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 God, 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 God. She walked with Him, and she much preferred the bright, sunlit out-of-doors in which to commune with Him. Josè 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 Mass itself?
“They are what the people are accustomed to, dear child, to direct their thought toward God,” 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 God to guide them both.
The days sped by silently and swiftly. Josè 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, Josè, 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 naïveté of interpretation that held the man enchanted. Even the schoolmaster, who had besought Josè 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 85 by the Alcalde himself, waited upon Josè and begged him to lecture to the people of Simití 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. Josè’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 assured that their request was granted.
The new ideas which had found entrance into Josè’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 God 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 impassable 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.
Josè’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 assiduously. To that official’s query as to the restitution 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 assistance 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 Simití––a very different sort from Padre Diego.
In the first days of Josè’s incumbency he found many serious 86 matters to adjust. He had learned from Rosendo that not half the residents of Simití 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 shirts was extended to include the initial of the mother’s family name. Josè had questioned Rosendo as to the meaning of the letters R. A. S. upon his shirt.
“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 Simití have never been really married.”