se, great, cunning, and
cruel; they were a picked race of the Spanish; their flags led in war;
the king called them his cousin; the people, when the rope was slung for
them or when they returned and found their hovels smoking, blasphemed
their name. Presently a change began. Man has risen; if he has sprung
from the brutes, he can descend again to the same level. The breath of
weariness blew on their humanity and the cords relaxed; they began to go
down; their minds fell on sleep, their passions awoke in gusts, heady
and senseless like the wind in the gutters of the mountains; beauty was
still handed down, but no longer the guiding wit nor the human heart;
the seed passed on, it was wrapped in flesh, the flesh covered the
bones, but they were the bones and the flesh of brutes, and their mind
was as the mind of flies. I speak to you as I dare; but you have seen
for yourself how the wheel has gone backward with my doomed race. I
stand, as it were, upon a little rising ground in this desperate
descent, and see both before and behind, both what we have lost and to
what we are condemned to go farther downward. And shall I--I that dwell
apart in the house of the dead, my body, loathing its ways--shall I
repeat the spell? Shall I bind another spirit, reluctant as my own, into
this bewitched and tempest-broken tenement that I now suffer in? Shall I
hand down this cursed vessel of humanity, charge it with fresh life as
with fresh poison, and dash it, like a fire, in the faces of posterity?
But my vow has been given; the race shall cease from off the earth. At
this hour my brother is making ready; his foot will soon be on the
stair; and you will go with him and pass out of my sight for ever.
Think of me sometimes as one to whom the lesson of life was very harshly
told, but who heard it with courage; as one who loved you indeed, but
who hated herself so deeply that her love was hateful to her; as one who
sent you away and yet would have longed to keep you for ever: who had no
dearer hope than to forget you, and no greater fear than to be
forgotten."

She had drawn towards the door as she spoke, her rich voice sounding
softer and farther away; and with the last word she was gone, and I lay
alone in the moonlit chamber. What I might have done had not I lain
bound by my extreme weakness, I know not; but as it was, there fell upon
me a great and blank despair. It was not long before there shone in at
the door the ruddy glimmer of a lan