“Hombre, yes!” exclaimed the latter a bit testily. “I know 150 it! Did not Don Felipe go there when the doctor in Mompox told him the little white spot on his hand was leprosy? And he came back cured.”
Leprosy! Josè started as if he had received a blow. He looked furtively at the scar on his own hand, the hand which the leper in Maganguey had lacerated that dreadful night, and which often burned and ached as if seared by a hot iron. He had never dared to voice the carking fear that tightened about his heart at times. But often in the depths of night, when dread anticipation sat like a spectre upon his bed, he had risen and gone out into the darkness to wrestle with his black thoughts. Leprosy! All the gladness and joy left his heart, and a pall of darkness settled over his thought. He turned back into his cottage and tried to find forgetfulness in the simple duties that lay at hand.
“Why is it,” he asked himself, as he sat wearily down at his little table, “that I always think of evil first; while Carmen’s first thought is invariably of God?”
He looked at the ugly scar on his hand. What thought was externalized in the loathsome experience which produced that? he wondered. Was it the summation of all the fear, the weakness, the wrong belief, that had filled his previous years? And now why was he finding it so difficult to practice what Carmen lived, even though he knew it was truth?
“Alas!” he murmured aloud, “it was the seminary that did it. For there my thought was educated away from the simple teachings of Jesus. To Carmen there is no mystery in godliness. Though she knows utterly nothing about Jesus, yet she hourly uses the Christ-principle. It is the children who grasp the simple truths of God; while the lack of spirituality which results from increasing years shrinks maturer minds until they no longer afford entrance to it. For godliness is broad; and the mind that receives it must be opened wide.”
As he sat with his bowed head clasped in his hands, a sweet, airy voice greeted him.
“Why, Padre dear––ah, I caught you that time!––you were thinking that two and two are seven, weren’t you?” She shook a rebuking finger at him.
Framed in the doorway like an old masterpiece, the sunlight bronzing her heavy brown curls, the olive-tinted skin of her bare arms and legs flushing with health, and her cheap calico gown held tightly about her, showing the contour of her full and shapely figure, the girl appeared to Josè like a vision from the realm of enchantment. And he knew that she did dwell in the land of spiritual enchantment, where happiness is not at the mercy of physical sense.
“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”