Her gestures, her every word, were an effervescence. There was something near hysteria in the bright flashes of her wit. However gay, joyous, cynical, Jacqueline may have seemed to herself, to Berthe, terrified though the girl was, Jacqueline’s mood was a sham.

“The frisson, oh, those few exquisite seconds of emotion, eh Berthe?” she exclaimed. “Pursued by robbers–the chase–the rescue–and the jolting, the jolting that took our breaths! Why, Berthe, what more would you have? HÉlas, to be over so quickly! And here we are, left alone in our coach, robbers gone, rescuers gone! Berthe, do you know, I believe they compared notes and decided we weren’t worth it. But I should have thought,” she went on in mock bitterness, “I should indeed, that at least our Fra Diavolo would have been more gallant, even if––”

“Even if?” prompted Berthe, then bit her lip.

“Even–Oh Berthe, fi donc, to catch me so because I was wandering!–even if one could expect no such gallantry from the Chevalier de Missour-i. There now, do you tell Tobie to drive on––”

“But mademoiselle––”

“Say ‘Jeanne’,” the marchioness commanded, stamping her foot.

407“My lady,” the girl persisted, but added with affectionate earnestness, “and my only friend, I was simply going to say that we are not deserted after all.”

“But didn’t I see him riding away?”

“Him, yes, but look out of the window. See, he’s left six or eight–O–oh––”

It was a joyful cry, which got smothered at once in confusion. Turning quickly, Jacqueline beheld a little Bretonne with eyes cast down and cheeks aflame. Yet even then Berthe gave a cosy sigh of relief. There was cannonading not far away. They had just been taken by brigands, and as suddenly left alone on the road. Thus Jacqueline’s company ever cost her many a tremor. Yet somehow one of those chevaliers de Missour-i needed only to appear, and she felt as secure as a kitten on the hearth rug. A chevalier de Missour-i had but now ridden up to the coach door.

“Berthe!” whispered Jacqueline severely, so that the girl thought her dress was awry. “Quick, tuck your heart away in your pocket. It’s right there on your sleeve.” Whereat Berthe employed the sleeve to hide her higher mantling color.

Jacqueline turned on the chevalier at the window, and surveyed his sleeve. It was covered with dust, but Jacqueline’s big eyes could see through dust. She felt about her a subtle atmosphere that made her an outsider.

“Ah, Monsieur le Troubadour?” came her bantering recognition.

Mr. Boone’s French crowded pleasantly to his tongue tip. “Mademoiselle,” he returned, “and,” he added, with an odd glance toward Berthe, “Madame l’Imperatrice, uh–how goes it?”

Jacqueline’s lashes raised inquiringly, until she remembered how the lank gentleman before her, with the tender heart of a Quixote, had mistaken Berthe for the Empress, months 408before at the CÓrdova plantation. She liked him somehow better now for persisting in it.

“Her Imperial Highness,” she explained, very soberly, “may deign presently to observe that you are here, monsieur, though, as you see, her thoughts are far away. However, if you can possibly give your own to a humbler person, to myself, dear Troubadour, I should very much like to know what is to happen next. Use fine words, if you must; even put it into verse, only tell me––” With an impulsive shove she flung open the door and stepped into the road. She could still see Driscoll’s troop, or rather the cloud of dust, speeding toward QuerÉtaro, but her arm swept the horizon impersonally. “Only tell me,” she demanded, “what’s happening now, over yonder?”

“Pressing business, ma’am–mademoiselle, and,” Daniel lied promptly, “Colonel Driscoll wished me to make you his excuses.”

“The minstrels of old, sir,” said Jacqueline, “usually accompanied their more gallant fibs with a harp.”

Her vivacity was rising fast, and for some reason, Berthe darted an angry look of warning on Mr. Boone. But the poor fellow was blind to Jacqueline’s jealousy of a distant conflict, and he blundered further.

“Jack Driscoll’s just that way,” he apologized for his friend cheerfully. “Abundat dulcibus vitiis–he’s chuck full of pleasant faults. When there’s a clash of arms around, let the most alluring Peri that ever wore sweet jessamine glide by, and–she can just glide. While with me––”

“I see. You have stayed. But I, too, like battles, monsieur. Tobie, get back up there with the driver. There’s no admission charge, I imagine, to this battle?”

Boone gladly offered to take them for a nearer view, but he saw Berthe–his eyes were never elsewhere–shrink involuntarily.

409“Stop, arretaz! Hey there!” he ordered, and the driver stopped.

Jacqueline’s pretty jaw fell in wonder. The natural order of things was prevailing over the artificial. Social status to the contrary notwithstanding, it was Berthe who commanded here, and not Mlle. la Marquise. But Jacqueline was happy in it, and perhaps a little envious too. Ah, those Missouriens! This one, who would rather stay than fight! And that other, who was now fighting for quite the opposite reason! They had a capacity for variety, those Missouriens!

It was much later, after a lunch from Jacqueline’s hampers under the nearest trees, and after the distant fusillades had quieted to an occasional angry spat, that the ladies’ escort of Gringo Grays, bearing a flag of truce, set out with their charge toward the town. Daniel rode beside the coach window, and the flaps of the old hacienda conveyance were drawn aside. He wondered how it happened that the hours had passed so quickly. He would not believe that his comrades had been fighting, that many of them had died, so blissfully fleeting were those hours to himself.

“It’s all according,” he mused profoundly.

And he could not help singing. He hummed the forlorn chanson of Joe Bowers of the State of Pike, which Bledsoe, then lying cold and stiff under a mountain howitzer, had so often bellowed forth.

But he sung it as a plaint, yet not hopelessly, and Mademoiselle Berthe was the maid entreated of his melody.

The sharpshooters on both sides paused as the coach drove into the little sweet-scented wood that was called the Alameda, and the Missourians, with sabres at salute, transferred their 410charge to the Imperialists crowding around. Among the latter were some of Jacqueline’s own countrymen, and those, in starvation and defeat, were as debonair as the cadets of Gascogne.

“A rose, mademoiselle,” said one, bowing low. He had an arm bandaged, and his sword was broken. “An early merciful bullet plucked it for you, so that it fell unhurt, though the petals of all the others are scattered everywhere among the leaves, among the fallen branches, among the shattered statues of our classic grove here. See, like the rose I tender, you come among us poor broken soldiers of fortune. I think, dear lady, there will be those above to bless you for it.”

Jacqueline smiled behind her tears. “Always a Frenchman, eh, mon lieutenant?” she said.

The fragrance of the place was smothered under gunpowder and sluggish fumes. The pleasant drives, the grass, the flowers, were trampled by gaunt soldiers bearing their wounded, but the young officer murmured on in the speech of the Alameda’s one time fashionable promenade.

“Who is that?” she interrupted.

She pointed over the heads around her to a man bearing someone off the late bloody field, and that moment staggering across the trenches into the Alameda. It was an act that moved her, for the rescuer was a richly uniformed officer, and the other but a common soldier. With Berthe close behind, she alighted from the coach and hurried forward to help. The wounded soldier’s face lay on the officer’s breast, and she saw only his hair, matted and very white, from which a rusty brown wig had partly fallen. But more to the purpose she saw that he was bleeding, and the callous warriors there knew that the angels of the siege had come at last.

“Lay him in my carriage–but carefully, you!” she said, and was obeyed, while Berthe deftly fixed cloaks and blankets around the withered form. Someone mounted with Toby 411and the driver, and the coach rolled slowly away to the hospital, leaving behind the two girls staring at the richly uniformed officer, and the officer staring tenfold harder at them. He was a large man, with big hands and feet, and for a Mexican he had a mongrel floridness of skin. His cap was in his hand, and his hair was red and thin. Amazement and a startled prying anxiety choked his utterance.

“Now then, Colonel Lopez,” Jacqueline addressed him calmly, “may I ask you the way? I have come to speak with Maximilian.”

“La SeÑorita d-d’Aumerle!” he stuttered.

“Faith, no other, who is awaiting your pleasure, seÑor.”

“You come from, from–Mexico?”

“But hardly to chat with you all the afternoon, caballero.”

“From Mexico! From the capital!” he kept repeating. The man’s finger nails cracked disagreeably, and his features worked in an extreme of agitation. He tried to fix his shifting blue eyes upon first one and then the other of the two girls, as though to ferret out what they must know. “You do bring news from there?” he said huskily. “What of Marquez? Is he coming? Shall we have the aid he went for? When––”

“Ah, the medal for military valor!” observed Jacqueline. “Indeed, mi coronel, all must acclaim your bravery, as well as–your loyalty. But take me to your beloved Prince Max, for I do assure you, seÑor, my news goes not without myself.”

“He visits the hospital every day,” Lopez advised reluctantly. “Perhaps if I should take Your Mercy there first––”

Passing on through the ravaged Alameda, they entered the streets of QuerÉtaro.

“Hear!” Jacqueline exclaimed. “Such a quantity of vivas and clarins and national hymns and triumphant dianas, one would imagine, for example, that there had been a great victory?”

“Eh? Oh yes, or a hearty breakfast, seÑorita.”

412Which was more essential. And why not? Hope’s bright hue blotted out emaciation. They had broken through to food that day. Bueno, could they not do it again? Old croons had returned to their stalls and accustomed corners in the market place, and as in days of peace were already squatted before corn or beans heaped on the stone pavement in portions for a quartilla, a media, or a real, as though the pyramids were not so pitifully little, as though the wholesale purchase were not made just that morning in heavy terms of blood.

Behind the ponderous Assyrian-like church of Santa Rosa, in the old, half ruined monastery and garden, was the hospital of the besieged. A stifling, fetid odor, far worse than of drugs merely, sickened the two girls as a foul breath when they passed with their guide between thick walls into the large, overcrowded rooms. Military medical service was not yet become an institution in Mexico, and this place was like some horrible antechamber of the grave. Every cot had its ghastly transient, and so had the benches, brought here from the different plazas. More and more wounded were arriving constantly, and those found to be still alive were laid on the flagstones wherever space for a blanket remained. But in spite of the morning’s fight, in spite of almost daily skirmishes for weeks past, the sick outnumbered all others; and those who did come with wounds, and survived them, stayed on to swell the longer list. Men tossed in fever, craving what they might not have, a cooling draught, a proper food, and effective medicine, until, with waking, they craved an easier boon, and died. But the hospital fever, the calenturas, the gangrene, were not to be all. Out of the diseased air, mid the fumes of pious tapers, the spectre of epidemic was taking hideous shape over the many, many upturned faces. The spectre was the tifo, a plague more dreaded in high altitudes than black vomit in the low.

Jacqueline found Maximilian bending over a stricken 413cavalry officer. The Emperor was far from a well man, and his fair skin more than ever contrasted as something foreign and lonely among the swarthy faces on every side. His ostentation was now simplicity, as befitted a monarch in camp. He wore neither sword nor star. His garb was plain charro, in which he often walked among citizens and soldiers, inquiring about rations, or requesting a light for his cigar, never minding if a shell burst and kicked dust over him, and always affable, always ready to smile and praise. It was a rÔle that came naturally to his gentle soul. One would like to believe–if one could, alas!–that he had in mind no kingly precedent.

Pausing unseen, Jacqueline noted tears in the blue eyes as he pinned some decoration on the officer’s bloodstained shirt. A good heart, she thought, yet ever the prince. In his divine right was he even here, presuming to send a dying subject to the Sovereign in Heaven with a “character,” with a recommendation for service faithfully done. His hands trembled from haste, for he would have the soldier appear before that dread Throne above as a Caballero of the Mexican Eagle. In pity for them both, Jacqueline asked herself what precedence awaited the new Caballero of the Mexican Eagle in a Court, not Imperial, but Divine.

Jacqueline had not journeyed her perilous way out of simple friendship for a desolate prince, but could she have foreseen how his eyes lighted with gladness to behold one friend who remembered, in sweet charity she would almost have come for that alone.

“When Your Highness has finished here,” she said, glancing at the inquisitive Lopez near her, “or whenever I can speak with Your Highness in private––”

There was beseeching in Maximilian’s quick scrutiny of her face, as though the helpless messenger had aught of power over her tidings. “In–in a moment, mademoiselle,” he said tremulously. “I always see the–new ones, before I go.”

414The “new ones” were still being brought in, until any first aid from the distracted surgeons was of the most casual–the ripping of bandaged cloth, a knot tied, and so on to the next. Followed by Lopez, the two girls, and several officers of the hospital staff, Maximilian passed from ward to ward. But Jacqueline’s hand seemed always to be threading a needle, or holding a ligature, or lightly touching a hot forehead, and in every case the surgeon would nod quickly, gratefully, as to a fellow craftsman. Berthe the while gazed in tender wonder on her calm mistress, and nerved herself someway to help also.

And so they came to the withered form in brave red coat, and green pantaloon whom Lopez had carried off the field. One of the nurses had placed a handkerchief over his face, because of the stinging flies, but Jacqueline recognized the thin white hair and the twisted wig as of the old man whom she had sent ahead in her coach. At first he seemed to be dead, for he lay very still on the floor, though a surgeon was probing his wound, and his blood was fast filling the bowl held by the nurse. But now and again, the straining cords in his emaciated wrist twitched with the protest of life. Maximilian stooped to raise the handkerchief. Lopez made a movement to prevent, but restrained the impulse as useless. And then Maximilian revealed the gaunt, leaden features of Anastasio MurguÍa, the father of MarÍa de la Luz.

Jacqueline fell back with bloodless lips. The father of that dead girl–and Maximilian! They were face to face, these two! But the Emperor’s expression was of pity only. He sank to his knees, the better to make the wounded man understand the words of comfort on his lips. For Jacqueline, the horror of it chilled her. Surely, surely, she thought, the hidden tragedy must now unmask; because of its very awfulness, it must! That the prince should be thus oblivious of such a knowledge, and yet kneeling there, made the scene ghastly beyond words.

415“I remember him,” said Maximilian softly, looking up to the others. “One of your orderlies, Colonel Lopez, I believe? Of course I remember him, for I see him often. He is always near me. Even to-day, on the llano, during the thickest of the battle, there he was at my stirrup, and there he must have fallen, in humble, unquestioning loyalty.”

Jacqueline drew back in relief, and she imagined that Lopez did also. Maximilian had forgotten the hacendado utterly.

With a grunt of satisfaction the surgeon drew forth his forceps from the wound and dropped a bullet to the floor. Next he gently rolled the patient over on his back, and then it was that Jacqueline saw in MurguÍa’s hand, in the hand that had been under him, a little ivory cross. Fainting, unconscious, he still clutched it, from Driscoll’s leaving him on the battlefield until the present moment. By now the stains of his child’s blood were washed away in his own. Jacqueline’s quick eyes caught an inscription on the gold mounting, and leaning close she read the dead girl’s name, “MarÍa de la Luz.”

With the gripping of the bullet and its extraction, or possibly at the sound of a voice–Maximilian’s–the old man’s eyes opened, and held the Emperor’s in a deathly stare. Jacqueline watched the piercing beads grow smaller and smaller in their cavernous sockets, and all the while they seemed to concentrate their intense fire. The others, except Lopez, thought it delirium, but Jacqueline would have named it the very blackest hate. “This man will live!” she said to herself, and shuddered.

Maximilian, seeing consciousness returned, spoke cheerily. “Ah, doctor, you will have him well and sound within a week, I know? Look to it, sir; a heroic veteran like this cannot be spared.”

A strange distortion wrapped the visage of suffering. “Could 416that be a smile?” Jacqueline wondered. But the Imperial party took its leave, and the tragedy lurking beneath was not revealed, as yet.

Through the throng waiting outside the hospital to acclaim him again as a prince victorious, Maximilian led the two girls to their coach, and went with them to the convent of Santa Clara, where he asked that they be received as guests by the sisters. Here, in the comfortless parloir of the retreat, he learned the reason of Jacqueline’s daring journey from the capital.

“I bring Your Highness,” said she, “the most spiteful news my feeble sex can ever bring.”

Again the involuntary plea for fair tidings swept his face.

“And, and that is, mademoiselle?”

“‘I told you so.’”

Maximilan’s cheeks paled to the marble whiteness of his brow. He had just heard the answer to the one question, to the one hope, of all QuerÉtaro.

“You, you mean Marquez?”

“Yes.” And then she told him, and seeing how stricken he was, her exasperation at his vain incapacity changed to pity for his breaking pride–which may be called his breaking heart.

“But mademoiselle, I gave my empire into his keeping,” he protested, as though such trust in a man of itself proved that man’s constancy. But the messenger, but Truth, would not recant.

“Then,” moaned the Emperor suddenly, “Marquez is not coming back?”

“Nor ever meant to, sire. Listen, Your Highness made him lieutenant of the Empire, and sent him to the capital for aid. Bien, he turned out the ministers. He broke into homes, and pillaged even the stanchest Imperialists. He heard that Puebla was besieged by a Liberal general, Porfirio Diaz, so 417instead of coming here, Marquez marches all his army down there. You will observe, sire, that he wanted the road kept open to Vera Cruz.”

“But why? Tell me!”

“Ma foi, to sell the capital more easily. In any case to be able to save himself.”

“Sell the capital?”

“Just a little patience, sire. Now what did Diaz do, but take Puebla by assault before Marquez could arrive? Then he turned on Marquez, and Marquez turned and ran. Oui, oui, sire, he ran, ran like the little ugly, skulking Leopard that he is. To cross a creek, he filled it with all the ammunition, and kept on running, leaving his army defenseless behind him. Groan if you must, sire; others have died in groans. But the Leopard had done this kind of thing before, it should have been remembered. He got back safely though, and squandered the army that might have relieved QuerÉtaro to do it. Mon Dieu, what that panic must have been! One entire battalion surrendered to fifty guerrillas. Yet the Austrian cavalry, the Hungarians, and some others fought, fought with their sabres, and won victories too. HÉlas, they only proved what might have been. They only proved how Marquez, if he had not hesitated, might perhaps have saved Puebla and destroyed the Liberals. As it was, they could only retreat, and hardly two thousand of them, ragged and bleeding and filthy, straggled back into Mexico during the next few days. Now they are besieged there. Oui, oui, besieged, by Diaz, by the army of the East, by twelve thousand Republicans, formerly called brigands. And inside is the Leopard, snarling as ever with his regency of terror. Oh no, he will not come to QuerÉtaro. BontÉ divine, he cannot. Nor would he. He still holds the capital–for sale.”

“No, no, mademoiselle, there you wrong him, surely. Or tell me, then, who would buy?”

418“Probably no one. At least not Santa Anna. The buyer must have an army.”

“My friend, this is a cruel jest.”

“Earnest enough, parbleu, to make the Leopard forget QuerÉtaro, once he was safely away.”

“Then why doesn’t he sell out to Diaz?”

Jacqueline’s eyes snapped contemptuously. “Young Diaz,” she replied, “is not a fighter to buy what he can take. It’s only a question of a few weeks.”

“Then by all that’s mysterious, who would buy? I cannot.”

“Of course you cannot. That is why Marquez wants you out of the way, sire. So he left you here. The Liberals will attend to that for him.”

“Then who will buy? Who? Who?”

The blood shot into the girl’s cheeks, and one small hand clenched tightly.

“France–possibly,” she said.

The Emperor started as from an acute shock. His thoughts raced backward, then forward, gathering the whole heinous truth about the perfidy of Marquez.

“And I,” Jacqueline added calmly, though she was still flushed, “I have forwarded his offer to Napoleon.”

“You, mademoiselle? You, an accessory?”

“To Your Imperial Highness’s downfall? Ah no, sire! Your Highness is no longer a factor. Your August Majesty will be eliminated absolutely before Napoleon can reply to my despatch. As I said, the Liberals around QuerÉtaro will attend to that. Your Highness has merely delayed the profit my country might have had from his abdication. Meantime Your Highness himself has made his own ruin inevitable. But I, sire, I would not see Marquez, nor receive a word from him, until we were actually besieged in the capital, and he beyond the hope of coming to Your Highness here. 419Now then, if Marquez only holds out until the army of France returns––”

A deep sigh interrupted her. “No longer a factor,” murmured the Emperor. Thus quickly, then, could the world take up its affairs again after his elimination!

“Mademoiselle,” he cried suddenly, generously, “you are–superb! Dear little Frenchwoman, you are, you are!”

“Poof!” said Jacqueline. “But don’t you see, sire,” she hurried on eagerly, “that we will have to fight the Americans? Yes, yes, then they can no longer say they drove us out.”

“Indeed they cannot. And I, among the first, and the most heartily, do wish you a warlike answer from that firebrand of a Napoleon. But tell me, why do you come to QuerÉtaro? How did you come?”

“How? Easily. All the guerrilla bands–except one, which I escaped–are concentrated either here or with Diaz.”

“And Marquez let you come, you who are so important to him now?”

“As though he could help it, parbleu! My message to Napoleon was in my own cipher, and after he had sent it by a scout to Vera Cruz, I informed him that in it I had directed Napoleon to send his answer to me at QuerÉtaro. Otherwise Marquez would have kept me in prison rather than let me go. But as it was, he assisted me through the Republican lines by a secret way he has arranged for his own escape, if need be. So––”

“But why did you wish to come at all?”

“Ma foi, as if I knew! A matter of conscience, I suppose.”

“Matters of conscience are usually riddles.”

“Like this one? Bien, I am still trying to get Your Highness to leave the country. But this time, sire, it is to save you.”

“To save me?”

“Of course, on account of France.”

“Oh, on account of France?”

“Why else? If–if anything happens to Maximilian, France 420will be blamed. Oh why, why did you not escape this morning, while the road was open?”

For the first time during the interview the fire of high resolve leaped into the prince’s eyes. “But could I, in honor?” he demanded sternly. “Think of the townspeople, abandoned to the Liberal fury. Their Emperor, mademoiselle, means to face the end with them, here, in QuerÉtaro.”

The dignity of his catastrophe was already beginning to appeal to him, to exalt him, even as the vision of a Hapsburg winning his empire had so often done before.

“But,” protested the girl, “if they capture Your Highness, if they–if they hold you for trial?”

She stopped, for Maximilian was laughing, and laughing heartily. The idea of hands laid on him, an Archduke of Austria–ha, he was grateful to her. Its very absurdity had given him the first relaxation of a laugh in months.

“Nevertheless,” persisted Jacqueline, whose heritage of a revolution was an obstinate bundle of these same absurdities, “nevertheless, I had hoped to save Your Highness with my news, since it is news that leaves no hope. Why not, then, escape? Treat for terms, do anything, only save your followers and–yourself, sire?”

But she found it impossible to sway him from this, his latest conceit. His new rÔle, the more desperate it looked, only ensnared him as the more worthy. He contemplated the end serenely. As a military captain he was culling laurels against theatric odds. His heroic loyalty to a lost cause, with perhaps a little martyrdom (of personal inconvenience), how these would count and be not denied when he should return to his destiny in Europe!

His was even a mood to consort with lofty traits in others, and in a kind of poetic ecstasy he thought of Jacqueline’s steadfast devotion to her country’s glory. And he was moved again by the vague, chivalrous longing to bend the knee, to do her 421some knightly service. But–yes, he seemed to remember, there was such a service to be done, yet and yet–no, he had forgotten.

Then quite curiously, yet still without remembering, he dwelt in reverie on that man named Driscoll who had so filled the morning with valiant deeds.