Eugene P. Lyle

“La belle chose que l’aristocratie quand on a le chance d’en Être.”

––Voltaire.

That garish daub which was sopped up from the burning homes of men and bespattered over the forest’s dark crest was already mellowing under the gentler touch of dawn, when the three travelers gained the open country.

“Poor, dirty, little Inditos,” Jacqueline mused aloud. Berthe struck her pony in a tremor of fright. The American was riding ahead. “Fire and sword,” Jacqueline went on, and her voice lowered to intense scorn, “they make the final tableau, but–it’s gaudy, it’s cheap.”

The trail had broadened into a high road, and now it wound among the hills like a soiled white ribbon. Driscoll turned in his saddle. “I shouldn’t wonder,” he observed in the full-toned drawl that was peculiar to him, “but what we’d better be projecting a change of venue. This route is too public, and publicity around here strikes me as sort of prejudiced. S’pose we just stir up an alibi?”

A certain stately old judge back in Missouri would have smiled thus to hear the scion of his house. But the marchioness, confident in her mastery of English, thought it was the veriest jargon. What was the boy trying to say? His next words grew fairly intelligible. “We are now headed for Valles. Well, we’ve decided not to go to Valles.”

Perhaps they had, but she at least had ceased deciding anything, 109since the overruling of her veto in the matter of precedence when one is hoisted upon a burro.

A narrow pony path crossed the road. “First trail to the left, after leaving the wood,” Driscoll said aloud, “and this must be it.” Campaigner in an unfamiliar country, he had informed himself, and it was with confidence that he led his little party into the bridlepath. But he looked anxiously at the forest behind. He did not doubt but that Rodrigo, if it were he back there, would terrify MurguÍa into betraying their destination, or their supposed destination, which was Valles.

“Can’t you hurry ’em up a bit?” he called back.

“We do try,” protested Jacqueline, holding aloft a broken switch, “but they only smile at us.”

Driscoll got down and undid the spurs from his boots. One of the immense saw-like discs he adjusted to mademoiselle’s high heel, passing the strap twice around the silk-clad ankle. Jacqueline gazed down on the short-cropped, curly head, and she saw that the back of his neck was suddenly red. But the discovery awakened nothing of the coquette in her. Quite the contrary, there was something grateful, even gravely maternal, in the smile hovering on her lips for the rough trooper who took fright like a girl over a revealed instep. Still, the interest was not altogether maternal as she watched him doing the same service for Berthe. Perhaps he was too far away, or perhaps practice brought indifference, but at any rate, his neck was no longer tinged in that fiery way.

“Now dig ’em!” said he. “We want to make that clump of mesquite yonder, now pretty quick.”

The trees he pointed to were two or three miles away, but the travelers covered the distance at an easy lope. Driscoll kept an eye on the road they had just left, and once hidden by the mesquite he called a halt. As he expected, a number of horsemen appeared at a trot from the direction of the forest. They did not pause at the cross trail, however, but kept to the 110highway in the direction of Valles. The American and the two girls could now safely continue their journey along the bridlepath.

“Monsieur,” Jacqueline questioned demurely, and in her most treacherous way, “how much longer do we yet follow you up and down mountains?”

“W’y, uh–I’m going to the City of Mexico.”

“And we others, we may tag along, n’est-ce pas? But the city is far, far. And, to-night?”

“Of course,” said Driscoll, “if you should happen to know of a good hotel––” He paused and gazed inquiringly over hills covered with banana and coffee to the frost line. He would not have tried a frailer temper so, but to provoke hers was incense to his own.

“You others, the Americans,” she said tentatively, as though explaining him to herself, “you are so greedy of this New World! You won’t give us of it, no, not even a poor little answer of information. Alas, Monseigneur the American, I apologize for being on this side the ocean at all–in a tattered frock.”

Driscoll looked, but he could see nothing wrong. She seemed as crisp and dainty as ever. If there were any disarray, it was a fetching sort, with a certain rakish effect.

“Oh that’s all right,” he assured her heartily, “you can stay.”

“Really, and after you’ve been writing us notes from Washington to–to ‘get out’? We French people do not think that was polite.”

“I never wrote you any notes, and,” he added in a lowered tone, “the devil take Washington, since Lee didn’t!”

Jacqueline’s lips pursed suddenly like a cherry. “Oh pardon me,” she exclaimed. “I did not know. And so you are a–a Confederate? But,” and the gray eyes fastened upon him. She rode, too, so that she could see his face, just ahead 111of her, “but your faction, the–yes, the South–she is already vanquis–no!–whipped? I–I heard.”

He did not reply, but his expression disturbed her unaccountably. She could almost note the whimsical daredeviltry fade from his face, as there came instead the grimmest and strangest locking of the jaws. She tried to imagine the French beaten and her feelings then, but it was difficult, for her countrymen were “the bravest of the world, the unconquered.” They had borne victory over four continents, into two hemispheres. But this American, what must he feel? He was thinking, in truth, of many things. Of his leave taking with his regiment, with those lusty young savages of Missourians whom perhaps he was never to see again. He was thinking of his ride through the South to Mobile, of the misery in stubborn heroism, of the suffering everywhere, matching that in the dreary fever camp of the Old Brigade. He was thinking of all the beautiful Southland torn and ravaged and of the lowering cloud of finality. Of the Army of Northern Virginia so hard pressed; of the doom of Surrender, a knell already sounded, perhaps. Never had Jacqueline seen such bitterness on a human face. It was a man’s bitterness. And almost a desperado’s. At least there was the making of a desperado in the youth of a moment before. She caught herself shuddering. There was something so like a lurking death astride the yellow horse in front of her.

But over her also there came a change, and it grew as she saw and appreciated the man in him. Her caprices fell from her, and she was the shrewd woman of the world, a deft creature of courts, a cunning weaver of the delicate skeins of intrigue and politics. A glint of craft and purpose struck from the gray eyes, as in preparation for battle. Her mischievous bantering had really been fraught with design, and by it she had revealed to herself this man. But the change in her came when he proved an antagonist, as she now supposed him to be. For in the uncloaking he stood forth a Confederate. His cause was 112lost. He was in Mexico. He was on a mission, no doubt. One question remained, what could the mission be?

Abrupt frankness, with its guileful calculation to surprise one into betrayal, was the subtlest diplomacy. “Let us see,” she mused aloud, “you, your comrades, monsieur, you have no country now? Bien, that accounts for your interest in Maximilian?”

“And what is your interest, Miss–Jack-leen?”

She staggered before the riposte. The “Jack-leen” was innocent blundering, she knew that. He had heard Rodrigo address her so, and he used it in all respect. But there was her own question turned on herself. By “her interest” he of course meant the interest she was showing in himself; he was not referring it to Maximilian. And yet the double meaning was there, just the same. He had struck back, that was certain, but because she could not tell where, nor even whether he had wounded, she was afraid to parry, much more to venture another thrust. Those who had sent the rustic evidently knew what they were about. He could shoot well, which was exhilarating. To redeem one’s country’s discredited bills, was quixotic. She rose to that, because she was French. But to fence with herself–well, that was quality. Instinctive, inbred, unconscious, and unregistered in any studbook of Burke or Gotha–but quality. And she recognized it, for there was deference in the silence which her baffled diplomacy now counseled.

They passed many natives plodding on to Valles with market stuff, going at the Inditos’ tireless foxtrot, now a man in loincloth stooped under a great bundle of straw or charcoal, or a family entire, including burro and dog. Of a gray-bearded patriarch with a chicken coop strapped to his back, Driscoll inquired the distance to an hacienda of the region which had the name of Moctezuma. “Probablemente, it will be ten leagues farther on, seÑor,” the Huastecan replied.

113“We are going,” Driscoll now informed his companions, “to drop in on Murgie–the hospitable old anaconda.”

They acquired a pineapple by purchase, and stopped for their morning coffee at a hut among numberless orange trees, and at another farther on for their midday lunch, where they learned that the Hacienda de Moctezuma was only just beyond the first hill, and only just beyond the first hill they learned that they had six leagues more to go. They covered three of these leagues, and were rewarded with the information that it was fully seven leagues yet. Geography in Mexico was clearly an elastic quantity. But towards three o’clock a young fellow on a towering stack of fagots waved his arm over the landscape, and said, “Why, seÑor, you are there now.” Yes, it was the hacienda, but how far was it to the hacienda house? Oh, that was still a few little leagues.

In the end, after nightfall, they rode into a very wide valley, where two broad, shallow rivers joined and flowed on as one through the lowland. Here, on the brow of a slope, they perceived the walls and the church tower of what seemed to be a small town. But after one last inquiry, they learned that it was the seat of Anastasio MurguÍa’s baronial domain.