“Look, lord Hualpa! This speaks to me of a religion better than that practised in the temples, and of a God mightier than all those known in Anahuac,—a God whom it is useless to resist, who may not be resisted,—the only God. There, in my chamber, is an altar to Him, upon which rests only this cross and such flowers as I can gather here in the morning; that is the shrine of which you have heard upon the street. I worship at no other. As to the king, I did come and tell the strangers of the attack he ordered. Lord Hualpa, to me, as is the destiny of every woman, the hour came to choose between love and father. I could not else. What harm has come of my choice? Is not the king safe?”
At that moment, the noise which had all the time been heard in the patio, as of a battle up in the air, swelled trebly loud. The tendrils of the vines shook; the floor trembled.
“Hark!” she said, with an expression of dread. “Is he not safer than that other for whom I forsook him? Yet I thought to save them both; and saved they shall be!” she added, with a confident smile. “The God I worship can save them, and He will.”
Then she became silent; and as he could tell by her face that she was struggling with a painful thought, he waited, listening intently. At length she spoke, this time with downcast eyes:—
“It would be very pleasant, O Hualpa, to have you go away thinking me pure as snow on the mountain-top. And if—if I am not,—then in this cross”—and she kissed the symbol tearfully—“there is safety for me. I know there is a love that can purify all things.”
The sensibilities are not alike in all persons; but it is not true, as some philosophers think, that infidels, merely because they are such, are incapable of either great joy or great grief. The mother of El Chico reviled him because he took his last look at Granada through tears; not less poignant was the sorrow of Hualpa, looking at his love, by her own confession lost to him forever; his head drooped, and he settled down and fell forward upon his face, crushed by the breath of a woman,—he whom a hundred shields had not sufficed to stay!
For a time nothing was heard in the patio but the battle. Nenetzin stirred not; she was in the mood superinduced by pity and remorse, when the mind merges itself in the heart, and is lost in excess of feeling.
At length the spell was broken. A woman rushed in, clapping her hands joyfully, and crying,—
“Be glad, be glad, O Nenetzin! Malinche has come back, and we are saved!”
And more the Doña Marina would have said, but her eyes fell upon the fallen man, and she stopped.