It is true, the dull staring of the natives of this unkempt town had long continued to throw him into fits of prolonged nervousness. They had not meant to offend, of course. Their curiosity was far from malicious. But at hardly any hour of the day or night could he look up from his work without seeing dark, inquisitive faces peering in through the latticed window or the open door at him, watchful of the minutest detail of his activity. He had now grown used to that. And he had grown used to their thoughtless intrusion upon him at any hour. He had learned, too, not to pale with nausea when, as was their wont of many centuries, the dwellers in this uncouth town relentlessly pursued their custom of expectorating upon his floor immediately they entered and stood before him. He had accustomed himself to the hourly intrusion of the scavenger pigs and starving dogs in his house. And he could now endure without aching nerves the awful singing, the maudlin wails, the thin, piercing, falsetto howls which rose almost nightly about him in the sacred name of music. For these were children with whom he dwelt. And he was trying to show them that they were children of God.
The girl’s education was progressing marvelously. Already Josè had been obliged to supplement his oral instruction with texts purchased for her from abroad. Her grasp of the English language was his daily wonder. After two years of study she spoke it readily. She loved it, and insisted that her conversations with him should be conducted wholly in it. French and German likewise had been taken up; and her knowledge of her own Castilian tongue had been enriched by the few books which he had been able to secure for her from Spain.
Josè’s anomalous position in Simití had ceased to cause him worry. What mattered it, now that he had endeared himself to its people, and was progressing undisturbed in the training of Carmen? He performed his religious duties faithfully. His people wanted them. And he, in turn, knew that upon his observance of them depended his tenure of the parish.
And he wanted to remain among them, to lead them, if possible, at least a little way along what he was daily seeing to be the only path out of the corroding beliefs of the human mind. He knew that his people’s growth would be slow––how slow might not his own be, too! Who could say how unutterably slow would be their united march heavenward! And 221 yet, the human mind was expanding with wonderful rapidity in these last days. What acceleration had it not acquired since that distant era of the Old Stone Man, when through a hundred thousand years of darkness the only observable progress was a little greater skill in the shaping of his crude flint weapons!
To Padre Diego’s one or two subsequent curt demands that Carmen be sent to him, Josè had given no heed. And perhaps Diego, absorbed in his political activities as the confidential agent of Wenceslas, would have been content to let his claim upon the child lapse, after many months of quiet, had not Don Jorge inadvertently set the current of the man’s thought again in her direction.
For Don Jorge was making frequent trips along the Magdalena river. It was essential to his business to visit the various riverine towns and to mingle freely with all grades of people, that he might run down rumors or draw from the inhabitants information which might result in valuable clues anent buried treasure. Returning one day to Simití from such a trip, he regaled Josè with the spirited recital of his experience on a steamboat which had become stranded on a river bar.
“Bien,” he concluded, “the old tub at last broke loose. Then we saw that its engines were out of commission; and so the captain let her drift down to Banco, where we docked. I was forced, not altogether against my will, to put up with Padre Diego. Caramba! The old fox! But I had much amusement at his expense when I twitted him about his daughter Carmen, and his silly efforts to get possession of her!”
Josè shook with indignation. “Good heaven, friend!” he cried, “why can you not let sleeping dogs alone? Diego is not the man to be bearded like that! Would that you had kept away from the subject! And what did you say to him about the girl?”
“Caramba, man! I only told him how beautiful she was, and how large for her few years. Bien, I think I said she was the most beautiful and well-formed girl I had ever seen. But was there anything wrong in telling the truth, amigo?”
“No,” replied Josè bitterly, as he turned away; “you meant no harm. But, knowing the man’s brutal nature, and his assumed claim on the girl, why could you not have foreseen possible misfortune to her in dwelling thus on her physical beauty? Hombre, it is too bad!”