Carmen Ariza Part 28

Jose's plans for educating the girl had gradually evolved into completion during the past two days. He explained them at length to Rosendo after the morning meal; and the latter, with dilating eyes, manifested his great joy by clasping the priest in his brawny arms.

"But remember, Rosendo," Jose said, "learning is not _knowing_. I can only teach her book-knowledge. But even now, an untutored child, she knows more that is real than I do."

"Ah, Padre, have I not told you many times that she is not like us?

And now you know it!" exclaimed the emotional Rosendo, his eyes suffused with tears of joy as he beheld his cherished ideals and his longing of years at last at the point of realization. What he, too, had instinctively seen in the child was now to be summoned forth; and the vague, half-understood motive which had impelled him to take the abandoned babe from Badillo into the shelter of his own great heart would at length be revealed. The man's joy was ecstatic. With a final clasp of the priest's hand, he rushed from the house to plunge into the work in progress at the church.

Jose summoned Carmen into the quiet of his own dwelling. She came joyfully, bringing an ancient and obsolete arithmetic and a much tattered book, which Jose discovered to be a chronicle of the heroic deeds of the early _Conquistadores_.

"I'm through decimals!" she exclaimed with glistening eyes; "and I've read some of this, but I don't like it," making a little _moue_ of disgust and holding aloft the battered history.

"Padre Rosendo told me to show it to you," she continued. "But it is all about murder, you know. And yet," with a little sigh, "he has nothing else to read, excepting old newspapers which the steamers sometimes leave at Bodega Central. And they are all about murder, and stealing, and bad things, too. Padre, why don't people write about good things?"

Jose gazed at her reverently, as of old the sculptor Phidias might have stood in awe before the vision which he saw in the unchiseled marble.

"Padre Rosendo helped me with the fractions," went on the girl, flitting lightly to another topic; "but I had to learn the decimals myself. He couldn't understand them. And they are so easy, aren't they? I just love arithmetic!" hugging the old book to her little bosom.

Both volumes, printed in Madrid, were reliques of Spanish colonial days.

"Read to me, Carmen," said Jose, handing her the history.

The child took the book and began to read, with clear enunciation, the narrative of Quesada's sanguinary expedition to Bogota, undertaken in the name of the gentle Christ. Jose wondered as he listened what interpretation this fresh young mind would put upon the motives of that renowned exploit. Suddenly she snapped the book shut.

"Tell me about Jesus," she demanded.

The precipitation with which the question had been propounded almost took his breath away. He raised his eyes to hers, and looked long and wonderingly into their infinite depths. And then the vastness of the problem enunciated by her demand loomed before him. What, after all, did he know about Jesus? Had he not arrived in Simiti in a state of agnosticism regarding religion? Had he not come there enveloped in confusion, baffled, beaten, hopeless? And then, after his wonderful talk with Rosendo, had he not agreed with him that the child's thought must be kept free and open--that her own instinctive religious ideas must be allowed to develop normally, unhampered and unfettered by the external warp and bias of human speculation? It was part of his plan that all reference to matters theological should be omitted from Carmen's educational scheme. Yet here was that name on her lips--the first time he had ever heard it voiced by her. And it smote him like a hammer. He made haste to divert further inquiry.

"Not now, little one," he said hastily. "I want to hear you read more from your book."

"No," she replied firmly, laying the volume upon the table. "I don't like it; and I shouldn't think you would, either. Besides, it isn't true; it never really happened."

"Why, of course it is true, child! It is history, the story of how the brave Spaniards came into this country long ago. We will read a great deal more about them later."

"No," with a decisive shake of her brown head; "not if it is like this. It isn't true; I told padre Rosendo it wasn't."

"Well, what do you mean, child?" asked the uncomprehending priest.

"It is only a lot of bad thoughts printed in a book," she replied slowly. "And it isn't true, because G.o.d is _everywhere_."

Clearly the man was encountering difficulties at the outset; and a part, at least, of his well-ordered curriculum stood in grave danger of repudiation at the hands of this earnest little maid.

The girl stood looking at him wistfully. Then her sober little face melted in smiles. With childish impulsiveness she clambered into his lap, and twining her arms about his neck, impressed a kiss upon his cheek.

"I love you, Padre," she murmured; "and you love me, don't you?"

He pressed her to him, startled though he was. "G.o.d knows I do, little one!" he exclaimed.

"Of course He does," she eagerly agreed; "and He knows you don't want to teach me anything that isn't true, doesn't He, Padre dear?"

Yea, and more; for Jose was realizing now, what he had not seen before, that _it was beyond his power to teach her that which was not true_. The magnitude and sacredness of his task impressed him as never before. His puzzled brain grappled feebly with the enormous problem.

She had rebuked him for trying to teach her things which, if he accepted the immanence of G.o.d as fact, her logic had shown him were utterly false. Clearly the grooves in which this child's pure thought ran were not his own. And if she would not think as he did, what recourse was there left him but to accept the alternative and think with her? For he would not, even if he could, force upon her his own thought-processes.

"Then, Carmen," he finally ventured, "you do not wish to learn about people and what they have done and are doing in the big world about you?"

"Oh, yes, Padre; tell me all about the good things they did!"

"But they did many wicked things too, _chiquita_. And the good and the bad are all mixed up together."

"No," she shook her head vigorously; "there isn't any bad. There is only good, for G.o.d is everywhere--isn't He?"

She raised up and looked squarely into the priest's eyes. Dissimulation, hypocrisy, quibble, cant--nothing but fearless truth could meet that gaze.

Suddenly a light broke in upon his clouded thought. This girl--this tender plant of G.o.d--why, she had shown it from the very beginning!

And he, oh, blind that he was! he could not see nor accept it. The secret of her power, of her ecstasy of life--what was it but this?--_she knew no evil!_

And the Lord G.o.d commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."

Oh, great G.o.d! It was the first--the very first--lesson which Thou didst teach Thy child, Israel, as the curtain rose upon the drama of human life! And the awful warning has rung down through the corridors of time from the mouths of the prophets, whom we slew lest they wake us from our mesmeric sleep! Israel forgot Thy words; and the world has forgotten them, long, long since. Daily we mix our perfumed draft of good and evil, and sink under its lethal influence! Hourly we eat of the forbidden tree, till the pangs of death encompa.s.s us!

And when at last the dark angel hovered over the sin-stricken earth and claimed it for his own, the great Master came to sound again the warning--"As a man thinketh in his heart, _so is he_!" But they would have none of him, and nailed him to a tree!

Oh, Jerusalem! Oh, ye incarnate human mind! Even the unique Son of G.o.d wept as he looked with yearning upon you! Why? Because of your stubborn clinging to false ways, false beliefs, false thoughts of G.o.d and man! Because ye would not be healed; ye would not be made whole!

Ye loved evil--ye gave it life and power, and ye rolled it like a sweet morsel beneath your tongue--and so ye died! So came death into this fair world, through the heart, the brain, the mind of man, _who sought to know what G.o.d could not_!

"Padre dear, you are so quiet." The girl nestled closer to the awed priest. Aye! And so the mult.i.tude on Sinai had stood in awed quiet as they listened to the voice of G.o.d.

This child knew no evil! The man could not grasp the infinite import of the marvelous fact. And yet he had sought to teach her falsities--to teach her that evil did exist, as real and as potent as good, and that it was to be accepted and honored by mankind! But she had turned her back upon the temptation.

"Padre, are you going to tell me about Jesus?"

The priest roused from his deep meditation.

"Yes, yes--I want to know nothing else! I will get my Bible, and we will read about him!"

"Bible? What is that, Padre dear?"

"What! You don't know what the Bible is?" cried the astonished priest.

"No, Padre."

"But have you never--has your padre Rosendo never told you that it is the book that tells--?"

"No," the girl shook her head. "But," her face kindling, "he told me that Jesus was G.o.d's only son. But we are all His children, aren't we?"

"Yes--especially you, little one! But Jesus was the greatest--"

"Did Jesus write the Bible, Padre?" the girl asked earnestly.

"No--we don't know who did. People used to think G.o.d wrote it; but I guess He didn't."