He took her hand and led her, weeping, but no longer resisting, down to the canoe. Carmen followed, dancing like an animated sunbeam. “What fun, oh, what fun!” she chirped, clapping her hands. “And just as soon as we get home we will go right up to the cárcel and let padre Rosendo out!”
“Na, chiquita,” said Josè, shaking his head mournfully; “we have no power to do that.”
“Well, then, God has,” returned the girl, nothing daunted.
Juan pushed the heavily laden canoe from its mooring, and set its direction toward Simití. Silence drew over the little group, and the hours dragged while the boat crept slowly along the margin of the great river. The sun had passed its meridian when the little craft turned into the caño. To Josè the change brought a most grateful relief. For, though his long residence in Simití had somewhat inured him to the intense heat of this low region, he had not yet learned to endure it with the careless indifference of the natives. Besides, his mind was filled with vivid memories of the horrors of his first river trip. And he knew that every future experience on the water would be tinged by them.
In the shaded caño the sunlight, sifting through the interlocking branches of ancient palms and caobas, mellowed and softened into a veil of yellow radiance that flecked the little stream with splashes of gold. Juan in the prow with the pole labored in silence. At times he stopped just long enough to roll a huge cigar, and to feast his bright eyes upon the fair girl whom he silently adored. Lázaro, as patron, sat in the stern, saturnine and unimpassioned. The woman, exhausted by the recent mental strain, dozed throughout the journey. Carmen alone seemed alive to her environment. Every foot of advance unfolded to her new delights. She sang; she chirped; she mimicked the parrots; she chattered at the excited monkeys. It was with difficulty that Josè could restrain her when her sharp eyes caught the glint of brilliant Passion flowers and orchids of gorgeous hue clinging to the dripping trees.
“Padre!” she exclaimed, “they are in us, you know. They are not out there at all! We see our thoughts of them––and lots of people wouldn’t see anything beautiful about them at all, just because their thoughts are not beautiful. Padre, we see––what you said to me once––we see our interpretations of God’s ideas, don’t we? That is what I told Padre Diego. But––well, he will just have to see some day, won’t he, Padre dear? But now let us talk in English; you know, I haven’t spoken it for such a long time.”
Josè gazed at her in rapt silence. What a rare interpretation of the mind divine was this child! But he wondered why one so pure and beautiful should attract a mind so carnal as that of Diego. And yet––
“Ah!” he mused, “it is again that law. Good always stirs up its suppositional opposite. And the most abundant good and the greatest purity stir up the most carnal elements of the human mind. All history shows it. The greater the degree of good, the greater the seeming degree of evil aroused. The perfect Christ stirred the hatred of a world. Carmen arouses Diego simply because of her purity. Yet she knows that he can not harm her.”
His eyes met the girl’s, and she answered his unspoken thought in the tongue which she was fast adopting. “We have to love him, you know, Padre dear.”