"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 pa.s.sed around the hill. What say you, Padre?"
Jose 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 Ma.s.s. 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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--"
"G.o.d above, Rosendo! what are you saying!" cried Jose 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 Jose. "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 Jose, 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, Jose 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 s.e.xtons!" muttered Rosendo.
Jose 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 Jose strangely out of place in that tense atmosphere, "I have been writing a question to G.o.d." She held out the paper.
"Writing a question to G.o.d! 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 G.o.d 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 Jose 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!" a.s.sented Jose; 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."
Jose 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 Ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 _sacristia_, 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 n.o.bis! Ora pro n.o.bis!"_ 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 G.o.d stood with outstretched hands, his full heart pouring forth a pa.s.sionate 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, Jose sank down upon the rock and buried his face in his hands.
"I know--I think I know, oh, G.o.d," 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 pa.s.s through purgatory. _Caramba!_ I like not the thought of those hot fires!"
"Rosendo!" exclaimed Jose 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!"