“... and could make the worse appearThe better reason.”–Paradise Lost.
“... and could make the worse appearThe better reason.”
–Paradise Lost.
After half an hour’s sharp canter, Maximilian dismounted at La Teja, his suburban hacienda. He had come quickly from Jacqueline’s, for his heart was light. The stress and storm of wavering were ended at last. Soon now he would be at Miramar, at beautiful Miramar, overlooking the sea, where Charlotte awaited him, but knew it not. And by love and tender care he would coax her back to sanity. Ah, no, the pure joy of living was not done for them yet!
“Desire Father Augustin to attend me in my private cabinet,” he said to the first lackey.
The huge priest came on the instant. He bore a candle in one fat, freckled hand, and above its light the dull flesh of his face shone yellow. His head was as ever pear-shaped with its heavy, flabby jowls, and in the apex the two little beads of eyes leaped adventurously at sight of the prince.
“I am here, sire,” he said purringly. “Your Majesty, then, wishes me to prepare for his return to the imperial palace to-morrow?”
“No, father,” His Majesty answered stoutly, though not without an uneasy glance. “To-morrow I set out for the coast. TheDandolois still there at anchor. You will give the necessary orders to my Hungarians, who will be my escort.”
Fischer opened his lips, to close them. The involuntary creasing of his brow smoothed at once. Maximilian, who had345dreaded argument from this man, breathed easier. But of course any man would give way when a Hapsburg had irrevocably made up his mind. The padre laid down the candle, and interlaced his bloated fingers over his paunch in an attitude of sleek calmness. He was smiling and fawned meek anxiety to second his patron’s least wish.
“Your Imperial Majesty’s wisdom, I see, is not a thing to be turned by the fräulein?”
“On the contrary, Mademoiselle la Marquise d’Aumerle counseled my departure, not my remaining.”
The fingers tightened slightly over the bulge of the sutane. “She then presumed to differ from Her Serene Highness, Your Majesty’s mother?”
“My mother would counsel the same, were she in Mexico. I thank you, padre, that I went to see the only one who could so take my mother’s place, because now, at last, I know what I must do.”
The priest took a long breath, and drew back, mentally, to some vantage point whence he could survey the field and plan his campaign anew. He nodded humble acquiescence, but the small bright eyes seemed to gorge themselves on the prince. Maximilian stirred restively. One has seen a lion watch the trainer’s whip, as though he wondered that a creature with only a whip should yet, in some way, compel him to do this or that. Before an obscure adventurer the monarch hastened to justify his abdication. But it did not make him easier because the padre listened so obsequiously, with never a quiver before the horror and misery pictured. He only listened, this man of God, noting it all deferentially, item by item, with a smiling gesture that he heard and understood, and was quite ready for the next. Maximilian became aware at last of his own low stooping. And that moment he stopped abruptly.
“The Lord reward Your Majesty’s tender heart,” now346spoke the priest, “and may the reward be such as a ruler should expect from his God!”
“What do you mean?” demanded Maximilian in impatient anger. “Have all the barbarities of civil war no power to move you? Do I not know that the savagery has already begun?”
The curate crossed himself. In humility he would bear the charge of hardness of heart. “Power to stir me?” he repeated. “If Your Majesty would think on his power to bring this same savagery to an end! That is his reward offered by Heaven, the reward of bringing holy peace to a stricken land.”
“Did I not come for that? You only remind me how I have failed.”
“And why, sire? Because your instruments were not blessed. The French oppressed the Church as well as the people. But now the French are leaving. It is the hand of Providence.”
“Shesaidhe would interpret the will of Heaven!” Maximilian exclaimed.
The priest heard, stammered, and went to wreck miserably, as a hypocrite unmasked knows that his next word must sound like hypocrisy. How slyly she had checkmated him! Forseeing his thrust, she had countered his every shift of cunning through this feeble fencer before him. And the mistake he had made, in sending Maximilian to her! For a moment the expression of the apostate Lutheran was very ugly in its baffled rage. But he was too wise a trainer to lose patience utterly. He realized instead that the struggle was harder than any he had yet had with his royal dupe, since now his real antagonist was the young Frenchwoman.
“I? I interpret the word of God?” He said it very humbly, with bowed head. “Alas, Your Majesty knows I am the last to presume to that. But there are those who can.347There is the Holy Father in Rome, who is infallible. I only know thathetold Your Majesty’s servant, myself, that a ruler blessed by the Church is an instrument of God. But if the ruler turns his back ere his work is done––”
Maximilian’s nostrils were dilating strangely, and the consummate tempter hurried on. He exalted the grandeur of the Emperor’s task, yet craftily made success appear simple and easy. The forces of “the arch-rebel Benito Juarez” were concentrated in “a horde of impious thieves calling themselves the Army of the North.” But Miramon, His Majesty’s own general, was hastening to meet them. One decisive battle, and there would be no more rebels. The nation must then recognize that the Empire had sustained itself without French aid.
“Of course a few lives will be lost,” he quietly sneered, “and we who do not understand may grieve for them, but the ways of Heaven, for its own ends, are inscrutable. Your Majesty knows that others before him, his ancestors, have had to wade through the blood of God’s enemies. But Your Majesty’s glorious ancestors were fulfilling their destiny. And why should not you, also, sire, you who are the child of destiny?”
It was a magic word. Fischer knew his man devilishly well.
“But how can I tell,” Maximilian demanded petulantly, “that my destiny really lies in Mexico?”
“Then your destiny, sire, must lie in Europe, in Austria,” was the priest’s astounding concession. “After all, a prince’s intuitions, being given him by divine revelation, can alone be his guide.”
Maximilian’s eyes flashed.
“Then I abdicate–herewith!”
Fischer meekly assented.
“There are rumors, nay, more than rumors,” he mused348aloud, “that a strong hand is needed in Austria. I repeat only what all Europe says boldly, that Franz Josef cannot long hold his throne. Yes, yes, sire, but do not stare so!–Yet the crown prince is a child. Who then shall be regent? Who but––”
“Enough, enough, I say! Now look to my orders. We start to-morrow.”
The secretary beamed unctious joy that his master had so decided, and was bowing himself out, when abruptly he paused, “Oh, I forgot, a packet for Your Majesty.”
Maximilian took the missive. It was not heavy. It did not seem as heavy as Fate, not as heavy as a coffin.
“This is an old date,” he said in a puzzled way. “See, the postmark, ‘Brussels, Sept. 17.’”
“It just came by courier from Vera Cruz, being sent via New York no doubt accounts for the delay.”
Maximilian sighed. Even the post no longer considered royalty. Packets had taken on leisurely habits since the Empire’s crumbling–or since the secretary’s ascendancy. He broke the seal with tremulous fingers. The thing must tell him of Charlotte.
“From Monsieur Éloin,” he said.
“But he–he does not send bad news, nothing, sire, of Her Imperial Highness?”
Well enough did that soul of mud know the letter’s contents. Well enough he knew that Éloin and himself could waste no time on an insane woman. Their chances of future position were in too critical a state. And the packet was designed for just such a crisis as the present.
Maximilian frowned, read excitedly. He was swept along as by a torrent. Fixed on him were the small bead eyes of the priest, darting a light, like a flame on oil. And when the Emperor gasped quickly and sprang to his feet with hands clenched in the manner of a strong man, the priest was ready.
349“Good news, then?” he cried. “What fortune! Now Your Majesty will hurry the faster to Vienna?”
Maximilian gave him a glance, as though he were dense to think so.
“Here, read, read it!”
M. Éloin, sycophant, courtier, had never sung for his royal patron a roundelay more pleasing than his prose of the moment. It caused to vibrate the very heart chords of the susceptible prince. There were subtle appeals to spite ungratified, to wounded pride, to ambition, to honor. The letter ran:
... Nevertheless, I am convinced that to abandon the throne now, before the return of the French army, would be interpreted as an act of weakness....If this appeal (to the Mexican people) is not heard, then Your Majesty, having accomplished his noble mission to the end, will return to Europe with all the prestige that accompanied his departure; and mid important events that are certain to happen, he will be able to play the rôle that belongs to him in every way....
... Nevertheless, I am convinced that to abandon the throne now, before the return of the French army, would be interpreted as an act of weakness....
If this appeal (to the Mexican people) is not heard, then Your Majesty, having accomplished his noble mission to the end, will return to Europe with all the prestige that accompanied his departure; and mid important events that are certain to happen, he will be able to play the rôle that belongs to him in every way....
And then the supreme refrain:
In passing through Austria, I was able to bear witness to the general discontent that reigns there. Yet nothing is done yet. The Emperor is discouraged; the people fret and publicly demand his abdication; the sympathies for Your Majesty are spreading visibly throughout the entire Empire; in Venetia a whole population wishes to acclaim its former governor....
In passing through Austria, I was able to bear witness to the general discontent that reigns there. Yet nothing is done yet. The Emperor is discouraged; the people fret and publicly demand his abdication; the sympathies for Your Majesty are spreading visibly throughout the entire Empire; in Venetia a whole population wishes to acclaim its former governor....
Thus it was that Éloin pilfered Jacqueline’s lever, and thus he used another fulcrum, as he had promised Charlotte he would. By pandering to Maximilian’s Austrian ambitions, he showed the weak prince how they could yet never be realized if prestige were lost in Mexico. To keep this prestige, to increase it, Maximilian must prove to Austria that he could hold the empire he already had, and that without foreign bayonets. He had only to stay a short time after the French should evacuate. And then, within a few months, a few weeks, he might lay down the sceptre voluntarily, to take up the one awaiting him across the ocean.
“We will leave here in the morning,” cried Maximilian–“no, to-night, at once!”
350“For Vera Cruz, sire?” queried the padre.
“No, for my capital, for my palace! And father, allow no one to mention abdication to me again. My decision to stay is irrevocable.”
The padre promised faithfully that he should not be disturbed, and this was one promise that the good padre kept.
“And Jove himself shall guard a monarch’s right.”–The Iliad.
“And Jove himself shall guard a monarch’s right.”
–The Iliad.
Early one morning a month later, a solemn little group of uniformed men climbed to the roof of Buena Vista, the imperial wedding gift to Marshal Bazaine, and nerving themselves, pulled down the Tricolor. France, a Napoleon, were again leaving the New World. It was Evacuation.
The Army of the Expedition came tramping down the Paseo. There were heavy Dragoons and Cuirassiers, on majestic chargers. There were light Chasseurs and Lancers, on fleet Arabians that had often proved themselves against the Mexican pony. There was the clanking of steel, and the flash of helmets through the dust. The imperial eagles, gilded anew, were poised for flight back to their native aeries. Lower in the earthly cloud bobbed the tasseled fez of the bronzed Zouave, and the perky red pompon on the fighting cap of the little piou-piou. With the steady beat of the march, the pantalons rouges crossed, spread, crossed, spread, like regiments of bright, bloody shears. The bands played. And yet it was not a martial scene. Feet, not hearts, lifted to the fife’s thrilling note. Nor was the multitude that thronged the wide avenue a fiesta populace. It looked on stolidly, without a huzza, yet without a hiss. Enthusiasm in either sense would have been relief, but the Mexicans assisting at the bag and baggage of an invader were as unmoved as those other spectators, the colossal figures in the glorietas; as the two Aztec giants, leaning on352their war clubs; as Guatemotzin, with high feathered crest and spear aloft, foreboding as in life to the European conqueror; as Columbus, who, having himself suffered, gave now no sign of remorse for the blows which this new hemisphere gave the old; as Charles IV. on his iron horse, who had bargained with a former Napoleon to be called Emperor of America, and who, unlike Maximilian, had wisely surrendered such a crown.
Cavalry, infantry, cannon, wagons, on they came through the city and past the Zócalo, under the Cathedral towers, under the lifeless, shuttered windows of the Palacio. Here in the Zócalo, in the central plaza, the sometime first lady of Her Imperial Majesty’s household sat in her barouche, and opposite her a pretty girl, and she was talking with an officer of Chasseurs d’Afrique whose horse was restive, and all the while there was the rumbling of wheels, the tread of feet, and the ring of hoofs.
The sometime first lady was saying good-bye to the officer, as she had already to many another gallant chevalier pausing beside her carriage. But for her it was farewell to all her countrymen there, to the little piou-pious most of all, and her gray eyes were frankly moist.
“And now they are going,” she mused aloud, “really going, because, parbleau, a monsieur in Washington says they must.”
“I wish to heaven,” swore the young officer gloomily, “some monsieur would say as much to you! See here, we’d give you and Mademoiselle Berthe enough room on the ship for a barracks, if you’d only come. There’s a many less welcome,” and he jerked his head toward a stream of vehicles straggling among the troops. They were filled with Mexican aristocrats whose doubtful titles had been revived by the Empire, all eagerly accepting French transport out of their native land.
Jacqueline laughed. “They’re so afraid of the Liberals, they will forget their escutcheons. So of course they’ve forgotten the bouquets. You should have seen the garlands,353Michel, that heralded our grand entry here. Oh, lá-lá! We paid for them ourselves. Thus arrived the Drapeau Civilizateur de la France. And now behold the departure. Not the cost of a violet to spare from Napoleon’s strong chest! Hé mais, hear that tune! It’s ‘Leaving for Syria,’ the thing decreed into our national hymn. For once I’m glad, glad it’s not the ‘Marseillaise.’”
“Mademoiselle–dear friend,” spoke the slow-thinking Michel, “you do not wish to answer my question. Why do you stay behind, alone? Why? Nothing good ever happens to anyone in this country, and who can tell what might happen to you when the army is gone? Come now,” he went on, forcing some bluff cheer into his words, “Jeanne d’Aumerle, your friends want you out of it. Fall in with us, here, now. Let me give the order, ’Cocher, à Paris!–Voilà, what more’s to be done?”
Indeed, what more simple? Or more to be desired? Yet there was nothing she desired less. She thought of what she had found in Mexico, and must leave behind. It was a dead thing, true, and already buried. But–the grave was too fresh as yet. However, the real reason for her staying involved something else.
She made no reply, for at the moment a strange voice, with a jagged Mexican accent and a thin insidious inflection, broke in upon them, and startled them all three.
“Nay, Monsieur le Duc,” it began, rolling the title as a morsel on the tongue. “Your Grace would deprive us of too much honor. Why, indeed, should mademoiselle not remain among us?”
Turning quickly, Jacqueline beheld the stranger’s black eyes upon herself. He, too, wished to know why she stayed in Mexico, but in his sharp, shifting look there was a penetration quite different from that of the guileless Michel. He bestrode a magnificent horse that seemed made for armor,354whereas he himself would surely have been crushed under so much as a Crusader’s buckler. Being so very small, and perched so very high, he cut a ludicrously martial figure with his plumed hat and epaulettes and gold buttons and braid and medals and exquisitely mounted sabre. It was not a French uniform that he wore, but Mexican Imperial, and stupendously ornate. And within the brave array, he was such a little, little man!–insignificance glorified into caricature.
But the pigmy was not altogether on parade. He had that morning been receiving arsenals and fortresses from the French; in short, the keys of the Empire. For he was Commander in Chief of the Imperial armies, was this species of manikin. And ugly? He was a man of lifted upper lip under a bristling moustache, a man of fangs, a wee, snarling, strutting, odious creature of a man. A deep livid scar split his cheek and would not heal. Instead of arousing sympathy, it proclaimed him rather for the scratches he gave to others. For he was that Mexican of infamous name, the Leopard. Once he had looted the British Legation. Another time he massacred young medical students attending the wounded of both sides. There were stories of children speared and tossed in ditches. Yet certain priests blessed his ardor as defender of the Church. Maximilian had sent him on a mission to Palestine, since he was abhorrent to the moderates. But now he was back again, to lead the clerical armies. The valley of Mexico shrank from his brutal proclamation demanding submission. “Mexicans, you know me!” so ended the snarl. He gathered forced loans. He drafted peons, though they were exempt. He emptied the prisons, and convicts he sent in chains as recruits for the Imperial garrisons. In such a fashion Leonardo Marquez began his duties as generalísimo of the Empire.
“Your Excellency is most kind,” said Jacqueline, for no other reason than to annoy him by changing from French into his own language.
355“On the contrary,” returned Marquez, “I am flattered that you will be here to observe how we, alone, shall crush the rebels. Your countrymen, señorita, happily leave plenty of them. But I cannot believe that this is why you remain.”
“Make her tell you, then,” interposed the helpless Ney. He was utterly at sea. There was a trial of strength on between these two, but how or for what was quite beyond him.
Jacqueline pushed back the Persian shawl she wore–this fifth day of February was the Mexican springtime–and settled herself to the contest in earnest. “I fear,” she began slowly, “that my motive in staying can hardly be intelligible, unless, perhaps, Your Excellency knows why I came to Mexico in the first place. No señor, that blank smile of yours will not serve. Your Excellency cannot feign ignorance of public gossip.”
“Of course, I have heard that––”
“To be sure you have,” she returned dryly, “and you might add that I failed, since Maximilian has not yet abdicated. But Your Excellency is not one to imagine that the end can be long delayed.”
She, too, was searching for a motive, his motive in the interview.
“The Mexicans alone will sustain our patriotic ruler,” stoutly declared the generalísimo. “But let us suppose, merely for pastime, that His Majesty does abdicate. What then? What profit to France, since at this moment, before our eyes, her army is leaving?”
Jacqueline smoothed the ruffled pleats on her full gray skirt. They looked like an exaggerated railroad on a map, and doubtless needed smoothing.
“And remotely supposing,” she said, “that our armymightcome back again?”
Then, in a flash, she raised her eyes, and surprised the start he gave. But she laughed at once, and at him, for taking her nonsense as serious.
356“No,” she exclaimed, “Your Excellency can more easily recall Santa Anna from his island exile.”
This, too, was nonsense, or so he was forced to consider it. But knowing that the Empire could not endure, he was believed even then to be negotiating with the rich former dictator. In his scowl Jacqueline discovered what she sought. He wanted, in brief, to negotiate with Napoleon also, and he wanted to negotiate through her. Napoleon could bid higher than Santa Anna. She saw, moreover, what was worrying the traitor. If Napoleon did not mean to bid, why then was she staying in Mexico?
Marquez glanced fretfully at Ney and Berthe. If he might be honored in the privilege of calling to pay his respects?––
But Jacqueline regretted that she was to be too much occupied in preparations for her own early departure. And that very evening she sent a note to Maximilian, frankly warning him against the Leopard. But she warned His Majesty farther, that if he did not heed, that when it should be too late to save him in any case, and Marquez still had something to sell, that then she would advise her own emperor, should her own emperor wish to buy. Hoping, though, for the best, she sent by Ney a message to Bazaine at the head of the column, suggesting that he delay embarkation as long as possible. She had in mind Maximilian awakened to the faithlessness of his chief support and wishing to overtake the French troops.
For which it appears that Jacqueline still wielded a free lance, belonging to her own country alone and owning no master other than her own conscience.
As Bazaine at the army’s head rode through the Zócalo, he looked up to find the palatial shutters closed. The Mexican Empire was sulking like a spiteful child. The marshal wearily shrugged his shoulders, and thought on the ingratitude of princes. But the silence of the Palace was only a pose, mean and despicable. Maximilian himself was peeping through the357shutters down upon the gallant, moving sea of color. It was a stream of gleaming bayonets, of champing horses, of lumbering artillery. His eyes would single out and cling to this or that figure till it was lost in the street beyond, and then he would try to realize that it was lost to him forever. For the street beyond lay toward the coast, where many ships awaited. The archducal petulance gave way to vague melancholy.
Finally he looked upon the last swinging foot, then at the dust settling. Below, in the Zócalo, what had been a fringe of mourning around the troops, became a scurrying of human creatures. They were his subjects. Not a French uniform remained, but the prince sighed heavily as he turned from his ignoble peep-hole. Courtiers and counselors glanced at each other significantly. By tacit consent one among them spoke.
“Free at last, sire, free at last! Ah, see them, there below. They know their shackles are broken, they know that the foreign invader who chilled their allegiance is gone. Nay more, their loyalty has already borne fruit. In the north, sire––”
“How, father? You do not mean––”
“Yes, sire, yes, the mother of God be praised! I mean victory, and death to many traitors. The news has just come. Miramon has won a decisive battle and taken Zacatecas.”
“Zacatecas! But Juarez was there?”
“Yes, sire, and Miramon entered so suddenly the arch rebel surely could not have escaped.”
“Juarez taken, that man taken!”
“Even so, sire, And”–Fischer’s interlaced fingers tightened until the veins grew large–“and, it only remains for Your Majesty to dispose of him, according to the law.”
Maximilian trembled with joy. He was master of the situation. His people had made him master. Here was divine right vindicated. It was–Destiny! He had but to follow whither the heavenly finger pointed. And in rapture, he seized his pen.
358Palace of Mexico, Feb. 5th, 1867.My dear General Miramon:I charge you particularly, in case you do capture Don Benito Juarez, Don Sebastian Lerdo de Tejado, and others of his suite, to have them tried and condemned by a council of war ... but the sentence is not to be executed before receiving Our approbation....Your affectionateMaximiliano.
358Palace of Mexico, Feb. 5th, 1867.
My dear General Miramon:
I charge you particularly, in case you do capture Don Benito Juarez, Don Sebastian Lerdo de Tejado, and others of his suite, to have them tried and condemned by a council of war ... but the sentence is not to be executed before receiving Our approbation....
Your affectionateMaximiliano.
Bazaine and the French camped the first night, the next day, and yet another night outside the City, waiting. They did not reach Puebla until the tenth. The rear guard fell farther and farther behind, keeping the road open. At last there was news. Juarez had escaped Miramon at Zacatecas, warned in time through some mysterious agency. And farther, Miramon had encountered another Republican army, by whom he was not only defeated, but routed completely. In panic he was fleeing to Querétero.
“Maximilian must surely abdicate now,” thought Bazaine, and he sent back a message. “I can,” he wrote, “yet extend a hand to His Majesty to help him retire.”
In Vera Cruz the marshal waited for an answer. Day after day passed, and then the answer came. Too late, was its refrain. Maximilian had left his capital with what troops he could spare. He had left for Querétero, to join Miramon there.
Bazaine, the last to quit the shore, climbed aboard his ship, and taking one final look for a chance horseman with word to wait yet longer, and seeing none, gave the order to weigh anchor.
“Si debbe ai colpi della sua fortunaVoltar il viso di lagrime asciutto.”–Machiavelli.
“Si debbe ai colpi della sua fortunaVoltar il viso di lagrime asciutto.”
–Machiavelli.
The mountain villages were arming. Bronzed men, savagely joyful, poured from under roofs of thatch, strapping on great black lead-weighted belts. In the corrals others lassoed horses. It looked like a sudden changing from peaceful highland domesticity, as the clans of Scotland or the cantons of Helvetia might gather. But these men were not rising to defend their homes. The hamlets clustered among the crags were their barracks, nothing more. The wildest cañons of the Sierra Madre del Sur, far away in the rocky southwestern corner of the continent, were only their camping grounds, their refuge. To be armed was their natural state. They were fighters by occupation. They were an army. Unceasing hardship and constant peril had seasoned them, and their discipline was perfect, unconscious, because it came from the herding instinct of wolves. During years they had waged war against a ruthless foe, and they, too, were relentless. The penalty of defeat was massacre.
The foe of this army was a greater army, and between the two it was a duel of chieftains, of General Régules in the Sierra, of General Mendez on the plain. Deadlier antagonists might not be imagined. Mendez, he who had shot two Republican generals under the Black Decree, was above all men the likeliest to hold stubborn Michoacan for the Empire. But even he failed, because the man against him was not less a man than360he, because also the spark of resistance to sceptre and crosier never dies out in Michoacan.
The man as good as he was Régules. A Spaniard, Régules had fought with the Catholic Don Carlos. And now, he was suffering for Mexican Liberals the most that any general can suffer, defeat after defeat, and sometimes annihilation. But he was a Marion, a Fabius. He knew the mountain recesses as no one else, even better than Mendez, who was born among them, and here he would gather fugitives, draft every straggler, until in time he sallied forth again to badger his arch enemy. He hoped only to exist till that day when the French should leave Empire and Republic face to face, on equal terms. It had taken tenacious faith and gloomy years, but the day came at last. The news sifted through defile and gorge. The invader had embarked for Toulon. Nearer at hand Mendez had evacuated Morelia, and was marching to Querétero. And at Querétero was Miramon, driven there from the north by Escobedo. At Querétero was the Emperor–was the Empire, desperate, ferocious, an animal at bay. Out boldly upon the plain, then! But no longer as a slinking guerrilla horde! As an army rather, with thrilling bugles and the Mexican eagle aloft, and regiment numbers in gold on pennons of brightest red! For the Empire was the hunted mad-dog now, and the dignified host was the Republic. The barracks of the Sierra were arming.
In one of the corrals an officer of cavalry was quelling insubordination with soft words. But the mutineers, not knowing their man, did not fathom the dangerous sweetness of his tone. They were deserters from Mendez, come that morning, and as they had horses, were foisted on the officer’s splendid troop. But like the native infantry, they insisted that their women, the soldaderas, should go with them on what was to be a swift march to Querétero. Having brought useful information concerning Mendez, they were insolent in their demands.
361“Now, muchachos,” said the officer of cavalry, “you see how absurd it is, so quiet down. The women can follow later.”
“A Gringo to dictate to us, bless me the saints! Us, free Mexicans, and Republicans!” And the ringleader drew his machete and rushed on the officer.
The Gringo smiled, in a way that a man rarely smiles. His eyes opened in mild surprise, and as the mutineers looked to see his head roll from his shoulders, he was still smiling in that poisonously sweet way. Perhaps there passed across his face just the shadow of pity or of revulsion, but none might say for certain, because of a pistol’s flash that came so quickly after. With the report the assailant plunged headlong, and on the ground seemed to shrivel in his rags. Behind the smoke the officer was carelessly holding a large black revolver, no higher than his hip.
“Because,” he added, “it’s not a woman’s game.”
Then he thrust the weapon back under his ribs and sauntered away. The mutineers gaped in trembling at his back. When they picked up the ringleader, they saw that his fingers had been neatly clipped at the hilt of the machete.
The cavalry officer was Driscoll–but changed! He was changed as bland Mephisto would change a man, if the material were adaptable and Mephisto an artist. Such exquisite gentleness in peril and in slaying could be no other than the devil’s own, and in the most devilishly artistic mood of that suave dilettante.
It was natural that any man should color somewhat into a desperado, considering such an existence among those Sierras, but Driscoll was a desperado refined by cynicism. And yet there was still naught of self-consciousness in it all. The change had not been abrupt, but gradual, as a growing into maturity. The roughened native instincts of a gentleman had sobered from Quixotic impulses into a diabolic calm. His bravery was turned to cool and almost supernatural self362possession, mocked withal by gentleness. And yet he was not a villain. To the mutineers, to those who beheld his smile, he seemed a fiend. But his horse knew no change in him, which was significant. Something had gone wrong, that was all. The young man who had looked out on the world, half challenging, half expectant, must have seen too suddenly that part of life which is unlovely. However, the thing may not be thus easily explained. The soul of a man, when bent or distorted under stress, is a weird and fearful growth. One may contemplate it in awe; but understand it, never.
More than a year before, when Driscoll changed sides, he was embarrassed to find a side to change to, so thoroughly had the Empire swept away all vestiges of the Liberal strength. But on achieving that farewell of his to Mendez, he rode happily southward, with some vague notion of tracking the Republic into Michoacan. The first night he slept under the stars mid tunas and Spanish daggers, and when he awoke it was to find a strange Indito squatting patiently at his feet. He sat up and rubbed his eyes at what might have been a Hindoo image, except that it doffed a straw sombrero.
“Y’r Mercy is awake?” queried the idol.
“N-o, but it will probably not be long now. Who in thunder are you?”
The Indito explained, and Driscoll covered his knees with his hands, and stared and grew more astounded. The ragged fellow said that he had escaped from Mendez’s camp by squirming on his belly through the cacti, and he had followed the American señor, on foot. He was, he added, a Republican spy.
Driscoll mechanically drew his pistol, but recalled that now he also was Republican.
“But why follow me?” he demanded.
“I was sent to watch only Y’r Mercy, Y’r Mercy’s thousand pardons.”
363“The devil!”
“And with Y’r Mercy’s permission, I was to kill Y’r Mercy at the first chance. But since Y’r Mercy has changed sides––”
“Now look here, who–who put you up to this business, I want to know?”
The man shrugged his shoulders. He only knew that a señor chaparro had sent him.
“A short señor?” Driscoll repeated. “Then we might call you a Shorter Yet, and maybe you know where this República is hiding out?”
The Indito brightened. “That’s why I’m here, señor. I’ll take Y’r Mercy to the Citizen General Régules.”
At the name Driscoll frowned involuntarily, but laughed as he again remembered that he no longer shared the Imperialist hates.
“Régules?” he repeated. “But we all thought he was dead, since the last time we scoured his mountains.”
“That the Virgin would have let me kill Y’r Mercy before then!” said the Indito regretfully. “But no matter, Y’r Mercy will discover that the citizen general is still alive.”
And so he was. They found him in the wildest of the wild region of the Sierra Madre del Sur, far away beyond the Rio de las Balsas, beyond Michoacan, in the impassable tierra caliente of the Pacific slope. The Indians here were the Pintos, who knew naught of the world outside, and owned allegiance to none but a grizzly old dictator, royally described as the Panther of the South. One thing was certain, the Empire could never follow Régules to the fever and ambush of the Panther’s marshy realm, and Régules was hard pressed indeed when he sought such protection. But he was there now, in that last refuge of Liberalism, alone, wounded, fever stricken, emaciated, but undaunted. Driscoll found him so, and became his first recruit.
For the moment Régules had no army, but armies were only364weapons brandished by the real principals in the duel. Over battle and rout and slaughter the two chiefs would glare each at the other, blade in hand and panting, but either ever ready for the stroke that should thrust through the army to the heart of its general. Such a struggle needed only antiquity and a bard to be Homeric. No Greek could equal either champion in cunning, nor Trojan in prowess, nor both in grim persistence and rugged hate. It was truly a fight to have a hand in, and with big, lusty zest, the Storm Centre bounded into the lists. He leaped backward into the age of colossal, naked emotions, which strove as great veined giants with a rude splendor that was barbaric. It was the grandeur of primeval man, of majesty resting on him who fought best. After a thousand years of roof and tableware a man may be no longer primeval, but he is no longer quite a man either if his primeval state does not sometimes appeal to him. As for the young Missourian, he was enthralled.
During that winter, the Spaniard and the American were a recruiting squad of two, picking up the seeds of rebellion among the fertile rocks. The vago, or poor Indito, was drafted wherever caught. Guerrilla fugitives rejoined their leader. The little band grew slowly, but in appearance merited Mendez’s contemptuous epithet of brigand thieves. Fluttering yellow rags revealed only leathery-hided bones. Sandals sloughed away. There were a few machetes, and one or two venerable musketoons. But the commoner weapon was a heavy wooden staff, used for trudging up the steep paths. Imagine a Mexican abandoning his horse! But pursuers often tracked “the brigand thieves” by their mounts dying here and there–a pitiful blazed trail. And their exhausted riders often lay down as well, and would not rise, though Régules lashed them, though the terrible Mendez followed close behind. If at this time the Republic compared its conditions with the tapestried court in Mexico, then hope of success must have365seemed lugubrious irony. Yet there was the watchword still, “Viva la Intervención del Norte!” Régules looked to the United States to drive away the French. Driscoll’s face would twist to a grimace. It was a peculiar position for an ex-Confederate.
The Republicans in Michoacan were cut off from all outside help, while those along the Rio Grande drew from the friendly Americans in Texas much aid and comfort. Driscoll pondered on this, until in June he got leave to go to the Córdova colony and there enlist, if possible, his old comrades of Shelby’s brigade. The result is known. After the affair at Tampico, he came back with a troop of colonels. They were the nucleus of a cavalry which he loved more than Demijohn, more than his ugly pistols, more than his pipe.
It was a grim affection that Driscoll bore his regiment of horse. He was no longer the same man as when he left. He returned from Córdova with a mood on him, which settled more and more heavily as he nursed his troops into a splendid fighting machine. There was a dangerously quiet exultation in the patience with which he built the regiment up to full strength and trained it into the power of a brigade. He did wonders through the idea, pleasantly instilled, that much of the fun of fighting lies in the winning, and he demolished, as an absurd fetich, the idea that the hunted men of Régules were doomed never to win.
Thus he labored with the Inditos, his terrible little fatalists in combat. There were enough to choose from, since by now the tide of desertion was changing toward the Republic. The problem of mounts in time solved itself. The French began selling their horses rather than transport them back to Europe, and these being declared contraband of war by the Liberal government, were complacently taken away from their owners without even Juarez script in payment. The question of arms proved more troublesome, but the answer at last was even more366satisfactory. For the besieged at Quéretero, Driscoll’s troop later became some unfamiliar dragon hissing an incessant flame of poisonous breath. This was due to a strange and mystical weapon which not only carried a ball farther than any rifle known before, but sixteen of them, one after the other. The strange and mystical weapon multiplied a lone man into a very genii of death, until the Missourian’s twelve hundred were more to be dreaded than many battalions.
The repeating rifles, it may be explained, formed a part of the cache which General Shelby had made on crossing into Mexico. He had taken them, among other things, from the Confederate depositories in Texas. Driscoll knew of the cache through Boone, and by infinite patience had it brought into Michoacan. A solitary Indito journeyed eight hundred miles unnoticed with some seeming fragments of scrap iron. Other vagos were in front of him. Others followed. And these passed yet others, empty handed, trudging in the opposite direction. So an arsenal came to the Sierra Madre del Sur all the way from the Rio Grande, and each and every cavalier, whether miserable ranchero or veteran Missourian, became an engine of destruction, good for a fusillade of forty shots without the biting of a cartridge, for sixteen from his rifle, for six from each of his revolvers, and after these, good for terrific in-fighting with his dragoon sabre. It was no marvel that Driscoll loved such a troop, but the wonder lay in his smile, soft and purring and far-away, as he stroked his murderous darling.
Colonel Daniel Boone, chief of scouts, was harassed nearly to insomnia over the change in his friend. At the bottom of the mystery there must be inspiration for a glowing line, and with pen ready poised over the violet fluid of romance, it was disheartening to have the solution elude him. He proposed clues as a poet tests rhymes. There was vendetta. There was blighted passion. But he ruefully discarded both. Either367would be marked by violent growth, while this thing that touched the Storm Centre formed as slowly as the gravity of wisdom. But what baffled most was that Driscoll himself was completely oblivious. Ifheknew nothing of the effect, how then could one ask him about the cause?
Daniel, however, overlooked the fact that a malady may break out variously, according to temperament. As an instance Daniel’s patient would lose himself in reverie, long and deep and mellowing. Now he was riding with a girl whose gray eyes were upon him in that pensive way she had; or rather, in the pensive way of a girl who finds herself in love, and wondering at it, seeks to learn the reason through a grave scrutiny of the object. It seemed very good to be riding with her again like that, for there was a soothing sense of companionship, of dear camaraderie that needed no words, but only that expression of her mouth and a pair of gray eyes. The day dream, while it lasted, had nothing of bitterness, but lulled his soul instead, and when it passed, he would be left with thankfulness for his moment of fleeting bliss and ineffable comfort. Or again, he awoke to reality with a longing that fiercely would not be denied. “Oh, I want–Jack’leen!” Often and often the imperious smothered cry all but passed his lips. And then he would shake himself, as out of physical slumber, and he would take up his life again. But he would be a shade deeper in the devil’s own mood, of gentleness and a smile.
After Cuernavaca Driscoll had brooded somewhat, yet rather as a boy whose melancholy is callow and easily fades. But during that evening in Boone’s cabin, he had changed to a man, for it was then he came to know the meaning of possession, and in the same moment he learned the meaning of loss. A dull and indefinable resentment thereafter grew on him. But against whom? Against no one, perhaps. Yet he had had a vision of his life’s dearest happiness, and it was gone, that vision, beyond recall.
368Ignorant as he was of Jacqueline’s mission, Driscoll had but one explanation. A man had been born a prince, and a prince dazzles a woman. Yet the rankling in him was neither because of the prince, nor because of the woman. It was much more hopeless than that. It was because a man could be born a prince at all. Something was out of harmony in the world. The irony of it made him grim, and to his sense of humor that such things could be came the smile. A prince in the New World and in the Nineteenth Century!–Now here was as incongruous a juxtaposition as a bull in a crockery shop. And the result?–A people robbed of their dignity as men; a spike among the cogs, and the machinery everywhere grinding discordantly. For the pilfered people, however, the matter could be righted, and Driscoll felt his vague wrath as one with theirs. Together they would drive the bull from the shop. The Mexicans could later repairtheircrockery. But as to his own precious little bit of bric-à-brac, that was shattered beyond hope. His only balm was to help the other sufferers. His only resentment was against fatality. But to pout at fatality is such a foolish business that he smiled, in a gentlemanly, sardonic way. Lucifer himself would be obsequious before fatality. And as for presuming to chastise it, that does indeed require the devil’s own mood.