“Very well; this time you are safe,” Montézuma then gravely replied. “But remember, if you ever do so again, he will not listen to my entreaties.”
With what an eye of curiosity and distrust did I gaze upon that anthropophagus of a horse, when I was taken to reviews. If I was placed near the colonel, curvetting in pride at the head of the regiment on his splendid white charger, I was seized with a terrible panic.
“Let us go further, Montézuma. Oh! do come away!” I used to pray, “he knows me, he is looking at me!”
“Don’t be afraid; while you are with me, and I do not sign to him, he will say and do nothing,” replied Montézuma.
“But,” I persisted, “don’t you see how he looks at me, and how he shakes his head? What does he mean?”
“Well, he means,” answered Montézuma, “he just means, ‘I have my eye on you: you must remember that, and take care how you behave.’”
IX.
CHILDREN SHOULD CONFIDE IN THEIR PARENTS.
All these things terrified me greatly, and yet, to tell the truth, I took a secret pleasure in them. It was an unhealthy excitement, but even men sometimes find, like children, a strange pleasure in what is alarming and mysterious. Much good may it do them!
Montézuma would have been wicked to put all these ideas in my head if he had known the harm they did me. But he had no idea of it, poor fellow! He must, however, have been rather ashamed of these inventions of his, because he never said a word about them before my father or mother. And I, without his bidding me keep silence, said not one word either, about the matter, except to him. It was a secret between us. One discovers when one is very young, I am afraid, the charm of forbidden pleasure, or at least, of mysteries, and it was certainly a great pleasure to me to have this secret of the white horse’s powers between Montézuma and myself.