Dawn brought Juan Mendoza and Pedro Cárdenas again to the hill, and
with them came others. "Mateo Gil, Pablo Polo, and Juanita Gomez are
sick, Padre," announced Mendoza, the spokesman. "They ask for the last
sacrament. You could come down and give it to them, and then return to
the hill, is it not so?"
"Yes," assented Josè, "I will come."
"And, Padre," continued Mendoza, "we talked it over last night, after
Amado Sanchez died, and we think it would help if you said a Mass for
us in the church to-day."
"I will do so this afternoon, after I have visited the sick," he
replied pityingly.
Mendoza hesitated. Then--
"We think, too, Padre, that if we held a procession--in honor of Santa
Barbara--perhaps she would pray for us, and might stop the sickness.
We could march through the town this evening, while you stood here and
prayed as we passed around the hill. What say you, Padre?"
Josè was about to express a vehement protest. But the anxious faces
directed toward him melted his heart.
"Yes, children," he replied gently, "do as you wish. Keep your houses
this afternoon while I visit the sick and offer the Mass. I will leave
the _hostia_ on the altar. You need not fear to touch it. Carry it
with you in your rogation to Santa Barbara this evening, and I will
stand here and pray for you."
The people departed, sorrowing, but grateful. Hope revived in the
breasts of some. But most of them awaited in trembling the icy touch
of the plague.
"Padre," said Rosendo, when the people had gone. "I have been thinking
about the sickness, and I remember what my father told me he learned
from a Jesuit missionary. It was that the fat from a human body would
cure rheumatism. And then the missionary laughed and said that the fat
from a plump woman would cure all diseases of mind and body. If that
is so, Padre, and Juanita Gomez dies--she is very plump, Padre--could
we not take some of the fat from her body and rub it on the sick--"
"God above, Rosendo! what are you saying!" cried Josè recoiling in
horror.
_"Caramba!"_ retorted the honest man. "Would you not try everything
that might possibly save these people? What the missionary said may be
true."
"No, my faithful ally," replied Josè. "You did not get the sense in
which he said it. Neither human fat nor medicine of any kind will help
these people. Nothing will be accomplished for them until their fear
has been removed. For, I--well, the symptoms manifested by poor Feliz
may have been those of Asiatic cholera. But--I begin to doubt. And as
for Sanchez--_Bien_, we do not know--not for certain." He stopped and
pondered the question.
"Padre," pursued Rosendo, "I have used the liver of a lizard for
toothache, and it was very good."
"I have no doubt of it, Rosendo," replied Josè, with a smile. "And in
days past stranger remedies than that were used by supposedly wise
people. When the eyesight was poor, they rubbed wax from the human ear
upon the eyes, and I doubt not marvelous restorations of sight were
made. So also dogs' teeth were ground into powder and taken to
alleviate certain bodily pains. Almost everything that could be
swallowed has been taken by mankind to cure their aches and torments.
But they still ache to-day; and will continue to do so, I believe,
until their present state of mind greatly changes."
When the simple midday meal of corn _arepa_ and black coffee was
finished, Josè descended into the quiet town. "It is absurd that we
should be kept on the hill," he had said to Rosendo, "but these dull,
simple minds believe that, having handled those dead of the plague, we
have become agents of infection. They forget that they themselves are
living either in the same house with it, or closely adjacent. But it
humors them, poor children, and we will stay here for their sakes."
"_Caramba!_ and they have made us their sextons!" muttered Rosendo.
Josè shuddered. The clammy hand of fear again reached for his heart.
He turned to Carmen, who was busily occupied in the shade of the old
church.
"Your lessons, _chiquita_?" he queried, going to her for a moment's
abstraction.
"No, Padre dear," she replied, smiling up at him, while she quickly
concealed the bit of paper on which she had been writing.
"Then what are you doing, little one?" he insisted.
"Padre dear--don't--don't always make me tell you everything," she
pleaded, but only half in earnest, as she cast an enigmatical glance
at him.
"But this time I insist on knowing; so you might as well tell me."
"Well then, if you must know," she replied, her face beaming with a
happiness which seemed to Josè strangely out of place in that tense
atmosphere, "I have been writing a question to God." She held out the
paper.
"Writing a question to God! Well--!"
"Why, yes, Padre dear. I have done that for a long, long time. When I
want to know what to do, and think I don't see just what is best, I
write my question to God on a piece of paper. Then I read it to Him,
and tell Him I know He knows the answer and that He will tell me. And
then I put the paper under a stone some place, and--well, that's all,
Padre. Isn't it a good way?" She beamed at him like a glorious noonday
sun.
The priest stood before her in wonder and admiration. "And does He
tell you the answers to your questions, _chiquita_?" he asked
tenderly.
"Always, Padre dear. Not always right away--but He never fails--never!"
"Will you tell me what you are asking Him now?" he said.
She handed him the paper. His eyes dimmed as he read:
"Dear, dear Father, please tell your little girl and her dear
Padre Josè what it is that makes the people think they have to die
down in the town."
"And where will you put the paper, little girl?" he asked, striving to
control his voice.
"Why, I don't know, Padre. Oh, why not put it under the altar in this
old church?" she exclaimed, pleased with the thought of such a novel
hiding place.
"Excellent!" assented Josè; and together they entered the building.
After much stumbling over rubbish, much soiling of hands and
disturbing of bats and lizards, while Carmen's happy laugh rang
merrily through the gloomy old pile, they laid the paper carefully
away behind the altar in a little pocket, and covered it with an adobe
brick.
"There!" panted the girl, the task finished. "Now we will wait for the
answer."
Josè went down into the ominous silence of the town with a lighter
heart. The sublime faith of the child moved before him like a beacon.
To the sick he spoke words of comfort, with the vision of Carmen
always before him. At the altar in the empty church, where he offered
the Mass in fulfillment of his promise to the people, her fair form
glowed with heavenly radiance from the pedestal where before had stood
the dilapidated image of the Virgin. He prepared the sacred wafer and
left a part of it on the altar for the people to carry in their
procession to Santa Barbara. The other portion he took to the sick
ones who had asked for the sacrament.
Two more had fallen ill that afternoon. Mateo Gil, he thought, could
not live the night through. He knelt at the loathsome bedside of the
suffering man and prayed long and earnestly for light. He tried not to
ask, but to know. While there, he heard a call from the street,
announcing the passing of Guillermo Hernandez. Another one! His heart
sank again. The plague was upon them in all its cruel virulence.
Sadly he returned to the hill, just as the sun tipped the highest
peaks of the _Cordilleras_. Standing on the crest, he waited with
heavy heart, while the mournful little procession wended its sad way
through the streets below. An old, battered wooden image of one of the
Saints, rescued from the oblivion of the _sacristía_, had been dressed
to represent Santa Barbara. This, bedecked with bits of bright colored
ribbon, was carried at the head of the procession by the faithful
Juan. Following him, Pedro Gonzales, old and tottering, bore a dinner
plate, on which rested the _hostia_, while over the wafer a tall young
lad held a soiled umbrella, for there was no canopy.
A slow chant rose from the lips of the people like a dirge. It struck
the heart of the priest like a chill wind. _"Ora pro nobis! Ora pro
nobis!"_ Tears streamed from his eyes while he gazed upon his stricken
people. Slowly, wearily, they wound around the base of the hill, some
sullen with despair, others with eyes turned beseechingly upward to
where the priest of God stood with outstretched hands, his full heart
pouring forth a passionate appeal to Him to turn His light upon these
simple-minded children. When they had gone back down the road, their
bare feet raising a cloud of thick dust which hid them from his view,
Josè sank down upon the rock and buried his face in his hands.
"I know--I think I know, oh, God," he murmured; "but as yet I have not
proved--not yet. But grant that I may soon--for their sakes."
Rosendo touched his shoulder. "There is another body to bury to-night,
Padre. Eat now, and we will go down."
* * * * *
Standing over the new grave, in the solemn hush of night, the priest
murmured: "I am the resurrection and the life." But the mound upon
which Rosendo was stolidly heaping the loose earth marked only another
victory of the mortal law of death over a human sense of life. And
there was no one there to call forth the sleeping man.
"Behold, I give you power over all things," said the marvelous Jesus.
The wondrous, irresistible power which he exerted in behalf of
suffering humanity, he left with the world when he went away. But
where is it now?
"Still here," sighed the sorrowing priest, "still here--lo, always
here--but we know it not. Sunken in materiality, and enslaved to the
false testimony of the physical senses, we lack the spirituality that
alone would enable us to grasp and use that Christ-power, which is the
resurrection and the life."
"Padre," said Rosendo, when they turned back toward the hill,
"Hernandez is now with the angels. You gave him the sacrament, did you
not?"
"Yes, Rosendo."
"_Bien_, then you remitted his sins, and he is doubtless in paradise.
But," he mused, "it may be that he had first to pass through
purgatory. _Caramba!_ I like not the thought of those hot fires!"
"Rosendo!" exclaimed Josè in impatience. "Your mental wanderings at
times are puerile! You talk like the veriest child! Do not be
deceived, Hernandez is still the same man, even though he has left his
earthly body behind. Do not think he has been lifted at once into
eternal bliss. The Church has taught such rubbish for ages, and has
based its pernicious teachings upon the grossly misunderstood words of
Jesus. The Church is a failure--a dead, dead failure, in every sense
of the word! And that man lying there in his grave is a ghastly proof
of it!"
Rosendo looked wonderingly at the excited priest, whose bitter words
rang out so harshly on the still night air.
"The Church has failed utterly to preserve the simple gospel of the
Christ! It has basely, wantonly betrayed its traditional trust! It has
fought and slain and burned for centuries over trivial, vulnerable
non-essentials, and thrown its greatest pearls to the swine! It no
longer prophesies; it carps and reviles! It no longer heals the sick;
but it conducts a purgatorial lottery at so much a head! It has become
a jumble of idle words, a mumbling of silly formulæ, a category of
stupid, insensate ceremonies! Its children are taught to derive their
faith from such legends as that of the holy Saint Francis, who, to
convince a heretic, showed the _hostia_ to an ass, which on beholding
the sacred dough immediately kneeled! Good God!"
"_Ca-ram-ba!_ But you speak hard words, Padre!" muttered Rosendo,
vague speculations flitting through his brain as to the priest's
mental state.
"God!" continued Josè heatedly, "the Church has fought truth
desperately ever since the Master's day! It has fawned at the feet of
emperor and plutocrat, and licked the bloody hand of the usurer who
tossed her a pittance of his foul gains! In the great world-battles
for reform, for the rights of man, for freedom from the slavery of man
to man or to drink and drugs, she has come up only as the smoke has
cleared away, but always in time to demand the spoils! She has filched
from the systems of philosophy of every land and age, and after
bedaubing them with her own gaudy colors, has foisted them upon
unthinking mankind as divine decrees and mandates! She has foully
insulted God and man!--"
"_Caramba_, Padre! You are not well! _Hombre_, we must get back to the
hill! You are falling sick!"
"I am not, Rosendo! You voice the Church's stock complaint of every
man who exposes her shams: 'He hath a devil!'"
Rosendo whistled softly. Josè went on more excitedly:
"You ask if Hernandez is in paradise or purgatory. He is in a state no
better nor worse than our own, for both are wholly mental. We are now
in the fires of as great a purgatory as any man can ever experience!
Yes, there is a purgatory--right here on earth--and it follows us
after death, and after every death that we shall die, until we learn
to know God and see Him as infinite good, without taint or trace of
evil! The flames of hell are eternal to us as long as we eat of 'the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil'--as long as we believe in
other powers than God--as long as we believe sin and disease and evil
to be as real and as potent as good! When we know these things as
awful human illusions, and when we recognize God as the infinite mind
that did not create evil, and does not know or behold it, then, and
then only, will the flames of purgatory and hell in this state of
consciousness which we mistakenly call life, and in the states of
consciousness still to come, begin to diminish in intensity, and
finally die out!"
He walked along in silence for some moments. Then he turned to Rosendo
and put his hand affectionately upon the old man's shoulder. "My good
friend," he said more calmly, "I speak with intense feeling, for I
have suffered much through the intolerance, the unspirituality, and
the worldly ambition of the agents of Holy Church. I suffer, because I
see what she is, and how widely she has missed the mark. But, worse, I
see how blindly, how cruelly, she leads and betrays her trusting
children--and it is the thought of that which at times almost drives
me mad! But never mind me, Rosendo. Let me rave. My full heart must
empty itself. Do you but look to Carmen for your faith. She is not of
the Church. She knows God, and she will lead you straight to Him. And
as you follow her, your foolish ideas of purgatory, hell, and
paradise, of wafers and virgins--all the tawdry beliefs which the
Church has laid upon you, will drop off, one by one, and melt away as
do the mists on the lake when the sun mounts high."
Carmen and Doña Maria sat against the wall of the old church, waiting
for them. The child ran through the darkness and grasped Josè's hand.
"I wouldn't go to sleep until you came, Padre!" she cried happily. "I
wanted to be sure you wouldn't sleep anywhere else than right next to
me."
"Padre," admonished Rosendo anxiously, "do you think you ought to let
her come close to you now? The plague--"
Josè turned to him and spoke low. "There is no power or influence that
we can exert upon her, Rosendo, either for good or evil. She is
obeying a spiritual law of which we know but little."
"And that, Padre?"
"Just this, Rosendo: _'Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind
is stayed on thee.'_"
The late moon peeped timidly above the drowsing treetops. Its yellow
beams stole silently across the still lake and up the hillside to the
crumbling church. When they reached the four quiet figures, huddled
close against the ghostly wall, they filtered like streams of liquid
gold through the brown curls of the little head lying on the priest's
shoulder. And there they dwelt as symbols of Love's protecting care
over the trusting children of this world, until the full dawn of the
glorious sun of Truth.