Carmen Ariza Part 66

"Of Ayacucho," suggested Jose.

"Just so," resumed Rosendo. "_Bien_, there was nothing for the poor man to do but hasten down the river to Cartagena as fast as possible, for he knew not what might have befallen his family. He did not dare go back to Simiti then for the box. And so the gold was left in the altar."

_"Hombre!"_ exclaimed Jose. "Now I understand what he meant by that note in his old diary, which we had in my father's house, in Spain! Of course! Arriving in Cartagena he went at once to the Department of Mines and tore out all the pages of the register that contained descriptions of his mineral properties. He intended some day to return to Guamoco and again locate them. And meantime, he protected himself by destroying all the registered locations. It was easy for him to do this, influential as he was in Cartagena. And doubtless at that stormy time the office of the Department of Mines was deserted. This note, Rosendo, I have read in his old diary, many times, but never knew to what it referred."

_"Hombre!"_ e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Rosendo. "_Bueno_, the soldiers sacked Simiti and slaughtered all the people they could find. Then they set fire to the town, and left. My parents had fled to Guamoco.

"But now for the old church and the picture of the Virgin that was lost during the terrible storm when the priest fell dead. We will have to guess that later, when peace had been restored, the priest of the old church in prying around the altar discovered the loose bricks and the box behind them. _Bueno_, the night of the awful storm he had gone secretly to the church to remove the box. I remember that my father said the priest had arranged for my father to take him down to Bodega Central the very next day. You see, he was going to flee with the gold, the rogue! _Bien_, while he was in the church taking out the loose bricks, that storm broke--and, from what I remember, it was terrible! The heavens were ablaze with lightning; the thunder roared like cannon; and the lake rose right out of its bed! _Caramba!_ The door of the church crashed open, and the wind whistled in and blew out the candles on the altar. The wind also tore loose a beautiful picture of the Virgin that was hanging near the altar. The picture was blown out of its frame and swept off to the hills, or into the lake. It was never seen again, although the frame was found just outside the door.

Perhaps it was the extinguis.h.i.+ng of the candles and the falling of the picture that frightened the old priest so terribly. At any rate he ran from the church to his house, and when he reached his door he fell dead of apoplexy.

"_Bueno_, after that you could never get any of the Simiti people to enter the church again. They closed the doors and left it, just as it was, for they thought the curse of G.o.d had fallen upon it because it had been erected by the enemies of the Rincon family, whose patron saint was the blessed Virgin herself. Well, the old altar began to crumble, and parts of it fell away from time to time. And when the people heard the bricks falling they said it was the bad angel that the Virgin had locked in there--the angel of Satan that had extinguished the candles on the altar that night of the storm.

_Caramba!_ And I believed it, too! I am a fool, Padre, a fool!"

"We are all fools, Rosendo, when we yield ourselves to superst.i.tion and false belief," said Jose solemnly. "But you have worked out a very ingenious story, and I doubt not you have come very near to accounting in the right way for the presence of the little box in the altar. But now, _amigo_, come with me to my house. I would discuss a plan with you.

"It is this, Rosendo," he said, when they were alone. "We now have gold, and the way has been providentially opened. Carmen is in great danger here. What say you, shall we take her and leave Simiti?"

Rosendo's face became grave. He did not reply for some moments.

"Padre," he said at length, "you are right. It would be best for her if we could get her away. But--you would have to leave the country. I see now that neither she nor you would be safe anywhere in Colombia if you left Simiti."

"True, Rosendo," replied Jose. "And I am sure that no country offers the asylum that America does--the America of the north. I have never been there, _amigo_; but of all countries I learn that it is the most tolerant in matters religious. And it offers the greatest opportunities to one, like Carmen, just entering upon life.

We will go there. And, Rosendo, prepare yourself and Dona Maria at once, for we had best start without delay."

But Rosendo shook his head. "No, Padre," he said slowly. "No. I could not go to the North with you; nor could Maria."

"But, Rosendo!" exclaimed the priest impatiently, "why?"

"_Bien_, Padre, we are old. And we know not the language of those up there. Nor the customs. We could not adapt ourselves to their ways of life--no, not at our age. Nor could we endure the change of climate.

You tell me they have cold, ice, snow, up there. What could we do? We would die. No, we must remain here. But--" his voice choked.

"_Bien_, Padre, do you go, and take the girl. Bring her up to be a power for good in that great land. We--Maria and I--will remain in Simiti. It is not permitted that we should ever leave. This has always been our home, and here we will die."

Jose exclaimed again in impatience. But the old man was immovable.

"No, Padre, we could not make so great a change. Anywhere in Colombia would be but little different from Simiti. But up north--in that great country where they do those wonderful things you have told me about--no, Padre, Maria and I could not make so great a change.

"But, Padre," he continued, "what will you do--leave the Church? Or will you still be a priest up there?"

The question startled Jose rudely. In the great joy which the discovery of the gold had stimulated, and in the thought of the possibilities opened by it, he had given no heed to his status respecting the Church. Yet, if he remained in the Church, he could not make this transfer without the approval of the Vatican. And that, he well knew, could not be obtained. No, if he went, he must leave behind all ecclesiastical ties. And with them, doubtless, the ties which still bound him to his distant mother and the family whose honored name he bore. It was not so easy a matter to take the girl and leave Simiti, now that he gave the project further consideration.

And yet he could not abandon the idea, however great his present sense of disappointment. He would cling to it as an ideal, some day to be realized, and to be worked up to as rapidly as might be, without exciting suspicion, and without abruptly severing the ties which, on serious reflection, he found he was not morally strong enough as yet to break.

"_Bien_, Rosendo," he concluded in chastened tones. "We will think it over, and try to devise ways to accomplish the greatest good for the child. I shall remain here for the present."

Rosendo's face beamed with joy. "The way will be shown us some time, Padre!" he exclaimed. "And while we wait, we will keep our eyes open, no?"

Yes, Jose would keep his eyes open and his heart receptive. After all, as he meditated the situation in the quiet of his little cottage that evening, he was not sorry that circ.u.mstances kept him longer in Simiti. For he had long been meditating a plan, and the distraction incident upon a complete change of environment certainly would delay, if not entirely defeat, its consummation. He had planned to translate his Testament anew, in the light of various works on Bible criticism which the explorer had mentioned, and which the possession of the newly discovered gold now made attainable. He had with him his Greek lexicon. He would now, in the freedom from interruption which Simiti could and probably would afford for the ensuing few months, give himself up to his consecrated desire to extract from the sacred writings the spiritual meaning crystallized within them. The vivid experiences which had fallen to him in Simiti had resulted in the evolution of ideas--radically at variance with the world's materialistic thought, it is true--which he was learning to look upon as demonstrable truths. The Bible had slowly taken on a new meaning to him, a meaning far different from that set forth in the clumsy, awkward phrases and expressions into which the translators so frequently poured the wine of the spirit, and which, literally interpreted, have resulted in such violent controversies, such puerile ideas of G.o.d and His thought toward man, and such religious hatred and bigotry, bloodshed, suffering, and material stagnation throughout the so-called Christian era. He would approach the Gospels, not as books of almost undecipherable mystery, not as the biography of the blessed Virgin, but as containing the highest human interpretation of truth and its relation to mankind.

"I seek knowledge," he repeated aloud, as he paced back and forth through his little living room at night; "but it is not a knowledge of Goethe, of Kant, or Shakespeare; it is not a knowledge of the poets, the scientists, the philosophers, all whom the world holds greatest in the realm of thought; it is a knowledge of Thee, my G.o.d, to know whom is life eternal! Men think they can know Homer, Plato, Confucius--and so they can. But they think they can _not_ know Thee! And yet Thou art nearer to us than the air we breathe, for Thou art Life! What is there out in the world among the multifold interests of mankind that can equal in importance a demonstrable knowledge of Thee? Not the unproven theories and opinions, the so-called 'authority' of the ancient Fathers, good men though they may have been; not modern pseudo-science, half-truths and relative facts, saturated with materialism and founded on speculation and hypothesis; but real knowledge, a knowledge of Thee that is as demonstrable as the simplest rule in mathematics! Alas! that men should be so mesmerized by their own beliefs as to say Thou canst not be known. Alas! for the burden which such thinkers as Spencer have laid upon the shoulders of stumbling mankind. For G.o.d _can_ be known, and proven--else is Jesus responsible for the most cruel lie ever perpetrated upon the ignorant, suffering world!"

And so, putting aside a portion of his gold--his by right of inheritance as well as discovery--for the future purchase of such books and aids as he might require, Jose set his house in order and then plunged into such a search of the Scriptures as rendered him oblivious to all but the immediate interests of Carmen and her foster-parents. The great world again narrowed into the rock-bound confines of little Simiti. Each rus.h.i.+ng morn that shot its fiery glow through the lofty treetops sank quickly into the hush of noon, while the dust lay thick, white, and hot on the slumbering streets of the ancient town; each setting sun burned with dreamy radiance through the afternoon haze that drew its filmy veil across the seething valley; each night died into a stillness, lonely and awful. Nature changed her garb with monotonous regularity; the drowsing children of this tropic region pa.s.sed their days in dull torpidity; Jose saw nothing of it all. At times a villager would bring a tale of grievance to pour into his ears--perhaps a jaguar had pounced upon his dog on his little _finca_ across the lake, or a huge snake had lured a suckling pig into its cavernous maw. At times a credulous woman would stop before his open door to dilate upon the thick worms that hung upon the leaves of the _algarrobas_ and dropped their wool-like fibers upon the natives as they pa.s.sed below, causing intermittent fevers. Perhaps an anxious mother would seek him for advice regarding her little son, who had eaten too much dirt, and was suffering from the common "_jipitera_,"

that made his poor little abdomen protrude so uncomfortably. Again, Rosendo might steal in for a few moments' mysterious, whispered talk about buried treasure, or the fables of El Dorado and Parime. Jose had time for them all, though as he listened his thought hovered ever about the green verge of Galilee.

By his side worked Carmen, delving a.s.siduously into the mysteries of mathematics and the modern languages. When the day's work closed for them both, he often asked her to sing to him. And then, leaning back with closed eyes, he would yield himself to the soft dreams which her sweet voice called up from his soul's unfathomed depths.

Often they walked together by the lake on a clear night; and on these little excursions, during which they were never beyond Rosendo's watchful eye, Jose reveled in the girl's airy gaiety and the spontaneous flow of her sparkling thought. He called her his domestic sunbeam; but in his serious moments--and they were many--he studied her with a wistful earnestness, while he sought to imbibe her great trust, her fearlessness, her unswerving loyalty to the Christ-principle of immanent Good. He would never permit restraint to be imposed upon her, even by Rosendo or his good wife.

She knew not what it was to be checked in the freest manifestation of her natural character. But there was little occasion for restraint, for Carmen dwelt ever in the consciousness of a spiritual universe, and to it paid faithful tribute. She saw and knew only from a spiritual basis; and she reaped the rewards incident thereto.

His life and hers were such as fools might label madness, a colorless, vegetative existence, devoid of even the elemental things that make mundane existence worth the while. But the appraisal of fools is their own folly. Jose knew that the torrid days which drew their monotonous length over the little town were witnessing a development in both himself and the child that some day would bear richest fruit. So far from being educated to distrust spiritual power, as are the children of this world, Carmen was growing up to know no other. Instead of the preponderance of her belief and confidence being directed to the material, she was developing the consciousness that the so-called evidence of the physical senses is but mortal thought, the suppositional opposite of the thought of the infinite G.o.d who says to mankind: "For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you an expected end." Jose knew that his method of education was revolutionary. But he also knew that it was not wholly his; that the child had really taken this course herself, as if led thereto by a power beyond them both.

And so he watched her, and sought to learn from her as from Christ's own loving and obedient disciple. It was because of his obedience to G.o.d that Jesus was able to "prove" Him in the mighty works which we call miracles. He said, "If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of G.o.d." Plain enough, indeed! And Carmen did do His will; she kept the very first Commandment; she walked by faith, and not by the sight of the human senses. She had been called an "_hada_," a witch, by the dull-witted folk of Simiti; and some day it would be told that she had a devil. But the Master had borne the same ignominy. And so has every pioneer in Truth, who has dared to lay the axe at the roots of undemonstrable orthodox belief and entrenched human error.

Jose often trembled for the child when he thought of the probable reception that awaited her in the world without, in case she ever left Simiti. Would her supreme confidence in good ever be weakened by an opposite belief in evil? Would her glorious faith ever be neutralized or counterbalanced by faith in a power opposed to G.o.d? He wondered. And sometimes in the fits of abstraction resulting from these thoughts, the girl would steal up to him and softly whisper, "Why, Padre, are you trying to make two and two equal seven?" Then he would laugh with her, and remember how from her algebraic work she had looked up one day and exclaimed, "Padre--why, all evil can be reduced to a common denominator, too--_and it is zero_!"

As recreation from the task of retranslating his Greek Testament, Jose often read to Carmen portions from the various books of the Bible, or told her the old sacred stories that children so love to hear. But Carmen's incisive thought cut deep into them, and Jose generally found himself hanging upon the nave interpretations of this young girl.

When, after reading aloud the two opposing accounts of the Creation, as given in the first and second chapters of Genesis, she asked, "But, Padre, why did G.o.d change His mind after He made people and gave them dominion over everything?" Jose was obliged to say that G.o.d had not made a mistake, and then gone back afterward to rectify it; that the account of the Creation, as given in Genesis, was not His, but was a record of the dawning upon the human thought of the idea of the spiritual Creation; that the "mist" which went up from the earth was suppositional error; and that the record of the Creation which follows after this was only the human mind's interpretation of the real, spiritual Creation, that Creation which is the ever unfolding of infinite Mind's numberless, perfect ideas. The book of Genesis has been a fetish to human minds; and not until the limitations imposed by its literal interpretation were in a measure removed did the human mentality begin to rise and expand. And when, reading from Isaiah, the grandest of the ancient prophets, the ringing words, "Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?" the child asked him if that did not refer to the very kind of people with whom they had daily intercourse, he had been obliged to say that it did, and that that sort of man was far, very far, from being the man of G.o.d's own creating.

"The mist, child, which is mentioned in the second chapter of Genesis, is said to have gone up from the ground. That is, it went up from matter. And so it is typical of materialism, from which all evil comes. The material is the direct opposite of the spiritual. Every bit of evil that men think they can see, or know, or do, comes as testimony of the five material senses. These might well be called the 'ground' senses. In the book of Genesis, you will notice that the account of the real comes first; then follows the account of its opposite, the unreal man of dust."

"Surely, Padre!" she exclaimed. "The plus sign is followed by a minus sign, isn't it? And the man made of dust is the real man with a minus sign before him."

"The man of dust is the human mind's interpretation of the spiritual man, dear child," returned Jose. "All human beings are interpretations by the mortal, or human, mind of infinite Mind, G.o.d, and His spiritual Creation. The interpretation is made in the human mind, and remains there. The human mind does not see these interpretations outside of itself--it does not see real men, and houses, and trees, outside of itself--but it sees its mental interpretations of G.o.d, which it calls men, and houses, and trees, and so on. These things are what we might call _mental concepts_. They are the man and the creation spoken of in the second chapter of Genesis after the mist went up from matter, from the ground, from materialism, resulting in the testimony of the physical senses."

"But, Padre, they are not real--these mental concepts?"

"No. They are illusions. They are formed in mentalities that are themselves wrong interpretations of the infinite Mentality, called G.o.d. They are formed without any rule or principle. They are made up of false thoughts, false opinions, beliefs of power opposed to G.o.d, beliefs in evil, in sickness, disaster, loss, and death. They are the results of educated and inherited and attached beliefs. They are largely made up of fear-beliefs. The human mentalities see these various beliefs combined in what it calls men and women, houses, animals, trees, and so on, all through the material so-called creation. It is this wrong interpretation that has caused all the suffering and sorrow in the world. And it is this false stuff that the good man Jesus finally said he had overcome."

"How did he do it, Padre?"

"By knowing its nothingness, and by knowing the Allness of his Father, infinite Mind. He called this false stuff a lie about G.o.d. And he overcame that lie by knowing the truth--just as you overcome the thought that you cannot solve your algebraic problems by knowing the truth that will and does solve them."

"But, Padre, you said once that Jesus was the best man that ever lived. Was he just a man?"

"Yes, _chiquita_. That is, the human minds all about him saw their mental concepts of him as a man. But he was a human concept that most clearly represented G.o.d's idea of Himself. Mortal, human minds are like window-panes, _chiquita_. When a window-pane is very dirty, very much covered with matter, only a little light can get through it. Some human minds are cleaner, less material, than others, and they let more light through. Jesus was the cleanest mind that was ever with us. He kept letting more and more light--Truth--through himself, until at last all the matter, even the matter composing the material concept that people called his earthly body, dissolved in the strong light, and the people saw him no more. That is called the Ascension."

"And--Padre, don't we have to do that way, too?" she asked earnestly.

"Just so, _chiquita_. We must, every one of us, do exactly as Jesus did. We must wash ourselves clean--wash off the dirty beliefs of power apart from G.o.d; we must wash off the beliefs of evil as a power, created in opposition to Him, or permitted by Him to exist and to use His children; we must wash off beliefs of matter as real and created by Him. We must know that matter and all evil, all that decays and pa.s.ses away, all discord and disease, everything that comes as testimony of the five physical senses, is but a part of the lie about Him, the stuff that has the minus sign before it, making it less than nothing. We must know that it is the suppositional opposite of the real--it is an illusion, seeming to exist, yet evaporating when we try to define it or put a finger on it, for it has no rule or principle by which it was created and by which it continues to exist. Its existence is only in human thought."

No, Jose a.s.sured himself, the Gospels are not "loose, exaggerated, inaccurate, credulous narratives." They are the story of the clearest transparency to truth that was ever known to mortals as a human being.

They preserve the life-giving words of him whose mission it was to show mankind the way out of error by giving them truth. They contain the rule given by the great Mathematician, who taught mankind how to solve their life-problems. They tell the world plainly that there seems to exist a lie about G.o.d; that every real idea of the infinite Mind seems to have its suppositional opposite in a material illusion.

They tell us plainly that resisting these illusions with truth renders them nugatory. They tell us clearly that the man Jesus was so filled with truth that he proved the nothingness of the lie about G.o.d by doing those deeds that seemed marvelous in the eyes of men, and yet which he said we could and should do ourselves. And we must do them, if we would throw off the mesmerism of the lie. The human concept of man and the universe must dissolve in the light of the truth that comes through us as transparencies. And it were well if we set about was.h.i.+ng away the dirt of materialism, that the light may s.h.i.+ne through more abundantly.

Jesus did not say that his great deeds were accomplished contrary to law, but that they fulfilled the law of G.o.d. The law is spiritual, never material. Material law is but human limitation. Ignorance of spiritual law permits the belief in its opposite, material law, or laws of matter. False, human beliefs, opinions, and theories, material speculations and superst.i.tions, parade before the human mind as laws.

Jesus swept them all aside by knowing that their supposed power lay only in human acceptance. The human mind is mesmerized by its own false thought. Even Paul at times felt its mesmerism and exclaimed: "I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me." The very idea of good stirs up its opposite in the human consciousness. But Paul rose above it and saw its nothingness. Then he cried: "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death." He recognized the spiritual law that Jesus employed; and with it he overcame the mesmerism of the lie.

"To be a Christian, then," said Jose, "means not merely taking the name of Christ, and, while morally opposing sin, succ.u.mbing to every form of mesmerism that the lie about G.o.d exerts. No, it is infinitely more! It means recognizing the nature of G.o.d and His Creation, including Man, to be wholly spiritual--and the nature of the material creation and mankind as their opposite, as mental concepts, existing as false interpretations of the spiritual Universe and Man, and as having their place only in the false human consciousness, which itself is a mental activity concerned only with false thought, the suppositional opposite of G.o.d's thought. It means taking this Truth, this spiritual law, as we would take a mathematical rule or principle, and with it overcoming sin, sickness, discord of every name and nature, even to death itself. What, oh, what have so-called Christians been doing these nearly two thousand years, that they have not ere this worked out their salvation as Jesus directed them to do? Alas!

they have been mesmerized--simply mesmerized by the lie. The millennium should have come long, long ago. It would come to-day if the world would obey Jesus. But it will not come until it does obey him."

Day after day, week after week, month after month, Jose delved and toiled, studied and pondered. The books which he ordered through the Empresa Alemania, and for which for some two months he waited in trembling antic.i.p.ation and fear lest they be lost in transit, finally arrived. When Juan brought them up from Bodega Central, Jose could have wept for joy. Except for the very few letters he had received at rare intervals, these were the only messages that had penetrated the isolation of Simiti from the outside world in the two long years of his exile. His starving mind ravenously devoured them. They afforded his first introduction to that fearlessly critical thought regarding things religious which has swept across the world like a tidal wave, and washed away so many of the bulwarks of superst.i.tion and ignorance bred of fear of the unknown and supposedly unknowable.