Luis was coming up the oleander walk. The pretty trees were thinner now, and had only a pink blossom here and there. But the bright winter sun shone through them, and fell upon Luis and Isabel. For she had also seen him coming, and had gone to meet him, with a little rainbow-tinted shawl over her head. She looked so piquant and so happy. She seemed such a proper mate for the handsome youth at her side that a word of dissent was not possible. The doctor said only, “She is so like you, Maria. I remember when you were still more lovely, and when from your balcony you made me with a smile the happiest man in the world.”
Such words were never lost ones; for the Senora had a true and great love for her husband. She gave him again a smile, she put her hand in his, and then there were no further conciliations required. They stood in the sunshine of their own hearts, and listened a moment to the gay youth, singing, how at—
The strong old Alamo
Two hundred men, with rifles true,
Shot down a thousand of the foe,
And broke the triple ramparts through;
And dropped the flag as black as night,
For Freedom’s green and red and white.[3]
CHAPTER XI. A HAPPY TRUCE.
“Well, honor is the subject of my story;
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but for my single self,
I had as lief not be, as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.”
“Two truths are told
As happy prologues to the swelling act,
Of the imperial theme.”
“This is the eve of Christmas,
No sleep from night to morn;
The Virgin is in travail,
At twelve will the Child be born.”
Cities have not only a certain physiognomy; they have also a decided mental and moral character, and a definite political tendency. There are good and bad cities, artistic and commercial cities, scholarly and manufacturing cities, aristocratic and radical cities. San Antonio, in its political and social character, was a thoroughly radical city. Its population, composed in a large measure of adventurous units from various nationalities, had that fluid rather than fixed character, which is susceptible to new ideas. For they were generally men who had found the restraints of the centuries behind them to be intolerable—men to whom freedom was the grand ideal of life.
It maybe easily undertood{sic} that this element in the population of San Antonio was a powerful one, and that a little of such leaven would stir into activity a people who, beneath the crust of their formal piety, had still something left of that pride and adventurous spirit which distinguished the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabel.
In fact, no city on the American continent has such a bloody record as San Antonio. From its settlement by the warlike monks of 1692, to its final capture by the Americans in 1836, it was well named “the city of the sword.” The Comanche and the white man fought around its walls their forty years’ battle for supremacy. From 1810 to 1821 its streets were constantly bloody with the fight between the royalists and republicans, and the city and the citadel passed from, one party to the other continually. And when it came to the question of freedom and American domination, San Antonio was, as it had ever been, the great Texan battle-field.
Its citizens then were well used to the fortunes and changes of war. Men were living who had seen the horrors of the auto da fe and the splendors of viceregal authority. Insurgent nobles, fighting priests, revolutionizing Americans, all sorts and conditions of men, all chances and changes of religious and military power, had ruled it with a temporary absolutism during their generation.