“The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of the soul.... Man cannot be happy and strong until he lives in the present.”
–Emerson.
For Maximilian it was the eve of execution. The soul feels that there is much to decide at such a time, but under the nettling merciless load the soul will either flounder pitifully and decide nothing, else lie numb and in a half death vaingloriously believe that it has decided everything. So may the condemned be open-eyed or blind. Or, according to the police reporter, be either coward or stoic. But it really depends in large measure on whether realization be dulled, or no.
Maximilian had too late come to understand that his anointed flesh was violable at all. He learned it only when the death watch was actually set on his each remaining breath. And now he was en capilla, in the chapel of the doomed; he, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, Count of Hapsburg, Prince of Lorraine, Emperor of Mexico, even He!
They had given him the tower room of Querétaro’s old Capuchin church, and against the wall was an improvised altar. But the sacrament waited. The tapers on the snow-white cloth were as yet unlighted. Instead the Most Serene Archduke–Emperor no longer–read from a battered volume of Universal History, which, with a book’s queer vagaries, had strayed into his cell. He read how Charles of England had died, then he paused, blinking at the two candles on the rough 460table. They were vague shapes, they were horrors, which he now began to see, as the visions of Truth so often are when hazily perceived.
He bitterly envied that unhappy Stuart, who, before his palace window, among Cavaliers and Roundheads, had died in majesty, the bright central figure in a tragedy of august magnitude. But for the Hapsburg how sordid, how mean, it all would be! He could see already the gaping, yellow faces, sympathetic in their stupidity. They would not really know that a prince was dying. The very guard with shouldered bayonet outside his door was a deserter, and it was this man, more than aught else, that gave him to chafe against his ignoble lot. The fellow never uttered a word, indeed; but he had a heavy, malignant eye, and each time he passed the large inner window that opened on the corridor he would look into the cell, as though to locate his prisoner. Then Maximilian could feel the insolent, mocking gleam upon himself, until for rage he clenched his fist.
Thus the Most Serene Archduke’s first perception of calamity was not that royal blood was to flow, but that it was to flow obscurely. Even the ancient raven curse, the curse of the Habicht which had given his House its very name, was now fulfilled by unclean buzzards. He saw them each day, perched on the neighboring roofs.
He sighed and turned to his book. Universal History? Yes, but for hundreds and hundreds of years that history of millions and millions of people was no more than the record of his own little family group. Such a course of reading for such a man held a terrible grandeur, and it must have been a unique sensation of pride that touched the golden-bearded, ultra-refined viking prince. A spoilt child he was, and though so cruelly reproved by Life, he yet could learn no lesson in the passing footnote that he would add to that family record. He could not see that the light which made the printed characters 461 so dazzling, yet distorted them. He could not know that the commonest man of the millions and millions might read that Universal History by quite a different and a calmer light. But he was aware of the sentinel’s tread back of him, and aware too of the fellow’s coarse, familiar leer.
One consolation he felt he might have had, and this was the dignity of martyrdom. But no one, alas, seemed to regard him as a martyr at all. He had begged that he alone should suffer. But the play at knightly generosity was too shallow. For at the time Maximilian believed that he would not suffer in any case. Later, though, when he knew that he must die, then with simple earnestness he had pleaded for Miramon and Mejía, and forgot himself altogether. But Juarez had hardly more than acknowledged the telegram, and now in the cell next him Miramon was confessing, and in the cell on his other side Mejía waited. Each of these two men would leave a wife and child.
Someone knocked. “No, father, not yet,” Maximilian answered gently, although his mood was impatience. The confessor sighed in protest against the waste of precious time, but he did not move away, as he had already twice before during the night. Instead he came and stood at the corridor window. His lip trembled pityingly. There was news, he said.
Maximilian pushed back the book, and was on his feet. The priest meeting his eager look, shook his head sadly.
“It comes from–from Miramar.”
Maximilian fell back. One hand groped out involuntarily, as in appeal before a blow. “News of Charlotte?” he asked faintly.
Charlotte was dead, the priest told him.
During a long time, after the priest had gone, his head lay on his arms, between the two candles. He heard no more the sentry challenges, nor sensed the menace in every slightest 462sound of the dark night outside. There was something else. “Death?” At first he did not consciously strive for an answer. But the question kept falling, and falling again, as a lash. The vulgar hands which plied the scourge, the stupid yellow faces, these no longer mattered. He felt the blows themselves, only the blows.
She had died, the poor maniac! She had died, a thing for the lowliest pity. And this was true of the haughty child of Orleans because she had wanted a throne. Slowly her husband raised his head; and staring at the wall, his tear-dimmed eyes opened wider and wider. Because she had wanted a throne? Because she had wanted a dais above the meek and lowly, above those who now pitied her! His eyes fell on the Universal History–the family record, and there grew in his eyes a look of detestation. Groaning suddenly, he buried his head again in his arms.
At dawn he too was to die, and because he too had craved a sceptre. Yet, and yet, he had meant to be an instrument of good. Born of kings, anointed by the Vicar of Christ, he had come as agent from the Almighty. But God had failed to sustain him, God had–again the blue eyes raised, but dry now, and stark in terror. “Yes, yes, yes,” so his reeling soul cried to him, “there is a God! There is, there is!” One sharp breath, and the mortal fear passed. In ghastly panic he crept back from the brink, either of the atheist’s despair or of the madman’s chaos. But the cost was heavy. Since God did exist, and God yet had failed him, then it was the man’s Divine Right that must be false. He, only a man, had mistaken his Destiny. Nay, had he a Destiny? Or why, more than another man? Here, then, was the cost. To keep his hope of Heaven, he stepped down among the millions and millions. His Divine Right, crumbling under the grandeur of partition among the millions, became for himself the most infinitesimal of shares, neither greater nor less than that of any 463 other human being. But glorified now by the holy alchemy of Charity, the tiny grain became divine indeed, and he beheld it as a glowing spark, his own inalienable share in the rights of man. So, for a moment, the poet prince knew again his old-time exultation. Even Truth, he now perceived, had her sublimities.
But the pall of horror fell again. To-morrow he was to die. He was to die because his life long he had sought to rob others of the tiny grain, of their God-given dignity as men, and that too, even as they were awaking to its possession. The vanity, the presumptuous, inconsistent vanity of it all! Under the dark mediæval cloak he had planned enlightenment, he, who had tried to rule without parliament, without constitution! He would have made a people believe in God’s injustice, in God’s choice of a man like them to be a demigod over them. Hence the blasphemous demigod had now to answer to human law. And it was meet and right. Purgatory was beginning on the eve of his death.
He, the torch of Progress! Maximilian smiled scornfully on himself. He was only a clod of grit caught in the world’s great wheels. The foreign substance had wrought a discordant screech for a moment, and then was mercilessly ground into powder and thrust out of the bearings. He pondered on the first days of the Family Group, when there was extenuation; more, when there was necessity, for a king. At any rate the monarch then earned, or could earn, his pomp and state by services actually rendered. And now? The Hapsburg decided that there was not a more contemptible parasite on the body politic. The crowned head was simply the first among paupers. He had his bowl of porridge, which was the civil list.
The doomed prince sank to a depth of shame that may not be conceived. He was humanity’s puny infant. He had dawdled among men centuries older than himself. His 464whole being was out of harmony with the universe. Fate had held his soul fast during those Dark Ages when he might have striven nobly, and now had cast it forth, an anachronism. It was a soul misplaced in eternity. The dire realization grew and grew, and with it the tragic agony, until with a sudden and the bitterest of cries he flung up his arms and fell heavily across the table.
“My life!” he moaned in piteous begging for something he might not have. “My life, to live my life over again!”
In the first light of morning Escobedo came. The Republican general unfolded a paper, and began to read. But instead of the death sentence, it was reprieve. President Juarez had postponed execution for three days.
“Three days?” Maximilian repeated, wearily shaking his head. “If your Republic could give me as many centuries, but three days!–Three days, in which to live my life!”
465CHAPTER XX
Knighthood’s Belated Flower
“Trusting to shew, in wordès few,
That men have an ill use
(To their own shame) women to blame,
And causeless them accuse.”
–The Nut-Brown Maid.
Later the same morning there sounded the ineffable swish of silken petticoats along the corridor and the clinking of high heels on the tiles. La Señorita Marquesa d’Aumerle had obtained permission to visit His Most Serene Highness. The sentinel of the evening before was again on duty, and his evil crossed eye seemed to lighten with vast humor as he presented arms for the lady to pass. She met his insolence with a searching, level gaze.
Maximilian hastened to the door of his bare cell, and took both her hands in his. “I am beginning to recognize my friends,” he said simply. “I know, I know,” he added, “you come to tell me that you failed to get the pardon. But you do bring reprieve.”
He would have her believe that he valued that.
Jacqueline regarded steadily the tall, slight figure in black, with the pinioned sheep of the Golden Fleece about his neck, and she sighed. She was disappointed in him. She had thought that pride of race, if nothing more, would give him character during these last moments. She allowed, too, for the grief, and the remorse, in the blow of Charlotte’s death. But she was not prepared for the roving eyes, the disordered mind, the feverish unrest of the condemned prince. Had his 466soul, then, been a cringing one throughout the night just past? It was the first time she had seen him, except at a distance, since the day she arrived in Querétaro, for she had chosen, and perhaps maliciously, to disconcert the tongue of slander. Hence she could not picture the ravages of sickness and anxiety, until now when she beheld his haggard face. It was one to bring a pang. The cheeks were hollow, the lines sharply drawn, and the skin was white, so very white, with never a fleck of pink remaining. And staring from the wasted flesh were the eyes, large and round and faded blue, and in them an appealing, a haunted look. But they softened at sight of her, as though comforted already.
“A reprieve is best,” he said. “You cannot think that I want a pardon, now that, that she is dead!”
“But sire––”
“‘Sire’? Ah, my lady, you are a little late, by something like a few hundred years. You see our American was right after all; a letter no longer makes a king.”
It was a bon mot that Maximilian had always enjoyed, it being his own, but this time he was most zealously in earnest.
“Monsieur, then,” she said, in no mood for reforms of etiquette. “Only, let me talk! We have three days, three days which are to be used. Your Highness must escape!”
But now she understood him less than before, for he only smiled wearily. It was, then, something else than fear that had broken him so.
Escape? And that guard in the corridor? Passing, ever passing, the diabolical humorist seemed to chuckle inwardly, as though to stand death-watch were the most exquisite of jokes.
“That man?” whispered Jacqueline. “Why, that’s Don Tiburcio. He was driven out of the Imperialist ranks by Father Fischer. But from his lips, this very night, Your Highness will hear that the road is open to Vera Cruz. Ah 467sire–monsieur–we have been working, we others. There will be horses ready, there will be a long ride, and then, you will safely board an Austrian ship waiting for you.”
Maximilian slowly shook his head. “No,” he said, “I am ready to die, as–as ready as I shall ever be.”
“But the remaining years of your natural life, Your Highness counts them as nothing! Yet you might live twice your present age!”
“My life–over again,” he murmured dreamily.
“Of course, why not?”
“One year to redeem each year that has gone.”
“Years of Destiny!” she cried, thinking to touch him there.
“No!” he exclaimed, so harshly and quick that it startled her. “But for me they will be years of dearest mercy. Wait, tell me first, Miramon and Mejía––”
“Yes, yes, we will save them too. Only, the risk is greater.”
“Bien!” He had almost accepted, but he smothered the word, and starting up, began to pace the room. At last he stopped. “The risk must be lessened, for them,” he said. “I will remain.”
“H’m’n,” the girl ejaculated, “Hamlet declines? Then there will be no play at all, at all.”
Maximilian knew how stubborn she could be; and so, reluctantly, he joined the plot.
“I have deserved Marquez and Fischer and Lopez,” he sighed. “But why there should be friends, even now, that I cannot understand.”
Yet she told him bluntly why she wanted his safety. It was on France’s account. Still, his gratitude was no less profound. She who would give life to others, what was her life to be henceforth? The mellowing sorrow, which her vivacity could not hide, smote him again, as it had that evening in Mexico when he came to her for counsel. He remembered. Out of a useless ambition for her country she had squandered 468her name, blighted her future. He remembered how, looking on her saddened face, he had been exalted to a pure devotion, and had burned with knightly fervor to do her some impossible service. But what was the service? There his memory failed, and he despised the chivalrous ardor which could be quenched with feeding on itself. After the fearful vigil of the night before, he had found a suit of armor beside him. In a word, he had forgotten self. Simple compassion was enough. That service? that service? If he could only remember. But he must. And in hot anger he strode back and forth, while Jacqueline sat and gazed in wonder. Once, turning from the corridor window, he paused. The guard had stopped a man, who now was evidently waiting until the prisoner should be unoccupied. Unseen himself, Maximilian recognized in the man the American named Driscoll. And then he remembered. He remembered Jacqueline’s secret, betrayed to him that evening in Mexico. He remembered that her happiness was lost in the loss of this man’s respect. Here, at last, lay the impossible service!
Maximilian glanced toward her stealthily. No, from where she sat she could not see the corridor, could not see the waiting American. A moment later Maximilian stood behind her; and when he spoke, she thought it odd that he should change from French to halting English.
“Miss d’Aumerle,” he began, in distinct if nervous phrasing, “yes, it was for France, all, all of which you haf done. Therefore is it that you haf come to this country, and here to Querétaro, whatever is to the contrary said.”
“De grace,” she laughed, rising abruptly, “there’s enough to do to-day without discussing––”
But he intercepted her even as she opened the door.
“Will Your Highness kindly let me pass?”
“And I know, I alone, that nefer haf you toward myself once felt, once shown, that which––”
469A sharp, indignant cry escaped her. Following her gaze he saw the American pass on down the corridor and out of hearing.
“Now who,” exclaimed the chagrined prince, “would ever have imagined such delicacy of breeding!”
“And don’t ever again,” cried Jacqueline furiously, “imagine that I stand in need of being righted!” Wherewith she too was gone, leaving her clumsy knight staring blankly after her.
A few moments later Driscoll knocked.
It was the first meeting of these two men since the memorable afternoon at Cuernavaca, when Driscoll had surprised Jacqueline listening to royalty’s shameless suit. Now he beheld Fatality’s retribution for that day’s bitterness. Retribution, yes. But it was not restitution. The girl he loved had just passed him in the corridor with a slight casual nod, and he would not, could not, stretch forth a hand to stop her. Instead, the smile so ironical of Fate had touched his lips.
“I was sent by Señor Juarez, sir,” he addressed the archduke in the tone of military business. “The President is afraid your three days of reprieve will be misunderstood. He sent for me as I was leaving San Luis yesterday, and I–I was to tell you––”
“You need not hesitate, colonel.”
“Well, that you must not hope for pardon, for the sentence will positively be carried out day after to-morrow. That–I believe that is all.”
“But–” Maximilian called, staying him. “Dios mio, such news merits a longer telling. It seems to me too, Señor Americano, that you should enjoy it the more, since it was partly you who brought me to this.”
“I don’t know as I’d thought of that. How?”
“You ask how? Do you forget how you took the traitor Lopez to Escobedo, the night I was betrayed?”
470Driscoll swung bluntly round on his questioner. “No I don’t,” he replied. “But you see, there was such a lot of bloodshed scheduled for the next day?”
“Isn’t that rather a curious reproof from a soldier? Loyal hearts would have bled, yes, and gladly. Noble fellows, they would have saved their Emperor!”
Driscoll half snorted, and turned on his heel. But he stopped, his lips pressed to a clean, hard line. “What of those townsmen in the trenches?” he demanded. “It wasn’t their fight.”
Maximilian’s eyes opened very wide, and slowly his expression changed. The thick lower lip drooped and quivered. Suddenly he came nearer the American, a trembling hand outstretched.
“I was saved that,” he murmured earnestly.
“They were,” the grim trooper corrected him.
“The townsmen, yes. But I–I was kept from murder. God in heaven, I would have murdered them! Ah, señor, if I could put to my account a night’s work such as yours, that night, when you used the traitor! I could almost thank Lopez. I do thank you.”
Still Driscoll failed to notice the proffered hand. He might have, had he seen his suppliant’s face, and the tense anguish there.
“Those innocent non-combatants, then,” Maximilian went on, “so they counted more than a prince with you?”
“Of course, there were a thousand of ’em.”
The other’s haggard look gave way to a smile, half sad, half amused, and taking the American by the shoulder in a grip almost affectionate, he said, “Colonel, did you ever happen to know of one Don Quixote of La Mancha? Well, lately I’ve begun to think that he was the truest of gentlemen, though now I believe I could name another who––”
“And,” interrupted Driscoll, “did you ever try to locate the 471most dignified animal that walks, bipeds not excepted? Well, sir, it’s the donkey. Take him impartially, and you’ll say so too.”
The strain was over. Maximilian laughed. “If Don Quixote had only had your sanity!” he began; “or rather,” he added, charmed with the conceit, “if knighthood had had it, then the poor don would never have been needed to be born at all.”
Ignoring the sincerity of the Hapsburg’s new philosophy, and how tragically it was grounded, Driscoll only smiled in a very peculiar way. Knighthood? The word was supercilious cant, and irritated him. During that very moment, while listening to Chivalry’s devotee, the young trooper thought of a little ivory cross in his pocket, a cross which was stained with a girl’s blood. Murguía had given it to him, to give to Maximilian on the eve of execution. But Driscoll had not promised, and yet Murguía had implored him to take it, even without promising. The old man held faith in vengeance as a spring to drive all souls alike, and if Maximilian’s last earthly moment could be embittered with sight of a cross, then, he firmly believed, the American needed only to be tempted with the means to do it. Moreover, in a sudden impulse, Driscoll had taken the holy symbol, “to do with as he chose.” There was no message, Murguía had explained. The Señor Emperador would read the graven name, “Maria de la Luz,” and that would suffice.
Looking now on the cultured gentleman caressing his beard, Driscoll thought again how hellishly distorted was the sign of salvation then in his pocket. But he left it there. He, too, had a king’s pride, incapable of low spite. Charity alone, though, would have held him, if he had but known that Maximilian was ignorant of the dead girl’s fate.
The archduke for his part had been amiable and conciliatory, because there was a certain delicate question he wished to ask.
“Oh by the way, mi coronel,” he said abruptly, “I must 472extend my excuses for keeping you waiting in the corridor just now. But there was another visitor here. And as we happened to be talking of–well, of a rather personal matter, not intended for outside ears––”
“Do not worry. When you raised your voice, I turned and left.”
“But perhaps,” said Maximilian slowly, “it would have been better if you had overheard, either you or another knowing the cruel rumors which–which link my recent visitor’s name with my own. Then the truth would have been made known. That truth, señor,” he hastened to add, despite a hardening frown between the American’s eyes, “means first that I have been honored, indeed, in my visitor’s––”
He got no further. A broad hand closed over his mouth.
“Another word of that, and I’ll–I’ll––”
The threat was left unfinished. Gasping in the chair where he had fallen, Maximilian found himself alone. He was vaguely nonplussed. There had been so many revelations of late that he thought this one simply a further re-adjusting of himself to the modern world of men. The present instance had to do with the critical juncture where the woman enters. But he had learned something else, too. The American loved her, and that was important. Yet lovers were very contrary beings, he mused lugubriously.
“Still, I shall try again,” he decided. “One humble success against my career of distinguished failures should not be too much to expect.”
The night that followed, a black, favorable night, was the time planned for escape. Horses ready saddled waited outside the town under the aqueduct. Certain guards were bribed, among them Don Tiburcio. The humorous rascal had driven a hard bargain, but only because the money was to be had. He would have sold himself as briskly for the cream of the jest.
473Late the same night there came a frantic pounding at Driscoll’s door, where he was quartered in the sacristy of the old Capuchin church. “Well?” he muttered, alert already.
“Hurry, mi coronel!” a cracked voice blended with the knocking. “Hurry, you are wanted!”
“Murgie!” Driscoll exclaimed, flinging wide the door. “Back from San Luis, and prowling round here as usual, eh? Well, what’s the matter?”
“Quick, señor! Maximilian is sick. Go, go to him!”
Partly dressed, bootless, unarmed, Driscoll shoved the old man aside, and sped through the church, hopping over half awakened soldiers as he went. Once in the street, he glanced up at the tower room, which was Maximilian’s, and thought it odd that no light streamed through the narrow slits there. The sentinels, too, were gone. But he ran up the steps and darted along the corridor, only to strike his head against a heavy wooden door that was ajar. He rushed inside the cell, and with arms outspread quickly covered the space of it, in the utter dark smashing a chair, crashing over a table, cursing a mishap to his toe. But he found no one.
“This here’s a jail-break,” he mumbled under his breath. “Dam’ that Murgie, he’s roped me in to stop ’em!” Whereat, all unconsciously, he smiled again at Fatality.
Groping his way back to the corridor, he felt rather than saw three dim figures steal past the door. Silently, swiftly, he gave pursuit. He heard a fervent whisper just ahead.
“Hasten, dear friends, and may God––”
The next second he was grappling with someone. But his unknown captive did not resist.
“There, señor, loosen your fingers. I am not escaping. I am returning to my cell. But I had to make the other two think that I was with them.”
The voice was Maximilian’s.
474“Hark! Ah, poor souls, they have failed!”
The prince spoke truly. A fierce “Alto ahí!” sounded below. Then there were musket shots and the confusion of many scrambling feet. Murguía had routed out the church barracks. And when torches were brought, the soldiers discovered that they had hands on Miramon and Mejía. But the false sentinels were gone! In leaving the road clear they had used it themselves, already.
“You fools!” suddenly a half crazed wail arose. “Fools, he has escaped! He––”
“Oh dry up, Murgie,” said Driscoll, coming down the steps. “He’s gone back to his room, I reckon.”
475CHAPTER XXI
The Title of Nobility
“Hear, therefore, O ye kings, and understand.”
–Wisdom of Solomon.
One more sunset, one more sunrise! And then?...
Maximilian again confronted the ghostly enumeration. But this time his last day should be the day of a man’s work, in simple-hearted humility. He no more searched the skies to find a supernal finger there. He let Destiny alone, and did his best instead. For a man’s best is Destiny’s peer.
The fiery June sun was dying in its larger shell of bronze over the western sierras, and the self-same blue that vaults beautiful Tuscany was taking on its richer, darker hue, when a foreigner in the land, Din Driscoll, walked under the Alameda trees, his pipe cold in his mouth, he perplexed before his heavy spirits. For he no longer had war to distract, to engross.
Maximilian’s physician, an Austrian, found him in his reverie. Would the Herr Americano at once repair to His Highness attend? The señor’s presence would a favor be esteemed, in reason that a witness was greatly necessitated.
Wondering not a little, Driscoll hastened back into the town. As the physician did not follow, he arrived alone. But in the door of the archduke’s cell he stopped, angry and embarrassed. For his eyes encountered a second pair, which were no less angry, which moreover, were Jacqueline’s. Maximilian and Padre Soria, the father confessor, were also there, but Driscoll at first saw no one but Jacqueline. As with him, she had been vaguely summoned, without knowing why. A last testament 476was to be signed, she imagined, but in his choice of witnesses she thought that Maximilian might at least have shown more delicacy. As to cruelty also, she would not confess, but cruelty it was, nevertheless. To see again this American was to know memory quickened into torture, and days afterward there would still be with her, vividly, hatefully, the beloved awkwardness of his strong frame, the splendid, roguish head, now so forbidding, and more than all, the way he smiled of late. It was a smile so cold, so cheerless, a something so changed in him since the old, piquant days of their first acquaintance. Despise herself as she might, Jacqueline knew how the sight of the man halted there would leave her whole woman’s being athirst and panting.
Maximilian’s thin white face lighted eagerly when he perceived that Driscoll had come. The haggard despair of two days before had given way to a serene calm, like that which soothes a dying man when the pain is no longer felt. In a gentleness of command that would not be denied, he rose and brought the American into the room.
“Colonel Driscoll,” he began, “you know, of course, that a witness is the world’s deputy. He is named to learn a certain truth, but afterward he must champion that truth, even against the world. So you find yourself here, but first I wish to thank––”
“Please don’t mention it,” Driscoll interposed. “I’m willing to do anything I can.”
“Then remember,” said Maximilian, “that you are a witness, and a witness only. Can you bear that in mind, señor, no matter what you may hear?”
Driscoll nodded, but the very first words all but made him a violent actor as well. Maximilian had turned to Jacqueline. For a moment he paused, then with a grave dignity spoke.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “reverently, prayerfully, I ask your hand in marriage.”
477She gasped, and so sharp and quick that certainly she was the most dumbfounded there. Her utter stupefaction amazed Driscoll as much again as the question itself. He stiffened as though struck. If this were a revelation? If it could be–if it could be that she really knew no reason why she should marry Maximilian?
The archduke observed them both, and his eyes shone with kindliness. But making a gesture for patience, he hurried on. “Father Soria here,” he said, “will come in the morning, just before the–the execution, to perform the ceremony. A judge of the Republic will come too, for the civil marriage. As to the banns––”
“But why–why, parbleu?”
Jacqueline stood before him, stung from her speechless trance by fury. Behind narrowed lids the gray eyes hardened as points of steel.
“You shall know, mademoiselle,” he answered softly. “It is a boon I ask of you, the greatest, and the only one before I go––”
“Why? Tell me why!”
“Because it is the boon a true knight may crave. It is to right before the world the noblest woman a knight can ever know––”
“Sire!”
The word was rage and supplication both. It was a hurt cry, piteous to hear. Then the glint dying from her eyes blazed to tempestuous life in those of the Missourian. But the priest’s hand touched his arm, and the priest’s voice, low and gentle, stayed him.
Maximilian, though, had seen the outburst. “Ah yes, señor, I remember,” he said, and smiled, “one may be slapped upon the mouth, yes, yes, for even breathing my lady’s name when one talks of rumor.”
Jacqueline darted at them a puzzled glance. She did 478not understand at first. Then she divined. And then, wide and gloriously, her eyes opened on Driscoll, her defender. But in the instant they sought a safer quarter. She could not, and would not, forgive him for being there at all.
“However,” the obdurate prince continued, “our witness must bear with me this time, for I will–will, I tell each of you–speak plainly. The false scandal does exist. Deny it, dear lady, if you can.–Nay, señor, you believe it, or did. So, now, as the world’s deputy here, you must be armed to foil those venomous tongues. But there is only one way. You shall tell them that they talk of Maximilian’s widow––”
“But––”
Jacqueline, Driscoll, both spoke at once. But the girl flashed on the man an angry command for silence.
“Enough, enough!” she cried, “Let me speak, then end it. Whatever others may think, Your Highness extends me his respect? Bien, but that gives me a certain right, which is the right to consider just one thing in answering the question of Your Highness–just one lone, little thing.”
“And that?”
“Is–is whether or not I have the honor to love Your Highness. Oh, the shame in such sacrifice, the shame you put on me! You should have known my answer already.”
Her answer? Driscoll stirred uneasily. What, indeed, was her answer?
“Yet later, mademoiselle,” pursued her inflexible suitor, “when others aspire to your hand, there might come one for whom your answer would be favorable. How then, if this suitor, when pausing to hear what the world says of you––”
“He’d choke it down the world’s throat!” Driscoll burst forth. “He alone need know it’s a lie.”
Jacqueline started as she heard him speak, but the glad and unintended look she gave him changed as quick as thought to haughty resentment. After all, he was still there.
479“But how else,” Maximilian persisted, “can such a man know so much?”
Then, a captive absolute to his lofty idea, the poet prince pleaded for it as one inspired. All things worked, as by Heaven’s own will, to sanction what he proposed. There was Charlotte’s death. There was his own. Dying, he was still a Mexican, and might wed in any station he chose. While if he lived, as an archduke of Austria he could not. But he detested life. With it he had bettered no one. Yet by his death he hoped to save more than life to another. This other was the girl before him. He had wrecked her dearest ambition. For France’s sake she would have lured him from peril. For that, and that alone, she had sacrificed her name. Such accounted for their interview at Cuernavaca. Such accounted for her coming to Querétaro. Yet through his own blind weakness she had failed. France had lost Mexico, he his life, and she–her happiness. But the last could yet be restored. And why not purchase it with his death, since he must have died in any case?
“Must have,” Driscoll interrupted, “must have died in any case?”
The American had listened perplexed, now with a quick, eager start, now with crinkled brows. First of all the old mystery and its anguish had assailed him. The hideous, gloomy tangle would wound him round again. Did Jacqueline care for this prince? Surely, because he had seen the evidence. But why had she intrigued against his Empire, why had she turned Confederate aid from him?
Then, as the ruined monarch spoke, the other man saw. He saw the truth. Truth that reconciled all contradictions. That explained what even the theory of her wanton heart had only half satisfied before. Explained everything by that heart of purest gold. The lover knew now why she had delivered him to Lopez and the Tiger, two years ago, though 480with the act so perversely confessing her love for him. He knew why, at Boone’s Córdova plantation, she had tempted him to hold her for his own, though even then she was returning to the capital, to Maximilian. No, it was not wanton sport. It was not contradiction. But it was conflict. In the contemplation of that conflict he stood unnerved. It was the conflict between a wild yet altogether French scheme of patriotic endeavor and her own good woman’s love. His eyes wandered to her, half afraid, and the chill of months about his heart was gone, as some great berg of ice sinks in the warmth of sunny waters. From siren alluring flesh whose touch was woe, she was become a sceptred angel, far, far away, so tantalizingly far away!
Thus Driscoll listened on, happy in his soul of a man, yet abashed as a boy. But listening, at the last he was perplexed anew, though for another reason.
“Must have died, sir?” he repeated again. “But that wasn’t what you thought last night. No sir, last night you thought you could escape. But just the same you turned back. You chose to die!”
“His Highness,” spoke the gray-haired priest, “returned for the señorita’s answer.”
“My answer?” cried Jacqueline. “You mean, father, for my sake?”
“Yes.”
Driscoll started violently, perplexed no longer. “By God, sir,” he swore, and clapped Maximilian on the shoulder, “but you are a man!”
The prince recoiled, his instincts of breeding in arms against the savage equality. But then, slowly, a smile that was almost beatific touched his lips, and without knowing it, he straightened proudly, as majesty would.
“A man?” he murmured, breathing exaltation. “Then am I, at my last moment, come into harmony with God’s own 481ordering of the universe. For he made man on the sixth day, not a Hapsburg. Man, and after His Own Image–Oh, but that is the title the hardest of all to win! You–you don’t think, señor, that you would like to take it back?”
Driscoll reddened inexplicably. Murguía’s ivory cross was still in his pocket.
“No!” he blurted out with sudden defiance. “It’s the truth!”
“Then,” said Maximilian solemnly, “on your word I stake my faith. To-morrow, at the judgment-seat, I shall hope to hear myself called so.”
“Your Highness,” questioned Jacqueline in a kind of daze, “Your Highness did not intend to escape last night?”
“No, he did not,” Driscoll answered for him. “He got Miramon and Mejía started all right, and then, without knowing that your plot had failed, he turned back to this cell here, alone.”
“Your Highness, you did that for–for––”
Her voice broke, and she stopped abruptly and went to the narrow window. With her back to them, she groped for the dainty bit of cambric that was her handkerchief.
“So you see, my daughter,” said the priest, drawing near her, “what he would have given, what, before Heaven, he has given, to tell you what you so hotly resent. Do you resent it now?”
The beautiful head shook slowly. She was touching her eyes with her handkerchief.
“Then you will not let his sacrifice be in vain? You will marry him?”
Impetuously she turned, and faced them. There were blinding drops, clear as diamonds, on the long lashes. “Oh Your Highness, Your–Oh, there is something you can tell me that is–that is inexpressibly better?”
“Let me know what it is.”
“It is if–if you can forgive me.–Mon Dieu, why did you 482need to heap this terrible sacrifice on me? Why could you not remember that I tried to drive you from your empire? That I plotted against you? That––”
“Hush, you would have saved me.”
“Oh, only incidentally, and you knew it. Yet you must––”
“Don’t! There’s nothing to forgive.–But wait, we will grant that there really is, but only that I may exact my price of forgiveness.”
“The price? Name it.”
“That you will marry me, here, to-morrow morning, before I die.”
Jacqueline raised her head. “Has Your Highness,” she demanded, smiling shyly behind her tears, “has he forgotten the woman’s, rather my consideration, before such a question?”
Driscoll straightened, squared his shoulders to take a blow. To his blindness her manner looked like awakening love for the other man–and for the man himself, not for the prince! His sense of loss, his agony, were extreme. But of the old bitterness he now knew nothing. His rival was putting the question. “And according to that consideration, mademoiselle?”
Driscoll did not see her swift glance toward himself. He was hurrying out lest he might hear her answer. And she let him go–till he reached the door. But there, like one frozen, he halted rigidly.
“Hélas, I do not love you, sire,” Jacqueline had answered, very quietly.
Maximilian, however, did not seem heart broken.
His attention was all for the mere witness. He saw the effect on that witness. In Driscoll’s glad face he read his own triumph, his own purpose achieved. Jacqueline was righted at last.
“No,” he agreed, “I could not hope for so much.–But another might.”
483Then apropos of nothing, he went and flung his arms about Driscoll. The astounded trooper could only grip his hand, just once, without a word. Then he was gone.
Maximilian watched him go. The priest turned to Jacqueline. She, too, stood poised so long as his spurs rang through the corridor. At last silence fell on them. For a moment she hesitated. Then, trembling, her eyes moist, she held out her hand. “Good-bye,” she whispered. But, impulsively, she raised her arm and touched the doomed man’s forehead lightly with her finger tips, making a blurred sign of the cross. And, not daring an instant longer, she too fled.
Maximilian was alone with the priest. The room was growing dark. It was the last night.
“Now, father, light the tapers, there on the altar. Yes, I am ready. Ready? Blessed Mother in Heaven, it is more than I had thought to be!”