He entered his carriage and was driven hurriedly to his sanctum. There he despatched a long message to the President of the Republic. At noon he had a reply. He mused over it for the space of an hour. Then he framed another despatch. “Your Excellency,” it read, “the Church supports the Administration.”
Late that evening a second message from Bogotá was put into his hand. He tore it open and read, “The Hercules ordered to Simití.”
“Ah,” he sighed, sinking into his chair. “At last! The President interferes! And now a wire to Ames. And––Caramba, yes! A message to the captain of the Hercules to bring me that girl!”
“Well, old man, I’ve done all I could to stave off the blundering idiot; but I guess you are in for it! The jig is up, I’m thinking!”
It was Reed talking. Simití again slept, while the American and Josè in the sacristía talked long and earnestly. Fernando kept guard at the door. The other prisoners lay wrapped in slumber.
“Your message went down the river two days ago,” continued Reed. “And, believe me! since then I’ve racked my dusty brain for topics to keep the Alcalde occupied and forgetful of you. But I’m dryer than a desert now; and he vows that to-morrow you and your friends will be dragged out of this old shack by your necks, and then shot.”
The two days had been filled with exquisite torture for Josè. Only the presence of Carmen restrained him from rushing out and ending it all. Her faith had been his constant marvel. 318 Every hour, every moment, she knew only the immanence of her God; whereas he, obedient to the undulating Rincón character-curve, expressed the mutability of his faith in hourly alternations of optimism and black despair. After periods of exalted hope, stimulated by the girl’s sublime confidence, there would come the inevitable backward rush of all the chilling fear, despondency, and false thought which he had just expelled in vain, and he would be left again floundering helplessly in the dismal labyrinth of terrifying doubts.
The quiet which enwrapped them during these days of imprisonment; the gloom-shrouded church; the awed hush that lay upon them in the presence of the dead Lázaro, stimulated the feeble and sensitive spirit of the priest to an unwonted degree of introspection, and he sat for hours gazing blankly into the ghastly emptiness of his past.
He saw how at the first, when Carmen entered his life with the stimulus of her buoyant faith, there had seemed to follow an emptying of self, a quick clearing of his mentality, and a replacement of much of the morbid thought, which clung limpet-like to his mentality, by new and wonderfully illuminating ideas. For a while he had seemed to be on the road to salvation; he felt that he had touched the robe of the Christ, and heavenly virtue had entered into his being.