Lucifer returned, and was invited to join the feast. He incited them maliciously to continue discussion of the robbery, and little by little to place the blame upon a stranger whom they all agreed having seen. Of course they meant Lucifer, but, upon being invited to describe him, they depicted a monster a thousand times more repulsive than the reality. None suspected that the apparently amiable stranger seated in their midst was Lucifer.
How Bato and Bras were at last discovered and punished, how Laura and Arcadio were reconciled, how Fabio was rebuked for his avariciousness and saw the error of his ways, how the Infant Jesus was shown lying in his manger, with the three strongly individualized Kings out of the East, how Lucifer was finally discovered and cast back into hell—I have not space here to describe.
The play lasted for three hours, absorbing all the attention of the audience. Bato and Bras—especially Bato—received their enthusiastic approbation. They sympathized with Laura, suffered with Arcadio, and hated Lucifer with the hatred of gallery gods for the villain in the melodrama. Only once was the play interrupted, when a hatless youth rushed in and shouted:
"A man has come from the army, who says that Urbina has taken Mapimi!"
Even the performers stopped singing—they were pounding the floor with jingling crooks at the time—and a whirlwind of questions beat upon the newcomer. But in a minute the interest passed, and the shepherds took up their song where they had dropped it.
When we left Doña Perdita's house, about midnight, the moon had already gone behind the western mountains, and a barking dog was all the noise in the dark sharp night. It flashed upon me, as Fidencio and I went home with our arms about each others' shoulders, that this was the kind of thing which had preceded the Golden Age of the Theater in Europe—the flowering of the Renaissance. It was amusing to speculate what the Mexican Renaissance would have been if it had not come so late.
But already around the narrow shores of the Mexican Middle Ages beat the great seas of modern life—machinery, scientific thought, and political theory. Mexico will have to skip for a time her Golden Age of Drama.
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INSURGENT MEXICO ***