Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & ProtectorateSkinner, Charles M. (Charles Montgomery)
History
Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate
Skinner, Charles M. (Charles Montgomery)
Tales -- Oceania; Tales -- West Indies
Before long it was rumored, likewise, that the grave of Guayos was
haunted, or worse, for a black figure had been seen, on some of the
darkest nights, squatted or kneeling before his tomb. It was remarkable
that this revolutionist should have had a burial-place of his own,
when all his relatives and a majority of the people in his station
were interred in rented graves, and their bones thrown into the common
ditch if the rent were not paid at the end of the second year. Certain
old women affirmed that this watching, waiting figure in the dark had
horns and green eyes, like a cat's, while other people said that it
was merely the form of a man, taller, thinner, more bent than Guayos;
therefore not his ghost. But what man?
The anniversary of the hanging had come. The small hours of the
morning were tolling, heavily, slowly, over the roofs of the sleeping
city. Sleeping? There was one who had no rest that night. An upper
window of the house of Morelos looked out upon a court in which two
palm trees grew. They had been tall and flourishing. One might see
them from the court-room. But for a year they had been shedding their
leaflets and turning sere. Tonight their yellow stems had clashed and
whispered until the wind was down, leaving the night sullen, brooding,
thick, starless, with dashes of rain and a raw chill on the ground that
brought out all the malefic odors of the pavement. The window on the
side toward the court was closed and curtained. The one overlooking
the street was slightly open, and if the night-bird prowling toward
the den he called his home had looked up, or had listened, he would
have seen the glimmer of a candle and heard the eager scratching of
a pen and rustling of papers. For an hour in the first half of the
night Morelos had been walking about his chamber. At about three in
the morning the housekeeper, whose room was at the opposite end of a
corridor from her master's, found herself sitting upright in bed. She
did not know why. Nobody had called to her. Listening intently, as if
she knew that somebody was about to speak, she distinguished a faint
sound of crumpling paper. A chair was moved hastily, and there was a
cry in a strained voice, "No, no! My God!" Then the house shook. She
bolted her door and prayed. In the morning twilight Don Alonzo Morelos
lay very still on the floor of his chamber, with a mark on his throat
like that made by the pressure of two crossed fingers.
The citation had been obeyed!
The Virgin's Diamond
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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