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!”