“Know then that the American peasant named Lincoln, who would not recognize a Hapsburg, is dead. He has been assassinated. He will no longer encourage our rebels in Mexico.”
“That poor gentleman whom you call a peasant,” she returned with galling frankness, “was greater than any Hapsburg. He was fifty million people, and one million are still under arms. Your rebels know it. They still cry, ‘Viva la Intervención del Norte!’ But go on, sire.”
He chafed under her mockery in the title. But sitting there, goading an imaginary shark, she was no less inciting than when he had ventured his caress.
“They are of no consequence,” he burst forth, “neither the Americans, nor the dissidents. Your own countrymen, mademoiselle, will, and must, assure my empire.”
“H’m’n,” she ejaculated, with a quick shrug. “Even the 260marshal, greatly against his will, has had to inform Your Majesty that we will shortly withdraw.”
“Then I shall depend on my subjects alone!”
She contented herself with repeating, “Viva la Intervención del Norte!” That too, was ample comment as to the loyalty of his subjects. The Emperor paused in his walk. “Alas,” he sighed wearily, “a Hapsburg sacrifices himself to regenerate a people, and–they do not appreciate it.”
Jacqueline bent her head to hide a smile. She dreamily made rings in the water, and seemed to fall into his mood of poetic melancholy. “A comedietta of an empire,” she mused sympathetically, “a harlequinade, nothing more. Grands dieux, I do not wonder that Your Highness finds it unworthy!”
There is no such incense to a man as when he imagines himself understood by a pretty woman.
Yet the temptress now found herself the harder to master. It was the thought of what she must yet do. But she gave her head an impatient toss, and the tears that had come were gone. The lines of her mouth tightened, and the dangerous glint shone in her eyes. “So,” she added, almost in a whisper, “you did not mean it, sire, when you offered only a play-empire–to me.”