But to remain in republican Cartagena after the final success of the revolutionists was to the royalist Don Ignacio quite impossible. Even if permitted the attempt, he was so attached to the ancient order of things that he could not adjust himself to the radically changed conditions. So, gathering about him the sorrowing remnant of his family, and converting into a pitifully small sum his few remaining possessions, he took passage on an English trader and sailed for the mother-country, to begin life anew among those whose speech and customs were most familiar to him.
He settled in Seville, where the elder of his two sons, Rafaél de Rincón, a lad of fifteen, was studying for the priesthood, under the patronage of the Archbishop. There he established himself in the wine business, associating with him his second son, Carlos, only a year the junior of his brother. But, broken in spirit as well as in fortune, he made little headway, and two years later died pitiably in poverty and obscurity.
Through the influence of the Archbishop, the business, 14 which Carlos was far too young and immature to conduct, was absorbed by larger interests, and the young lad retained as an employe. As the years passed the boy developed sufficient commercial ability to enable him to retain his position and to extract from it enough to provide for the needs of himself and his dependents. He married, late in life, a woman whose family had fled from Cartagena with his own and settled in Seville. She was but a babe in arms at the time of the exodus, and many years his junior. A year after the marriage a child was born to them, a son. The babe’s birth was premature, following a fright which the mother received when attacked by a beggar. But the child lived. And, according to the honored family custom, which the father insisted on observing as rigidly in Spain as it had been formerly in Cartagena, this son, Josè Francisco Enrique de Rincón, was at birth consecrated to the service of God in the Holy Catholic Church.
CHAPTER 3
If, as Thoreau said, “God is on the side of the most sensitive,” then He should have been very close to the timid, irresolute lad in Seville, in whom the softer traits of character, so unexpectedly developed in the adventurous founder of the Rincón family, now stood forth so prominently. Somber, moody, and retiring; delicately sensitive and shrinking; acutely honest, even to the point of morbidity; deeply religious and passionately studious, with a consuming zeal for knowledge, and an unsatisfied yearning for truth, the little Josè early in life presented a strange medley of characteristics, which bespoke a need of the utmost care and wisdom on the part of those who should have the directing of his career. Forced into the world before his time, and strongly marked by his mother’s fear; afflicted with precarious health, and subjected to long and desperate illnesses in childhood, his little soul early took on a gloom and asceticism wholly unnatural to youth. Fear was constantly instilled into his acutely receptive mind by his solicitous, doting parents; and his life was thereby stunted, warped, and starved. He was reared under the constant reminder of the baleful effects of food, of air, of conduct, of this and that invisible force inimical to health; and terror and anxiety followed him like a ghost and turned about all his boyish memories. Under these repressing influences his mind could not but develop with a lack of stamina for self-support. Hesitancy and vacillation became pronounced. In 15 time, the weight of any important decision gave him acute, unendurable agony of mind. Called upon to decide for himself a matter of import, his thought would become confused, his brain torpid, and in tears and perplexity the tormented lad would throw himself into the arms of his anxious parents and beg to be told what course to pursue.
Thus his nature grew to depend upon something stronger than itself to twine about. He sought it in his schoolmates; but they misread him. The little acts which were due to his keen sensitiveness or to his exaggerated reticence of disposition were frequently interpreted by them as affronts, and he was generally left out of their games, or avoided entirely. His playmates consequently became fewer and more transient as the years gained upon him, until at length, trodden upon, but unable to turn, he withdrew his love from the world and bestowed it all upon his anxious mother. She became his only intimate, and from her alone he sought the affection for which he yearned with an intensity that he could not express. Shunning the boisterous, frolicking children at the close of the school day, he would seek her, and, nestling at her side, her hand clasped in his, would beg her to talk to him of the things with which his childish thought was struggling. These were many, but they revolved about a common center––religion.
The salient characteristics already mentioned were associated with others, equally prominent, and no less influential in the shaping of his subsequent career. With the development of his deep, inward earnestness there had appeared indications of latent powers of mind that were more than ordinary. These took the form of childish precocity in his studies, clearness of spiritual vision, and maturity in his conduct and mode of life. The stunting of his physical nature threw into greater prominence his exaggerated soul-qualities, his tenderness, his morbid conscientiousness, and a profound emotionalism which, at the sight of a great painting, or the roll of the Cathedral organ, would flood his eyes and fill his throat with sobs. When the reckless founder of the family experienced a reversal of his own dark traits of soul, nearly three centuries before, it was as if the pendulum had swung too far in the opposite direction, and at the extreme point of its arc had left the little Josè, with the sterner qualities of the old Conquistador wholly neutralized by self-condemnation, fear, infirmity of purpose, a high degree of intellectuality, and a soul-permeating religious fervor.
At the mention of religion the timid lad at once became passionate, engrossed––nay, obsessed. In his boyhood years, before the pall of somber reticence had settled over him, he had 16 been impressed with the majesty of the Church and the gorgeousness of her material fabric. The religious ideals taught him by his good mother took deep root. But the day arrived when the expansion of his intellect reached such a point as to enable him to detect a flaw in her reasoning. It was but a little rift, yet the sharp edge of doubt slipped in. Alas! from that hour he ceased to drift with the current of popular theological belief; his frail bark turned, and launched out upon the storm-tossed sea, where only the outstretched hand of the Master, treading the heaving billows through the thick gloom, saved it at length from destruction.