The Missourian Part 19

"Why, the, the American monsieur. He said just coffee wasn't enough, and for me to bring along the entire contest of marksmans.h.i.+p--the, the whole shooting match--and for madame to hurry."

"Berthe! one would say you thought him a prince."

"He--he is a kind of prince," said the little Bretonne doggedly.

Madame whistled softly. Still, she ate a hearty breakfast.

Meantime, outside two resplendent hors.e.m.e.n were galloping up the curving sweep of the wide road. Their haste smacked of vast importance, and the very dazzling flash of their bra.s.s helmets in the sunlight had a certain arrogance. The foremost jerked his horse's bit with a cruel petulance and drew up before the hacienda house. Several natives were basking on the steps, and he cut at them sharply with his whip.

"Wake, you r-rats!" A Teutonic thickness of speech clogged his utterance, and he turned to his companion. "Tell this canaille," he snarled in Flemish, "to go fetch their master here at once."

The administrador came hurrying, and was overcome. His hospitable flow gushed and choked at its source before the splendor of the two cavaliers. They were Belgians. The first wore a long blue coat bedecked with golden leaves and belted with a sash. Crosses and stars dangled on his breast. His breeches were white doe, and his high glossy boots had wrinkles like a mousquetaire's. Heavy ta.s.sels flapped from his sword hilt. A bra.s.s eagle was perched on his helmet. Altogether, here was a glittering bit of flotsam from the new Mexican Empire. But a narrowness between the man's eyes affected one unpleasantly. It was a mean and a sour scowl, of a fellow lately come into authority. The other man graced the ornate uniform of an aide in Maximilian's imperial household.

"Your Mercy is--is the Emperor?" stammered the poor fat administrador.

He had, indeed, heard rumors of Maximilian on one of his ostentatious voyages. The first Belgian, however, was in no way embarra.s.sed at the question. It was a natural mistake, in his opinion.

"Explain to this imbecile," he ordered, "since there's no better here to receive us."

The aide explained. His Imperial Majesty, Maximiliano, was returning to his capital. Fascinated by the beauty of the tropics, as well as ill of a cough, he had lingered for a week past at the adjoining hacienda of Las Palmas. He had also been deep in studies for the welfare of his people. But now the business of the Empire demanded that he relieve the Empress of her regency. Accordingly, His Majesty and His Majesty's retinue had left Las Palmas that very morning, and would shortly pa.s.s by the hacienda of Moctezuma. His Majesty, when en voyage, always took a loving interest in his subjects, and a sincere ovation never failed to touch his heart. So Monsieur eloin--here the aide glanced with some irony at the first Belgian--so Monsieur eloin thought that the master of La Moctezuma would be grateful to know of His Majesty's approach, in order to gather the peons from the fields to welcome him. It would be as well, perhaps, to reveal nothing to the Emperor of this thoughtful hint.

"To make it quite plain," concluded the speaker, "can you a.s.semble enough men within an hour to do a seeming and convincing reverence to your ruler?"

"And tell him," interrupted Monsieur eloin, "not to forget the green boughs waving in their hands. Make him understand that there will be consequences if it's not spontaneous."

As they galloped back to rejoin Maximilian, the imperial aide was thoughtful. "I can't help it," he said aloud, "I feel sorry for him. How his blue eyes glisten--there are actually tears in them--when he talks to these Indians of freedom and a higher life! He thinks they love him!

And all this elegance--no wonder they believe that the Fair G.o.d is come at last to right their sorrows."

"The loathsome beasts!"

"But I do feel sorry. He really believes that he will verify the tradition and be their savior. It's his sincere goodness of heart. Man, how exalted he is!"

"But where's the harm?"

"Because, because the poor devils were fooled once before. And their new Messiah may deceive them as bitterly with unwise meddling as Cortez did with greed and cruelty."

"Messiah for these pigs!" eloin sneered. "What pleasure it gives him, _I_ can't see."

CHAPTER XV

THE RITUAL

"... a bearded man, Pamper'd with rank luxuriousness and ease."

--_Dante._

The Emperor was coming--elaborately, by august degrees.

First, and far in advance, arrived a haughty pack liveried in the royal green of ancient Aztec dynasties. New tenants might have been moving on this bright May day, for the flunkies attended a small caravan of household stuff, which they crammed through the gaping doorway as nuts into a goose's maw. The stuff was all royal, of royalty's absolute necessities. There were soft rugs, and finely spun tapestries, and portieres to smother a whisper. There was a high-backed chair, and a velvet-covered dais for the high-backed chair. There were brushes, whose stroke caressed gently and purringly the Hapsburg whisker. There was a Roman poet, fastidiously bound, and then--there was the Ritual.

The Ritual was a ma.s.sive tome, of glazed, gilt-edged paper, of print as big for the proclaiming of truth as the Family Bible, of weight to burden a strong man, of contents to stagger a giant brain, unless the giant brain had in it the convolution of a smile. Maximilian and Charlotte had reigned a year, and so far the Ritual was the supreme monument to the glory and usefulness of their Empire. It decreed, by Imperial dictation and signature, the etiquette that must and should be observed in the courtly circle. But alas, you can't codify genuflections, nor yet a handshake.

The next degree in the imperial advent was the imperial courier, who proclaimed from a curveting steed what everybody suspected. "Our August Sovereign" was approaching.

Several hundred peons stared with open mouths. Gathered before the house, they prattled to one another in childlike expectancy of the Senor Emperador. Most of them were learning for the first time that they had an emperor. Still, it sufficed to know this was an occasion for auto-inspiring vivas, like once when the Il.u.s.trisimo Bishop came. They took new hold on the green boughs they were to wave. A handkerchief here and there fluttered from a bamboo pole. Down in an adobe village by the river junction, every gala sc.r.a.p of calico print, whether s.h.i.+rt or skirt, pended from cords stretched across the street; and cotton curtains, some of crude drawn work, hung outside the windows. All the poor finery of the Indians was on exhibition to do honor to a gorgeous Old World court. But the fiesta air had already gotten into the susceptible native lungs, and that alone, with only a trumpet's blare, would make for a hurrah in genuine fervor.

The roomy porch of the old mansion was crowded with the chief people of the hacienda, clerks, foremen, house servants, besides the administrador and the chaplain. Behind a remote column were the three wanderers in the wilderness; the Storm Centre, the Marchioness, and the Maid. They were to have been gone by now, and yet it was not the coming of the emperor that had stopped them. The cause was nearer at hand. Smoking a long black cigar, "grizzled and fierce, as ornate in braid and decorations as a bullfighter," Colonel Dupin had delayed them.

His Cossacks thronged the colonnade. The brick-red of their raw leather jackets splotched every other color with rust. The Contra Guerrillas were many things. They were Frenchmen and Mexicans. They were Americans, Confederate deserters, Union deserters. They were Negroes and Arabs.

They were the ruined of fortune, now soldiers of fortune. They were pirates and highwaymen. They were gold hunters, gamblers, swindlers.

They were fugitives from the noose, from the garrote, from the guillotine. But they were all right willing desperadoes. And there was not a softened feature on a man of the troop. Only a tigerish ferocity could lead them, could hold them.

They surrounded the Missourian on the hacienda portico. If only for his debonnaire indifference, they knew him for a "bad man" such as none of them might ever hope to be. And they watched him like lynxes, though he was unarmed. Yet he did not look "bad." He merely looked bored. He was a prisoner, but not the only one. Anastasio Murguia fidgetted among the Cossacks on his own porch. His restless eyes roved incessantly over the crowd, seeking his daughter, but they were steadily baffled.

Down in the valley, where the Rio Moctezuma joined its course with the Panuco, a dusty mist moved nearer along the old Spanish highway, and faintly there came the sound of clarions. An eager murmuring arose from the throng on the hillside. It swelled more confidently to a buzz as the far-away dust lifted at the ford and revealed the beaded stringing of a numerous company. The distant bugles rang clearer on the pure air. "Yes, he comes," the people cried, "There! Seest thou, hombre?--_There!_ Viva el Senor Emperador!"

For Colonel Dupin the cloud of dust would shortly evolve into a staying hand of mercy, into the exasperating stupidity of mercy. He had captured the American not ten minutes before, and here was interference in a gauzy haze of dust. He signed to one of his men to follow with Murguia, and he himself placed a gauntleted hand on Driscoll's shoulder. "Now,"

he said.

But a white figure of Mexican rebosa and silken instep moved swiftly from behind a column and touched the Tiger's arm. Both Jacqueline and Berthe had been watching the Cossack chief rather than the spectacle in the valley. And as he turned on his prisoner, Berthe half screamed and clutched at the bosom of her dress. It was Jacqueline who gained his side. She addressed him sharply as one who hates to reopen a tedious argument.

"Monsieur Dupin," she cried, "have I not already permitted myself to tell you--yes, I repeat, you are mistaken. He is in no sense whatever an accomplice of Rodrigo Galan."

The Tiger heard, no doubt, but he did not stop. He kept on toward the door, Driscoll beside him, and his men around him. He meant to pa.s.s through the house. Some secluded corral in the back would do for the execution. Driscoll seemed as indifferent as ever, though there was a lithe, alert spring in his step. Behind him Murguia was moaning, praying to see his daughter. Berthe followed, bewildered, and silently wringing her hands. But the death march was so business-like, and every one else was so intent on the approach of a royally born person, that the crowds shoved aside by the little group never once suspected that they had just brushed elbows with tragedy in the making.

Jacqueline caught her breath, sucked it in rather, in a pang of angry despair; and plucking up her skirts she ran ahead until she could oppose her slender figure squarely in front of the burly Frenchman. If he were to move on, he must trample her down. Her eyes, usually so big and round and shading to a depth of blue with their lively mischief, were all but closed, and through the narrowed lashes they gleamed like white steel.

Her voice, though, was clear and even, of a studied courtesy.

"Yes, I know, Monsieur le Coronel, suspicion with you is quite enough.

But," she went on in contempt and feigned surprise at his dullness, "this rage of yours at being outwitted by Rodrigo Galan blinds you to something else.--Pardon, monsieur, a Frenchman does not jostle a woman.--Thank you."

"But the jostling by a woman's tongue, mademoiselle.--Well, what is it?

Have mercy, be brief, since I am not even to breathe while my lady talks."

"I was thinking, dear monsieur, of the feelings of an artist, to which you are very, very blind."

"Feelings, artist? Name of a name, mademoiselle!"

"Precisely, Maximilian's feelings. You know how he abhors the sight of blood. Ma foi, and I agree with him."

"Go it, Miss Jack-leen!" Driscoll abetted her. Never a word of their French did he understand, but he knew that she had a power of speech.

Dupin evidently knew it better yet, for though he laughed, he did not laugh easily.

"Never fear," he said, "His Majesty's delicate prejudices are safe. It will be all underground before he comes, and no muss at all."