The Missourian Part 73

IN ARTICULO MORTIS

"The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of the soul.... Man cannot be happy and strong until he lives in the present."--_Emerson._

For Maximilian it was the eve of execution. The soul feels that there is much to decide at such a time, but under the nettling merciless load the soul will either flounder pitifully and decide nothing, else lie numb and in a half death vaingloriously believe that it has decided everything. So may the condemned be open-eyed or blind. Or, according to the police reporter, be either coward or stoic. But it really depends in large measure on whether realization be dulled, or no.

Maximilian had too late come to understand that his anointed flesh was violable at all. He learned it only when the death watch was actually set on his each remaining breath. And now he was _en capilla_, in the chapel of the doomed; he, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, Count of Hapsburg, Prince of Lorraine, Emperor of Mexico, even He!

They had given him the tower room of Queretaro's old Capuchin church, and against the wall was an improvised altar. But the sacrament waited.

The tapers on the snow-white cloth were as yet unlighted. Instead the Most Serene Archduke--Emperor no longer--read from a battered volume of Universal History, which, with a book's queer vagaries, had strayed into his cell. He read how Charles of England had died, then he paused, blinking at the two candles on the rough table. They were vague shapes, they were horrors, which he now began to see, as the visions of Truth so often are when hazily perceived.

He bitterly envied that unhappy Stuart, who, before his palace window, among Cavaliers and Roundheads, had died in majesty, the bright central figure in a tragedy of august magnitude. But for the Hapsburg how sordid, how mean, it all would be! He could see already the gaping, yellow faces, sympathetic in their stupidity. _They_ would not really know that a prince was dying. The very guard with shouldered bayonet outside his door was a deserter, and it was this man, more than aught else, that gave him to chafe against his ign.o.ble lot. The fellow never uttered a word, indeed; but he had a heavy, malignant eye, and each time he pa.s.sed the large inner window that opened on the corridor he would look into the cell, as though to locate his prisoner. Then Maximilian could feel the insolent, mocking gleam upon himself, until for rage he clenched his fist.

Thus the Most Serene Archduke's first perception of calamity was not that royal blood was to flow, but that it was to flow obscurely. Even the ancient raven curse, the curse of the Hab.i.+.c.ht which had given his House its very name, was now fulfilled by unclean buzzards. He saw them each day, perched on the neighboring roofs.

He sighed and turned to his book. Universal History? Yes, but for hundreds and hundreds of years that history of millions and millions of people was no more than the record of his own little family group. Such a course of reading for such a man held a terrible grandeur, and it must have been a unique sensation of pride that touched the golden-bearded, ultra-refined viking prince. A spoilt child he was, and though so cruelly reproved by Life, he yet could learn no lesson in the pa.s.sing footnote that _he_ would add to that family record. He could not see that the light which made the printed characters so dazzling, yet distorted them. He could not know that the commonest man of the millions and millions might read that Universal History by quite a different and a calmer light. But he was aware of the sentinel's tread back of him, and aware too of the fellow's coa.r.s.e, familiar leer.

One consolation he felt he might have had, and this was the dignity of martyrdom. But no one, alas, seemed to regard him as a martyr at all. He had begged that he alone should suffer. But the play at knightly generosity was too shallow. For at the time Maximilian believed that he would not suffer in any case. Later, though, when he knew that he must die, then with simple earnestness he had pleaded for Miramon and Mejia, and forgot himself altogether. But Juarez had hardly more than acknowledged the telegram, and now in the cell next him Miramon was confessing, and in the cell on his other side Mejia waited. Each of these two men would leave a wife and child.

Someone knocked. "No, father, not yet," Maximilian answered gently, although his mood was impatience. The confessor sighed in protest against the waste of precious time, but he did not move away, as he had already twice before during the night. Instead he came and stood at the corridor window. His lip trembled pityingly. There was news, he said.

Maximilian pushed back the book, and was on his feet. The priest meeting his eager look, shook his head sadly.

"It comes from--from Miramar."

Maximilian fell back. One hand groped out involuntarily, as in appeal before a blow. "News of Charlotte?" he asked faintly.

Charlotte was dead, the priest told him.

During a long time, after the priest had gone, his head lay on his arms, between the two candles. He heard no more the sentry challenges, nor sensed the menace in every slightest sound of the dark night outside.

There was something else. "Death?" At first he did not consciously strive for an answer. But the question kept falling, and falling again, as a lash. The vulgar hands which plied the scourge, the stupid yellow faces, these no longer mattered. He felt the blows themselves, only the blows.

She had died, the poor maniac! She had died, a thing for the lowliest pity. And this was true of the haughty child of Orleans because she had wanted a throne. Slowly her husband raised his head; and staring at the wall, his tear-dimmed eyes opened wider and wider. Because she had wanted a throne? Because she had wanted a dais above the meek and lowly, above those who now pitied her! His eyes fell on the Universal History--the family record, and there grew in his eyes a look of detestation. Groaning suddenly, he buried his head again in his arms.

At dawn he too was to die, and because he too had craved a sceptre. Yet, and yet, he had meant to be an instrument of good. Born of kings, anointed by the Vicar of Christ, he had come as agent from the Almighty.

But G.o.d had failed to sustain him, G.o.d had--again the blue eyes raised, but dry now, and stark in terror. "Yes, yes, yes," so his reeling soul cried to him, "there _is_ a G.o.d! There is, there is!" One sharp breath, and the mortal fear pa.s.sed. In ghastly panic he crept back from the brink, either of the atheist's despair or of the madman's chaos. But the cost was heavy. Since G.o.d did exist, and G.o.d yet had failed him, then it was the man's Divine Right that must be false. He, only a man, had mistaken his Destiny. Nay, had he a Destiny? Or why, more than another man? Here, then, was the cost. To keep his hope of Heaven, he stepped down among the millions and millions. His Divine Right, crumbling under the grandeur of part.i.tion among the millions, became for himself the most infinitesimal of shares, neither greater nor less than that of any other human being. But glorified now by the holy alchemy of Charity, the tiny grain became divine indeed, and he beheld it as a glowing spark, his own inalienable share in the rights of man. So, for a moment, the poet prince knew again his old-time exultation. Even Truth, he now perceived, had her sublimities.

But the pall of horror fell again. To-morrow he was to die. He was to die because his life long he had sought to rob others of the tiny grain, of their G.o.d-given dignity as men, and that too, even as they were awaking to its possession. The vanity, the presumptuous, inconsistent vanity of it all! Under the dark mediaeval cloak he had planned enlightenment, he, who had tried to rule without parliament, without const.i.tution! He would have made a people believe in G.o.d's injustice, in G.o.d's choice of a man like them to be a demiG.o.d over them. Hence the blasphemous demiG.o.d had now to answer to human law. And it was meet and right. Purgatory was beginning on the eve of his death.

He, the torch of Progress! Maximilian smiled scornfully on himself. He was only a clod of grit caught in the world's great wheels. The foreign substance had wrought a discordant screech for a moment, and then was mercilessly ground into powder and thrust out of the bearings. He pondered on the first days of the Family Group, when there was extenuation; more, when there was necessity, for a king. At any rate the monarch then earned, or could earn, his pomp and state by services actually rendered. And now? The Hapsburg decided that there was not a more contemptible parasite on the body politic. The crowned head was simply the first among paupers. He had his bowl of porridge, which was the civil list.

The doomed prince sank to a depth of shame that may not be conceived. He was humanity's puny infant. He had dawdled among men centuries older than himself. His whole being was out of harmony with the universe. Fate had held his soul fast during those Dark Ages when he might have striven n.o.bly, and now had cast it forth, an anachronism. It was a soul misplaced in eternity. The dire realization grew and grew, and with it the tragic agony, until with a sudden and the bitterest of cries he flung up his arms and fell heavily across the table.

"My life!" he moaned in piteous begging for something he might not have.

"My life, to live my life over again!"

In the first light of morning Escobedo came. The Republican general unfolded a paper, and began to read. But instead of the death sentence, it was reprieve. President Juarez had postponed execution for three days.

"Three days?" Maximilian repeated, wearily shaking his head. "If your Republic could give me as many centuries, but three days!--Three days, in which to _live_ my life!"

CHAPTER XX

KNIGHTHOOD'S BELATED FLOWER

"Trusting to shew, in wordes few, That men have an ill use (To their own shame) women to blame, And causeless them accuse."

--_The Nut-Brown Maid._

Later the same morning there sounded the ineffable swish of silken petticoats along the corridor and the clinking of high heels on the tiles. La Senorita Marquesa d'Aumerle had obtained permission to visit His Most Serene Highness. The sentinel of the evening before was again on duty, and his evil crossed eye seemed to lighten with vast humor as he presented arms for the lady to pa.s.s. She met his insolence with a searching, level gaze.

Maximilian hastened to the door of his bare cell, and took both her hands in his. "I am beginning to recognize my friends," he said simply.

"I know, I know," he added, "you come to tell me that you failed to get the pardon. But you do bring reprieve."

He would have her believe that he valued that.

Jacqueline regarded steadily the tall, slight figure in black, with the pinioned sheep of the Golden Fleece about his neck, and she sighed. She was disappointed in him. She had thought that pride of race, if nothing more, would give him character during these last moments. She allowed, too, for the grief, and the remorse, in the blow of Charlotte's death.

But she was not prepared for the roving eyes, the disordered mind, the feverish unrest of the condemned prince. Had his soul, then, been a cringing one throughout the night just past? It was the first time she had seen him, except at a distance, since the day she arrived in Queretaro, for she had chosen, and perhaps maliciously, to disconcert the tongue of slander. Hence she could not picture the ravages of sickness and anxiety, until now when she beheld his haggard face. It was one to bring a pang. The cheeks were hollow, the lines sharply drawn, and the skin was white, so very white, with never a fleck of pink remaining. And staring from the wasted flesh were the eyes, large and round and faded blue, and in them an appealing, a haunted look. But they softened at sight of her, as though comforted already.

"A reprieve is best," he said. "You cannot think that I want a pardon, now that, that _she_ is dead!"

"But sire----"

"'Sire'? Ah, my lady, you are a little late, by something like a few hundred years. You see our American was right after all; a letter no longer makes a king."

It was a bon mot that Maximilian had always enjoyed, it being his own, but this time he was most zealously in earnest.

"Monsieur, then," she said, in no mood for reforms of etiquette. "Only, let me talk! We have three days, three days which are to be used. Your Highness must escape!"

But now she understood him less than before, for he only smiled wearily.

It was, then, something else than fear that had broken him so.

Escape? And that guard in the corridor? Pa.s.sing, ever pa.s.sing, the diabolical humorist seemed to chuckle inwardly, as though to stand death-watch were the most exquisite of jokes.

"That man?" whispered Jacqueline. "Why, that's Don Tiburcio. He was driven out of the Imperialist ranks by Father Fischer. But from his lips, this very night, Your Highness will hear that the road is open to Vera Cruz. Ah sire--monsieur--we have been working, we others. There will be horses ready, there will be a long ride, and then, you will safely board an Austrian s.h.i.+p waiting for you."

Maximilian slowly shook his head. "No," he said, "I am ready to die, as--as ready as I shall ever be."

"But the remaining years of your natural life, Your Highness counts them as nothing! Yet you might live twice your present age!"

"My life--over again," he murmured dreamily.

"Of course, why not?"

"One year to redeem each year that has gone."