When Josè arrived in Cartagena he had found it a city of vivid contrasts. There mediaevalism still strove with the spirit of modern progress; and so it suited well as an environment for the dilation of his shrunken soul-arteries. The lethal influence of the monastery long lay over him, beneath which he continued to manifest those eccentric habits which his prolonged state of loneliness had engendered. He looked askance at the amenities which his associates tentatively held out to him. He sank himself deep in study, and for weeks, even months, he shunned the world of people and things. He found no stimulus to a search for his ancestral palace within the city, nor for a study of the Rincón records which lay moldering in the ancient city’s archives.
But, as the sunlit days drifted dreamily past with peaceful, unvarying monotony, Josè’s faculties, which had always been alert until he had been declared insane, gradually awakened. His violently disturbed balance began to right itself; his equilibrium became in a measure restored. The deadening thought that he had accomplished nothing in his vitiated life yielded to a hopeful determination to yet retrieve past failure. The pride and fear which had balked the thought of self-destruction now served to fan the flame of fresh resolve. He dared not do any writing, it was true. But he could delve and study. And a thousand avenues opened to him through which he could serve his fellow-men. The papal instructions which his traveling companion, the Apostolic Delegate, had brought to the Bishop 110 of Cartagena, evidently had sufficed for his credentials; and the latter had made no occasion to refer to the priest’s past. An order from the Vatican was law; and the Bishop obeyed it with no other thought than its inerrancy and inexorability. And with the lapse of the several months which had slipped rapidly away while he sought to forget and to clear from his mind the dark clouds of melancholia which had settled over it, Josè became convinced that the Bishop knew nothing of his career prior to his arrival in Colombia.
And it is possible that the young priest’s secret would have died with him––that he would have lived out his life amid the peaceful scenes of this old, romantic town, and gone to his long rest at last with the consciousness of having accomplished his mite in the service of his fellow-beings; it is possible that Rome would have forgotten him; and that his uncle’s ambitions, to which he knew that he had been regarded as in some way useful, would have flagged and perished over the watery waste which separated the New World from the Old, but for the intervention of one man, who crossed Josè’s path early in his new life, found him inimical to his own worldly projects, and removed him, therefore, as sincerely in the name of Christ as the ancient Conquistadores, with priestly blessing, hewed from their paths of conquest the simple and harmless aborigines.
That man was Wenceslas Ortiz, trusted servant of Holy Church, who had established himself in Cartagena to keep a watchful eye on anticlerical proceedings. That he was able to do this, and at the same time turn them greatly to his own advantage, marks him as a man of more than usually keen and resourceful mentality. He was a native son, born of prosperous parents in the riverine town of Mompox, which, until the erratic Magdalena sought for itself a new channel, was the chief port between Barranquilla and the distant Honda. There had been neither family custom nor parental hopes to consider among the motives which had directed him into the Church. He was a born worldling, but with unmistakable talents for and keen appreciation of the art of politics. His love of money was subordinate only to his love of power. To both, his talents made access easy. In the contemplation of a career in his early years he had hesitated long between the Church and the Army; but had finally thrown his lot with the former, as offering not only equal possibilities of worldly preferment and riches, but far greater stability in those periodic revolutions to which his country was so addicted. The Army was frequently overthrown; the Church, never. The Government changed with every successful political revolution; the Church remained immovable. And so with the art of a trained politician he cultivated 111 his chosen field with such intensity that even the Holy See felt the glow of his ardor, and in recognition of his marked abilities, his pious fervor and great influence, was constrained to place him just where he wished to be, at the right hand of the Bishop of Cartagena, and probable successor to that aged incumbent, who had grown to lean heavily and confidingly upon him.
As coadjutor, or suffragan to the Bishop of Cartagena, Wenceslas Ortiz had at length gathered unto himself sufficient influence of divers nature as, in his opinion, to ensure him the See in case the bishopric should, as was contemplated, be raised eventually to the status of a Metropolitan. It was he, rather than the Bishop, who distributed parishes to ambitious pastors and emoluments to greedy politicians. His irons in ecclesiastical, political, social and commercial fires were innumerable. The doctrine of the indivisibility of Church and State had in him an able champion––but only because he thereby found a sure means of increasing his prestige and augmenting his power and wealth. His methods of work manifested keenness, subtlety, shrewdness and skill. His rewards were lavish. His punishments, terrible. The latter smacked of the Inquisition: he preferred torture to quick despatch.
It had not taken Wenceslas long to estimate the character of the newcomer, Josè. Nor was he slow to perceive that this liberal pietist was cast in an unusual mold. Polity necessitated the cultivation of Josè, as it required the friendship––or, in any event, the thorough appraisement––of every one with whom Wenceslas might be associated. But the blandishments, artifice, diplomacy and hints of advancements which he poured out in profusion upon Josè he early saw would fail utterly to penetrate the armor of moral reserve with which the priest was clad, or effect in the slightest degree the impression which they were calculated to make.
In the course of time the priest became irritating; later, annoying; and finally, positively dangerous to the ambitions of Wenceslas. For, to illustrate, Josè had once discovered him, in the absence of the Bishop, celebrating Mass in a state of inebriation. This irritated. Wenceslas had only been careless. Again, Josè had several times shown himself suspicious of his fast-and-loose methods with the rival political factions of Cartagena. This was annoying. Finally, he had come upon Josè in the market place a few weeks prior, in earnest conference with Marcelena and the girl, Maria; and subsequent conversation with him developed the fact that the priest had other dark suspicions which were but too well founded. This was dangerous. It was high time to prepare for possible contingencies.
And so, in due time, carefully wording his hint that Padre Josè de Rincón might be a Radical spy in the ecclesiastical camp, Wenceslas found means to obtain from Rome a fairly comprehensive account of the priest’s past history. He mused over this until an idea suddenly occurred to him, namely, the similarity of this account with many of the passages which he had found in a certain book, “The Confessions of a Roman Catholic Priest”––a book which had cast the shadow of distrust upon Wenceslas himself in relation to certain matters of ecclesiastical politics in Colombia nearly three years before, and at a most unfortunate time. Indeed, this sudden, unheralded exposure had forced him to a hurried recasting of certain cherished plans, and drawn from him a burning, unquenchable desire to lay his pious hands upon the writer.
His influence with Rome at length revealed the secret of the wretched book’s authorship. And from the moment that he learned it, Josè’s fate was sealed. The crafty politician laughed aloud as he read the priest’s history. Then he drew his plans and waited. But in the interim he made further investigations; and these he extended far back into the ancestral history of this unfortunate scion of the once powerful house of Rincón.