I was beautiful in those days and
this is something with a man. I was faithful and that is more, and once
or twice you thought that you loved me. Now I wish that those Teules had
come an hour later, and we had died together there upon the stone, that
is I wish it for my own sake, not for yours. Then we escaped and the
great struggle came. I told you then that I understood it all. You had
kissed me on the stone of sacrifice, but in that moment you were as one
dead; when you came back to life, it was otherwise. But fortune took the
game out of your hands and you married me, and swore an oath to me, and
this oath you have kept faithfully. You married me but you did not know
whom you married; you thought me beautiful, and sweet, and true, and all
these things I was, but you did not understand that I was far apart from
you, that I was still a savage as my forefathers had been. You thought
that I had learned your ways, perchance even you thought that I
reverenced your God, as for your sake I have striven to do, but all the
while I have followed the ways of my own people and I could not quite
forget my own gods, or at the least they would not suffer me, their
servant, to escape them. For years and years I put them from me, but at
last they were avenged and my heart mastered me, or rather they mastered
me, for I knew nothing of what I did some few nights since, when I
celebrated the sacrifice to Huitzel and you saw me at the ancient rites.
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