[CHAPTER VI.]
A GLANCE AT THE PAST.
In Spanish America, and especially in Peru and Mexico, all the Creoles of the pure white breed pretend to be descended in a straight line from the first Conquistadors. We have no need to discuss this claim, whose falsehood is visible to any man at all conversant with the sanguinary history of the numberless civil wars—a species of organized massacre—which followed the establishment of the Spaniards in these rich countries.
Still there are in America some families, very few in number it is true, which can justly boast of this glorious origin. Most of these families live on the estates conceded to their ancestors—they only marry among themselves, and only interfere against the grain in the political events of the day. With their eyes turned to the past, which is so full of great memories for them, they have kept up the old traditions of the chivalrous loyalty of the time of Charles V., which are forgotten everywhere else. They maintain the national honour unsullied, and those patriarchal virtues of the old time which they alone still practise with a proud and simple majesty.
The Creoles, half-breeds, and Indians, in spite of the hatred they affect for their old masters, and the principles of so-called republican equality which they profess with such absurd emphasis in the presence of strangers, feel for these families a respect bordering on veneration; for they seem to understand inwardly the superiority of these powerful natures, which no political convulsion has been able to level or even bind, over their own vicious decrepit natures, which have grown old without ever having been young.
A few leagues from Arispe, the old capital of the Intendancy of Sonora, but now greatly fallen, and only a second-class city, there stands like an eagle's nest, on the summit of an abrupt rock, a magnificent showy mansion, whose strong and haughty walls are crowned with Almenas, which at the time of the Spanish conquest were only permitted to families of the old and pure nobility, and they alone had the right to have battlements on their houses.
This fortress-palace—which dates from the first days of the conquest, and whose antiquity is written on its walls, which have seen so many bullets flatten, so many arrows break against them, but which time, that grand destroyer of the most solid things, is gradually crumbling away by a continuous effort, under the triple influences of the air, the sun, and rain—has never changed masters since the day of its construction, and the chiefs of the same family, on dying, have ever left it to their descendants.
This family is one of those to which we just now referred, whose origin dates back to the first conquerors, and whose name is Tobar de Moguer—(Moguer was added at a later date, doubtless in memory of the Spanish town whence the chief of the family came.)