At that time Cortés was thinking of a return to Spain. He was thirty-five, still young enough to thirst for a full recognition at home of his great deeds. While making his preparation for departure, he heard of the insurrection of his lieutenant Olid in Honduras, who had declared himself independent. It was necessary for him to hasten at once to chastise his boldness. Aguilar, the interpreter, was dead, and Cortés, who had never troubled himself to acquire the Mexican dialects, had to send for Marina to accompany him, as interpreter only. This caused the rumors about the death of his wife to circulate more than before. Cortés, warned of the danger, took a decisive step to silence all such insinuations. At Orizaba, he caused the sudden marriage of Marina with one of his officers, Don Juan de Jaramillo.
Poor Marina was required to carry her devotion, her absolute obedience to her chief, to the extreme point of marrying a man she scarcely knew. She yielded. It is said that she never lived with her husband, but withdrew at once to her birthplace, at Païnala, where her own family still lived; that her guilty relatives threw themselves at her feet, afraid that she would have them destroyed by the Spaniard. She forgave them, and passed the rest of her life far away from the capital, in obscurity. She died young, when Cortés was yet at the height of his fame, before he had suffered the mortification of seeing himself overlooked by the court of Spain.
Not long after the expedition to Honduras, Cortés carried out his intention of crossing to Spain. On this first visit he was, as we have seen, received with acclamations, and loaded with praise and honors. When he again entered Mexico, with the title of Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca, he brought with him a Spanish bride, Doña Juana de Zuñiga, daughter of the second Count of Aguilar, and niece of the Duke de Bejar.
So Malintzi, if her shade returns to wander under the ahuehuetes of Chapultepec, has her own grief to mourn, in addition to the ruin she helped to bring upon her people.
XIX.
INDIANS.
The Conquest was complete. Tenochtitlan was no more, and the Aztec kings with their dynasty were blotted out. So were all the other independent states of Anahuac, for if here and there a petty chieftain were allowed still to call himself lord of his domains, it was a mere form, to keep him and his people contented, while in reality the Spaniard controlled every thing throughout the conquered land. The terrible war gods were overthrown, their temples and images thrown down and hidden under ground. Even the annals of the country, the picture-writings, which the Spaniards imagined to be impious scrolls connected with the heathen belief of the savages, were destroyed. Before long distinctive names of the separate tribes were wiped out, as details of no importance, and all the native races of the country went by the common title of Indios.
This of course is the Spanish word for Indians, with the same source. Columbus in seeking a new world believed that when found it would be India, little thinking that the earth he had rightly guessed to be round, was big enough to contain a whole continent between the western shore of Europe and the Indies, a remote land almost fabulous for its riches and precious stones.