“Charity, then?”
She did not protest.
“As I thought,” he said. “There was no feeling in–in––”
Jacqueline raised her eyes and met his frankly.
“When a woman feels in the sense you mean, sire,” she said, “then she does not make an empire, even the Austrian Empire, a condition. If the man in question has no more than his horse, his pistols, even his pipe, then the woman––” But she stopped abruptly.
“With you,” he granted honestly, “it was not a matter of personal ambition either. But if neither of these, then what–Now I see!” he cried. “A state reason! A decoy, to tempt me out of Mexico! Yes, yes, now I see!”
“It is good to know,” said Jacqueline, not ungratefully, “that Your Majesty at least, if no other, can see a high motive in my self abasement.”
“Now what can she mean by that?” he demanded of himself. “What other, in particular, thinks hard of her that she should care?”
Éloin was the only other man who could have seen them, there at Cuernavaca. No, little it mattered to her what Éloin thought. But–yes, there was another. There was the American who had intruded and wanted to save his empire. Maximilian recalled now her change to bitterness after the American had left them, and a moment ago he had seen the identical pain of self-contempt tug at her lips. And yet, once 343she had left the American to die. But Maximilian answered even that objection. Leaving him to die was a necessity for her country. And the sacrifice had gone farther. It had not faltered before the self-degradation of which she had just spoken.
The admiration in his eyes grew. The chivalry in his race awoke within him, and exalted him. He felt himself become the true knight, in the purity of devotion to a woman–a gentleman, as real chivalry would have the term. Poor man and poet, he felt even the impulse to bend the knee and crave as a boon some risk of life in her service, without thought of boon thereafter–a knightly impulse nearly obsolete in chivalry, if ever customary. But he knew now that the impulse was really possible, and the proof was this: that the constraint between them had vanished, that soon he was talking with her easily and naturally.