"'Beloved Mariquita!' I exclaimed, and pressed her to my breast in a long and mutual embrace, 'and you will be mine—mine?'
"'At the foot of the altar, Pedro—at the foot of the altar alone,' she whispered, with a heart that swelled with love, and with dark eyes steeped in languor.
"But vain are human resolves, even when made by a heart so pure and guileless as that of Mariquita, when struggling with a passion so deep and consuming; for with these very words on her lips she was yielding; we were alone and undisturbed, and ere the sun's last rays had faded from the cone of Orizaba, Mariquita had lost her honour!
* * * * *
"The hapless Mariquita! She loved me more than ever now. She clung to me with all the strength of love, of sacrifice, and of despair.
"For days after this, on her knees, she besought me to marry her. I would raise her, kiss and console her, and flatter, too—how weary now the task!—flatter and pacify her, making countless promises and professions, for I still loved her in my own selfish fashion; but I shrunk from the idea of marriage with the daughter of one of my own grangeros—one whose ancestors had been hewers of wood and drawers of water to mine—a girl, moreover, who had the taint of native blood in her veins!
"I, Pedro de Barradas, Knight of Santiago de Compostella, and Lord of Anahuac, whom the proud daughters of the first men, and of the noblest houses in New Spain, had failed to lure within the meshes of matrimony, was not likely to mate with the daughter of Miguel Escudero, however much I might love her, and however much she might please my somewhat fastidious eye.
"I heard her many tender and pathetic entreaties—and once, too, her wild threats of self-destruction, poniard in hand—that I would save her from impending shame; but I was pitiless as the ocelot—the tiger-cat that lurked in the woods of Orizaba—all the more pitiless that I knew she fondly—yes, madly—loved me.
"Weary of the endless task of seeking to console one who would not and could not be consoled, I quitted Orizaba for some months, as we were planning the revolt against the mother country, a movement which was to secure to me the captaincy of the great castle of San Juan, de Ulloa, the citadel of La Vera Cruz, which mounts nearly 200 pieces of cannon, and is the key of the whole province.
"During my absence and in the fulness of time, Mariquita had a son, born in secrecy, amid tears, shame, and sorrow. She baptised it by the name of Pedro, and sent him to a lonely puebla in the mountains that overlook the Barranca Secca, to be nursed by one of my people. This birth, all unknown alike to Miguel Escudero, whom I had despatched on a political mission towards the shores of the Pacific, and to his son, Juan, who was now a lieutenant of infantry at the castle of San Juan de Ulloa.