The Emperor was coming–elaborately, by august degrees.

First, and far in advance, arrived a haughty pack liveried in the royal green of ancient Aztec dynasties. New tenants might have been moving on this bright May day, for the flunkies attended a small caravan of household stuff, which they crammed through the gaping doorway as nuts into a goose’s maw. The stuff was all royal, of royalty’s absolute necessities. There were soft rugs, and finely spun tapestries, and portiÉres to smother a whisper. There was a high-backed chair, and a velvet-covered dais for the high-backed chair. There were brushes, whose stroke caressed gently and purringly the Hapsburg whisker. There was a Roman poet, fastidiously bound, and then–there was the Ritual.

The Ritual was a massive tome, of glazed, gilt-edged paper, of print as big for the proclaiming of truth as the Family Bible, of weight to burden a strong man, of contents to stagger a giant brain, unless the giant brain had in it the convolution of a smile. Maximilian and Charlotte had reigned a year, and so far the Ritual was the supreme monument to the glory and usefulness of their Empire. It decreed, by Imperial dictation and signature, the etiquette that must and should be observed in the courtly circle. But alas, you can’t codify genuflections, nor yet a handshake.

123The next degree in the imperial advent was the imperial courier, who proclaimed from a curveting steed what everybody suspected. “Our August Sovereign” was approaching.

Several hundred peons stared with open mouths. Gathered before the house, they prattled to one another in childlike expectancy of the SeÑor Emperador. Most of them were learning for the first time that they had an emperor. Still, it sufficed to know this was an occasion for auto-inspiring vivas, like once when the IlustrÍsimo Bishop came. They took new hold on the green boughs they were to wave. A handkerchief here and there fluttered from a bamboo pole. Down in an adobe village by the river junction, every gala scrap of calico print, whether shirt or skirt, pended from cords stretched across the street; and cotton curtains, some of crude drawn work, hung outside the windows. All the poor finery of the Indians was on exhibition to do honor to a gorgeous Old World court. But the fiesta air had already gotten into the susceptible native lungs, and that alone, with only a trumpet’s blare, would make for a hurrah in genuine fervor.

The roomy porch of the old mansion was crowded with the chief people of the hacienda, clerks, foremen, house servants, besides the administrador and the chaplain. Behind a remote column were the three wanderers in the wilderness; the Storm Centre, the Marchioness, and the Maid. They were to have been gone by now, and yet it was not the coming of the emperor that had stopped them. The cause was nearer at hand. Smoking a long black cigar, “grizzled and fierce, as ornate in braid and decorations as a bullfighter,” Colonel Dupin had delayed them.

His Cossacks thronged the colonnade. The brick-red of their raw leather jackets splotched every other color with rust. The Contra Guerrillas were many things. They were Frenchmen and Mexicans. They were Americans, Confederate deserters, Union deserters. They were Negroes and Arabs. 124They were the ruined of fortune, now soldiers of fortune. They were pirates and highwaymen. They were gold hunters, gamblers, swindlers. They were fugitives from the noose, from the garrote, from the guillotine. But they were all right willing desperadoes. And there was not a softened feature on a man of the troop. Only a tigerish ferocity could lead them, could hold them.

They surrounded the Missourian on the hacienda portico. If only for his debonnaire indifference, they knew him for a “bad man” such as none of them might ever hope to be. And they watched him like lynxes, though he was unarmed. Yet he did not look “bad.” He merely looked bored. He was a prisoner, but not the only one. Anastasio MurguÍa fidgetted among the Cossacks on his own porch. His restless eyes roved incessantly over the crowd, seeking his daughter, but they were steadily baffled.

Down in the valley, where the Rio Moctezuma joined its course with the PÁnuco, a dusty mist moved nearer along the old Spanish highway, and faintly there came the sound of clarions. An eager murmuring arose from the throng on the hillside. It swelled more confidently to a buzz as the far-away dust lifted at the ford and revealed the beaded stringing of a numerous company. The distant bugles rang clearer on the pure air. “Yes, he comes,” the people cried, “There! Seest thou, hombre?–There! Viva el SeÑor Emperador!”

For Colonel Dupin the cloud of dust would shortly evolve into a staying hand of mercy, into the exasperating stupidity of mercy. He had captured the American not ten minutes before, and here was interference in a gauzy haze of dust. He signed to one of his men to follow with MurguÍa, and he himself placed a gauntleted hand on Driscoll’s shoulder. “Now,” he said.

But a white figure of Mexican rebosa and silken instep moved swiftly from behind a column and touched the Tiger’s 125arm. Both Jacqueline and Berthe had been watching the Cossack chief rather than the spectacle in the valley. And as he turned on his prisoner, Berthe half screamed and clutched at the bosom of her dress. It was Jacqueline who gained his side. She addressed him sharply as one who hates to reopen a tedious argument.

“Monsieur Dupin,” she cried, “have I not already permitted myself to tell you–yes, I repeat, you are mistaken. He is in no sense whatever an accomplice of Rodrigo GalÁn.”

The Tiger heard, no doubt, but he did not stop. He kept on toward the door, Driscoll beside him, and his men around him. He meant to pass through the house. Some secluded corral in the back would do for the execution. Driscoll seemed as indifferent as ever, though there was a lithe, alert spring in his step. Behind him MurguÍa was moaning, praying to see his daughter. Berthe followed, bewildered, and silently wringing her hands. But the death march was so business-like, and every one else was so intent on the approach of a royally born person, that the crowds shoved aside by the little group never once suspected that they had just brushed elbows with tragedy in the making.

Jacqueline caught her breath, sucked it in rather, in a pang of angry despair; and plucking up her skirts she ran ahead until she could oppose her slender figure squarely in front of the burly Frenchman. If he were to move on, he must trample her down. Her eyes, usually so big and round and shading to a depth of blue with their lively mischief, were all but closed, and through the narrowed lashes they gleamed like white steel. Her voice, though, was clear and even, of a studied courtesy.

“Yes, I know, Monsieur le Coronel, suspicion with you is quite enough. But,” she went on in contempt and feigned surprise at his dullness, “this rage of yours at being outwitted by Rodrigo GalÁn blinds you to something else.–Pardon, 126monsieur, a Frenchman does not jostle a woman.–Thank you.”

“But the jostling by a woman’s tongue, mademoiselle.–Well, what is it? Have mercy, be brief, since I am not even to breathe while my lady talks.”

“I was thinking, dear monsieur, of the feelings of an artist, to which you are very, very blind.”

“Feelings, artist? Name of a name, mademoiselle!”

“Precisely, Maximilian’s feelings. You know how he abhors the sight of blood. Ma foi, and I agree with him.”

“Go it, Miss Jack-leen!” Driscoll abetted her. Never a word of their French did he understand, but he knew that she had a power of speech. Dupin evidently knew it better yet, for though he laughed, he did not laugh easily.

“Never fear,” he said, “His Majesty’s delicate prejudices are safe. It will be all underground before he comes, and no muss at all.”

“But you forget,” Jacqueline cried testily, “you forget the imagination of a poet.”

“And he will imagine––”

“Yes, because I shall tell him.”

“SacrÉ––”

“And possibly he would brace his feelings to a second Æsthetic horror as a rebuke for the first. In a word, my colonel, there will be one more body to follow–underground. Now is this quite clear, or–do you require my promise on it?”

The savage old brow manifested the desire to make her a victim as well, but in this extra blood-thirst she knew that Driscoll was safe. “I understand, Mademoiselle la Marquise,” he said, laying on heavily the suave gallantry of a Frenchman. “Yes, I understand. Prince Max values Your Ladyship’s good taste so highly–– Pardi, I believe he would certainly shoot me if you told him to.”

“Exactly,” Jacqueline coldly assented.

127“And Monsieur l’Americain may congratulate himself on the influence of mademoiselle, the arbiter elegantiarum–with His Majesty.”

“As Monsieur le Tigre may congratulate himself that the American does not understand this insult, sir.”

Behind her rose a dry hysterical cackle of renewed hope. “The Little Black Crow!” she exclaimed. “See, my colonel, he is not worth an execution all to himself, so do we all go back to contemplate Prince Max’s loving ovation.”

“The Emperor arrives!” she cried gayly, returning to the porch. With the others she was once more behind the remote column, an end of the rebosa hanging over her arm ready to be flung across her face. “But what–HÉlas, I haven’t my Ritual with me.”–The Ritual classified every movement, every breath of the Court, as rigidly and with as little consciousness of humor as LinnÆus did his flowers.–“It can’t be a Minor Palace Luncheon of the Third Class,” she mused, “and it isn’t Grand Court Mourning of the First Degree. Ha, I have it, He–that ‘H’ is a capital, please, not as a sacrilege, but to be Ritualistic–He is out on a voyage of the Minor Class, Small Service of Honor, Lesser CortÈge. Now then, all’s comfortable; no room for plebeian misconceptions.”

On they came, each rigidly after his kind, a Noah’s procession of Dignitaries with the August Sovereign first of all. To bring on the majestic climax so early was illogical, of course, but dust having happened to be created before precedence, the CortÈge was changed the other way round for a voyage, so that the First Category people breathed what the August Sovereign kicked up and kicked up some additional for the Second Category, and the Second did the same for the Third, and so on down to the Ninth, or “And all others,” who breathed the best they could and paid the bill.

Nothing preceded the royal coach except the royal escort, and that by exactly two hundred paces, in which interval a 128canonical obligation was laid on the dust to settle. It was a particularly gallant royal escort. The Empress’s Own, or the Dragoons, or Lancers, or Guardsmen, or Hussars, or whatever they were, were picked Mexicans; and they were frankly proud of their rich crimson tunics; also, perhaps, of their heavily fringed standard worked by Carlota herself. A cavalry detachment in fur caps with a feather completed the body guard. Mexico is a hot country, but that was no reason why an Austrian regiment should sacrifice its furry identity.

“Belgians too!” exclaimed Jacqueline. “And the Mexican emigrÉs! They came back when we made it safe for them. But where, oh where, are the French?”

“Everywhere,” growled the Tiger, “in mountains and swamps, dying everywhere, fighting for this Austrian archduke. But he doesn’t like to be seen with them.”

Behind eight white mules of Spain, four abreast, rolled the coach of the Emperor, solitary and marked as majesty itself. There were postilions and outriders and footmen arrayed in the Imperial livery with the Imperial crown. And on the coach door flashed Maximilian’s escutcheon, his archducal arms grafted on the torso of his new imperial estate. There were the winged griffins with absurd scrolls for tails. They had voracious claws, had these droll beasts of prey, and they clutched at an oval frame ruthlessly, as though to shatter it and get at a certain bird within. Poor bird, his shelter looked very fragile, and he about to be smothered under an enormous diadem as under an extinguisher. He was none other than the Mexican eagle perched on his own native cactus, and he desired only peace and quiet while he throttled the snake of ignorance in his talons, which snake had been his worry ever since the Aztec hordes from the north had first caged him in. Beneath the Imperial arms was the motto, “Equidad en la Justicia,” but it seemed an idle promise.

In the huge traveling coach, with a greyhound at his feet, 129sat one lone man. He had a soft skin, rosy like a baby’s, and blue eyes, and what some called a beautiful golden beard. The huzzas swelled and surged from all sides, and he smiled on the people. But he gazed beyond them, and into the blue eyes came the light of exaltation such as is inspired by music that starts a heartstring in vague trembling.

The CortÈge followed in carriages one hundred paces apart. The first held the First Grand Dignitary, the only Dignitary of Third Category rank, and hence the only one who could stand near the throne after Highnesses, Grand Collars, and Ambassadors. He was the Grand Marshal of the Court and Minister of the Imperial Household. His privileges consisted of seeing “His Majesty when called for,” and of “communicating with Him in writing.” But he could not see Him when not called for. In reality the Grand Marshal was a quiet old Mexican gentleman who seemed ill at ease. He was General Almonte, one of those conservatives who had sought their country’s tranquillity in foreign intervention. But Maximilian had bespangled him into a Dignidad, and thus lost to himself an able politician’s usefulness. The real man of affairs was an obscure Belgian who openly and insolently despised everything Mexican. He also sang chansonettes. He was the sour-browed Monsieur Éloin already mentioned.

Dignidades enough to make up the Lesser CortÈge were not lacking. Riding alone was the Chief of the Military Household, who could return no salutes when near His Majesty except from First and Second Category personages. Under the circumstances, recognition of his own father would have been rank heresy. Then there was the Grand Physician, the Grand Chaplain, and Honorary Physicians and Chaplains, who could wear Grand Uniforms and a Cordon and eat at the Grand Marshal’s table; and there were Chamberlains and Secretaries of Ceremony and Aides. Many surreptitiously peeped into a monster volume as they 130rode. It was not a mass book nor a materia medica. It was the Ritual.

The Sixth Grand Dignitary of Cabellerizo Mayor helped His Majesty to descend from His coach. He did it mid vociferous cheering and waving of boughs and agitation of handkerchiefs on bamboo poles. Aides and Deputy Dignitaries worked industriously driving back the simple Inditos.

“‘The General Aide de Camp,’” Jacqueline quoted reverently, “‘will keep the people from the Imperial coach, but without maiming them.’”