“The pole and paddle, Padre, were left on the island. I took them out when we landed. Diego pushed off without them. He––the boat––it must have drifted long. But––did he land? Or––”
He stopped and scratched his head. “Padre,” he said, looking up suddenly with an expression of awe upon his face, “do you suppose––do you think that the Virgin––that she––made him fall from the canoe into the lake––and that a cayman ate him? Ca-ram-ba!”
Josè did not vouchsafe a reply. But his heart leaped with a great hope. Rosendo, wrapped in profound meditation, wandered back to his house, his head bent, and his hands clasped tightly behind his back.
CHAPTER 29
The rainy season dragged its reeking length through the Simití valley with fearful deliberation. Josè thought that he should never again see the sun. The lake steamed like a cauldron. Great clouds of heavy vapor rolled incessantly upward from the dripping jungle. The rain fell in cloud-bursts, and the narrow streets of the old town ran like streams in a freshet.
Then, one day, Rosendo abruptly announced, “Padre, the rains are breaking. The dry season is at hand. And the little Carmen is fourteen years old to-day.”
It gave the priest a shock. He had been six years in Simití! And Carmen was no longer a child. Youth ripens quickly into maturity in these tropic lands. The past year had sped like a meteor across an evening sky, leaving a train of mingled light and darkness. Of Diego’s fate Josè had learned nothing. Ricardo and his companion had disappeared without causing even a ripple of comment in Simití. Don Mario remained quiet for many weeks. But he often eyed Josè and Rosendo malignantly 275 through the wooden grill at his window, and once he ordered Fernando to stop Rosendo and ply him with many and pointed questions. The old man was noncommittal, but he left a dark suspicion, which was transmitted to the receptive mind of the Alcalde. Acting-Bishop Wenceslas likewise was growing apprehensive as the weeks went by, and both Josè and Don Mario were the recipients of letters of inquiry from him regarding the whereabouts of the priest Diego. In the course of time came other letters from Cartagena, and at length an order for a most scrutinizing search to be made for the Bishop’s confidential agent.
It was of no avail. Rosendo’s oft-repeated testimony revealed nothing. The citizens of Simití had not seen the man. The Alcalde had nothing but his suspicions to offer. And these might have fallen harmlessly upon the acting-Bishop’s well occupied thought, had it not been for the complicating influence of certain other events. The first of these was the exhaustion of the gold which Josè and Carmen had discovered in the old church. The other was the outbreak of the religio-political revolution which Diego had predicted some six years before, and which, in these latter days, Don Jorge, on his infrequent journeys through Simití had repeatedly announced as inevitable and imminent. Their combined effect was such as to wrest Carmen away from Josè, and to set in a new direction the currents of their lives.