CHAPTER XXVIII.
It was late in the night; a horizontal moon flung the long shadows ofthe houses over the wide streets of Cholula, when the knight Calavar,wrapped in his black mantle, strode along through the deserted city.With no definite object before him, unless to fly, or perhaps to giveway, in solitude, to the bitter thoughts that oppressed him, he sufferedhimself to be guided as much by accident as by his wayward impulses; andas he passed on, at every step, some mutation of his fancies, or sometrivial incident on the way, conspired to recall his disorder. Now, as abat flitted by, or an owl flew, hooting, from its perch among some ofthose ruins, which yet raised their broken and blackened walls, inmemory of the cruelty of his countrymen, the knight started aghast, anda mortal fear came over him; for, in these sounds and sights, hisdisturbed senses discovered the signs of the furies that persecuted him;and even the night-breeze, wailing round some lonely corner, orwhispering among the shrubbery of a devastated garden, seemed to him thecries of haunting spirits.
"Miserere mei, Deus!" muttered Don Gabriel, as a tree, bowing away fromthe wind, let down a moonbeam through a fissure on his path--"the whitevisage will not leave me!--Heavy was the sin, heavy is the punishment!for even mine own fancies are become my chastisers."
Thus, at times, conscious, in part, of his infirmity, and yet yieldingever, with the feebleness of a child, to the influence of unrealhorrors, he wandered about, sometimes driven from his path by whatseemed a gaunt spectre flitting before him, sometimes impelled onwardsby a terror that followed behind: thus he roved about, he knew notwhither, until he found himself, by chance, in the neighbourhood of thegreat temple, the scene of the chief atrocities enacted on that daywhich has been called, by a just metonymy, the Massacre of Cholula. Hereit was, as had been mentioned by De Morla, that the miserable natives,huddled together in despair, had made their last cry to their gods, andperished under the steel and flames of the Christians; and the memorialsof their fate were as plainly written as if the tragedy had been thework of the previous day. No carcasses, indeed, lay crowded among theruins, no embers smouldered on the square; weeds had grown upon theplace of murder, as if fattening on the blood that had besprinkled theirroots; life had utterly vanished from the spot; and it presented theappearance of a desert in the bosom of a populous city.
A great wall, running round the temple, had enclosed it in a largecourt, once covered with the houses of priests and devotees. The wallwas shattered and fallen, the dwellings burned and demolished; and thepyramid, itself crumbling into ruins, lay like the body of some hugemonster among its severed and decaying members. The flags of stone,tumbled by the victims, in their fury, from its sides and terraces,though they had not called up the subterraneous rivers, had exposed theperishable earth, that composed the body of the mound, to thevicissitudes of the weather; and, under the heavy tropical rains, it waswashing rapidly away. The sanctuaries yet stood on the summit, but withtheir walls mutilated, and their roofs burnt; and they served only tomake the horror picturesque. A wooden cross of colossal dimensions,raised by the conquerors, in impious attestation that God had aided themin the labour of slaughter, flung high its rugged arms, towering abovethe broken turrets, and gave the finish of superstition to the monumentof wrath. It was a place of ruins, dark, lugubrious, and forbidding; andas Don Gabriel strode among the massive fragments, he found himself in atheatre congenial with his gloomy and wrecking spirit.
It was not without many feelings of dismay that he plunged among theruins; for his imagination converted each shattered block into a livingphantasm. But still he moved on, as if urged by some irresistibleimpulse, entangling himself in the labyrinth of decay, until he scarcelyknew whither to direct his steps. Whether it was reality, or somecoinage of his brain, that presented the spectacle, he knew not; but hewas arrested in his toilsome progress by the apparition of severalfigures rising suddenly among the ruins, and as suddenly vanishing.
"Heaven pity me!" he cried: "They come feathered like the fiends of theinfidel! But I care not, so they bring no more the white face, that isso ghastly!--And yet, this is her day!--this is her day!"
Perhaps it was his imagination, that decked out the spectres with suchornaments; but a less heated spectator might have discovered in them,only the figures of strolling savages. With his spirits stronglyagitated, his brain excited for the reception of any chimera, hefollowed the direction in which these figures seemed to have vanished:and this bringing him round a corner of the pyramid, into the moonshine,he instantly found himself confronted with a spectacle that froze hisblood with horror. In a spot, where the ruins had given space for thegrowth of weeds and grass, and where the vision could not be so easilyconfounded,--illuminated by the moonbeams as if by the lustre of theday,--he beheld a figure, seemingly of a woman, clad in robes of whiteof an oriental habit, full before him, and turning upon him acountenance as wan as death.
"Miserere mei, Deus!" cried the knight, dropping on his knees, andbowing his forehead to the earth. "If thou comest to persecute me yet, Iam here, and I have not forgot thee!"
The murmur, as of a voice, fell on his ear, but it brought with it nointelligence. He raised his eye;--dark shadows flitted before him; yethe saw nothing save the apparition in white: it stood yet in his view;and still the pallid visage dazzled him with its unnatural radiance andbeauty.
"Miserere mei! miserere mei!" he cried, rising to his feet, andtottering forwards. "I live but to lament thee, and I breathe but torepent! Speak to me, daughter of the Alpujarras! speak to me, and let medie!"
As he spoke, the vision moved gently and slowly away. He rushedforwards, but with knees smiting together; and, as the white visageturned upon him again, with its melancholy loveliness, and with agesture as of warning or terror, his brain spun round, his sight failedhim, and he fell to the earth in a deep swoon.