1. That the ringing of the bell was a matter of no importance to good Christians.
2. That the bell, being possessed of a devil, should have its tongue torn out: so that never again should it dare to ring of its lone devilish self, to the peril of human souls.
3. That the bell, being dangerous to good Christians, should be banished from the Spanish Kingdom to the Indies, and forever should remain tongueless and exiled over seas.
Thereupon, that wise sentence was executed. The devil-possessed bell was taken down from the belfry of the little convent, and its wicked tongue was torn out of it; then it was carried shamefully and with insults to the coast; then it was put on board of one of the ships of the flota bound for Mexico; and in Mexico, in due course, it arrived. Being come here, and no orders coming with it regarding its disposition, it was brought from Vera Cruz to the Capital and was placed in an odd corner of one of the corridors of the Palace: and there it remained quietly—everybody being shy of meddling with a bell that was known to be alive with witchcraft—for some hundreds of years.
In that same corner it still was, Señor, when the Conde de Revillagigedo—only a little more than a century ago—became Viceroy; and as soon as that most energetic gentleman saw it he wanted to know in a hurry—being indisposed to let anything or anybody rust in idleness—why a bell that needed only a tongue in it to make it serviceable was not usefully employed. For some time no one could tell him anything more about the bell than that there was a curse upon it; and that answer did not satisfy him, because curses did not count for much in his very practical mind. In the end a very old clerk in the Secretariat gave him the bell's true story; and proved the truth of it by bringing out from deep in the archives an ancient yellowed parchment: which was precisely the royal order, following the decree of the Consejo, that the bell should have its tongue torn out, and forever should remain tongueless and exiled over seas.
With that order before him, even the Conde de Revillagigedo, Señor, did not venture to have a new tongue put into the bell and to set it to regular work again; but what he did do came to much the same thing. At that very time he was engaged in pushing to a brisk completion the repairs to the Palace—that had gone on for a hundred years languishingly, following the burning of it in the time of the Viceroy Don Gaspar de la Cerda—and among his repairings was the replacement of the Palace clock. Now a clock-bell, Señor, does not need a tongue in it, being struck with hammers from the outside; and so the Conde, whose wits were of an alertness, perceived in a moment that by employing the bell as a clock-bell he could make it useful again without traversing the king's command. And that was what immediately he did with it—and that was how the Palace clock came to have foisted upon it this accursed bell.
But, so far as I have heard, Señor, this bell conducted itself as a clock-bell with a perfect regularity and propriety: probably because the devils which were in it had grown too old to be dangerously hurtful, and because the curse that was upon it had weakened with time. I myself, as a boy and as a young man, have heard it doing its duty always punctually; and no doubt it still would be doing its duty had not the busybodying French seen fit—during the period of the Intervention, when they meddled with everything—to put another bell in the place of it and to have it melted down. What was done with the metal when the bell was melted, Señor, I do not know; but I have been told by an old founder of my acquaintance that nothing was done with it: because, as he very positively assured me, when the bell was melted the metal of it went sour in the furnace and refused to be recast.
If that is true, Señor, it looks as though all those devils in the bell—which came to it from the Moor and from the devil-forged armor and from Don Gil de Marcadante—still had some strength for wickedness left to them even in their old age.