A few days later Jacqueline and Berthe attended a performance at the Teatro de Iturbide. It was the first held there since the beginning of the siege, and to the place late foes were thronging eagerly in what seemed a most inordinate thirst for amusement. The playhouse was without a roof. Its metal covering had been widely sown in the shape of bullets, and only a canvas overhead kept out the sun. But the broiling pit was filled, as well as circling tier over tier of loges, and in the street a great crowd jostled and surged, like people who stare at the dead walls of a jail because a man is being hanged inside. If the curious cannot have both Time and Space to their liking, then the more ghoulish will gorge themselves on the coincidence of Time alone. “Now,” they whisper awesomely, “his hands and feet are being strapped! What must he be thinking this very instant, and we standing here?” So those outside the Teatro de Iturbide sweated patiently. In all evidence it was not an ordinary performance scheduled for that day.

“Buzzards?” said Jacqueline, looking up and seeing their outspread wings shadowed on the canvas roof, “Fi donc, that effect is long since shabby!” But it chilled her, nevertheless.

The curtain was up. A drop, showing fields in green and a receding road in brown, filled the back. The actors seemed actors solely, and this idea persisted with the Frenchwoman, 444as with many another, throughout. Seven military characters arranged themselves in a kind of state on the unpainted, slanting stage. They might have been supernumeraries, like the “senators” in “Othello.” At least their severe demeanor became them awkwardly. They wore uniforms, but not of appalling rank. He who presided was only a lieutenant colonel, the other six were captains. Before them, each on a square stool, sat two generals, one with a bandaged cheek. There were legal gentlemen in plain black, while guards at stiff attention here and there completed the grouping. Beyond any doubt, it was a trial scene. And to confirm the surmise, one of the legal gentlemen, a very peaceable appearing youth, arose and in the Republic’s name demanded the lives of Miguel Miramon and Tomas MejÍa–here he indicated the two generals–and with impressive cadence, also in the Republic’s name, demanded likewise the life of Fernando Maximiliano de Hapsburgo. The lieutenant colonel and the captains knitted their seven tawny brows portentously, but they were not in the least astounded at such a very extraordinary request.

There was no need of a theatrical production at all. Other Imperialists had not been so unnecessarily distinguished, as for instance, General Mendez, that ancient enemy of RÉgules and executioner of Republicans under the Black Decree. Caught the day QuerÉtaro fell, he was shot in the back as a traitor. Yet he met a legal death. Taken in armed defiance of the Republic, identity established, the hollow square and shooting squad, such was the routine prescribed. But the lesser official relics of the Empire, six hundred in all, escaped generally with a few months of prison. The rank and file of the betrayed army had already melted away. But for the three arch-culprits a trial was deemed requisite, and President Juarez, in San Luis Potosi, so ordered. Hence the stage setting as above described.

Maximilian was at first surprised. He had said to Escobedo, 445“I am ready to go whenever you can favor me with an escort to the coast, but first I require assurance that my loyal followers shall not suffer.” But the Republican chief had smiled oddly, and locked him up. Later, however, Maximilian had seemed content. A trial for his life, that would add the last needed glamour to the prestige of his return to Europe. So he affably humored his captors, and was rewarded with humiliation–his judges could hardly be more obscure. So as he was genuinely sick abed, he got himself excused from playing his part in the Teatro Iturbide.

The soi-disant Emperor had four conscientious defenders, chosen from Republican jurists, two of whom were then in San Luis to do what they might before Juarez. The other two spent eloquence and acumen on the court’s seven tawny brows. Their first point came from Maximilian himself. It was complacent, this point. The naÏvetÉ of it was superb.

“I am no longer Emperor,” so the defense ran, “nor was I during the siege; because, before leaving the capital, I drew up my abdication, which was then countersigned by my ministers. However, it was not to take effect until I should fall prisoner.”

When the Republic recovered her breath, she felt in her amusement a wounded pride. This prince must think her very simple. So, she was to recognize the usurper’s abdication after she had fought and suffered to take the usurper? A captured thief draws from his pockets a quit-claim deed to the plunder he has stolen, and giving it to the court, would therefore go free! The tragedy changed for a spell to comic opera. And matters were not helped greatly when next were invoked “the immunities and privileges which pertain under any and all circumstances to an archduke of Austria.”

Though handicapped by their client’s arrogance, counsel yet did their utmost. They argued law and humanity, with tremulo effects. They prayed that “the greatest of victories 446be crowned by the greatest of pardons.” But it was of no use. The bloodthirsty stripling persisted in the Republic’s name. This Maximiliano was a Mexican. In many beautiful speeches the said Maximiliano had said so. Hence he could not evade responsibility to the laws of his adopted country. And there was, for instance, the law of 1862 concerning treason.

Well, in a word, the three accused were straightway sentenced to death; and Escobedo, approving, named Sunday, June 16th, for the execution. It might be mentioned of this Escobedo that on two former occasions, when the circumstances were exactly reversed, MejÍa had each time saved his life. Since QuerÉtaro, there have been comments on the vigor of Escobedo’s memory.

“Poor pliant Prince Max,” sighed Jacqueline, “he is still being influenced to stay in Mexico! Come, Berthe, we must make all speed to San Luis and see the Presidente.”

In the long hall of the Palacio MunÍcipal at San Luis Potosi, before the old-fashioned desk there, sat an Indian. He was low and squat and pock-marked, and there was an ugly scar, livid against yellow, across the upper lip. He had a large mouth, high cheek-bones, and swarthy skin with a copperish tinge. He was a pure-blooded Indian. At twelve he did not know a word of Spanish. His race, the Zapotecas of Oaxaca, had all but been extinguished by the Conquest. Except for the ungainly black he wore–excepting, too, his character–he might have been a peon, or still the servant he once had been. But the homely, heavy features of his round head did not, in any sense, repel. On the contrary, the countenance was frank, though yet inscrutable. The piercing black eyes were good eyes, and indomitable, like his muscled jaw. The flat, square forehead made one aware of intellect, and of force. So short and thick, he looked a sluggish man, but it was the phlegm of a rock, the calm of strength, and 447whatever the peril, almost inanimate. His country called him BenemÉrito de AmÉrica, a title the noblest and rarest in its Spartan hint of civic virtue.

The Indian’s desk was littered with messages from the princes of the earth. Like his expiring race, he had fought their order, and they had made of him a wandering fugitive. But now they were imploring him for one of their number, whose surrendered sword that moment lay across their petitions. Two of the letters, but not from princes, he had read with deep consideration. One was from the President of the United States, the other from Victor Hugo. But these also he shoved from him, though regretfully, and now he was gazing out over the Plaza, the line of his jaw as inflexible as ever.

But they were not many, the moments this man had to himself, and it was not long before a gendarme in coarse blue, serving as an orderly, disturbed him.

“Well, show her in then,” he said, frowning at the card laid on his desk, nor did he rise when an unusually beautiful but very grave young woman entered the room.

“At your orders, SeÑorita de–d’Aumerle. You come, I suppose, to save him?–But,” he added with the austerity of a parent, “it is not difficult to imagine why you are interested.”

“No, SeÑor Presidente,” he heard himself quietly contradicted, “Your Excellency can not imagine.”

He looked up, into a pair of honest gray eyes. But her tone had already told him enough. He rose to his feet in rugged courtesy. The Indian was a wise man, and he knew now that other men had whispered falsely about one exquisite Parisienne.

“Pardon me, child,” he said gently. “No, I cannot imagine.”

Impulsively Jacqueline leaned over the desk and gave him her hand. “Thank you,” she said, in a voice that trembled unexpectedly. From that moment, too, she abandoned tactics. The wiles of courts would avail nothing against the primitive straightforwardness of the man before her. It seemed, moreover, 448good and homely, to cast them aside. She took a seat near the window, since he remained standing until she did, and waited. He should speak first, and afterward, she would accept. For there was nothing, she felt, that she could say. O rare tongue of woman, to so respect the leash of intuitions!

As for Don Benito Juarez, he had not meant to speak at all. But knowing her now to be not what he had thought, he spoke as he had not to any plenipotentiary of any crowned head.

“You are a Frenchwoman, seÑorita,” he began. “Tell me, your coming must be explained by that?”

“Now,” said Jacqueline, smiling on him cordially, “Your Excellency’s imagination is getting better.”

“And you wish to save Maximilian,” the Presidente stated, rather than questioned, “because he is a victim of France.”

“Because he will be considered so.”

The old Roman smiled. “My dear young lady,” he said, “an answer to France is the least of my obligations. Yet you expect it, and ask for clemency, though I deny all the great nations?”

“Oh seÑor, what’s the use? Let him go!”

The keen black eyes regarded her quizzically. “Do you know,” he said, “this is the second time I’ve heard that question to-day? One of our American officers had himself put in command of the escort for Maximilian’s two lawyers here, and now I believe he did it simply because he too wanted to know, ‘What’s the use?’ It was anti-climax, and a wet blanket over the fervid eloquence of the two lawyers. But nevertheless, he hit the one argument.”

“Yes, yes!”

“In a word, why not brush aside our archduke? He’s harmless, now, he’s insignificant? Why not take from him the only dignity left, that of dying?”

“Of course, SeÑor Juarez! Of course!”

449“And at the same time win bright renown for ourselves, instead of what will be called harsh cruelty?”

“Surely!”

The smile vanished. The large mouth closed tightly.

“No,” spoke the judge of iron. “He dies! That is the truest mercy, a mercy to those who might otherwise follow him here. And we, seÑorita, we have already suffered enough from Europe.”

“But the other two?” pleaded Jacqueline. “They are Mexicans.”

“They are that, por Dios, and they make me proud of my race. Miramon, MejÍa, they are the leaven. They redeem Lopez, they redeem Marquez, they redeem the deserters who now so largely form my armies, who before had deserted me for the French invasion. By the signal example of these two men to die to-morrow, the world shall know that Mexicans are not all traitors. And as we grow, we Mexicans, we may grow beyond the empty loyalty of glowing Spanish words. Remembering such an example, we may come to be, in our very hearts, breathing things of honor. We have been shackled because of infamy during the last centuries. Can you wonder, then, that we use the treacherous weapon of the Conquistadores?–But that’s apart. The loyalty of Miramon and MejÍa has been loyalty to an invader, a wrong their country will not forgive. But our cultured gentleman of Europe, our vain fool who would regenerate the poor Indito, he will perhaps not feel so ashamed of us, not when he has two such companions in death, and not when he learns, though painfully, that the rod of Mexican justice respects neither immunity nor privilege of birth. There, seÑorita, I’ve had to talk more about this one individual than about the hundreds of others who have been punished for much less than he.”

“But it must be terrible to die, seÑor. And he doesn’t realize, while a delay of only a few days––”

450“Would suffice for his escape?”

Jacqueline reddened guiltily. “No, to prepare for his end,” she said.

The Presidente smiled tolerantly. “Never fear,” he answered first her confusion, “our justice stands committed, and to wink at escape now would be cowardly. Yet, whether you meant it or not, you are right, and the execution stands postponed until the nineteenth. A doomed man may learn much in three days to comfort him–on his way. But the criminal of all is lacking.”

“Marquez, you mean?”

“U’m, him also. But I was thinking of Louis Napoleon, and his wife.”

The order of postponement, being openly telegraphed to Escobedo at QuerÉtaro, was known at once in San Luis, and caused a fury of excitement. For none doubted but that it meant eventual pardon. The tender hearted rejoiced. The rabid ones muttered. The wise shook dubious heads. And even as Jacqueline and Berthe were hurrying back to QuerÉtaro in the canvas-covered coach, another caller was admitted roundly on the president’s privacy, without so much as being announced. Juarez wondered if his orderly had gone crazy, for the newcomer thus obsequiously presented looked to be a species of ancient vagabond.

“Well, what is it?” the President asked, frowning heavily. He was curiously irritated. “Stay,” he interposed, “those dusty, muddy rags you have on, that green and red, that’s not a Republican uniform?”

“It’s of the Batallon del Emperador,” replied the stranger, unabashed.

“Bless me the saints! Well, well, well, I suppose you, too, want to save your Maximilian. But how does it happen that you’re not under guard yourself?”

For answer the old man came nearer. He limped feebly, 451and the while he unbuttoned his coarse red jacket. Juarez watched him sluggishly, but with a hand upon a revolver under the papers on his desk. The stranger, however, drew forth nothing more sensational than five or six square bits of parchment. Yet these aroused the President more than a weapon could have done. They were blank, except at the bottom, and there the President read his own signature, “Benito Juarez, Libertad y Reforma.”

“Your–Your Excellency remembers?”

“How well!” The admission came involuntarily. Juarez was laboring under an emotion that he could not at first control. He stared at his visitor in a new wonder. So gaunt, so hollow, so utterly insignificant! The President’s wonder grew.

“You–you gained entrance here by one of these slips?” he questioned sharply. The old man nodded. “And it was countersigned by––”

“Si seÑor, by El Chaparrito. The slip said, ‘Admit bearer at once.’”

“Then I cannot blame my orderly! But who are you?”

“Anastasio MurguÍa, to serve Your Mercy.”

“Bien, SeÑor MurguÍa, and now will you explain what no other messenger from our unknown friend has done? Who–who is El Chaparrito?”

But, like the wretched messengers who had gone before, Anastasio MurguÍa only shrugged his shoulders blankly. “Your Excellency does not know El Chaparrito?” he asked. “And yet you trusted him, a stranger, with your signature?”

There was a crafty stress on his words.

“Ah, seÑor,” Juarez placidly inquired, “what if a chief magistrate did not know when to trust? You are to be informed, then, that one year ago last October, at Chihuahua, I was saved from a French flying column by an Indito. The 452poor wretch had run across the desert with his warning. But he could prove nothing. He couldn’t even tell who sent him, except that it was a short gentleman, a seÑor chaparro. Yet it was well for the Republic that I took his word and fled. Later, when I reached the Rio Grande, and he wanted my signature to some blank squares of parchment, which he was to take back to his seÑor chaparro–well, seÑor, I trusted again. That Indito in breech-clout obtained my autograph some twenty times over.”

The President, however, might have added that every Republican officer was advised first to test any warning on any bit of parchment signed “Benito Juarez.” Yet, as a matter of fact, there came to be such magic in the name of El Chaparrito that the name of Juarez thereto was only needed as a guarantee that the lesser name was genuine.

“Now, then, SeÑor Emissary,” said the President, “what danger hangs over our Republic this time?”

“None, seÑor. I return the parchment squares left over. El–El Chaparrito has no more thoughts for the Republic. He thinks,” and MurguÍa ground his knuckles into the desk top, “he thinks of no one, of no one–except Maximilian! And he has never thought of aught else. The Republic? Bah, the Republic was only his tool, SeÑor Presidente. Only his tool, but the tool needed sharpening. They say that’s the way with the guillotine, eh, SeÑor Presidente?”

“But hombre–No, our unseen friend of the Republic, our Chaparrito, would not ask for Maximilian’s pardon?”

“Pardon!”–It was fairly a cry of rage–“Yet you, SeÑor Presidente, you postpone the execution! You mean to pardon him!”

“Indeed?”

“Yes, I–I think so. But you shall not, SeÑor Presidente. I come to, to––”

453“Now that’s curious. Possibly I, too, am to be sharpened into a kind of guillotine, eh, seÑor?”

“All the others were,” MurguÍa returned stubbornly. “That is, all except one.”

“Ha, then El Chaparrito found one man who was incorruptible?”

“Yes. But still Your Excellency is mistaken. El Chaparrito did not use money to win his agents. That, seÑor, is the unsafest way of all.”

“You would tell me, seÑor, that El Chaparrito had a safe way?”

“Yes, and it was absolute. He awakened memory, the memory, SeÑor Presidente, of wrongs. For example, there was Your Excellency’s savior in breech-clout. He once lived in a forest village down in the Huasteca. One night Dupin came and burned the huts, and the Indito’s family perished with other women and children there. That village alone gave the Chaparrito many another messenger or spy, but memories left by the Empire were plentiful enough everywhere, and cheap. The Chaparrito simply drafted them, that was all. But once his system failed. Yet–well the man in that case was an American, and they are liable to be exceptions to any rule, to any passion. But in the end he was safe enough too, though something else, that I can’t understand, made him so.”

“And what did he do, this American?”

“He took me to Escobedo.”

“And you?”

“I took Lopez. That same night QuerÉtaro fell.”

“You? Now–now to what particular wrong in your case, seÑor, does the Republic stand thus indebted?”

Juarez put the question lightly, even patronizingly. But his steadfast gaze had not once left his gaunt and battered visitor. By design, too, he had not asked a second time who the Chaparrito was, because he saw, or felt, that the old man 454knew, though former emissaries from that mysterious source had not known. And Juarez meant to possess the secret. But with his casual irony he never looked for any such kindling of memory as then flashed deep in the cavernous sockets opposite him. The eyes of the aged man glowed and darkened, glowed and darkened, and seemed the very breathing of some famished beast. It was a thing to startle even Benito Juarez, who during many, many years had learned the meaning of civil war. The President leaped to his feet, pointing a finger.

“You are,” he cried, “yes, you are the Chaparrito!–No?–Yes! Ha, I’ve struck, I’ve struck!”

He had indeed. The colossal guile and intellect and will, the giant whom men in awe called El Chaparrito, was only old, withered Anastasio MurguÍa. But the astute Juarez knew that he was right. He knew it in that one look of consuming, conquering hate. He knew the giant in that hate. The feeble flesh, Anastasio MurguÍa, was an incident. Yet even so, only the President’s tenacity held him to where his instinct had leapt. For under discovery MurguÍa was changed to a huddled, abject creature, stammering denial. Yet it must be true, it must. The strangest, the most weird of contrasts in the same soul and body–yet it must, it was true!

And MurguÍa? He might have asked for reward, and had it. But his was rankest despair. His work was not finished, his goal not attained. And now his most potent instrument of all, the Chaparrito, was miserably identified in his own self, was taken from him.

Juarez rose and touched his shoulder, “Come,” he said, “there’s much too much tension here. Now then, sit down, so. Let me see, you said your name was–yes, MurguÍa. But–why, Dios mio, that’s the Huasteca miser! Well, well, well, and so you are that rich old hacendado who never gave even a fanega of corn to Republic or French either, unless 455frightened into it? But hombre, we’ve had big sums from the Chaparrito, and all unasked!”

And yet must it still be true, yet must even this contrast accord. El Chaparrito had indeed given munificently. But in each case it was to bridge a crisis. As the shrewdest general he knew a vital campaign, and aided, if need be. But on a useless one the Republic’s soldiers might starve, might freeze, might bleed and die, without ever the most niggardly solace ever reaching them from El Chaparrito. Economy was applied to vengeance, and made it unspeakably grim.

“Once though,” Juarez pursued, “you all but lost your Maximilian? I mean last fall when he started for the coast. He could have escaped to Europe.”

“I know,” said MurguÍa quietly, “but I was near him. If he had not turned back, I would have done it myself.”

“It?”

“The justice which Your Excellency has just postponed three days.”

“Dios mio, but our Chaparrito is a dangerous person! He’d have to be locked up if Maximilian were pardoned.”

“But–but Your Excellency will not pardon him!”

“To be sure, I had forgotten. I am to be given a memory. Well?”

“Your Excellency remembers, he remembers Zacatecas?”

“Last February? Certainly I do. Miramon came, but a warning from El Chaparrito, from you, came first, and a last time I escaped. As it was, I was reported captured, and I sometimes wonder what Maximilian would have done had that report been true.”

“If I should tell you, seÑor?”

“Ah, that is beyond even you, since Maximilian has never had the chance to decide my fate.”

“But he did decide, seÑor. He got word that you were taken at Zacatecas, and at once he sent orders to Miramon as 456to your treatment. But Miramon was already defeated, already fleeing to QuerÉtaro.”

“And the orders, the orders from Maximilian?”

“They never arrived. They were intercepted. They–yes, here they are, but before reading them, will Your Excellency promise to imagine himself in Miramon’s power?”

“I would, naturally. Come, seÑor, hand them over.”

It made curious reading, that weather-blotched dispatch. For Don Benito Juarez it was reading as curious as a man may ever expect to come by. In the handwriting of his prisoner, he read his own death sentence.

“Your–Your Excellency sees?” MurguÍa stammered hungrily.

“H’m, what, for example?”

“Why, that–that Maximilian would not have pardoned?”

“On the contrary, seÑor mio, that is precisely what the generous Maximilian did intend. Listen–Miramon was ‘to delay execution until His Majesty should pass upon it.’”

“No–no, Your Excellency, he would not have––”

“O ho, so you think you’ve missed your last stroke! You think that there is no memory for me in this dispatch! But don’t whine so, because, man, there is, there is! It may not be the memory of my intended death, but it is the memory of–intended insult. Oh, what a patriot he must have thought me, this good, regenerating prince! He had already offered to make me chief justice. But this time he would have saved me from his own Black Decree. And I would have been touched by his clemency? I would have accepted, the grateful tears streaming from my eyes? And thus I would be regenerated? It sounds beautiful. It sounds like the chivalrous Middle Ages, when there were Black Princes along with the Black Decrees. My liege lord he would have been, but my liege Patria, what of her?–Well, well, well, he has three days in 457 which to understand me better, and to think of his own regeneration a little.”

“Then,” cried MurgÍa, limping gleefully toward him, “then there will be no pardon?”

“I see,” said Juarez, suddenly cold and very calm, “I am now corrupted. I am now safe, like the others. Take that chair, wait!”

Saying which the Presidente left his desk, clapped his hands for the orderly, and seated himself near the window. To the orderly he said, “Go to the diligence office across the Plaza. Ask for Colonel Driscoll, the American officer who commands the escort of the two lawyers. Say that I wish to see him here at once.”

When Driscoll appeared, Juarez put to him this question, “Colonel–I’ll say ‘General’ whenever you decide to be a citizen among us–Colonel, can you reach QuerÉtaro early to-morrow morning by riding all night?”

“Not with my own horse, sir. He’s getting old, and deserves better.”

“Then it’s all right, seÑor. You will take any horse you want. I have telegraphed to stop the execution, but there’s been no reply. You must therefore see General Escobedo yourself. Look on my desk. Do you find a packet there?”

“Yes.”

“Sealed? Well, break it open. Now read the contents to my visitor here.”

Driscoll unfolded a long sheet of foolscap, and began to read. MurguÍa the while fidgeted in an agony, but listening further, his limbs grew tense, and a hideous joy overspread his face.

“‘But at sunrise of the nineteenth you will execute the sentence already approved.’”

The prisoners were not to be deceived by false hopes. There would be no further appeal. The last, the final decision, had been made.

458“I have signed it, I believe, Colonel Driscoll?”

“Yes.”

“Then seal it again, and hurry! Good-bye, sir, good-bye.”

When Driscoll was gone, the BenemÉrito of America turned to the grinning hyena-like old man who was his visitor. His own dark features were passionless, impenetrable.

“You observe, seÑor,” he said, “that Justice does not require corrupting, nor even a memory. So let El Chaparrito add this to his philosophy, that he need not boast again of an infallible spur to civic loyalty, for he will never find it, nor I. And yet–there is patriotism.”