Meantime, Josè did not permit his mental torture to interfere with Carmen’s education. For six years now that had progressed steadily. And the results? Wonderful, he thought––and yet not wholly attributable to his peculiar mode of tutelage. For, after all, his work had been little more than the holding of her mind unwarped, that her instinctive sense of logic might reach those truthful conclusions which it was bound to attain if guided safely past the tortuous shifts of human speculation and undemonstrable theory. To his great joy, these six years had confirmed a belief which he had held ever since the troublous days of his youth, namely, that, as a recent writer has said, “adolescent understanding is along straight lines, and leaps where the adult can only laboriously creep.” There had been no awful hold of early teaching to loosen and throw off; there were no old landmarks in her mind to remove; no tenacious, clinging effect of early associations to neutralize. And, perhaps most important of all, the child had seemed to enter the world utterly devoid of fear, and with a congenital faith, amounting to absolute knowledge, in the immanence of an omnipotent God of love. This, added to her eagerness and mental receptivity, had made his task one of constant rejoicing in the realization of his most extravagant dreams for her.
As a linguist, Carmen had become accomplished. She spoke English fluently. And it was only a matter of practice to give her a similar grasp of French, Italian, and German. As for other instruction, such knowledge of the outside world as he had deemed wise to give her in these six years had been seized upon with avidity and as quickly assimilated. But he often 278 speculated curiously––sometimes dubiously––upon the great surprises in store for her should she ever leave her native village. And yet, as often as such thought recurred to him he would try to choke it back, to bar his mind against it, lest the pull at his heartstrings snap them asunder.
Often as he watched her expanding so rapidly into womanhood and exhibiting such graces of manner, such amiability of disposition, such selfless regard for others, combined with a physical beauty such as he thought he had never before gazed upon, a great yearning would clutch his soul, and a lump would rise in his throat. And when, as was so often the case, her arms flew impulsively about his neck and she whispered words of tender endearment in his ear, a fierce determination would seize him, and he would clutch her to himself with such vehemence as to make her gasp for breath. That she might marry he knew to be a possibility. But the idea pierced his soul as with a sword, and he thought that to see her in the arms of another, even the man of her choice, must excite him to murder. One day, shortly after her fourteenth birthday, she came to him and, perching herself as was her wont upon his knees, and twining her arms about his neck, said, with traces of embarrassment, “Padre dear, Juan––he asked me to-day to marry him.”
Josè caught his breath. His ears rang. She––marry a peon of Simití! To be sure, Juan had often reminded him of the request he had made for her hand long ago. But Josè had not considered the likelihood of the lad’s taking his question directly to her. And the girl––
“And what did you reply?” he asked thickly.
“Padre dear––I told him that––” She stopped abruptly.
“Well, chiquita; you told him––what?” His voice trembled.
She flushed, still hesitating. He held her back from him and looked squarely into her wide eyes.
“You told him, chiquita––”