"Ah, caballero," said the Spanish lady, with a pretty play of fan and
eye as she spoke, "you will not return to Mexico, the beautiful city?"
"No, señorita," replied the young man addressed, a handsome boy, about
twenty-two years old, olive-skinned and graceful, with black curly
hair, that had those bluish lights one sees in the plumage of a raven.
"Y porque?" asked the girl, laying aside her fan for a moment, and
concentrating all the deep fire of her eyes upon his face.
The boy did not answer. He made an effort to speak, and turned his head
aside. There was a momentary lull in the conversation. Suddenly he
burst into tears, and left the room.
The beautiful city! Ah! how well he remembered it! The mighty hills
sleeping in their eternal winding-sheets of snow, the azure heaven and
the bright lake rippled by mountain winds, the plaza and its familiar
sights and sounds. Y porque? The question brought up all the old bright
memories, and the present for the moment melted away, and the dream of
a Mexican night rose in ghostliness before him.
He stood again within an ancient street, quaint with the quaintness of
another century, and saw the great windows of the hospitable Spanish
residence at which he had been so often received as a son. Again he
heard the long chant of the sereno in the melancholy silence; again
he saw the white stars glimmering like lamps above the towers of the
cathedral. The windows were tall and large, and barred with bars of
iron; and there were lights in one of them--flickering taper-lights
that made moving shadows on the wall. And within the circle of the
tapers, a young girl lay all in white with hands crossed upon her
breast, and flowers in the dark hair. He remembered all with that
terrible minuteness agony lends to observation--even how the flickering
of the tapers played with the shadows of the silky eyelashes, making
the lids seem to quiver, as though that heart, to which all his hopes
and aims and love had been trusted, had not forever ceased to beat.
Again the watchman solemnly chanted the hour of the night, with words
of Spanish piety; and far in the distance that weird mountain which
ancient Mexican fancy called "The White Lady," and modern popular
imagination, "The Dead One," lay as a corpse with white arms crossed
upon its bosom, in awful mockery of the eternal sleep.