Montezuma\'s Daughter

H >> H. Rider Haggard >> Montezuma\'s Daughter

MONTEZUMA'S DAUGHTER

by H. Rider Haggard



NOTE

The more unpronounceable of the Aztec names are shortened in many
instances out of consideration for the patience of the reader; thus
'Popocatapetl' becomes 'Popo,' 'Huitzelcoatl' becomes 'Huitzel,' &c.
The prayer in Chapter xxvi. is freely rendered from Jourdanet's French
translation of Fray Bernardino de Sahagun's History of New Spain,
written shortly after the conquest of Mexico (Book VI, chap. v.), to
which monumental work and to Prescott's admirable history the author of
this romance is much indebted. The portents described as heralding the
fall of the Aztec Empire, and many of the incidents and events written
of in this story, such as the annual personation of the god Tezcatlipoca
by a captive distinguished for his personal beauty, and destined to
sacrifice, are in the main historical. The noble speech of the Emperor
Guatemoc to the Prince of Tacuba uttered while they both were suffering
beneath the hands of the Spaniards is also authentic.



DEDICATION

My dear Jebb,

Strange as were the adventures and escapes of Thomas Wingfield, once of
this parish, whereof these pages tell, your own can almost equal them
in these latter days, and, since a fellow feeling makes us kind, you at
least they may move to a sigh of sympathy. Among many a distant land
you know that in which he loved and fought, following vengeance and his
fate, and by your side I saw its relics and its peoples, its volcans
and its valleys. You know even where lies the treasure which, three
centuries and more ago, he helped to bury, the countless treasure that
an evil fortune held us back from seeking. Now the Indians have taken
back their secret, and though many may search, none will lift the graven
stone that seals it, nor shall the light of day shine again upon the
golden head of Montezuma. So be it! The wealth which Cortes wept over,
and his Spaniards sinned and died for, is for ever hidden yonder by
the shores of the bitter lake whose waters gave up to you that ancient
horror, the veritable and sleepless god of Sacrifice, of whom I would
not rob you--and, for my part, I do not regret the loss.

What cannot be lost, what to me seem of more worth than the dead hero
Guatemoc's gems and jars of gold, are the memories of true friendship
shown to us far away beneath the shadow of the Slumbering Woman,* and it
is in gratitude for these that I ask permission to set your name within
a book which were it not for you would never have been written.

I am, my dear Jebb,

Always sincerely yours,

H. RIDER HAGGARD.


* The volcano Izticcihuatl in Mexico.


DITCHINGHAM, NORFOLK, October 5, 1892.

To J. Gladwyn Jebb, Esq.



NOTE

Worn out prematurely by a life of hardship and extraordinary adventure,
Mr. Jebb passed away on March 18, 1893, taking with him the respect and
affection of all who had the honour of his friendship. The author has
learned with pleasure that the reading of this tale in proof and the
fact of its dedication to himself afforded him some amusement and
satisfaction in the intervals of his sufferings.

H. R. H.

March 22, 1893.



CONTENTS

I WHY THOMAS WINGFIELD TELLS HIS TALE

II. OF THE PARENTAGE OF THOMAS WINGFIELD

III. THE COMING OF THE SPANIARD

IV. THOMAS TELLS HIS LOVE

V. THOMAS SWEARS AN OATH

VI. GOOD-BYE, SWEETHEART

VII. ANDRES DE FONSECA

VIII. THE SECOND MEETING

IX. THOMAS BECOMES RICH

X. THE PASSING OF ISABELLA DE SIGUENZA

XI. THE LOSS OF THE CARAK

XII. THOMAS COMES TO SHORE

XIII. THE STONE OF SACRIFICE

XIV. THE SAVING OF GUATEMOC

XV. THE COURT OF MONTEZUMA

XVI. THOMAS BECOMES A GOD

XVII. THE ARISING OF PAPANTZIN

XVIII. THE NAMING OF THE BRIDES

XIX. THE FOUR GODDESSES

XX. OTOMIE'S COUNSEL

XXI. THE KISS OF LOVE

XXII. THE TRIUMPH OF THE CROSS

XXIII. THOMAS IS MARRIED

XXIV. THE NIGHT OF FEAR

XXV. THE BURYING OF MONTEZUMA'S TREASURE

XXVI. THE CROWNING OF GUATEMOC

XXVII. THE FALL OF TENOCTITLAN

XXVIII. THOMAS IS DOOMED

XXIX. DE GARCIA SPEAKS HIS MIND

XXX. THE ESCAPE

XXXI. OTOMIE PLEADS WITH HER PEOPLE

XXXII. THE END OF GUATEMOC

XXXIII. ISABELLA DE SIGUENZA IS AVENGED

XXXIV. THE SIEGE OF THE CITY OF PINES

XXXV. THE LAST SACRIFICE OF THE WOMEN OF THE OTOMIE

XXXVI. THE SURRENDER

XXXVII. VENGEANCE

XXXVIII. OTOMIE'S FAREWELL

XXXIX. THOMAS COMES BACK FROM THE DEAD

XL. AMEN




MONTEZUMA'S DAUGHTER



CHAPTER I

WHY THOMAS WINGFIELD TELLS HIS TALE


Now glory be to God who has given us the victory! It is true, the
strength of Spain is shattered, her ships are sunk or fled, the sea has
swallowed her soldiers and her sailors by hundreds and by thousands, and
England breathes again. They came to conquer, to bring us to the torture
and the stake--to do to us free Englishmen as Cortes did by the Indians
of Anahuac. Our manhood to the slave bench, our daughters to dishonour,
our souls to the loving-kindness of the priest, our wealth to the
Emperor and the Pope! God has answered them with his winds, Drake has
answered them with his guns. They are gone, and with them the glory of
Spain.

I, Thomas Wingfield, heard the news to-day on this very Thursday in the
Bungay market-place, whither I went to gossip and to sell the apples
which these dreadful gales have left me, as they hang upon my trees.

Before there had been rumours of this and of that, but here in Bungay
was a man named Young, of the Youngs of Yarmouth, who had served in one
of the Yarmouth ships in the fight at Gravelines, aye and sailed north
after the Spaniards till they were lost in the Scottish seas.

Little things lead to great, men say, but here great things lead to
little, for because of these tidings it comes about that I, Thomas
Wingfield, of the Lodge and the parish of Ditchingham in the county of
Norfolk, being now of a great age and having only a short time to live,
turn to pen and ink. Ten years ago, namely, in the year 1578, it pleased
her Majesty, our gracious Queen Elizabeth, who at that date visited this
county, that I should be brought before her at Norwich. There and then,
saying that the fame of it had reached her, she commanded me to give
her some particulars of the story of my life, or rather of those twenty
years, more or less, which I spent among the Indians at that time when
Cortes conquered their country of Anahuac, which is now known as Mexico.
But almost before I could begin my tale, it was time for her to start
for Cossey to hunt the deer, and she said it was her wish that I should
write the story down that she might read it, and moreover that if it
were but half as wonderful as it promised to be, I should end my days
as Sir Thomas Wingfield. To this I answered her Majesty that pen and ink
were tools I had no skill in, yet I would bear her command in mind.
Then I made bold to give her a great emerald that once had hung upon the
breast of Montezuma's daughter, and of many a princess before her, and
at the sight of it her eyes glistened brightly as the gem, for this
Queen of ours loves such costly playthings. Indeed, had I so desired,
I think that I might then and there have struck a bargain, and set the
stone against a title; but I, who for many years had been the prince of
a great tribe, had no wish to be a knight. So I kissed the royal hand,
and so tightly did it grip the gem within that the knuckle joints shone
white, and I went my ways, coming back home to this my house by the
Waveney on that same day.

Now the Queen's wish that I should set down the story of my life
remained in my mind, and for long I have desired to do it before life
and story end together. The labour, indeed, is great to one unused to
such tasks; but why should I fear labour who am so near to the holiday
of death? I have seen things that no other Englishman has seen, which
are worthy to be recorded; my life has been most strange, many a time it
has pleased God to preserve it when all seemed lost, and this perchance
He has done that the lesson of it might become known to others. For
there is a lesson in it and in the things that I have seen, and it is
that no wrong can ever bring about a right, that wrong will breed wrong
at last, and be it in man or people, will fall upon the brain that
thought it and the hand that wrought it.

Look now at the fate of Cortes--that great man whom I have known clothed
with power like a god. Nearly forty years ago, so I have heard, he died
poor and disgraced in Spain; he, the conqueror--yes, and I have learned
also that his son Don Martin has been put to the torture in that city
which the father won with so great cruelties for Spain. Malinche, she
whom the Spaniards named Marina, the chief and best beloved of all the
women of this same Cortes, foretold it to him in her anguish when after
all that had been, after she had so many times preserved him and his
soldiers to look upon the sun, at the last he deserted her, giving her
in marriage to Don Juan Xaramillo. Look again at the fate of Marina
herself. Because she loved this man Cortes, or Malinche, as the Indians
named him after her, she brought evil on her native land; for without
her aid Tenoctitlan, or Mexico, as they call it now, had never bowed
beneath the yoke of Spain--yes, she forgot her honour in her passion.
And what was her reward, what right came to her of her wrongdoing? This
was her reward at last: to be given away in marriage to another and
a lesser man when her beauty waned, as a worn-out beast is sold to a
poorer master.

Consider also the fate of those great peoples of the land of Anahuac.
They did evil that good might come. They sacrificed the lives of
thousands to their false gods, that their wealth might increase, and
peace and prosperity be theirs throughout the generations. And now the
true God has answered them. For wealth He has given them desolation, for
peace the sword of the Spaniard, for prosperity the rack and the
torment and the day of slavery. For this it was that they did sacrifice,
offering their own children on the altars of Huitzel and of Tezcat.

And the Spaniards themselves, who in the name of mercy have wrought
cruelties greater than any that were done by the benighted Aztecs, who
in the name of Christ daily violate His law to the uttermost extreme,
say shall they prosper, shall their evil-doing bring them welfare? I am
old and cannot live to see the question answered, though even now it
is in the way of answering. Yet I know that their wickedness shall
fall upon their own heads, and I seem to see them, the proudest of the
peoples of the earth, bereft of fame and wealth and honour, a starveling
remnant happy in nothing save their past. What Drake began at Gravelines
God will finish in many another place and time, till at last Spain is of
no more account and lies as low as the empire of Montezuma lies to-day.

Thus it is in these great instances of which all the world may know, and
thus it is even in the life of so humble a man as I, Thomas Wingfield.
Heaven indeed has been merciful to me, giving me time to repent my sins;
yet my sins have been visited on my head, on me who took His prerogative
of vengeance from the hand of the Most High. It is just, and because it
is so I wish to set out the matter of my life's history that others may
learn from it. For many years this has been in my mind, as I have said,
though to speak truth it was her Majesty the Queen who first set the
seed. But only on this day, when I have heard for certain of the fate of
the Armada, does it begin to grow, and who can say if ever it will come
to flower? For this tidings has stirred me strangely, bringing back my
youth and the deeds of love and war and wild adventure which I have been
mingled in, fighting for my own hand and for Guatemoc and the people of
the Otomie against these same Spaniards, as they have not been brought
back for many years. Indeed, it seems to me, and this is no rare thing
with the aged, as though there in the far past my true life lay, and all
the rest were nothing but a dream.

From the window of the room wherein I write I can see the peaceful
valley of the Waveney. Beyond its stream are the common lands golden
with gorse, the ruined castle, and the red roofs of Bungay town gathered
about the tower of St. Mary's Church. Yonder far away are the king's
forests of Stowe and the fields of Flixton Abbey; to the right the steep
bank is green with the Earsham oaks, to the left the fast marsh lands
spotted with cattle stretch on to Beccles and Lowestoft, while behind me
my gardens and orchards rise in terraces up the turfy hill that in old
days was known as the Earl's Vineyard. All these are about me, and yet
in this hour they are as though they were not. For the valley of the
Waveney I see the vale of Tenoctitlan, for the slopes of Stowe the snowy
shapes of the volcans Popo and Iztac, for the spire of Earsham and the
towers of Ditchingham, of Bungay, and of Beccles, the soaring pyramids
of sacrifice gleaming with the sacred fires, and for the cattle in the
meadows the horsemen of Cortes sweeping to war.

It comes back to me; that was life, the rest is but a dream. Once more
I feel young, and, should I be spared so long, I will set down the story
of my youth before I am laid in yonder churchyard and lost in the world
of dreams. Long ago I had begun it, but it was only on last Christmas
Day that my dear wife died, and while she lived I knew that this task
was better left undone. Indeed, to be frank, it was thus with my wife:
She loved me, I believe, as few men have the fortune to be loved, and
there is much in my past that jarred upon this love of hers, moving her
to a jealousy of the dead that was not the less deep because it was so
gentle and so closely coupled with forgiveness. For she had a secret
sorrow that ate her heart away, although she never spoke of it. But one
child was born to us, and this child died in infancy, nor for all her
prayers did it please God to give her another, and indeed remembering
the words of Otomie I did not expect that it would be so. Now she knew
well that yonder across the seas I had children whom I loved by another
wife, and though they were long dead, must always love unalterably, and
this thought wrung her heart. That I had been the husband of another
woman she could forgive, but that this woman should have borne me
children whose memory was still so dear, she could not forget if she
forgave it, she who was childless. Why it was so, being but a man, I
cannot say; for who can know all the mystery of a loving woman's heart?
But so it was. Once, indeed, we quarrelled on the matter; it was our
only quarrel.

It chanced that when we had been married but two years, and our babe was
some few days buried in the churchyard of this parish of Ditchingham,
I dreamed a very vivid dream as I slept one night at my wife's side.
I dreamed that my dead children, the four of them, for the tallest lad
bore in his arms my firstborn, that infant who died in the great siege,
came to me as they had often come when I ruled the people of the Otomie
in the City of Pines, and talked with me, giving me flowers and kissing
my hands. I looked upon their strength and beauty, and was proud at
heart, and, in my dream, it seemed as though some great sorrow had been
lifted from my mind; as though these dear ones had been lost and now
were found again. Ah! what misery is there like to this misery of
dreams, that can thus give us back our dead in mockery, and then
departing, leave us with a keener woe?

Well, I dreamed on, talking with my children in my sleep and naming them
by their beloved names, till at length I woke to look on emptiness, and
knowing all my sorrow I sobbed aloud. Now it was early morning, and the
light of the August sun streamed through the window, but I, deeming
that my wife slept, still lay in the shadow of my dream as it were, and
groaned, murmuring the names of those whom I might never see again.
It chanced, however, that she was awake, and had overheard those words
which I spoke with the dead, while I was yet asleep and after; and
though some of this talk was in the tongue of the Otomie, the most was
English, and knowing the names of my children she guessed the purport
of it all. Suddenly she sprang from the bed and stood over me, and there
was such anger in her eyes as I had never seen before nor have seen
since, nor did it last long then, for presently indeed it was quenched
in tears.

'What is it, wife?' I asked astonished.

'It is hard,' she answered, 'that I must bear to listen to such talk
from your lips, husband. Was it not enough that, when all men thought
you dead, I wore my youth away faithful to your memory? though how
faithful you were to mine you know best. Did I ever reproach you because
you had forgotten me, and wedded a savage woman in a distant land?'

'Never, dear wife, nor had I forgotten you as you know well; but what
I wonder at is that you should grow jealous now when all cause is done
with.'

'Cannot we be jealous of the dead? With the living we may cope, but who
can fight against the love which death has completed, sealing it for
ever and making it immortal! Still, THAT I forgive you, for against this
woman I can hold my own, seeing that you were mine before you became
hers, and are mine after it. But with the children it is otherwise. They
are hers and yours alone. I have no part nor lot in them, and whether
they be dead or living I know well you love them always, and will love
them beyond the grave if you may find them there. Already I grow old,
who waited twenty years and more before I was your wife, and I shall
give you no other children. One I gave you, and God took it back lest
I should be too happy; yet its name was not on your lips with those
strange names. My dead babe is little to you, husband!'

Here she choked, bursting into tears; nor did I think it well to answer
her that there was this difference in the matter, that whereas, with
the exception of one infant, those sons whom I had lost were almost
adolescent, the babe she bore lived but sixty days.

Now when the Queen first put it in my mind to write down the history of
my life, I remembered this outbreak of my beloved wife; and seeing that
I could write no true tale and leave out of it the story of her who was
also my wife, Montezuma's daughter, Otomie, Princess of the Otomie, and
of the children that she gave me, I let the matter lie. For I knew well,
that though we spoke very rarely on the subject during all the many
years we passed together, still it was always in Lily's mind; nor did
her jealousy, being of the finer sort, abate at all with age, but rather
gathered with the gathering days. That I should execute the task without
the knowledge of my wife would not have been possible, for till the very
last she watched over my every act, and, as I verily believe, divined
the most of my thoughts.


And so we grew old together, peacefully, and side by side, speaking
seldom of that great gap in my life when we were lost to each other and
of all that then befell. At length the end came. My wife died suddenly
in her sleep in the eighty-seventh year of her age. I buried her on the
south side of the church here, with sorrow indeed, but not with sorrow
inconsolable, for I know that I must soon rejoin her, and those others
whom I have loved.

There in that wide heaven are my mother and my sister and my sons;
there are great Guatemoc my friend, last of the emperors, and many other
companions in war who have preceded me to peace; there, too, though she
doubted of it, is Otomie the beautiful and proud. In the heaven which
I trust to reach, all the sins of my youth and the errors of my age
notwithstanding, it is told us there is no marrying and giving in
marriage; and this is well, for I do not know how my wives, Montezuma's
daughter and the sweet English gentlewoman, would agree together were it
otherwise.

And now to my task.



CHAPTER II

OF THE PARENTAGE OF THOMAS WINGFIELD


I, Thomas Wingfield, was born here at Ditchingham, and in this very room
where I write to-day. The house of my birth was built or added to early
in the reign of the seventh Henry, but long before his time some kind of
tenement stood here, which was lived in by the keeper of the vineyards,
and known as Gardener's Lodge. Whether it chanced that the climate was
more kindly in old times, or the skill of those who tended the fields
was greater, I do not know, but this at the least is true, that the
hillside beneath which the house nestles, and which once was the bank
of an arm of the sea or of a great broad, was a vineyard in Earl Bigod's
days. Long since it has ceased to grow grapes, though the name of the
'Earl's Vineyard' still clings to all that slope of land which lies
between this house and a certain health-giving spring that bubbles from
the bank the half of a mile away, in the waters of which sick folks come
to bathe even from Norwich and Lowestoft. But sheltered as it is from
the east winds, to this hour the place has the advantage that gardens
planted here are earlier by fourteen days than any others in the country
side, and that a man may sit in them coatless in the bitter month of
May, when on the top of the hill, not two hundred paces hence, he must
shiver in a jacket of otterskins.

The Lodge, for so it has always been named, in its beginnings having
been but a farmhouse, faces to the south-west, and is built so low that
it might well be thought that the damp from the river Waveney, which
runs through the marshes close by, would rise in it. But this is not so,
for though in autumn the roke, as here in Norfolk we name ground fog,
hangs about the house at nightfall, and in seasons of great flood the
water has been known to pour into the stables at the back of it, yet
being built on sand and gravel there is no healthier habitation in the
parish. For the rest the building is of stud-work and red brick, quaint
and mellow looking, with many corners and gables that in summer are half
hidden in roses and other creeping plants, and with its outlook on
the marshes and the common where the lights vary continually with the
seasons and even with the hours of the day, on the red roofs of Bungay
town, and on the wooded bank that stretches round the Earsham lands;
though there are many larger, to my mind there is none pleasanter in
these parts. Here in this house I was born, and here doubtless I shall
die, and having spoken of it at some length, as we are wont to do of
spots which long custom has endeared to us, I will go on to tell of my
parentage.

First, then, I would set out with a certain pride--for who of us does
not love an ancient name when we happen to be born to it?--that I am
sprung from the family of the Wingfields of Wingfield Castle in Suffolk,
that lies some two hours on horseback from this place. Long ago the
heiress of the Wingfields married a De la Pole, a family famous in our
history, the last of whom, Edmund, Earl of Suffolk, lost his head for
treason when I was young, and the castle passed to the De la Poles
with her. But some offshoots of the old Wingfield stock lingered in the
neighbourhood, perchance there was a bar sinister on their coat of arms,
I know not and do not care to know; at the least my fathers and I are
of this blood. My grandfather was a shrewd man, more of a yeoman than
a squire, though his birth was gentle. He it was who bought this place
with the lands round it, and gathered up some fortune, mostly by careful
marrying and living, for though he had but one son he was twice married,
and also by trading in cattle.

Now my grandfather was godly-minded even to superstition, and strange as
it may seem, having only one son, nothing would satisfy him but that the
boy should be made a priest. But my father had little leaning towards
the priesthood and life in a monastery, though at all seasons my
grandfather strove to reason it into him, sometimes with words and
examples, at others with his thick cudgel of holly, that still hangs
over the ingle in the smaller sitting-room. The end of it was that the
lad was sent to the priory here in Bungay, where his conduct was of such
nature that within a year the prior prayed his parents to take him back
and set him in some way of secular life. Not only, so said the prior,
did my father cause scandal by his actions, breaking out of the priory
at night and visiting drinking houses and other places; but, such was
the sum of his wickedness, he did not scruple to question and make
mock of the very doctrines of the Church, alleging even that there
was nothing sacred in the image of the Virgin Mary which stood in the
chancel, and shut its eyes in prayer before all the congregation when
the priest elevated the Host. 'Therefore,' said the prior, 'I pray you
take back your son, and let him find some other road to the stake than
that which runs through the gates of Bungay Priory.'

Now at this story my grandfather was so enraged that he almost fell into
a fit; then recovering, he bethought him of his cudgel of holly, and
would have used it. But my father, who was now nineteen years of age and
very stout and strong, twisted it from his hand and flung it full fifty
yards, saying that no man should touch him more were he a hundred times
his father. Then he walked away, leaving the prior and my grandfather
staring at each other.