The blood quickened in Hualpa’s heart, as he asked,—“Then the end is near?”
“To-morrow, or the next day,” said the ’tzin.
“But Montezuma is generous,—”
“Can he give what he has not? To-night there will be delivered for his use and that of his household, whom I have had numbered for the purpose, provisions for one day, not more.”
“Then it is so! Praised be the gods! and you, O my master, wiser than other men!” cried Hualpa, with upraised face, and a gladness which was of youth again, and love so blind that he saw Nenetzin,—not the stars,—and so deaf that he heard not the other words of the ’tzin,—
“The couriers bear my orders to bring up all the armies. And they will be here in the morning.”
In the depth of the night, while Cortes lay restlessly dreaming, his sentinels on the palace were attracted by music apparently from every quarter; at first, so mellowed by distance as to seem like the night singing to itself; afterwhile, swollen into the familiar dissonant minstrelsy of conch and atabal, mixed with chanting of many voices.
“O ho!” shouted the outliers on the neighboring houses, “O ho, accursed strangers! Think no more of conquest,—not even of escape; think only of death by sacrifice! If you are indeed teules, the night, though deepened by the smoke of our burning houses, cannot hinder you from seeing the children of Anahuac coming in answer to the call of Huitzil’. If you are men, open wide your ears that you may hear their paddles on the lake and their tramp on the causeway. O victims! one day more, then,—the sacrifice!”
Even the Christians, leaning on their lances, and listening, felt the heaviness of heart which is all of fear the brave can know, and crossed themselves, and repeated such pater nosters as they could recollect.