“È un peccato che se ne va con l’acqua benedetta.”
–Machiavelli.
The Storm Centre looked round, about and above. He was as a fly in a bottle. A massive rough-hewn door, jammed tight, sealed him within adobe walls two feet thick. There was one window, cross-barred, as high as his chin, and only large enough to frame his head. They had brought him to the carcel, or dungeon, of the hacienda, where peons were constrained to docility. A wide masonry bench against the wall approximated a couch, but it was as blocked ice. By the flickering of a lone tallow dip, Din Driscoll noted these things with every sense delicately attuned to strategy. But his verdict was unpromising.
“Tough luck!” he observed.
The adobe was built among the stables that bordered on the pasture, and when not needed as a calabozo, it served snugly for the administrador’s best horse. From the one stall came a tentative whinny. Driscoll jumped with delight. “Demijohn! W’y, you good old scoundrel, you!” The night before, he remembered, he had seen the horse bedded here. “Say howdy as loud as you want,” he cried, slapping him fondly on the flank, “you’ll not betray us. That’s been done already.”
Driscoll was cavalryman to the bone, and it heartened him unaccountably to find his horse. If, only, he could have his pistols too! Ever since the Federals had cut him off from his furloughs home, those black ugly navies were next to the 189nearest in his affections. The nearest was the buckskin charger. And now, only the buckskin was left, which simply made the dilemma more poignant. The condemned man gazed critically at the walls, the rafters, the ground, and shook his head. Supposing a chance for escape, could he bring himself to leave Demijohn behind? He got his pipe to going, sat down, and frowned ruefully at the candle.
“I don’t want to be shot!” he burst out suddenly, with a plaintive twang. Then he grinned. The boy still in him had prompted the absurdity. And the rough warrior had laughed at it. Boy and warrior faced each other, either surprised that the other existed. The boy flushed resentfully at the veteran’s contemptuous grunt. His eyes still had the boy’s naïvely inquisitive greeting to the world before him. Next, quite abruptly, the warrior knew a bitterness against himself. If he could, but once, whimper as the lad about to be soundly strapped! He took no pride in his irony, nor in his hardened indifference to the visage of death. How far, how very far, had the few past years of strife carried him from the youngster who used to gaze so eagerly, so expectantly, out on life!
First, he was home from the University, from the pretty, shady little Missouri town of Columbia. But the vacation following he spent in bloodily helping to drive the Jayhawkers back across the Kansas line. And soon after, when the fighting opened up officially, and his State, at the start, had more of it than any other battle ground, how many hundreds of times did his life bide by the next throw of Fate? During one cruel winter month he had lain with other wounded in a hospital dug-out in the river’s cliff, and there, wanting both quinine and food, he would peep through the reeds, only to see the merciless Red Legs prying about in search of his hiding place.
And then there was the wild, busily dangerous life with Old Joe’s Brigade, with that brigade of Missouri’s young firebrands. 190Once, stretched on the prairie, where he had dropped from exhaustion and hunger and loss of blood, the Storm Centre awoke to find a Pin Indian stooping over him for his scalp. On that occasion, the deft turning of the wrist from the waist outward, with the stripping of the pistol’s hammer simultaneously, had enabled him later to restore to relatives certain other scalps already dangling from the savage’s girdle.
And now here he was in an adobe with walls two feet thick, and numerous saddle-colored Greasers proposing to shoot him first thing in the morning!
“I’ll be blessedly damned,” he drawled querulously, “I object!”
It was the warrior who spoke now, and with him the boy joined hands. They became as one and the same person. The common foe was without. They would see this through together, with grim stoicism, with young-blooded daredeviltry.
The door opened, and one of the common foe, bearing a tray, came within.
“Well, Don Erastus, how goes it?” With a pang of homesickness the Missourian thought of darkies who carried trays.
“Juan Bautista, at Y’r Mercy’s orders,” the Dragoon corrected him.
“Don John the Baptist then, como le whack?”
“Bien, señor, bien.”
“Any theory as to what you’ve got there?”
“Y’r Mercy’s supper. The Señor Coronel Lopez does not desire that Y’r Mercy should have any complaint.”
“Oh, none whatever, Johnny, except what I’m to die of. Set it down, here on the feather bed.”
There were a few native dishes, with a botellon of water and a jar of wine. Driscoll tipped the botellon to his lips. His whiskey flask had contained poison, though the poison of ink, and as he drank, he pondered on why water should not be an antidote for the poisons that lurk in whiskey flasks. 191Then he wondered why such foolish conceits at such times persist in shouldering death itself out of a man’s thoughts. And meanwhile, there stood the precursor of his end, in the emblematic person of a very brown John the Baptist. The fellow’s gorgeous red jacket was unbuttoned, revealing a sordid dirty shirt. He was officer of the guard, and had a curiosity as to how a Gringo about to be shot would act. He waited clumsily, lantern in hand. But he was disappointed. There seemed to be nothing out of the commonplace. Some condemned Mexican, though a monotonously familiar spectacle, would yet have been more entertaining.
Driscoll looked at him over the botellon. That earthen bottle had not left the prisoner’s lips. It had stopped there, poised aloft by an idea.
“See here,” Driscoll complained, “where’s the rest of the water I’m to have?”
“Of what water, señor?”
“For my bath, of course. Don’t I die to-morrow?”
“Yes, but––”
“Here, this wine is too new for me. Drink it yourself, if you want.”
“Many thanks, señor, with pleasure. But a bath? I don’t understand.”
“No? Don’t you Mexicans ever bathe before you die?”
“We send for the padre.”
“Oh, that’s it! And he spiritually washes your sins away? But suppose you couldn’t get your padre?”
The Indian shuddered. “Ai, María purísima, one’s soul would go to everlasting torment!”
“There! Now you can understand why I count so much on ablution. It’s absolution.”
The native readily believed. Like others of his class, he thought all Protestants pagans, and none Catholic but a Mexican. “Must be something like John the Baptist’s day, 192verdad, señor?” he said. “On that holy day, once a year, we must all take a bath.”
“Quite right too,” Driscoll returned soberly. “A man should go through most anything for his religion.–Haven’t noticed my horse there, have you, Johnny?” The guard pricked up his ears. “Of course not,” Driscoll went on, “you’re worrying about my soul instead. Well, so am I. We Americans, you know, save our yearly baths for one big solemn final one, just before we die. And if I don’t get mine to-night, I’ll be associating with you unshrived Mexicans hereafter, and that would be pretty bad, wouldn’t it? It’s what made me think of my horse there. That horse, Johnny, is heavy on my soul. He’s most too heavy to wash away. Now, I’m not going to tell you that I actually stole him; but just the same, if a good man like you would take him, after I’m gone–why, I’d feel that he was washed off pretty well.”
The Mexican’s sympathy grew more keen.
“But the other sins,” Driscoll added, “they’ll need water, and a great plenty, too.”
Juan Bautista was feeling the buckskin’s knees. Driscoll longed to choke him, but instead, he drove again at the wedge. “Another thing, I’ll have to leave my money behind.” He mentioned it casually, but his breath stopped while he waited for the effect. The guard straightened. Demijohn’s knees seemed to be all right. He took up the tray, and opened the door, yet without a word. Driscoll’s fist doubled, to strike and run for it. Then the fellow spoke.
“Does Y’r Mercy want soap too?”
The fist unclenched. “No,” came the reply, almost in a joyful gasp, “this is for, for godliness only.”
“One jar, señor?”
“Bless me, no! Two big ones, bigger’n a barrel.”
With a parting glance at Demijohn, the guard stole forth to gratify the heathen’s whim.
“I’ll give him enough to buy a horse,” Driscoll resolved.
193CHAPTER XXIV
The Man Who Did Not Want to Be Shot
“A horse and a man
Is more than one,
And yet not many.”
–Taming of the Shrew.
“Now Berthe–why, what in the world––” Jacqueline began.
It was her second morning to awake in the hacienda house, and the little Bretonne tripped into her room under a starchy mountain heaped high. “Clothes, madame,” she replied.
“Hé mais––”
“They were made yesterday by some of the ranchero women. Madame will look?”
“Calico! Grands dieux!”
There were two dresses, one for each girl. The native seamstresses had slyly taken stock of mademoiselle the day before, only to discover that a “simple” frock from Paris was a formidable thing to duplicate. The marchioness smiled, and the maid also.
“But, for example, Berthe, who inspired this?”
“He did.”
“He?”
“The American monsieur, of course.”
“Oh, the American monsieur, of course! So, monsieur permits himself to observe that I need a wardrobe? But you, Berthe, you surely did not––”
“Oh, no, madame! I knew nothing, till just now, when the woman brought them. The monsieur ordered them yesterday, 194she said. And naturally, madame, if he could have found better material, I do not doubt––”
“There, child, I’ll not be reproached by your even thinking it necessary to defend––”
“And madame will see, too, that they will do nicely.” She spread the frocks on the bed, and began snipping here and there with the scissors and taking stitches everywhere. “By letting it out this way–voilà, if madame will kindly slip it on?”
“Berthe, you can’t mean–Oh nonsense!”
None the less the skirt passed over her head, and the maid’s deft fingers kept on busily. “And why not?” she talked as she worked, “unless one likes rags better. And who will see? Only men. Poof, those citizens do not know percale from a Parisian toilette.”
Jacqueline began to wax angry with the quiet tyranny of it. She looked at the horror and shuddered, then with both hands pushed the calico to the floor, gathering up her own lawn skirt instead. It was rather a woebegone lawn skirt. She gazed ruefully at the garment, then down at the blue flowering heaped about her ankles. Berthe, kneeling over the dress, raised her eyes. The puckered brow of her mistress spelled fury, and the maid tried not to laugh, at which Jacqueline stamped her foot. “Berthe,” she cried, “shall I slap you?”
“Mais oui, madame. And madame, I was thinking, what will he say if you do not wear it?”
Jacqueline gave her a keen look. “Child, child,” she exclaimed, “you seem to imagine that whatever he wants––”
“Oui, madame.–I think you can try it on again now.”
And madame submitted petulantly. But to herself she had to confess the magic in Berthe’s fingers. Though she pouted over the fresh, rustic effect, yet on her slender figure there was witchery in it.
An orderly knocked. He was one of her Austrian escorts come to say that everything was ready for departure. She 195gladly hailed the chance to escape this house of mourning. All night long old women in the death chamber had mumbled incantations, and the droning was in her ears as she slept. It was not nice. Because she could not blot out the inartistic shock of ugly mortality, in very self-hate she yearned to get away. The evening before, even while she loaned common sense to the crazed household, even while she pressed down the icy eyelids, she wondered–obstinately wondered, despite herself, what the dead girl could have thought, what she could have felt, during that one horrid, thrilling second of flight downward, and what, in anticipation of the second after. It was gruesome, this being always and always the spectator. Yet Jacqueline knew that, had it been she herself plunging from the tower, she still would have been that spectator. Too well she knew that she would have analyzed what she thought and felt. She would have rated even the second before eternity in its degree as a frisson; and, no doubt, would have been aware of a voluptuous satiety, while anticipating the second after. She hated herself, and she hated too the smart, ultra-refined life that had brought her to it. How many of those past years, or of the years to come would she not give to shed a few tears without interrogating them!
Ney met the two girls under the colonnade. At the steps was the coach and eight mules left by Maximilian for their use, and drawn up in stately line were Messieurs the Feathers and Furs, as Jacqueline called His Majesty’s Austrian Imperial Guards. When she appeared, out flashed their curved blades. The queenly little lady in blue-flowered calico and a rakish Leghorn hat returned the salute with a smile.
“Where are the Dragoons, Michel?” she asked.
Ney did not know. But a Mexican with a crossed eye approached, doffing a silver-lettered sombrero. He had been waiting for her, he said. There was time. Otherwise he would have forced his way to wherever she was.
196“Indeed, Seigneur Farceur?” said Jacqueline.
She recognized that most sinister of jokers, Don Tiburcio. He was eyeing her narrowly, and there was a vigilance in the baleful gleam, as though of late he might have been deceived by his fellowmen.
“But,” he coolly proceeded, “only a few minutes are left now.”
“My good man, whatever are you talking about?”
“And after the few minutes, we’ll have the shooting. I came to invite Your Mercy.”
“Shoot whom?”
“There is but one prisoner.”
“You mean Señor Murguía? The American was acquitted, I believe.”
“It’s the other way, señorita. They were both tried over again, and then, the American was condemned.”
“Mademoiselle,” ejaculated Ney, “you are deathly––”
“I am not!” Jacqueline protested furiously. “It’s the powder.”
But Berthe knew better. Her mistress used it not, for all the roguish freckle on her nose-tip. Tiburcio, too, was satisfied as to her sudden pallor. She would save him the American, he decided. “Your Mercy had best hasten,” he urged her frankly.
Jacqueline ran to the end of the portico, from were she could see the pasture. Within, a platoon of red jackets were filing toward the carcel.
“That scoundrel Lopez!” exclaimed Tiburcio, “he has advanced the time on us!”
Only for an instant did Jacqueline wring her hands.
“Michel, your horse!” she cried. “Quick, quick! Now hold the stirrup!”
But Tiburcio was the quicker. He bent his knee, on it she stepped, and up she jumped, and kicked her heel as a 197spur. The charger leaped, and down the road clattered girl and horse, she swaying perilously.
It was a hundred yards to the pasture gate, and as much again to the adobe inside. When her horse rose in his gallop, she caught glimpses over the wall. The Dragoons were drawing up before the carcel. Sentinels tugged at the huge wooden door, and Lopez goaded them on. He saw her coming, and would have it over with before she could interfere. He bellowed an order, and the shooting squad threw up their guns at aim. They would not wait. They would fire on their victim the second the door opened. The heavy oak began to give. But that moment swinging in through the gate, Jacqueline could see only the carcel’s blank adobe wall. Yet she pictured the man just behind. She pictured the door opening. And–too late! Dieu, the muskets had volleyed already!
But–what made the shots scatter so? Scattered and flurried, they sounded. And no wonder! She saw a miracle in the doing. It was the most astounding sight of all her life long. Straight through the blank adobe wall, for all its two feet of thickness, she beheld a man on a great-boned yellow horse, both man and horse plunge mid a sudden cloud of dust, plunge squarely into the light of day.
The dumfounded shooting squad had blazed crazily against the half-open door; and for the critical quarter minute following, their weapons were harmless. Other Dragoons ran wildly out into the pasture, and as wildly fired at the horseman. Only one of the sentinels had happened to be on the side of the magic exit, but as the solid wall dissolved into a powdered cloud and the apparition hurtled past him, down upon his head crashed a gigantic water jar filled with earth. He who had sympathized with pagan ablutions the night before stood now with mouth agape. Some heathen god was having a hand in this, he knew.
Jacqueline wheeled to Driscoll’s side as he dashed toward 198her. He was coatless. His woolen shirt was open at the neck, the sleeves were rolled to the elbows. His slouch hat sat upon the back of his head. The short cropped curls, gray with dust, fluttered against the brim. She had never seen a face so buoyantly happy.
“Morning, Miss Jack-leen! Race you to the river?”
They galloped through the gate together. He was for turning down the road, but she blocked his horse with her own. During a second the flight was stopped.
“I’m in a hurry just now,” he panted, but made no effort to get by her.
“Up that way!” she cried. “Up that way, past the House!”
“But those pretty boys––”
“The Austrians? They’ll not stop you, I promise.”
“Then it’s our move. Careful, little girl, don’t fall!”
Jacqueline, waving her arm, signaled the Feathers and Furs to make room, and Tiburcio and Ney saw to it that they did. Man and girl raced through them.
“Wait here, Michel!” called Jacqueline, leaving Ney still with thumb to cap at salute. Tiburcio gazed after them.
Lopez ran across the pasture to the colonnade. His red face was redder than ever before. Tiburcio sardonically regarded him. Lopez glared at Ney.
“Why aren’t you in pursuit?” he demanded hotly.
“And you, monsieur?”
“And I, and I! Who are you to question me, señor? Every girth has been cut!”
“Caramba, mi coronel,” cried Tiburcio in dismay, “you don’t say so!”
“And it will take ten minutes to tie up the cords, while you, you, Señor Frenchman, you stand there, your men mounted and ready! Obey me, I tell you!”
“Can’t,” said Ney doggedly. “Against orders.”
“Orders? Whose orders?”
199“Of Mademoiselle la Marquise, monsieur.”
“Who runs away with a convict. A fit commander, por Dios!”
Off came the Frenchman’s gauntlet, but he paused in the gesture of striking. Too quick at this, and not enough at wits, he might ruin her plans.
“As fit,” he retorted instead, “as another who lets prisoners escape. I advise Monsieur the Colonel to look to his girths.”
200CHAPTER XXV
The Person on the Other Horse
“Yet am I sure of one pleasùre,
And shortly, it is this:
That, where ye be, me seemeth, pardè,
I could not fare amiss.”
–Ballad of the Nut Brown Maid.
Din Driscoll had never remotely imagined that there could be such intoxication in a horseback ride. The person on the other horse made for the difference. How the joy of her filled him that instant of his bursting through the black prison wall into the bright morning of the world! She, the splendid first thing to gladden his eyes! Could liberty be really so glorious? Ravishing horsewoman, she was coming to save him. He had supposed her on her way to Mexico, and ’twas she whom he saw first of all.
And now, she rode beside him. They two, they were riding together, alone. The smell of the wild free air of the universe thrilled them both with an exquisite recklessness. Vague, limitless, subtle in mystery, the seduction of it was ineffable. Out of the corner of his eye he peeped at her. But wasn’t she perched entrancingly on that dragoon saddle, wasn’t she, though? The richly heavy coils of burnished copper had loosened, and they were very disconcerting in their suggestion of flowing wealth. If they would but fall about her shoulders! And the lace from the slanting hat brim, and the velvet patch near the dimple–the velvet patch called an assassin. And–what dress was that? Flowered calico? Yes, and light blue. His cheeks burned as of one surprised in crime, but the 201 self-possessed young woman herself was oblivious. So was it this, a blue flowered gown, that made her so suddenly tangible, so tangible and maddening? The haughty Parisienne of imperial courts was gone. In fact, she had become so distractingly tangible that–well, he didn’t know. But a lump got into his throat. She might be a Missouri girl, this moment. And there came to him the vision of one, of a Missouri girl molding biscuits, patting them, and her arms were bared, in a simple piquancy just like Jacqueline’s now. He even saw the pickaninnies in the shade of the porch outside, worshiping the real Missouri girl from the very whites of their eyes. How he had loved to tease her! He could not help it; she was so daintily prim. That he should thus think of his sister, the while gazing on the one-time gilded butterfly–to say the least, it was a pertinent comment on the transmuting magic that lurks in blue flowered percale.
They slowed to a trot.
“Monsieur is my prisoner, yes,” said she in her wonderful English.
He took the other meaning. “I don’t know–yet,” he returned soberly.
She laughed, and he realized that he had spoken aloud.
He turned on himself in dismay. “What’s the matter with me?” he muttered.
“I think, monsieur,” said Jacqueline demurely, “that I have the guess.”
“You haven’t–you can’t guess either! I don’t know myself.”
“Just the same, I wish I knew so well my chances for heaven.”
“But you’re mistaken, I tell you. I’m not!”
“Not what, monsieur?”
“In, in–w’y, in love.”
Jacqueline’s laughter was the merriest peal. In the end 202he half grinned. Little use trying to convince the little witch! He had much to do convincing himself.
On the farther slope of a hill where coffee grew and the giant sheltering banana hid the road, they paused at a trail that crossed the highway and wound on down toward the Pánuco river, where tropical stuff for Tampico was transferred from burros to dugout barges. Jacqueline listened. There were no sounds of pursuit as yet, nor was there any one in sight. Making up her mind, she changed to the path. Driscoll followed, with a delight in this new leadership over him.
When they gained the river, she stopped again, and he did too.
“But you must go, on, on!” she protested. “They may not be deceived, no. They may have you to overtake here.” She held out her hand. “There, this path, you follow it to Tampico. Good bye. Yes, yes, you have not one minute!”
Driscoll took the little gauntleted hand readily enough. He saw that the lines of her face were drawn, but her manner was inexorable.
“How do you like your dress?” he inquired.
Had she been on her feet, she would have stamped one of them. “Monsieur,” she cried, “here is no time to observe the replenishment of a lady’s wardrobe. Do you go? I insist. I wish you bon voyage to your own country, monsieur.”
“But it’s so far away. I reckon I’d better rest a spell first. A month or so, prob’bly.”
She watched him clamber down and tie Demijohn to the low branch of a live oak on the river’s bank.
“There you are, getting stubborn again,” she said. But the lines in her face had vanished.
“Of course I mean to see you back to your friends,” he explained.
“Merci bien. But you will not. You will have this river straight to Tampico. I say yes!”
203She turned her horse as she spoke, whereat he started to remount his own.
“I think, sir––” she began haughtily.
“The road is free.”
“Oh, why have you to be so, so quarrelsome?”
“The temptation, I reckon.”
“You really will go back with me?”
“I might be going back along about the same time. It’s a public trail.”
“Then I will stay, and you must! I will not permit you to go back there now. I will see that you do wait here so long until Lopez has the time to start to Mexico after you. Then you will be behind him. Have the goodness to hold my bridle. I think I shall take me a rest a little also.”
Together they sat on a huge live-oak root and watched the sluggish Pánuco flow by.
“No hurry now,” Driscoll observed comfortably. “Our scarlet upholstered colonel won’t get away for years yet.”
Years, at least, were in his wishes, years in which to provoke her quaintly inflected English, and its quaint little slips. She had learned it in London long before, playing with wee Honorable toddlers while her father played France’s diplomacy with grown-ups. That accent of hers, then, was as broad as Mayfair, and to the Missourian doubly foreign, and doubly alluring.
“I cannot understand,” she said, “why it is the Dragoons have not followed you immediately?”
“Tibby’s the reason, I reckon. That Tibby is a deep one.”
She made him explain, and he told her. The blackmailing humorist, Tiburcio, had paid him a visit at his dungeon window during the night. Being chief witness for the prosecution, Tiburcio could pass the sentry unchallenged.
204“Come for your money?” Driscoll had inquired, and Tiburcio seemed hurt.
“What is the matter,” Tiburcio demanded, “with pointing a revolver at the Señor Americano right now, and making him deliver?”
Driscoll had not figured out what the objections might be, but he reckoned some would materialize.
“But,” said Tiburcio, “I’m not doing it, and why? Simply because I want to know if you care to escape?”
“W’y,” returned Driscoll, “I’ll think it over, and let you know in the morning,” at which lack of confidence Tiburcio was more hurt than ever.
“What’s the use,” Driscoll objected, “they’d catch me again?”
“Not if I fixed their horses, and if I do, will you promise to get out?”
And thus the bargain had stood, and thus it was fulfilled, though at the last the anxious Tiburcio had called in Jacqueline to help.
“Now,” said the marchioness, settling herself for a treat, “I must know. Tame for me the miracle, explain it. I cannot longer hold my curiosity. But it was fine–exquis–however you have done it!”
“Weren’t they a surprised lot, though?”
“But the miracle, monsieur! The miracle!”
“Well, it was this way. Being on the yawning brink–as old Meagre Shanks, friend of mine, would say–I figured it out that lacking in godliness, I’d try to get the next best thing.”
“Please, monsieur!”
“That I’d try to get a bath.”
“Of dust and mud, for example?”
At that Driscoll ceased all miracle taming and brushed himself off. But, putting him back into his dungeon, one will recall how he plotted to obtain two jars of water. This water 205he used simply to soften the hard, sun-baked adobes. First he hung his coat over the window. A suspicious guard naturally wanted to know why, and Driscoll appeared at the bars stripped to the waist. To keep out the cold air while he bathed, he said, and his teeth chattered. Then he went back to work. He handled his precious water with desperate economy. He began at the exposed end of one adobe brick, soaking it as needed and digging it out with a chip of earthenware knocked off one of the jars. The wall was two adobe lengths in thickness, but after he had gotten out his first brick, it was easy, by tugging and kicking, to tear out the others of the inside tier, since luckily they did not dovetail in with the outer ones. Soon he had an arch-shaped niche in the wall almost as high as his head when mounted on Demijohn. The really tedious part remained, and it was an all night job.
To deepen the niche without breaking through, he had to scrape it out piecemeal, wetting the dried mud as he toiled. He measured carefully just how much of the thickness to leave, because the weed stalks in the adobe could not be trusted to hold too thin a crust, and also he had to take care that the water did not soak entirely through and make a tell-tale blot on the outside when daylight should come. It was an infinitely laborious task, and even with completion at last, there was yet the question–which would break first, bone or masonry?
But he would learn when he should dash his horse’s skull and his own against the shell that remained. He saddled Demijohn, filled an empty jar with the soft earth of his excavations, and waited. His dramatic appearance at the instant of the door’s opening was not a coincidence. It was minute calculation. Already mounted, he faced the wall, with the heavy jar poised over his head in both hands, his spurs drawn back to strike. He waited until sentinels and shooting squad had gathered at the door. He waited to draw their fire, to 206empty their muskets. But he did not wait until the door should open enough to give them unimpeded aim. In the second of its opening he drove back the spurs, hurled the jar against the wall, and–crashed through his dungeon as easily as breaking a sucked egg.
“But,” demanded Jacqueline eagerly, “how is it you did feel?” She was disappointed that the personal equation had had so little prominence.
“I don’t recollect,” said Driscoll, puzzled, “there was nothing hurting especially.”
“No, no! Your sensations facing death, then escaping?”
He brightened. “W’y yes,” he replied, happy to catch her meaning. “I felt toler’ble busy.”
She sighed despairingly. Yet there was plenty left her for wonderment, and in it she revelled.
“Ingenuity!” she mused. “I declare, I believe the first human being to stand up on his hind legs must have been an American. It simply occurred to him one day that he didn’t need all fours for walking, and that he might as well use his before-feet for something else.”
“And a Frenchman, Miss Jack-leen?”
She flung up her hands.
“He!” she exclaimed. “If ever a compatriot of mine had gotten that idea into his–how you say?–pate, would he not carry it out to the idiotic limit, yes? He? He would try to walk without any feet whatever, and use all of them for other things. Already you have seen him doing the, the pugilat–the box–with every one of his fours. Voilà!”
But time was passing. Lopez had certainly repaired his girths by this time. Driscoll arose. “There’s a shorter way back,” he announced. “The river junction can’t be far down stream, and I’ll wait for you there, Miss Jack-leen, while you scout on ahead to the hacienda house. If all’s clear, you signal and I will advance with the heavy cavalry.”
“Whatever that means, I hope it ain’t mutiny.”
At best it was only mock compliance. Jacqueline also knew that time was passing, but she had not mentioned the fact. Now the reason transpired. She harked back on their separation, with a grave earnestness and a saddened air of finality. He was to leave her here, she said. He was to go back to his own country. How badly had his reception fared so far? Why not, then, leave Mexico to ingratitude, and have done? The romantic land of roses was notoriously a blight to hopes. Why should he seek to thrive despite the mysterious curse that seemed to hover over all things like a deadly miasma?
Driscoll shook his head. “You know I have come to see Maximilian.”
“But you are under sentence. You will lose your life.”
“Miss Jack-leen, you said a while back that I was your prisoner. You have the Austrian escort. All right. You will deliver me to the Emperor,” and he waved his hand as though the matter was arranged.
“But monsieur,” she cried, “may not others have plans as vital as yours? And, perhaps–yes, you interfere.”
He did interfere, in grimmest truth. Leaving the Sphinx of the Tuileries, she had come with her mission, and with an idea, too, of the obstacles that must be vanquished. But here, almost at landing, she encountered a barrier left out of her calculations, and which alone, unaided, she had to surmount. It was the surrender of the Confederacy, and what this upsetting complication meant against her own errand was embodied in the man before her. For in him lay the results of the Surrender as affecting the Mexican empire. In a word, he brought aid for Maximilian at the moment when Maximilian might be discouraged enough to give way to France; when the forgetful prince might gladly leave all to the generous nation which had placed him on his throne and which by him 208was cheated of the reward of its costly empire building. Should the French threaten to withdraw, should they in reality withdraw, still he would not abdicate, not with Confederate veterans to replace the pantalons rouges. Like the dog of the fable, Maximilian would cling to the manger.
“Oui, oui, monsieur,” she repeated sharply, “you interfere!”
“In that case,” said Driscoll quietly, “I will leave you at the river junction. When I see that you are safely at the hacienda––”
“You will go back to America?”
“That need not worry you.”
“Then you are not going back, back to your own country?” He would keep on to the City alone. She would have no chance to intercept him. After all Fate had been good to her–no, cruel!–to cast him in her path. “You might find the Austrian escort safer than going alone,” she said enticingly.
He hesitated. What all this was about, he could not imagine. He knew nothing, naturally, of the dark intrigues of an enigmatical adventurer far away in the Tuileries, nor how they could affect him. And so he put away as absurd the fancy that she in her turn might interfere with him. Besides, he was tempted.
“It’s a go!” he said.
She for her part was thinking, hoping, rather, that perhaps she was mistaken. Perhaps he only bore the offer of a paltry few hundred, a handful of homeseekers from his regiment. She hoped so. She would have prayed for it, had praying occurred to her.
209CHAPTER XXVI
The Strangest Avowal of Love
“Nae living man I’ll love again,
Since that my lovely knight is slain.”
–Lament of the Border Widow.
Back once more at the hacienda, Driscoll recovered his coat still hanging over the dungeon window. Lopez would have called it insolence, had he been there instead of scouring the country toward Mexico. Jacqueline and Berthe settled themselves in the traveling coach left for their comfort by Maximilian. Driscoll’s effects, including his gray cape-coat and the bundle he had carried behind his saddle, were found in his room at the House. Jacqueline took them into the carriage with her, along with that absurd little valise that she had brought from the ship for an hour’s jaunt on shore. Driscoll rode with Ney and the Austrians, and was once again headed toward the capital, still sixty fair Mexican leagues southward.
For six days it was an uneventful journey, seemingly. By day there were sierras, and valleys, and wayside crosses marking violent deaths. By night they accepted either ranchero hospitality or put up at some village mesón. But within himself, adventures were continuous and varying for the Storm Centre. He could not account for the strange, curious elation that possessed him, especially when Jacqueline would take Ney’s horse and ride at his side, perhaps for an hour, when the sun was not too hot. Driscoll never knew how long these occasions lasted. He did not know that they were long 210at all. As a matter of fact, he had ceased using ordinary standards of measurement. The universe, and sordid accessories such as time, radiated entirely about one little velvet patch near a dimple satellite.
There came to be long silences between them as they rode, either boy or girl content to have it so, and neither the least bit lonesome. And they talked too, naturally, though this was not so significant. She would slyly provoke him. To her mind, there was never anyone quite so satisfying at a quarrel. She would pause in delighted expectancy to see his eyes grow big when she thrust, and then to see his mouth twitch at the corners as he caught her blade on his own keen wit. She had forgotten that he was rustic, except for the added zest it gave. Nor was there a false note in him, so happily and totally unconscious was he of self. And as for a certain gaucherie, that was the spice to his whole manner.
They talked of many things; rather, she made him talk. She learned that his name was John, as hers was Jeanne, and she wanted to know why the horse was Demijohn.
“Because, Miss Jack-leen,” he answered, “he’s my other half, and sometimes the better one, too.” He remembered that once, when he had drooped limp over the saddle, the buckskin had carried him out of the fighting to the rear. “You see,” he added, “we were both colts when our little shindy up there broke loose.”
“And you both went? Ah, Monsieur the Patriot, you did go, you did affront the tyrant? Yes!” She had the explorer’s eagerness. Perhaps she might discover in him her own especial demon of self-introspection.
“N-o,” he replied, “I reckon we went mostly for the fun of the thing.”
“Fi donc!” she cried. “But wait till you are old. Oh yes, we have them too, those blessed, over-petted veterans of the Grande Armée. They are in the Hôtel des Invalides, 211with medals to diagnose their glory. Oh, là, là, but there’s a pleasant fashion! The people, the politicians, they forget the hot blood that fought simply because there were pretty blows to strike. They see only the gray hairs. ‘Honneur aux patriotes!’ You wait, monsieur. You, too, will be made into the hero, ex post facto, and you will believe it yourself. Yes, with the wolves, one learns to howl.”
“N-o,” said the young Confederate, “we–we got licked.”
They talked–he rather–of Missouri. He was not reluctant to have stirred the memories of his home, not with one who could listen as she did. In his heart settled a warmth that was good, and the glow of it shone on his face. He became aware that the gray eyes were upon him, taking conscious note of his hair, his mouth, his chin, as though she were really seeing him for the first time. What made a girl do that way? He felt queerly, it being thus brought to him that he had awakened interest in a woman, but the tribute she paid him was ennobling, and a deep thankfulness, though to whom or for what he had not the least idea, made more kindly and good the cheery warmth around his heart. The gray eyes had never sparkled on him in coquetry as they sometimes did on other men, and now they were grave and sweet. It was a phase of Jacqueline that only her maid had known.
The marquise gathered that Missour-i, as she called it, was an exceedingly strange and fascinating region. She learned that it was a state, like a department in France, like her own Bourbonnais for instance. But there the comparison ended. The rest was all startling versatility. For the inhabitants had not only taken both sides during the Civil War, but through their governor had proclaimed themselves an independent republic into the bargain. They must be unusual citizens, those Missourians.
But they were strangest because they did not seem to be actors. They did not refine living into a cult, with every 212pleasure and pain classified and weighed out and valued. No, they actually lived. It was hard to realize this, but in the end she did, and with ever increasing wonder, with also a beginning of envy and hunger. But there was still another thing even more indefinable. It centered in the word “home,” which she knew neither in French nor Spanish, but which she came to know now, as its meaning grew upon her. It was more than a “maison” or a “casa,” or a “chez nous.” It was a manner of temple. And the high priest there was a grim lord. How very grim, indeed! There was no compromise, no blinking, no midway gilded dais between the marriage altar and the basest filth. As grim, this was, as that original Puritanism which has become a synonym of American backbone. Grim, yes; but the woman there, where the high priest blinked not, was a divinity. She was a divinity in the tenderest and most devoted sense of the word. And the Puritanism was purity enshrined, as a simple matter of course. The longing, if only to know more of this odd country, rose in her mysteriously, and stronger and stronger.
When on one occasion she went back to the coach, she found that Berthe also was enjoying the change to horseback. Jacqueline was glad of it. Now she could be alone, and she believed that she wanted to think. But she could not pin down what she wanted to think about; because, no doubt, there was so very much. Instead, she looked vacantly at the Storm Centre’s cartridge belt and pistols on the seat in front of her. They were grim, too, these playthings of a boy.
Dupin had left the weapons with Ney, back at the hacienda, and Ney had turned them over to Jacqueline as to the real strategic chief of the expedition. And Jacqueline had kept them, perhaps to look at, perhaps because of a whim that a prisoner should not be armed. She liked to hear Driscoll mourn for them, not knowing where they were, and she held back the surprise as one lingers before an anticipated pleasure. She 213picked up the great, black revolvers with a woman’s fascinated respect for the harsh, eternal male of her species, who is primeval and barbaric yet, and ever will be, to hold his mate his very own. Her touch was gingerly, but there was a caress in her fingers on the ugly things.
She lifted the belt. How heavy of metal it was! Idly, she thought she would count the leaden missiles. When finally she laid the belt aside, a bullet remained in her lap. It had fallen there out of its shell. Starting to fit the bullet in again, she suddenly dropped both bullet and cartridge. Her hands trembled. This particular shell contained no powder. But it contained a tightly rolled slip of oiled paper. The cartridge was a dummy, a wee strong box for some vital document.
It was not for scruples against looking that she paused. On the contrary, it was that she must look, absolutely, in sacred, patriotic duty bound, that finally decided–nay, compelled her to look. Still she hesitated before drawing out the paper. She dreaded what it might tell her. Concealed thus, and revealed only by a hazard, the paper held, she felt certain, the secret and the significance of the American’s errand to Mexico. And she did not want to know. She reviled bitterly the cruel chance that had thrust it on her.
She read. The paper was a communication addressed to the Emperor Maximilian by the Confederate generals of the Trans-Mississippi department. Foreseeing Lee’s surrender, they had gathered from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, at a place in the latter state named Marshall, and there they had decided that they would not surrender. They would seek homes and a country elsewhere, swords in hand. At this meeting, which had been inspired by Gen. Joe Shelby, they had deposed the cautious general commanding, Kirby Smith, and they had put in his stead Simon Bolivar Buckner. The Trans-Mississippi department numbered fifty thousand men. There would also be fugitives from Lee’s and Johnson’s corps, 214besides Jefferson Davis in person, should he contrive to pass the Federal lines. Many thousands of veterans would shortly be marching across the Rio Grande. In Texas, at the Confederate arsenals and depositories, they would seize what they needed: guns, ammunition, horses, provisions, money. In Mexico they would become citizens, and they would defend their new homes against outlawry, rebellion, or invasion. The signatory generals prayed the Emperor Maximilian to consider this, and “to do it quick.”
Jacqueline put the letter back in the cartridge, and everything looked as before. But no genii, once out, can ever quite be bottled up again. That stray bullet had wounded her to the heart.
“As bad as fifty thousand!” she cried half aloud. “And they will become citizens, too–Mon Dieu, that is a nation!”
With them Maximilian would have a people behind him, and his throne would be as a rock. He could, and most certainly would, disdain the French army of occupation with its thirty thousand bayonets. The French might go back home. He would speed them cheerfully, and henceforth be Emperor in fact.
“But our treasure and our dead,” sighed Jacqueline bitterly, “we cannot take them back. No, nor our hopes, though they weigh little enough now, for that matter. Oh dear, and I am one of those hopes!–Help me Heaven, else I shall hate my own country. Oh, I must be true!–Now, why couldn’t those Missourians have sent–someone else?”
That evening she held a pen, but it would not move, not while her thoughts were upon it. So, by sheer will, she nerved herself not to think, and wrote mechanically. She wrote a message to Lopez, and another to Dupin, and yet a third. The third brought the tears long before it was finished. An Austrian took the first two, and rode all that night. She kept the other one herself.
215This was the fifth day of their journey since leaving Murguía’s hacienda. They had taken pains to keep behind Lopez. Their pursuer, ahead of them, had not made twenty miles the first day, for he had delayed in order to search here and there. But the second day, he had evidently accepted failure, and hastened on to overtake the Emperor. The Emperor himself, after traveling constantly for a night and a day, had rested a night and half a day to reflect on his late energy, and thereafter he was proceeding as roadside ovations would permit. Accordingly on this, the fifth night, Lopez was close behind the Emperor, and both were within a day of the capital, and less than a day ahead of Driscoll, Jacqueline and Ney.
All the next day Jacqueline kept to her coach. She was cross or nervously excited or melancholy, and by erratic turns in every mood that was hopelessly downcast, until her maid became well nigh frantic. At first Ney would hover near in helpless concern, but she ordered him away angrily. However, the storm broke at last when Driscoll reined in and waited at the roadside. She could see him through the little front pane of glass as the carriage drew nearer, and she watched with a fierce hunger in her eyes. All the time she stirred in greater agitation, and her breath came more and more quickly. At the very last moment, when a second later he might have seen her, she sprang to the window, looked once again, then in a fury snatched at the shade and jerked it down. Driscoll paused uncertain, but wheeled and galloped back to the head of the column. Berthe turned to her mistress. She was lying weakly against the cushions, staring at nothing and panting for air.
Toward dusk they reached Tuxtla, a little pueblo on the highroad set mid maguey farms that made the rolling hill slopes of Anahuac look like a giant’s cabbage patch. In the distance, under two snow-capped peaks beyond, the mosaic domes and sandstone towers and painted walls of the capital 216glittered in the setting sun like some picture of an Arabian city vaguely known to memory. The travelers were not a dozen miles from their destination, but Berthe announced that madame her mistress would rest at Tuxtla for the night.
The Austrians were quartered in the village, and Ney and Driscoll found accommodations for the two girls and themselves farther down the road, at the house of a maguey grower whom they persuaded to vacate. While it was still light Driscoll amused himself strolling alone between the rows of the great century plants. Under their leaves, curving high above his head, he watched peons with gourds suck out the honey water from the onion-like bulbs into goatskin bags. After a time he wandered through the hacendado’s primitive distillery and on back to the house, with a feeling for supper.
As he entered, he heard the clanking of a sabre in the dark room. He thought nothing of it, but almost at once something cut through the air and a noose fell over him. He swung round, but the rope jerked tight about his knees, and he lurched and swayed as an oak before the axe. He struck with his fist and had a groan for reward, but a second lariat circled his shoulders and bound his arms to his body. As he went down under the weight of men, the shutters were thrown open, and he looked up into the red-lidded eyes of Colonel Lopez. A troop of cavalry was passing on the road outside, and he caught the sound of wheels departing.
“You hear?” said Lopez. “The marquesa is going to the City, having decided not to wait for you. But she leaves a note, pour prendre congé, eh? You will perhaps have time to read it before the shooting.”
Once more Driscoll found himself in an adobe with a sputtering candle for company. But he also had her note. It was the third of the messages which she had written the night before.
217“Monsieur,” it began, “I cannot let you die without telling you that it was I who betrayed––”
He jumped to his feet. “Oh–the pythoness!” he breathed fervently.
“––who betrayed you,” the letter read. “That you know this, monsieur, that your last thought shall be a curse at me, such will be my punishment. It is a self inflicted one, because you need not have known what I have done. The telling of this to you is my scourge, but it is not penitence. Worse and more unbearable is my sorrow that the penitence will never come, that I can feel no remorse, no more than if some inevitable thing, like the fever, had taken you. I would always do again what I have just done; as pitiless as I must be for you, Fate is for me. Your life, monsieur, is but added to the hundreds already snuffed out in this country for France’s sake. Those hundreds are my countrymen, and you, if you lived till to-morrow, would make their offering useless. I have tried to save you, monsieur, but you would not permit. You would not return to your own country, and–there was no other way. But do not think there will come emissaries in your place. Do not believe that I would so send you to death needlessly. There will be no emissaries after you. Your Confederates shall know that Maximilian’s court martial executed you, and is it that your compatriotes will then desire to help Maximilian? Believe–only believe, monsieur–that it is a cruel duty not permitting that I shall listen to my heart. If you but knew, if you but knew–and you shall know. Monsieur Driscoll–oh, mon chevalier, it is that I love you. There, know then, dear heart cheri, the enormity of my sacrifice. Know the necessity of it. Know that I envy you, for you are going, and I must stay, all alone, without you. Mon bien aimé, without you, through all my long life!”
She had signed it simply, “Jacqueline.”
Again Driscoll was on his feet. He paced up and down the 218room. “There’s one thing,” he muttered, “and that is, there’s nothing between her and Maximilian, not when she’s keeping help from him.” And on he paced, his fists opening and clenching. Suddenly he came to a dead halt.
“By God,” he cried, “I’m not going to be shot, no sir, not now, not after–not after this letter!”
Here was neither boy nor warrior. It was very much in the way of a lover.