The Missourian Part 77

Maximilian watched him go. The priest turned to Jacqueline. She, too, stood poised so long as his spurs rang through the corridor. At last silence fell on them. For a moment she hesitated. Then, trembling, her eyes moist, she held out her hand. "Good-bye," she whispered. But, impulsively, she raised her arm and touched the doomed man's forehead lightly with her finger tips, making a blurred sign of the cross. And, not daring an instant longer, she too fled.

Maximilian was alone with the priest. The room was growing dark. It was the last night.

"Now, father, light the tapers, there on the altar. Yes, I am ready.

Ready? Blessed Mother in Heaven, it is more than I had thought to be!"

CHAPTER XXII

THE ABBEY OF MOUNT REGRET

"O, here Will I set up my everlasting rest, And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh."

--_Romeo and Juliet_.

It is curious and humiliating, how Nature does not vex herself in the least for the dying of a man. And yet, to the man, the event is so very important! Each breath of s.p.a.celess night, each twinkle from the firmament, though but the phantom of a ray quenched ages before, everything, he teases into anxious commentary on his own puny end. There could not be more ado if the Universe were in the throes, writhing against a reconquering Chaos. Hara.s.sed creature, what ails him is only the pathetic fallacy, which is a soothing melody and stimulating to mortal pride. But the lapses into healthier realization are very, very hard to bear.

How cold it was, when Maximilian awoke! The chill seemed creeping nearer his heart, nearer the citadel. And how black the night, before the dawn!

But where, now, were his matches? He had the same monotonous trouble of any other morning in getting one to light. Then the two candles guttered fitfully, sordidly, just as they had always done. The white cloths of the last communion seemed a ghostly intrusion on what was of every day.

Maximilian drew his cloak about him. The chill was simply of the plateau, of the night, not the portent of death. The world without was dark and desolate, but that had no reference to the tomb. The world was merely taking its normal sleep. The heavy cloak ought to answer--but, it did not.

He took up the snuffers, coaxing the yellow flames to brighter promise, then set the candles before him on the table. A piece of dripping tallow fell upon his hand, and the hand jerked back. The man pondered. So, even his flesh was part of Nature too, and heeded trivial pain, with no thought of the bullets to drive through it shortly.

He wrote two or three letters yet remaining, to friends, to his brother, the Emperor of Austria. He penned words of farewell, yet even as the tears welled in his eyes, he needed to stop and make sure that he had indeed not more than three hours yet to live. It was difficult, though, with the candles spluttering there, in the ordinary, every-day fas.h.i.+on.

He signed the last letter, to his mother. He gazed at the signature, of characters squarely formed. He might have written it yesterday, or the year before. It looked the same. But the pen he had just dropped had dropped forever. No, no, that should not be! And he s.n.a.t.c.hed it up again, and wrote, scribbled, covered paper, fearing to stop. But at last he did stop, with a s.h.i.+vering laugh. He must face this thing, he decided. And over and over again he told himself, "I have written my last. Yes, my last!" and steadfastly resisted the taunting, airy quill lying there. So, what was harder than farewell to loved ones, he nerved himself to end the small actions of his daily existence.

Maximilian had his life long been a dreamer, ever gazing wide-eyed as a child on the wonderful fantasies that came, whether entrancing or dreadful. But the child's fantasies are kindred with man's philosophies.

Often, as he lay awaiting sleep, there was one particular thought that would bring him quickly, stark, staring awake. And this thought was, how certain things always came to pa.s.s. No matter how far away, nor how very slow their approach, making vague the hope or horror of them, yet the actual, present hour of their happening always struck at last. There was the eve of the day when he should be of age. Oh, but he had longed for that day! He had longed until he craftily suspected it never would arrive. And yet, despite those leaden-footed oxen, the minutes, arrive it did, in very fact. The eve of that day was a happy bed-time; but over his ardent reveries, over the vista of future achievements, there suddenly, darkly loomed another thought, a foretoken and clammy shroud, which smote the young prince with trembling. For would not the day of his death, however far away also, sometime be the present, pa.s.sing moment, as surely, just as surely, as this anniversary of his birth?

Here was a terrifying glimpse of mortality.

When, not fifteen years later, Maximilian opened his eyes in the black Capuchin cell, and comprehension grew on him of the present day's meaning, he recalled how the fantasy of a morning of death had first come to him. He was a boy, and he was to go on a voyage. The boy had awakened when there was scarcely light as yet, and heard his mother at the door. "It is time, dear." She spoke low, not liking to break his slumber. But in the silence of all the world her voice was clear, and very sweet, and the words stood forth against his memory ever afterward.

He was to be gone from her for a time, and this was in her mind as she called him. The boy, though, could think of nothing except that his little excursion among new and strange adventures was to begin, actually to begin. But then, quite unaccountably, there fell over his eagerness a chilling gloom. The delightful sprite named Expectation, who had whispered so piquantly of this same eventful morn, had basely changed herself into a hideous vampire, and she muttered at him, in frightful, raucous tones. Yet the hag's snarls were true promises. There was to come, surely, inexorably, a certain other eventful morn, and he would awake, and without his mother's calling him, he would know--_know_--that it was time!

Back in that childhood hour he had lain for a while quite inconsolable, until his mother came again, and rested her hand on his head, and told him--"Why, one would think the little goose was going away forever!" It was broad daylight by now, too; and wholly comforted, he had sprung up, joyfully alive. Eternity did not worry him any more for a week.

But the awakening of this later morning, in a Mexican prison! And when he understood that the old familiar fantasy was become a fact! When he remembered how once he had been consoled in his boyhood! For a moment the sense of loss and of helplessness was stifling, and he yearned--yearned frantically, as he never had as a boy--for the touch of his mother's hand, for her voice, so low and sweet. The horrid cruelty he could not, during that moment, bear. He felt that he must cry out for her, like a very child. And though he wept, it was the man, and the man's despair that his was not now the boy's need of comfort.

But when they came in the first dawn and knocked at his door, they found him serene, untroubled, and only the wonted shade of melancholy on his brow. He greeted them courteously, and was desirous that they should have no unnecessary difficulties on his account. Being dressed already, punctiliously, and in black, he himself went to call Miramon and Mejia, and brought them to his own cell, where they received the last sacrament together.

Later the three condemned were at breakfast--bread, chicken, a little wine and a cup of coffee--when horses' hoofs rang abruptly in the street below, and as abruptly ceased under their window. There was a command, and sabres rasped against their scabbards to gain the light. Maximilian raised eyes filled with pity to his two companions. Mejia, an Indian thoroughly, made a gesture of impatience. The handsome Miramon, of French blood, shrugged his shoulders. Then both glanced timidly in their turn at Maximilian, and each finding a hand stretched forth, grasped it silently. But the priests of the condemned, who were waiting apart, felt their blood turn to icy beads. For them the quick metallic gust of strident life down in the street had the merciless quality of hammering upon a coffin lid.

Troops filed up the stairs, and along the corridor. They halted, faced the door, grounded arms. An officer stepped out, fumbled with a doc.u.ment, and read the death sentence. Maximilian gently released himself from one and another of those present, and turning to the Austrian physician, handed him his wedding ring. "You will give it to my mother," he said. Father Soria's eyes filled with tears, one plump fist clenched pathetically. Maximilian pa.s.sed an arm over the good man's shoulder, and with him walked out among the soldiers. He nodded to them encouragingly, and so started on his little journey.

Three ramshackle public hacks, set high over wabbling wheels, and drawn by mules, waited at the door. Maximilian smiled an apology as he motioned Father Soria to precede him into the first. The troops used their spurs. A whip cracked. The springs jolted. Everywhere, on the curbs, in windows, on housetops, there were people. The archduke had the impression of breath tensely held, and of eyes, eyes strained, curious, and awed, like those of children who witness suffering and cannot understand.

Pa.s.sing the convent of Santa Clara, Maximilian peered upward at the windows; and, as he hoped, he saw Jacqueline. She was leaning far out, and tremulously poised. Tender compa.s.sion was in every line of her tense body, but as their gaze met she tried to smile, bravely and cheerfully, and until the hack swung round the corner, there was her hand waving him farewell. The little journey might have been, a fete, and somehow, he was comforted.

"I wonder," he mused, "if I've done very much for her, after all. Or for that American, named Driscoll? Will she--" He shook his head, and sighed. "No, she is not the la.s.s to have him, not after my little scene of last night. But, the choice does rest with her, now. And for a girl, that is everything.--Alas, poor young man!"

His rueful prophecies were that moment interrupted by a woman's scream.

It rose piercingly over the clatter of their march. Maximilian put out his head and looked back. The woman was running beside Mejia's hack, panting, stumbling through the dust, her black hair streaming. She held a babe in her rebosa, but with her free hand she clutched weakly at the spokes. To the clumsy, pitying soldiers who would force her away, she cried again, "Mercy ... Mercy ... Mercy...." A low murmuring grew on every side. Maximilian flung open his cab door. But the same instant it was slammed against him. He sank to his seat, with a stare of dumb pain in his eyes that the priest beside him never afterward forgot. The woman back there was Mejia's wife. And Maximilian had had one glimpse of the husband's face. It was a face stretched to agony, deadened to the color of lead.

"May I, may I--_pay_ for this!" moaned the one-time Emperor. "O G.o.d, grant Thou that I do pay for this, hereafter!"

Beyond the last hovels of the suburbs, at the foot of the Cerro de las Campanas, the condemned were told to alight. Here again there was a throng, hundreds and hundreds of swarthy faces, blank in awed pity. One gaping fellow pointed wonderingly.

"Look, there they are! There--los muertos!"

Maximilian overheard, and a cold s.h.i.+ver crossed his spine. To be identified already as "the dead one!"

Then he beheld his coffin, there, the longest of the three being borne up the hill. They were boxes of cheap wood, unpainted inside, smeared with black on the outside. A wavy streak of carmine simulated the drooping cord and golden ta.s.sels of richer caskets. It was the pomp and circ.u.mstance that pertains to the humblest peon clay.

Four thousand serried bayonets squared the base of the hill, and made a compact, bristling hedge to hold back the common people. Through it marched the doomed Imperialists, each with his confessor and a platoon of guards, and so toiled on up the slope. The archduke looked about him.

There were many privileged spectators within the cordon, but nowhere did he see a former friend. All, all, had kept away, and in his heart he knew that it was better so. He could not ask that much of them. But stay--yes, a remembered figure caught his attention; a shriveled decrepit figure. Here, too, mid every color Republican, he beheld in the man's garb a last surviving uniform of the vanished Empire. It was, however, scarcely to be distinguished as such. The red coat was threadbare, and soiled with dust. The ragged green pantaloons, held by a knotted rope, were grotesquely faded. Yet the prince, who had once gloried in das.h.i.+ng regimentals and mistook them for power, was deeply touched. He recognized a lone unit of what had been none other than the Batallon del Emperador. He paused, to have a word with the miserable derelict.

"So, you would be near me, even now?" he said. "Ah, ever faithful little old man, but are you brave enough for the horror of it? Are you?"

Red eyeb.a.l.l.s rolled upward in their sockets, and for a s.p.a.ce met the archduke's kindly gaze. Then the steady repellant hate in them seemed disconcerted, and the withered form cowered under the touch of the pale white hand. Inaudible words rattled in the old man's throat, and he trembled, as though to turn and run. Maximilian regarded him benevolently, thinking it a crisis of emotion.

"There, there," he said, "go if you wish. It's not well, you see, to think of me so much. But you must not imagine that I am ungrateful. When you believed yourself unseen, certainly when you had no hope of reward, throughout my misfortunes, you have always hovered near me, on the battlefield, and more lately under my prison window. Yes, yes, I have seen. And now, and now I thank you." The bloodshot eyes roved the ground, but did not lift again. "As humble, as loyal as a dog,"

Maximilian murmured as he turned away.

They indicated to him that he should take his place before a wall of adobe blocks which had been piled together near the crest of the hill, only a little lower than those very fortifications built by the Imperialists themselves. With a gesture of a.s.sent, he complied. The priests fell sorrowfully back behind the soldiers, and he and Miramon and Mejia were alone together, three tragic isolated figures in a little oblong patch of bare rocky hillside. One end of the oblong was the adobe s.h.i.+eld. The other three sides were walls of living men, ma.s.sed shoulder to shoulder, with bayonets pointed outward against the jostling peering crowd. The three who were to die could now see no human being beyond the dense, double row of soldiery. The remainder of earth for them was the hollow square, bounded by the slouching backs clothed in blue, by the white flats of the kepis, by the line of light playing over the thorns of steel. Beyond was the early morning sun; above, the mystery of s.p.a.ce.

Through the gap of an instant the shooting squads tramped in, nearer and nearer, until they halted opposite the condemned. Maximilian then perceived which squad was to be his own. It numbered seven tiradores and a yellow, beardless officer. The seven were low, c.u.mbersome, tawny, and they shuffled awkwardly. Their stripling chief thrust out his stomach, and he handled his large sword with an unaccustomed flourish. The pompous severity was, after all, only insolence. He had need to keep guard on his importance; he did not wish to hear the pounding of his heart. Yet his muscles twitched unbecomingly, which jerked his mouth, and sometimes his head.

Maximilian stepped forward and addressed them. To each he gave a gold piece bearing his effigy. It was his last expenditure in that coin. He requested them earnestly, gently, to aim at his body, not at his head.

He was thinking of his mother. He would not have her see him with mangled features. Then with a final rea.s.suring word, he turned back to the wall.

They were going to place him between the other two, but with a smile and shake of the head, he would not have it so. His last act was for precedence. Affectionately he drew Miramon to the place of honor, so that Mejia was on the right, and himself on the left.

Then the _fiscal_ of the Republic appeared, and read the military law. For any who should ask the lives of the condemned, death was prescribed. But if there was anything the condemned themselves wished to say....

Maximilian removed his hat. "Mexicans," he said, "may my blood be the last to be spilled for this country's welfare. Long live Independence!

Long live Mexico!"

He spoke the words calmly, gravely, and having concluded, he carefully adjusted a large handkerchief, so that his beard might not be burned by the powder. Then he crossed his arms on his breast, and gazed steadily into the barrels of the leveled muskets, waiting.

A wave of motion, of tendons stiffening, pa.s.sed along the thick wall of flesh. Against it the tide without swelled higher, stronger. Tension strained upward to the supreme crash. The quiet of a mult.i.tude is pain.

But the other two Imperialists had not spoken yet. Mejia shook his head pa.s.sionately. He saw only his young wife with her babe, panting, stumbling through the dust. He held a crucifix, and would not take it from his lips. Miramon, however, raised his voice to protest against the charge of treason. Of that crime he died innocent. But he pardoned, as he hoped for pardon. Then he cried, "Long live Mexico! Long live the Emperor!"

Maximilian started. These were the words that he thought he should like to hear. But now they grated. They recalled the mistake he had lived, the anachronism of his life. They were scorpions. They stung like the needle in an ulcer. He turned sharply, in tearful reproach. But a sword flashed, the volley came, and the three men fell, as under a crus.h.i.+ng rock, one against the wall; his head broken over upon his breast. The pert young officer pointed his blade at three convulsive bodies, and through each a last bullet sped, burying itself in the earth beneath.

The crowd pressed, surged, stood on tiptoe.