barranquilla. There he would work until he had earned enough for his pa.s.sage to the great States up north, of which the explorer had told such wonderful tales. Once there, he could teach, or--

His thought turned to Rosendo. He saw him, bent with age, and wearied with toil, alone in the awful solitude of the jungle, standing knee deep in the cold mountain water, while from early dawn till sunset he incessantly swung the heavy _batea_ to concentrate the few flakes of precious gold it might contain. And the old man was facing years of just such loneliness and heavy toil--facing them gladly.

He thought of Carmen. Was she worth such sacrifice as he and Rosendo were making? G.o.d forgive him! Yes--a thousand times yes! If he betrayed Rosendo's confidence and fled like a coward now, leaving her to fall into the sooty hands of men like Padre Diego, to be crushed, warped, and squeezed into the molds of Holy Church, could he ever again face his fellow-men?

He jumped to his feet. "Get thee behind me, Satan!" he cried in a voice that echoed through the barren rooms. He smote his chest and paced the floor. Then he stopped still. He heard Carmen's voice again.

It was the same simple melody she had sung the day he awoke from his fever. He stood listening. His eyes filled. Then--

"Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might, Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, pa.s.sed in music out of sight."

CHAPTER 12

In the days that followed, while at times Jose still struggled desperately against the depression of his primal environment, and against its insidious suggestions of license, Carmen moved before him like the shechinah of Israel, symbolizing the divine presence. When the dark hours came and his p.r.o.nounced egoism bade fair to overwhelm him; when his self-centered thought clung with the tenacity of a limpet to his dreary surroundings and his unfilled longings; when self-condemnation and self-pity rived his soul, and despair of solving life's intricate problems settled again like a pall upon him, he turned to her. Under the soft influence of her instinct for primitive good, he was learning, even if slowly, to jettison his heavily laden soul, and day by day to ride the tossing waves of his stormy thought with a lighter cargo. Her simple faith in immanent good was working upon his mind like a spiritual catharsis, to purge it of its clogging beliefs. Her unselfed love flowed over him like heavenly balm, salving the bleeding wounds of the spiritual mayhem which he had suffered at the violent hands of Holy Church's worldly agents.

Carmen's days were filled to the brim with a measure of joy that constantly overflowed upon all among whom she moved. Her slight dependence upon her impoverished material environment, her contempt of its _ennui_, were constant reminders to Jose that heaven is but a state of mind. Even in desolate Simiti, life to her was an endless series of delightful experiences, of wonderful surprises in the discovery of G.o.d's presence everywhere. Her enthusiasms were always ardent and inexhaustible. Sparkling animation and abounding vitality characterized her every movement. Her thought was free, unstrained, natural, and untrammeled by those inherited and educated beliefs in evil in which Jose had early been so completely swamped.

In worldly knowledge she was the purest novice; and the engaging _navete_ with which she met the priest's explanations of historical events and the motives from which they sprang charmed him beyond measure, and made his work with her a constant delight. Her sense of humor was keen, and her merriment when his recitals touched her risibility was extravagant. She laughed at danger, laughed at the weaknesses and foibles of men, when he told of the political and social ambitions which stirred mankind in the outside world. But he knew that her merriment proceeded not from an ephemeral sense of the ludicrous, but from a righteous appraisal of the folly and littleness of those things for which the world so sorely strives.

And daily the little maid wrapped herself about his heart. Daily her wondrous love coiled its soft folds tighter around him, squeezing from his atrabilious soul, drop by drop, its sad taciturnity and inherent morbidness, that it might later fill his empty life with a spiritual richness which he had never known before.

On the day following the opening of the church Carmen had asked many questions. It was the first religious service she had ever voluntarily attended. To her former queries regarding the function of the church edifice, Rosendo had vouchsafed but one reply: it was the house of G.o.d, and in it the people used to gather to learn of Him.

But she protested that she had no need of the musty, ramshackle, barn-like old building as a locus in which to center her thought upon G.o.d. She walked with Him, and she much preferred the bright, sunlit out-of-doors in which to commune with Him. Jose explained the need of a central gathering place as a shelter from the hot sun. But the images--the pictures of Saints and Virgin--and the Ma.s.s itself?

"They are what the people are accustomed to, dear child, to direct their thought toward G.o.d," he explained. "And we will use them until we can teach them something better." He had omitted from the church service as far as possible the collects and all invocations addressed to the Virgin and the Saints, and had rendered it short and extremely simple. Carmen seemed satisfied with his explanation, and with his insistence that, for the sake of appearance, she attend the Sunday services. He would trust her G.o.d to guide them both.

The days sped by silently and swiftly. Jose and the child dwelt together apart from the world, in a universe purely mental. As he taught her, she hung upon his every word, and seized the proffered tutelage with avidity. Often, after the day's work, Jose, in his customary strolls about the little town, would come across the girl in the doorway of a neighboring house, with a group of wide-eyed youngsters about her, relating again the wonder-tales which she had gathered from him. Marvelous tales they were, too, of knight and _hidalgo_, of court and camp, of fairies, pyxies, gnomes and sprites, of mossy legend and historic fact, bubbling from the girl's childish lips with an engaging _navete_ of interpretation that held the man enchanted. Even the schoolmaster, who had besought Jose in vain to turn Carmen over to him, was often a spellbound listener at these little gatherings.

The result was that in a short time a delegation, headed by the Alcalde himself, waited upon Jose and begged him to lecture to the people of Simiti in the church building at least two or three evenings a week upon places and people he had seen in the great world of which they knew nothing. Jose's eyes were moist as he looked at the great, brawny men, stout of heart, but simple as children. He grieved to give up his evenings, for he had formed the habit of late of devoting them to the study of his Bible, and to meditation on those ideas which had so recently come to him. But the appeal from these innocent, untutored people again quenched the thought of self, and he bade them be a.s.sured that their request was granted.

The new ideas which had found entrance into Jose's liberated mentality in the past few days had formed a basis on which he was not afraid to stand while teaching Carmen; and his entire instruction was thenceforth colored by them. He knew not why, in all the preceding years, such ideas had not come to him before. But he was to learn, some day, that his previous tenacious clinging to evil as a reality, together with his material beliefs and his worldly intellectuality, had stood as barriers at the portals of his thought, and kept the truth from entering. His mind had been already full--but its contents were unbelief, fear, the conviction of evil as real and operative, and the failure to know G.o.d as immanent, omnipotent and perfect mind, to whom evil is forever unknown and unreal. Pride, egoism, and his morbid sense of honesty had added their portion to the already impa.s.sable obstruction at the gateway of his thought. And so the error had been kept within, the good without. The "power of the Lord" had not been absent; but it had remained unapplied. Thus he had wandered through the desolate wilderness; but yet sustained and kept alive, that he should not go down to the pit.

Jose's days were now so crowded that he was forced to borrow heavily from the night. The Alcalde continued his unctuous flattery, and the priest, in turn, cultivated him a.s.siduously. To that official's query as to the rest.i.tution of the confessional in the church, the priest replied that he could spare time to hear only such confessions from his flock as might be necessary to elicit from him the advice or a.s.sistance requisite for their needs. He was there to help them solve their life problems, not to pry into their sacred secrets; and their confessions must relate only to their necessities.

The Alcalde went away with a puzzled look. Of a truth a new sort of priest had now to be reckoned with in Simiti--a very different sort from Padre Diego.

In the first days of Jose's inc.u.mbency he found many serious matters to adjust. He had learned from Rosendo that not half the residents of Simiti were married to the consorts with whom they lived, and that many of the children who played in the streets did not know who their fathers were. So prevalent was this evil condition that the custom among the men of having their initials embroidered upon the bosoms of their s.h.i.+rts was extended to include the initial of the mother's family name. Jose had questioned Rosendo as to the meaning of the letters R. A. S. upon his s.h.i.+rt.

"The S, Padre, is the initial of my mother's family name. I am Rosendo Ariza, son of the daughter of Saurez. My parents were married by a priest. But half the people of Simiti have never been really married."

Jose sought the cause of this dereliction. Fidel Avila was living with a woman, by whom he had three children. The priest summoned him to the parish house.

"Fidel," he questioned sternly, "Jacinta, the woman you live with, is your wife?"

"Yes, _Senor Padre_."

"And you were married by the Church?"

"No, Padre."

"But was there a priest here when you began to live with Jacinta?"

"Yes, Padre. The _Cura_, Don Diego Polo, was here."

"Then why were you not married by him? Do you not know how wicked it is to live as you are doing? Think of your children!"

"Yes, Padre, and I asked the _Cura_, Don Diego, to marry us. But he charged twenty _pesos oro_ for doing it; and I could not afford it. I loved Jacinta. And so we decided to live together without the marriage."

"But--!" Jose stopped. He knew that the Church recognized no marriage unless it were performed by a priest. The civil magistrate had no jurisdiction in such a case. And a former priest's rapacity had resulted in forcing illegitimacy upon half the children of this benighted hamlet, because of their parents' inability to afford the luxury of a canonical marriage.

"Fidel, were your father and mother married?" he asked in kinder tones.

"I do not know, Padre. Only a few people in Guamoco can afford to pay to be married. The men and women live together, perhaps for all time, perhaps for only a few months. If a man wishes to leave his woman and live with another, he does so. If there are children, the woman always has to keep and care for them."

"And could you leave Jacinta if you wished, and live with another woman?"

"Yes, Padre."

"And she would have to lake care of your children?"

"Yes."

"And all because you are not married?"

"I think so, Padre."

"_Hombre!_ But that will do, Fidel."

Oh, the sordid greed of those who abuse their sacred commission! What punishment is mete for such as exploit these lowly folk in the name of religion! Jose strode off to consult the Alcalde.

"Don Mario, the men in Simiti who are living with women have _got_ to be married to them! It is shameful! I shall make a canva.s.s of the town at once!"

The Alcalde laughed. "_Costumbre_, Padre. You can't change it."