Page:Vagabond life in Mexico.djvu/88

86 me precipitately to follow him. I rose and accompanied him to a window which commanded a view of the inner courts of the convent, which were still bathed in the silvery light of the moon. The monk, whose stern and forbidding countenance had awakened my attention in the garden of St. Francis, was at this moment traversing one of the courts. We remarked that his steps were more tottering, and his body more bent than usual. When he disappeared, "Follow me," said Fray Serapio, "to the cell which was his, which he has just quitted." We soon arrived at the cell, but nothing distinguished it from the others. The walls were quite bare; the wind whistled through the parasitical plants which clung to the disjointed stones. A pine torch, stuck into an interstice of the wall, was just expiring. Fray Serapio fanned the dying flame, and, with all the obstinacy of a conscientious cicerone, he pretended to point out upon the wall the traces of the five fingers of the unknown who had stabbed the monk in his prison. I did not tell Serapio that the black stains on the wall had been produced by damp, and not by the hand of Satan. I seized, however, this opportunity of informing the worthy monk that the story of his unfortunate superior could be perfectly well explained without the intervention of the devil. The superiors of Fray Epigmenio, jealous of his rigid virtue, had probably set the trap into which he had fallen. They had found an adroit monk and a female willing to work through their plans, and the brutal fanaticism of the monk had unhappily spoiled every thing. The Inquisition had got wind of the matter. The farce was then turned into a tragedy. The vengeance of the father, who repented the selling of his child, her unhappy end, and the blighted,