CHAPTER XXVIII.

It was late in the night; a horizontal moon flung the long shadows of the 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 give way, in solitude, to the bitter thoughts that oppressed him, he suffered himself to be guided as much by accident as by his wayward impulses; and as he passed on, at every step, some mutation of his fancies, or some trivial incident on the way, conspired to recall his disorder. Now, as a bat flitted by, or an owl flew, hooting, from its perch among some of those ruins, which yet raised their broken and blackened walls, in memory of the cruelty of his countrymen, the knight started aghast, and a mortal fear came over him; for, in these sounds and sights, his disturbed senses discovered the signs of the furies that persecuted him; and even the night-breeze, wailing round some lonely corner, or whispering among the shrubbery of a devastated garden, seemed to him the cries of haunting spirits.

"Miserere mei, Deus!" muttered Don Gabriel, as a tree, bowing away from the wind, let down a moonbeam through a fissure on his path--"the white visage 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 yielding ever, with the feebleness of a child, to the influence of unreal horrors, he wandered about, sometimes driven from his path by what seemed a gaunt spectre flitting before him, sometimes impelled onwards by a terror that followed behind: thus he roved about, he knew not whither, until he found himself, by chance, in the neighbourhood of the great temple, the scene of the chief atrocities enacted on that day which has been called, by a just metonymy, the Massacre of Cholula. Here it was, as had been mentioned by De Morla, that the miserable natives, huddled together in despair, had made their last cry to their gods, and perished under the steel and flames of the Christians; and the memorials of their fate were as plainly written as if the tragedy had been the work of the previous day. No carcasses, indeed, lay crowded among the ruins, no embers smouldered on the square; weeds had grown upon the place of murder, as if fattening on the blood that had besprinkled their roots; life had utterly vanished from the spot; and it presented the appearance of a desert in the bosom of a populous city.

A great wall, running round the temple, had enclosed it in a large court, once covered with the houses of priests and devotees. The wall was shattered and fallen, the dwellings burned and demolished; and the pyramid, itself crumbling into ruins, lay like the body of some huge monster 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 the perishable earth, that composed the body of the mound, to the vicissitudes of the weather; and, under the heavy tropical rains, it was washing rapidly away. The sanctuaries yet stood on the summit, but with their walls mutilated, and their roofs burnt; and they served only to make the horror picturesque. A wooden cross of colossal dimensions, raised by the conquerors, in impious attestation that God had aided them in the labour of slaughter, flung high its rugged arms, towering above the broken turrets, and gave the finish of superstition to the monument of wrath. It was a place of ruins, dark, lugubrious, and forbidding; and as Don Gabriel strode among the massive fragments, he found himself in a theatre congenial with his gloomy and wrecking spirit.

It was not without many feelings of dismay that he plunged among the ruins; for his imagination converted each shattered block into a living phantasm. But still he moved on, as if urged by some irresistible impulse, entangling himself in the labyrinth of decay, until he scarcely knew whither to direct his steps. Whether it was reality, or some coinage of his brain, that presented the spectacle, he knew not; but he was arrested in his toilsome progress by the apparition of several figures rising suddenly among the ruins, and as suddenly vanishing.

"Heaven pity me!" he cried: "They come feathered like the fiends of the infidel! But I care not, so they bring no more the white face, that is so ghastly!--And yet, this is her day!--this is her day!"

Perhaps it was his imagination, that decked out the spectres with such ornaments; but a less heated spectator might have discovered in them, only the figures of strolling savages. With his spirits strongly agitated, his brain excited for the reception of any chimera, he followed 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 his blood with horror. In a spot, where the ruins had given space for the growth of weeds and grass, and where the vision could not be so easily confounded,--illuminated by the moonbeams as if by the lustre of the day,--he beheld a figure, seemingly of a woman, clad in robes of white of an oriental habit, full before him, and turning upon him a countenance as wan as death.

"Miserere mei, Deus!" cried the knight, dropping on his knees, and bowing his forehead to the earth. "If thou comest to persecute me yet, I am here, and I have not forgot thee!"

The murmur, as of a voice, fell on his ear, but it brought with it no intelligence. He raised his eye;--dark shadows flitted before him; yet he saw nothing save the apparition in white: it stood yet in his view; and still the pallid visage dazzled him with its unnatural radiance and beauty.

"Miserere mei! miserere mei!" he cried, rising to his feet, and tottering forwards. "I live but to lament thee, and I breathe but to repent! Speak to me, daughter of the Alpujarras! speak to me, and let me die!"

As he spoke, the vision moved gently and slowly away. He rushed forwards, but with knees smiting together; and, as the white visage turned upon him again, with its melancholy loveliness, and with a gesture as of warning or terror, his brain spun round, his sight failed him, and he fell to the earth in a deep swoon.