Hualpa, at last released, went and paid homage to his betrothed, and was made still more happy by her words, and the congratulations of the queens.
Tula alone lingered at the king’s side, her large eyes fixed appealingly on his face.
“What now, Tula?” he asked, tenderly.
And she answered, “You have need, O king and good father, of faithful, loving warriors. I know of one. He should be here, but is not. Of to-morrow, its braveries and sacrifices, the minstrels will sing for ages to come; and the burden of their songs will be how nobly the people fought, and died, and conquered for you. Shall the opportunity be for all but him? Do not so wrong yourself, be not so cruel to—to me,” she said, clasping her hands.
His look of tenderness vanished, and he walked away, and from the parapet of the azoteas gazed long and fixedly, apparently observing the day dying in the west, or the royal gardens that stretched out of sight from the base of the castled hill.
She waited expectantly, but no answer came,—none ever came.
And when, directly, she joined the group about Nenetzin and Hualpa, and leaned confidingly upon Io’, she little thought that his was the shadow darkening her love; that the dreamy monarch, looking forward to the succession, saw, in the far future, a struggle for the crown between the prince and the ’tzin; that for the former hope there was not, except in what might now be done; and that yet there was not hope, if the opportunities of war were as open to the one as to the other. So the exile continued.
CHAPTER VIII
THE IRON CROSS COMES BACK TO ITS GIVER
Admitting that the intent with which the Spaniards came to Tenochtitlan took from them the sanctity accorded by Christians to guests, and at the same time justified any measure in prevention,—a subject belonging to the casuist rather than the teller of a story,—their situation has now become so perilous, and possibly so interesting to my sympathetic reader, that he may be anxious to enter the old palace, and see what they are doing.