Days melted into weeks, and these in turn into months. Simití, 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 Josè. “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 Panamá 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 Simití.” Josè 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. Josè ignored him as far as possible. Events move with terrible deliberation in these tropic lands, and men’s minds are heavy and lethargic. Josè assumed that Don Mario had failed in the support upon which he had counted; or else Diego’s interest in Carmen was dormant, perhaps utterly passed. 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 assured, if not altogether certain.
Juan continued his frequent trips down to Bodega Central 219 as general messenger and transportation agent for his fellow-townsmen, meanwhile adoring Carmen from a distance of respectful decorum. Rosendo and Lázaro, 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 constituted 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 encompassment! Yet how helpless he was to afford them the needed lustration 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 Josè had progressed during his years in Simití. 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 220 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.