Montezumas Daughter | Page 5

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