"This Kamaiakan appears to be a remarkable personage: where did you pick him up?" inquired the professor.
"It was rather the other way," Trednoke replied, taking one of his daughter's hands in his, and caressing it. "We are appendages to Kamaiakan. You look so natural, sitting there, Meschines, that I forget it's thirty years since we met, and that all the significant events of my life have happened in that time,--the Mexican war, my marriage, and the rest of it! I have been a widower ten years."
"And I've been a bachelor for over sixty!" said Meschines, with a queer expression.
"Your wife was Spanish, was she not?"
"Her father was a Mexican of Andalusian descent. But her mother was descended from the race of Azatlan: there are records and relics indicating that her ancestors were princes in Tenochtitlan before Cortez made trouble there."
"And I've been losing my heart to a princess, and never realized my audacity!" exclaimed the professor, laying his hand on his waistcoat and ****** an obeisance to Miriam.
She tossed her free foot, and played with the fringe of her reboso.
"I will tell my maid to look for it," she said; "but I think you must have left it in papa's curiosity-room."
"No: I'm an Aztec sacrifice!" cried the professor; and they all laughed. "One would hardly have anticipated," he resumed after a pause, addressing Trednoke, "that you would have made a double conquest,-- first of the men, and then of the woman!"
"The woman conquered me, without trying or wishing to, and then, because she was a woman, took compassion on me.
Whether my country has benefited much by the Mexican annexation, I can't say; but I know Inez--made a heaven on earth for me," concluded the general, in a low voice.
His countenance, at this moment, wore a solemn and humble expression, beautiful to see; and Miriam bent and laid her cheek against his. Meschines knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and sighed.
"No woman ever took compassion on me," he remarked, "and you see the result, --ashes!"
"Ashes,--with their wonted fires living in them," said Trednoke.
"We were talking about this Indian of yours," said Meschines.
"Ay, to be sure. Well, he was attached to Inez's family when I first knew them. It was a peculiar relation; not like that of a servant. One finds such things in Mexico.
The conquered race were of as good strain as their conquerors; the blood of Montezuma was as blue as the best of the Castilian.
There were many intermarriages; and there are many instances of the survival of traditions and records; though the records are often symbolic, and would have no meaning to persons not initiated. But they have been sufficient to perpetuate ties of a personal nature through generation after generation; and the alliance between Kamaiakan and Inez was of this kind. His forefathers, I imagine, were priests, and priests were a mighty power in Tenochtitlan. For aught I know, indeed Kamaiakan may be an original priest of Montezuma's; no one knows his age, but he does not look an hour older, to-day, than when I first saw him, over twenty years ago."
"He must be!" said Miriam, with some positiveness. "He has told me of seeing and doing things hundreds of years ago.
And he says----" She paused.
"What does he say, Nina adorada?" asked her father.
"It was about the treasure, you know."
"Let us hear. The professor is one of us."
"It's one of our traditions that my mother's ancestors, at the time of Cortez, were very rich people," continued Miriam, glancing at Meschines, and then letting her eyes wander across the garden, blooming with roses and fragrant with orange-trees, and so across the trellised vines towards the soft outline of the mountains eastward. "A great part of their wealth was in the form of jewels and precious stones. When Cortez took the city, one of the priests, who was a relative of our family, put the jewels in a box, and hid them in a certain place in the desert."
"And does Kamaiakan know where the place is?" asked the general.
"He can know, when the time comes."
"Which will be, perhaps, when you are ready for your dowry," observed the professor, genially.
"A spell was put upon the spot," Miriam went on, with a certain imaginative seriousness; for she loved romance and mystery so well, and was of a temperament so poetical, that the wildest fairy-tales had a sort of reality for her. "No one can find the treasure while the spell remains. But Kamaiakan understands the spell, and the conjuration which dissolves it; and when he dissolves it, the treasure will be found."
"And, between ourselves," added the general, "Kamaiakan is himself the priestly relative by whom the spell was wrought.
He bears an enchanted life, which cannot cease until he has restored the jewels to Miriam's hands."
"There might be something in it, you know," said Meschines, after a pause.
"The treasures of Montezuma have never been found. Is there no old chart or writing, in your collection of curiosities and relics, that might throw light on it?"
