A RETROSPECT.
Before carrying our story further we must give the reader certain details about the family and antecedents of Don Sebastian Guerrero, who is destined to play a great part in our narrative.
The family of Don Sebastian was rich; he descended in a straight line from one of the early kings of Mexico, and pure Aztec blood flowed in his veins. Like several other great Mexican families, his ancestors had not been dispossessed by the conquerors, to whom they rendered important services; but they were obliged to add a Spanish name to the Mexican one, which sounded harshly in Castilian ears.
Still the Guerrero family boasted loudly of its Aztec origin, and if it seemed ostensibly devoted to Spain, it secretly maintained the hope of seeing Mexico one day regain her liberty.
Thus, when the heroic Hidalgo, the humble curate of the little village of Dolores, suddenly raised the standard of revolt against the oppressors of his country, Don Eustaquio Guerrero, though married but a short time previously to a woman he adored, and father of a son hardly six years of age, was one of the first to respond to the appeal of the insurgents, and join Hidalgo at the head of four hundred resolute men raised on his own enormous estates.
The Mexican revolution was a singular one; for nearly all the promoters and heroes were priests—the only country in the world where the clergy have openly taken the initiative in progress, and thus displayed profound sympathy for the liberty of the people.
Don Eustaquio Guerrero was in turn companion of those modest heroes whom disdainful history has almost forgotten, and whose names were, Hidalgo, Morelos, Hermenegildo Galeana, Allende, Abasolo, Aldama, Valerio Trujano, Torres, Rayon, Sotomayor, Manuel Mier-y-Teran, and many others whose names have escaped me; and who, after fighting gloriously for the liberty of their country, now repose in their bloody tombs, protected by that glorious nimbus which Heaven places round the brow of martyrs, whatever be the cause they have defended, so long as that cause is just.
More fortunate than the majority of his brave comrades in arms, who were destined to fall one after the other, some as victims to Spanish barbarity, others conquered by treachery, Don Eustaquio escaped as if by a miracle from the innumerable dangers of this war, which lasted ten years, and at length witnessed the complete expulsion of the Spaniards and the proclamation of independence.
The brave soldier, prematurely aged, covered with wounds, and disgusted by the ingratitude of his fellow countrymen, who, scarce free, began attacking each other, and inaugurated that fatal era of pronunciamientos, the list of which is already so long, and will only be closed by the ruin of the country, and the loss of its nationality, retired, gloomy and sad, to his Hacienda del Palmar, situated in the province of Valladolid, and sought, in the company of his wife and son, to recover some sparks of that happiness he had formerly enjoyed when he was but an obscure citizen.
But this supreme consolation was denied him; his wife died in his arms scarce two years after their reunion, attacked by an unknown disease, which dragged her to the grave in a few weeks.