The Missourian Part 76

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.

"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 Queretaro. 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 a.s.sailed 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 with the act so perversely confessing her love for him. He knew why, at Boone's Cordova 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 senorita's answer."

"My answer?" cried Jacqueline. "You mean, father, for my sake?"

"Yes."

Driscoll started violently, perplexed no longer. "By G.o.d, 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 G.o.d's own ordering 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 t.i.tle the hardest of all to win! You--you don't think, senor, that you would like to take it back?"

Driscoll reddened inexplicably. Murguia'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 Mejia 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 need 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.

"Helas, 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."

Then 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.