Driscoll stiffened as he stood, his lips parted as his last word had left them. He wondered why these foreign, unsympathetic beings of Austria and France and Belgium and Germany and Mexico looked so blurred to him. He never imagined that there were tears in his eyes.
“It is really true,” continued Maximilian, addressing them all. “A courier brought me the news this morning. Yes, my friends, the North is free at last to attack our Empire. But,” he added blandly, “let us not fear, not while we are sustained by the unconquered legions of France.”
“How he remembers us now!” thought Jacqueline.
She thought too of him who had sent the legions. The entire fabric of Napoleon’s dream of Mexican empire was builded on the dismemberment of the American Union. But, as the Southerners began so well by themselves, Napoleon had left them to do his work alone. He just failed of genius.
“Oh, mon petit, bien petit Napoleon,” she cried in her soul, “how terribly you have miscalculated!”
The room had filled with murmurs, with awed whispering, with frightened questioning looks at one’s neighbor, with ambitions and hates gone panic-stricken. Driscoll came forward. The fellow of homespun held the Empire in his hand, if they but knew it. “Now let me deliver my message,” he said earnestly. “And, afterward, on with the drum-head, I’ll not complain.”
“There, there,” spoke the unseeing monarch, though affected 154by the dignity of sorrow, “you shall have no cause. I came here, meaning to pardon.”
“Pardon?” came the Tiger’s growl. “Your Majesty saves so many enemies, does he fear that soon he will have none left?”
“Perhaps, Colonel Dupin, since my imperial brother, Napoleon, sends me so efficient a bloodhound. But I thought the prisoners were already tried and condemned. That must come first, of course. Yet We are constrained to find another judge, one without preconceived notions of guilt, to hold the court martial. Ah yes, as Monsieur Éloin here suggests, I name Colonel Lopez.–Colonel Lopez, you will stay behind with a company of your own men. Finish the trial to-night, if you can, and overtake me before I reach the city.–Colonel Dupin, I have to request yourself and men as escort, to replace the Dragoons left with Colonel Lopez. And you, Mademoiselle d’Aumerle, shall have a carriage. We start this afternoon. You will be ready, mademoiselle?”
“Is Your Majesty quite resolved,” Jacqueline asked in French, “that the American must be tried? He can easily be found guilty, I warn Your Majesty.”