The Missourian Part 64

"Maria, Maria de la Luz," he fell to murmuring, gazing upon the cross as though it were her poor crushed face. In the old days she had made him forget avarice or fear, and now, before this token of her, the hardness died out of his eyes and they swam in tears. Driscoll gazed down on him pityingly. The old man was palsied. He trembled. There pa.s.sed over him the same spasm, so silent, so terrible, as on the night of her death, when he had sat at the court martial, his head buried in his arm.

"Rod said you would want it," Driscoll spoke gently. Then he moved away.

An Imperialist officer was approaching over the field who would bring the help which Murguia refused to accept of the Republicans.

Driscoll looked back once. The Imperialist officer was carrying Murguia into the town. He was a large man, and had red hair. His regimentals were gorgeous. There seemed to be something familiar about him, too.

Greatly puzzled, Driscoll unslung his gla.s.ses, and through them he recognized Colonel Miguel Lopez. Lopez, the former colonel of Dragoons, now commanded the Imperialist reserve, quartered in the monastery of La Cruz around the person of their sovereign. But Lopez had once condemned Murguia to death. A strange solicitude, thought Driscoll, in such a high and mighty person for a little, insignificant, useless warrior as poor Murgie. A strange, a very strange solicitude, and Driscoll could not get it out of his head.

CHAPTER XV

OF ALL NEWS THE MOST SPITEFUL

"O poor and wretched ones!

That, feeble in the mind's eye, lean your trust Upon unstaid perverseness."--_Dante_.

Her gestures, her every word, were an effervescence. There was something near hysteria in the bright flashes of her wit. However gay, joyous, cynical, Jacqueline may have seemed to herself, to Berthe, terrified though the girl was, Jacqueline's mood was a sham.

"The _frisson_, oh, those few exquisite seconds of emotion, eh Berthe?" she exclaimed. "Pursued by robbers--the chase--the rescue--and the jolting, the jolting that took our breaths! Why, Berthe, what more would you have? Helas, to be over so quickly! And here we are, left alone in our coach, robbers gone, rescuers gone! Berthe, do you know, I believe they compared notes and decided we weren't worth it. But I _should_ have thought," she went on in mock bitterness, "I should indeed, that at least our Fra Diavolo would have been more gallant, even if----"

"Even if?" prompted Berthe, then bit her lip.

"Even--Oh Berthe, _fi donc_, to catch me so because I was wandering!--even if one could expect no such gallantry from the Chevalier de Missour-_i_. There now, do you tell Tobie to drive on----"

"But mademoiselle----"

"Say 'Jeanne'," the marchioness commanded, stamping her foot.

"My lady," the girl persisted, but added with affectionate earnestness, "and my only friend, I was simply going to say that we are not deserted after all."

"But didn't I see him riding away?"

"_Him_, yes, but look out of the window. See, he's left six or eight--O--oh----"

It was a joyful cry, which got smothered at once in confusion. Turning quickly, Jacqueline beheld a little Bretonne with eyes cast down and cheeks aflame. Yet even then Berthe gave a cosy sigh of relief. There was cannonading not far away. They had just been taken by brigands, and as suddenly left alone on the road. Thus Jacqueline's company ever cost her many a tremor. Yet somehow one of those chevaliers de Missour-_i_ needed only to appear, and she felt as secure as a kitten on the hearth rug. A chevalier de Missour-_i_ had but now ridden up to the coach door.

"Berthe!" whispered Jacqueline severely, so that the girl thought her dress was awry. "Quick, tuck your heart away in your pocket. It's right there on your sleeve." Whereat Berthe employed the sleeve to hide her higher mantling color.

Jacqueline turned on the chevalier at the window, and surveyed _his_ sleeve. It was covered with dust, but Jacqueline's big eyes could see through dust. She felt about her a subtle atmosphere that made her an outsider.

"Ah, Monsieur le Troubadour?" came her bantering recognition.

Mr. Boone's French crowded pleasantly to his tongue tip. "Mademoiselle,"

he returned, "and," he added, with an odd glance toward Berthe, "Madame l'Imperatrice, uh--how goes it?"

Jacqueline's lashes raised inquiringly, until she remembered how the lank gentleman before her, with the tender heart of a Quixote, had mistaken Berthe for the Empress, months before at the Cordova plantation. She liked him somehow better now for persisting in it.

"Her Imperial Highness," she explained, very soberly, "may deign presently to observe that you are here, monsieur, though, as you see, her thoughts are far away. However, if you can possibly give your own to a humbler person, to myself, dear Troubadour, I should very much like to know what is to happen next. Use fine words, if you must; even put it into verse, only tell me----" With an impulsive shove she flung open the door and stepped into the road. She could still see Driscoll's troop, or rather the cloud of dust, speeding toward Queretaro, but her arm swept the horizon impersonally. "Only tell me," she demanded, "what's happening now, over yonder?"

"Pressing business, ma'am--mademoiselle, and," Daniel lied promptly, "Colonel Driscoll wished me to make you his excuses."

"The minstrels of old, sir," said Jacqueline, "usually accompanied their more gallant fibs with a harp."

Her vivacity was rising fast, and for some reason, Berthe darted an angry look of warning on Mr. Boone. But the poor fellow was blind to Jacqueline's jealousy of a distant conflict, and he blundered further.

"Jack Driscoll's just that way," he apologized for his friend cheerfully. "_Abundat dulcibus vitiis_--he's chuck full of pleasant faults. When there's a clash of arms around, let the most alluring Peri that ever wore sweet jessamine glide by, and--she can just glide. While with me----"

"I see. _You_ have stayed. But I, too, like battles, monsieur.

Tobie, get back up there with the driver. There's no admission charge, I imagine, to this battle?"

Boone gladly offered to take them for a nearer view, but he saw Berthe--his eyes were never elsewhere--shrink involuntarily.

"Stop, arretaz! Hey there!" he ordered, and the driver stopped.

Jacqueline's pretty jaw fell in wonder. The natural order of things was prevailing over the artificial. Social status to the contrary notwithstanding, it was Berthe who commanded here, and not Mlle. la Marquise. But Jacqueline was happy in it, and perhaps a little envious too. Ah, those _Missouriens_! This one, who would rather stay than fight! And that other, who was now fighting for quite the opposite reason! They had a capacity for variety, those _Missouriens_!

It was much later, after a lunch from Jacqueline's hampers under the nearest trees, and after the distant fusillades had quieted to an occasional angry spat, that the ladies' escort of Gringo Grays, bearing a flag of truce, set out with their charge toward the town. Daniel rode beside the coach window, and the flaps of the old hacienda conveyance were drawn aside. He wondered how it happened that the hours had pa.s.sed so quickly. He would not believe that his comrades had been fighting, that many of them had died, so blissfully fleeting were those hours to himself.

"It's all according," he mused profoundly.

And he could not help singing. He hummed the forlorn chanson of Joe Bowers of the State of Pike, which Bledsoe, then lying cold and stiff under a mountain howitzer, had so often bellowed forth.

"It said that Sal was false to me, Her love for me had fled, She's got married to a butcher-- The butcher's hair was red."

But he sung it as a plaint, yet not hopelessly, and Mademoiselle Berthe was the maid entreated of his melody.

The sharpshooters on both sides paused as the coach drove into the little sweet-scented wood that was called the Alameda, and the Missourians, with sabres at salute, transferred their charge to the Imperialists crowding around. Among the latter were some of Jacqueline's own countrymen, and those, in starvation and defeat, were as debonair as the cadets of Gascogne.

"A rose, mademoiselle," said one, bowing low. He had an arm bandaged, and his sword was broken. "An early merciful bullet plucked it for you, so that it fell unhurt, though the petals of all the others are scattered everywhere among the leaves, among the fallen branches, among the shattered statues of our cla.s.sic grove here. See, like the rose I tender, you come among us poor broken soldiers of fortune. I think, dear lady, there will be those above to bless you for it."

Jacqueline smiled behind her tears. "Always a Frenchman, eh, mon lieutenant?" she said.

The fragrance of the place was smothered under gunpowder and sluggish fumes. The pleasant drives, the gra.s.s, the flowers, were trampled by gaunt soldiers bearing their wounded, but the young officer murmured on in the speech of the Alameda's one time fas.h.i.+onable promenade.

"Who is that?" she interrupted.

She pointed over the heads around her to a man bearing someone off the late b.l.o.o.d.y field, and that moment staggering across the trenches into the Alameda. It was an act that moved her, for the rescuer was a richly uniformed officer, and the other but a common soldier. With Berthe close behind, she alighted from the coach and hurried forward to help. The wounded soldier's face lay on the officer's breast, and she saw only his hair, matted and very white, from which a rusty brown wig had partly fallen. But more to the purpose she saw that he was bleeding, and the callous warriors there knew that the angels of the siege had come at last.

"Lay him in my carriage--but carefully, you!" she said, and was obeyed, while Berthe deftly fixed cloaks and blankets around the withered form.

Someone mounted with Toby and the driver, and the coach rolled slowly away to the hospital, leaving behind the two girls staring at the richly uniformed officer, and the officer staring tenfold harder at them. He was a large man, with big hands and feet, and for a Mexican he had a mongrel floridness of skin. His cap was in his hand, and his hair was red and thin. Amazement and a startled prying anxiety choked his utterance.

"Now then, Colonel Lopez," Jacqueline addressed him calmly, "may I ask you the way? I have come to speak with Maximilian."

"La Senorita d-d'Aumerle!" he stuttered.