“Give me what you have there,” he said sternly, extending his hand.
“It is but a simple present,” she said, holding back.
“No, it has to do with religion, and that not of our fathers.”
“It is mine,” she persisted, and the queen mother turned pale at sight of her firmness.
“The child is bewitched,” interposed Cuitlahua.
“And for that I should have the symbol. Obey me, or—”
Awed by the look, now dark with anger, Nenetzin took the chain from her neck, and put the cross in his hand. “There! I pray you, return them to me.”
Now, the cross, as a religious symbol, was not new to the monarch; in Cozumel it was an object of worship; in Tabasco it had been reverenced for ages as emblematic of the God of Rain; in Palenque, the Palmyra of the New World, it is sculptured on the fadeless walls, and a child held up to adore it (in the same picture) proves its holy character; it was not new to the heathen king; but the cross of Christ was; and singularly enough, he received the latter for the first time with no thought of saving virtues, but as a problem in metallurgy.
“To-morrow I will send the trinkets to the jewellers,” he said, after close examination. “They shall try them in the fire. Strange, indeed, if, in all my dominions, they do not find whereof they are made.”
He was about to pass the symbol to Maxtla, when a messenger came up, and announced the lord Hualpa and the prince Io’. Instantly, the cross, and Nenetzin, and her tears and troubles, vanished out of his mind.