Part 7

And just as our young ladies nowadays wait and wait and think and think before they make their hearts up, so Doña María waited and thought then--and the time slipped on and on, and neither the Lieutenant nor the Conde knew what was in her mind. Then there happened, Señor, a very dismal thing. A pestilence fell upon the City, and of that pestilence Doña María sickened and died. But it chanced that neither of her lovers was on his corner when they took her out from her house to bury her--you see, Señor, even lovers must eat and sleep sometimes, and they could not be always on their watch for her--and in that way it happened that neither of them knew that she was dead and gone. Therefore they kept on standing on their parade quite as usual--coming steadfastly to their corners day after day, and month after month, and year after year. And although, after a while, they died too, they still stood at their posts--just as though they and Doña María still were alive. And there, on their corners, they have remained until this very day.

[Illustration: HOME OF DOÑA MARÍA]

It is told, Señor, that once in broad daylight half the City saw those honest waiting skeletons. It was on a day when there was a great festival for the incoming of a new Viceroy, and they were seen by the crowd that waited in the atrium of the church of Santa Catarina to see the procession pass. But that was some hundreds of years ago, Señor. Now, for the most part, it is at night and by moonlight that they are seen. I have not happened to see them myself--but then I do not often go that way.

LEGEND OF THE CALLE DE LA JOYA

What this street was called, in very old times, Señor, no one knows: because the dreadful thing that gave to it the name of the Street of the Jewel happened a long, long while ago. It was before the Independence. It was while the Viceroys were here who were sent by the King of Spain.

In those days there lived in this fine house at the corner of the Calle de Mesones and what since then has been called the Calle de la Joya--it is at the northwest corner, Señor, and a biscuit-bakery is on the lower floor--a very rich Spanish merchant: who was named Don Alonso Fernández de Bobadilla, and who was a tall and handsome man, and gentle-mannered, and at times given to fits of rage. He was married to a very rich and a very beautiful lady, who was named Doña Ysabel de la Garcide y Tovar; and she was the daughter of the Conde de Torreleal. This lady was of an ardent and a wilful nature, but Don Alonso loved her with a sincerity and humored her in all her whims and wants. When they went abroad together--always in a grand coach, with servants like flies around them--the whole City stood still and stared!

Doña Ysabel was not worthy of her husband's love: and so he was told one day, by whom there was no knowing, in a letter that was thrown from the street into the room where he was sitting, on the ground floor. It was his office of affairs, Señor. It is one of the rooms where the biscuits are baked now. In that letter he was bidden to watch with care his wife's doings with the Licenciado Don José Raul de Lara, the Fiscal of the Inquisition--who was a forlorn little man (_hombrecillo_) not at all deserving of any lady's love--and Don Alonso did watch, and what came of his watching was a very terrible thing.

He pretended, Señor, that he had an important affair with the Viceroy that would keep him at the Palace until far into the night; and so went his way from his home in the early evening--but went no farther than a dozen paces from his own door. There, in the dark street, huddled close into a doorway, his cloak around him--it was a night in winter--he waited in the creeping cold. After a time along came some one--he did not know who, but it was the Licenciado--and as he drew near to the house Doña Ysabel came out upon her balcony, and between them there passed a sign. Then, in a little while, the door of Don Alonso's house was opened softly and the Licenciado went in; and then, softly, the door was shut again.

Presently, Don Alonso also went in, holding in his hand his dagger. What he found--and it made him so angry that he fell into one of his accustomed fits of rage over it--was the Licenciado putting on the wrist of his wife a rich golden bracelet. When they saw him, Señor, their faces at once went white--and their faces remained white always: because Don Alonso, before the blood could come back again, had killed the two of them with his dagger--and they were white in death! Then Don Alonso did what gave to this street the name of the Street of the Jewel. From Doña Ysabel's wrist he wrenched loose the bracelet, and as he left the house he pinned it fast with his bloody dagger to the door.

In that way things were found the next morning by the watch; and the watch, suspecting that something wrong had happened--because to see a bracelet and a bloody dagger in such a place was unusual--called the Alcalde to come and look into the matter; and the Alcalde, coming, found Doña Ysabel and the Licenciado lying very dead upon the floor. So the street was called the Calle de la Joya, and that is its name.

Don Alonso, Señor, was worried by what he had done, and became a Dieguino--it is the strict order of the Franciscans. They go barefoot--and it was in the convent of the Dieguinos, over there at the western end of the Alameda, that he ended his days.

LEGEND OF THE CALLE DE LA MACHINCUEPA

Naturally, Señor, this matter which gave its name to the Calle de la Machincuepa created a scandal that set all the tongues in the City to buzzing about it: every one, of course, blaming the young lady--even though she did it to win such vast riches--for committing so publicly so great an impropriety; but some holding that a greater blame attached to the Marqués, her uncle, for punishing her--no matter how much she deserved punishment--by making her inheritance depend upon so strange and so outrageous a condition; and some even saying that the greatest blame of all rested upon the Viceroy: because he did not forbid an indecorum that was planned to--and that did--take place in the Plaza Mayor directly in front of his Palace, and so beneath his very nose. For myself, Señor, I think that the young lady deserved more blame than anybody: because she was free to make her own choice in the matter, and that she chose riches rather than propriety very clearly proved--though that, to be sure, was known before she did her choosing--that she had a bad heart. As the Viceroy who did not forbid that young lady to do what she did do was the Duque de Linares--who, as you know, Señor, took up the duties of his high office in the year 1714--you will perceive that the curious event about which I now am telling you occurred very nearly two full centuries ago.

At that time there lived in the street that ever since that time has been called the Street of the Machincuepa a very rich and a very noble Spanish gentleman whose name was Don Mendo Quiroga y Saurez, and whose title was Marqués del Valle Salado. In his beginning he was neither rich nor noble, and not even of good blood: having been begotten by an unknown father and born of an unknown mother; and having in his young manhood gone afloat out of Spain as a common sailor to seek his fortune on the sea. What he did upon the sea was a matter that his teeth guarded his tongue from talking about in his later years: but it was known generally that--while in appearance he and his ship had been engaged in the respectable business of bringing slaves from Africa to the colonies--his real business had been that of a corsair; and that on his murdering piracies the corner-stone of his great fortune had been laid.

Having in that objectionable manner accumulated a whole ship-load of money, and being arrived at an age when so bustling a life was distasteful to him, he came to Mexico; and, being come here, he bought with his ship-load of money the Valle Salado: and there he set up great salt-works out of which he coined more gold--knowing well how to grease the palms of those in the Government who could be of service to him--than could be guessed at even in a dream. Therefore it was known with certainty that he possessed a fortune of precisely three millions and a half of dollars--which is a greater sum, Señor, than a hundred men could count in a whole month of summer days. And of his millions he sent to the King such magnificent presents that the King, in simple justice to him, had to reward him; and so the King made him a marqués--and he was the Marqués del Valle Salado from that time on.

Therefore--being so very rich, and a marqués--his sea-murderings of his younger days, and his sea-stealings that made the corner-stone of his great fortune, were the very last things which his teeth suffered his tongue to talk about: and he lived with a great magnificence a life that caused much scandal, and he was generally esteemed and respected, and because of his charities he was beloved by all the poor.

As old age began to creep upon this good gentleman, Señor, and with it the infirmities that came of his loose way of living, he found himself in the world lonely: because, you see--never having perceived any necessity for marrying--he had no wife to care for him, nor children whose duty it was to minister to his needs. Therefore--his brother in Spain about that time dying, and leaving a daughter behind him--he brought from Spain his dead brother's daughter, whom he put at the head of his magnificent household, and equally confided himself in his infirmity to her care. And, that she might be repaid for her care of him, he heaped upon her every possible luxury and splendor that his great riches could procure.

The name of this young lady, Señor, was Doña Paz de Quiroga; and the position to which she was raised by Don Mendo's munificence--and all the more because she was raised to it from the depths of poverty--was very much to her mind. Doña Paz was of a great beauty that well became the rich clothing and the rich jewels that her uncle lavished upon her; and what with her beauty, and her finery, and her recognized nobility as the lawful inheritor of her uncle's title, she knew herself to be--and made no bones of asserting herself to be--the very greatest lady at the Viceroy's court. She was of a jealous and rancorous disposition, and very charitable, and excessively selfish, and her pride was beyond all words. Every one of the young men in the City immediately fell in love with her; and she won also the respect of the most eminent clerics and the homage of the very greatest nobles of the court. So nice was her sense of her own dignity that even in the privacy of her own household her conduct at all times was marked by a rigorous elegance; and in public she carried herself with a grave stateliness that would have befitted a queen.

But this young lady had a bad heart, Señor, as I have already mentioned; and toward Don Mendo, to whom she owed everything, she did not behave well at all. So far from ministering to him in his infirmities, she left him wholly to the care of hired servants; when she made her rare visits to his sick-room she carried always a scented kerchief, and held it to her nose closely--telling him that the smell of balsams and of plasters was distasteful to her; and never, by any chance whatever, did she give him one single kind look or kind word. As was most natural, Don Mendo did not like the way that Doña Paz treated him: therefore, in the inside of him, he made his mind up that he would pay her for it in the end. And in the end he did pay her for it: as she found out when, on a day, that worthy old man was called to go to heaven and they came to read his will.

Doña Paz listened to the reading of the will with the greatest satisfaction, Señor, until the reading got to the very end of it: because Don Mendo uniformly styled her his beloved niece--which somewhat surprised her--and in plain words directed that every one of his three millions and a half of dollars should be hers. But at the very end of the will a condition was made that had to be fulfilled before she could touch so much as a tlaco of her great inheritance: and that condition was so monstrous--and all the more monstrous because Doña Paz was so rigorously elegant in all her doings, and so respectful of her own dignity--that the mere naming of it almost suffocated her with fright and shame.

And, really, Señor, that Doña Paz felt that way about it is not be wondered at, because what Don Mendo put at the very end of his will was this: "So to Paz, my beloved niece, I leave the whole of my possessions; but only in case that she comply precisely with the condition that I now lay upon her. And the condition that I now lay upon her is this: That, being dressed in her richest ball dress, and wearing her most magnificent jewels, she shall go in an open coach to the Plaza Mayor at noonday; and that, being come to the Plaza Mayor, she shall walk to the very middle of it; and that there, in the very middle of it, she shall bow her head to the ground; and that then, so bowing, she shall make the turn which among the common people of Mexico is called a 'machincuepa.' And it is my will that if my beloved niece Paz does not comply precisely with this condition, within six months from the day on which I pass out of life, then the whole of my possessions shall be divided into two equal parts: of which one part shall belong to the Convent of Nuestra Señora de la Merced, and the other part shall belong to the Convent of San Francisco; and of my possessions my beloved niece Paz shall have no part at all. And this condition I lay upon my beloved niece Paz that, in the bitterness of the shame of it, she may taste a little of the bitterness with which her cruelties have filled my dying years."

Well, Señor, you may fancy the state that that most proud and most dignified young lady was in when she knew the terms on which alone her riches would come to her! And as to making her mind up in such a case, she found it quite impossible. On the one side, she would say to herself that what was required of her to win her inheritance would be done, and done with, in no more than a moment; and that then and always--being rich beyond dreaming, and in her own right a marquésa--she would be the greatest lady in the whole of New Spain. And then, on the other side, she would say to herself that precisely because of her great wealth and her title she would be all the more sneered at for descending to an act so scandalous; and that if she did descend to that act she would be known as the Marquésa de la Machincuepa to the end of her days. And what to do, Señor, she did not know at all. And as time went on and on, and she did not do anything, the Mercedarios and the Franciscanos--being always more and more sure that they would share between them Don Mendo's great fortune--talked pleasantly about new altars in their churches and new comforts in their convents: and as they talked they rubbed their hands.

And so it came to the very last day of the six months that Don Mendo had given to Doña Paz in which to make her mind up; and the morning hours of that day went slipping past, and of Doña Paz the crowds that filled the streets and the Plaza Mayor saw nothing; and the Mercedarios and the Franciscanos all had smiling faces--being at last entirely certain that Don Mendo's millions of dollars would be theirs.

And then, Señor, just as the Palace clock was striking the half hour past eleven, the great doors of Don Mendo's house were opened; and out through the doorway came an open coach in which Doña Paz was seated, dressed in her richest ball dress and wearing the most magnificent of her jewels; and Doña Paz, pale as a dead woman, drove through the crowds on the streets and into the crowd on the Plaza Mayor; and then she walked, the crowd making way for her, to the very middle of it--where her servants had laid a rich carpet for her; and there, as the Palace clock struck twelve--complying precisely with Don Mendo's condition--Doña Paz bowed her head to the ground; and then, so bowing, she made the turn which among the common people of Mexico is called a machincuepa! So did Doña Paz win for herself Don Mendo's millions of dollars: and so did come into the soul of her the bitterness of shame that Don Mendo meant should come into it--in reward for the bitterness with which her cruelties had filled his dying years!

What became of this young lady--who so sacrificed propriety in order to gain riches--I never have heard mentioned: but it is certain that the street in which she lived immediately got the name of the Street of the Machincuepa--and the exact truth of every detail of this curious story is attested by the fact that that is its name now.

Perhaps the meaning of this word machincuepa, Señor--being, as Don Mendo said in his will, a word in use among the common people of Mexico--is unknown to you. The meaning of it, in good Spanish, is salto mortal--only it means more. And it was precisely that sort of an excessive somersault--there in the middle of the crowded Plaza Mayor at noonday--that the most proud and the most dignified Doña Paz turned!

LEGEND OF THE CALLE DEL PUENTE DEL CUERVO

As you know, Señor, in the street that is called the Street of the Bridge of the Raven, there nowadays is no bridge at all; also, the house is gone in which this Don Rodrigo de Ballesteros lived with his raven in the days when he was alive. As to the raven, however, matters are less certain. My grand-father long ago told me that more than once, on nights of storm, he had heard that evil bird uttering his wicked caws at midnight between the thunderclaps; and a most respectable cargador of my acquaintance has given me his word for it that he has heard those cawings too. Yet if they still go on it must be the raven's spectre that gives voice to them; because, Señor, while ravens are very long-lived birds, it is improbable that they live--and that much time has passed since these matters happened--through more than the whole of three hundred years.

This Don Rodrigo in his youth, Señor, was a Captain of Arcabuceros in the Royal Army; and, it seems, he fought so well with his crossbowmen at the battle of San Quintin (what they were fighting about I do not know) that the King of Spain rewarded him--when the fighting was all over and there was no more need for his services--by making him a royal commissioner here in Mexico: that he might get rich comfortably in his declining years. It was the Encomienda of Atzcapotzalco that the King gave to him; and in those days Atzcapotzalco was a very rich place, quite away from the City westward, and yielded a great revenue for Don Rodrigo to have the fingering of. Nowadays, as you know, Señor, it is almost a part of the City, because you get to it in the electric cars so quickly; and it has lost its good fortune and is but a dreary little threadbare town.

It was with the moneys which stuck to his fingers from his collectorship--just as the King meant that they should stick, in reward for his good fighting--that Don Rodrigo built for himself his fine house in the street that is now called, because of the bridge that once was a part of it, and because of the raven's doings, the Puente del Cuervo. If that street had another name, earlier, Señor, I do not know what it was.

This Don Rodrigo, as was generally known, was a very wicked person; and therefore he lived in his fine house, along with his raven, in great magnificence--eating always from dishes of solid silver, and being served by pages wearing clothes embroidered with gold. But, for all his riches, he himself was clad as though he were a beggar--and a very dirty beggar at that. Over his jerkin and breeches he wore a long capellar that wrapped him from his neck to his heels loosely; and this capellar had been worn by him through so many years that it was shabby beyond all respectability, and stained with stains of all colors, and everywhere greasy and soiled. Yet on the front of it, upon his breast, he wore the Cross of Santiago that the King had given him; and wearing that cross, as you know, Señor, made him as much of a caballero as the very best. In various other ways the evil that was in him showed itself. He never went to mass, and he made fun openly of all holy things. The suspicion was entertained by many people that he had intimacies with heretics. Such conduct gives a man a very bad name now; but it gave a man a worse name then--and so he was known generally as the Excommunicate, which was the very worst name that anybody could have.

As to the raven, Señor, Don Rodrigo himself named it El Diablo; and that it truly was the devil--or, at least, that it was a devil--no one ever doubted at all. The conduct of that reprobate bird was most offensive. It would soil the rich furnishings of the house; it would tear with its beak the embroidered coverings of the chairs and the silken tapestries; it would throw down and shatter valuable pieces of glass and porcelain; there was no end to its misdeeds. But when Don Rodrigo stormed at his servants about these wreckings--and he was a most violent man, Señor, and used tempestuous language--the servants had only to tell him that the raven was the guilty one to pacify him instantly. "If it is the work of the Devil," he would say without anger, "it is well done!"--and so the matter would pass.