415“I remember him,” said Maximilian softly, looking up to the others. “One of your orderlies, Colonel Lopez, I believe? Of course I remember him, for I see him often. He is always near me. Even to-day, on the llano, during the thickest of the battle, there he was at my stirrup, and there he must have fallen, in humble, unquestioning loyalty.”
Jacqueline drew back in relief, and she imagined that Lopez did also. Maximilian had forgotten the hacendado utterly.
With a grunt of satisfaction the surgeon drew forth his forceps from the wound and dropped a bullet to the floor. Next he gently rolled the patient over on his back, and then it was that Jacqueline saw in Murguía’s hand, in the hand that had been under him, a little ivory cross. Fainting, unconscious, he still clutched it, from Driscoll’s leaving him on the battlefield until the present moment. By now the stains of his child’s blood were washed away in his own. Jacqueline’s quick eyes caught an inscription on the gold mounting, and leaning close she read the dead girl’s name, “María de la Luz.”
With the gripping of the bullet and its extraction, or possibly at the sound of a voice–Maximilian’s–the old man’s eyes opened, and held the Emperor’s in a deathly stare. Jacqueline watched the piercing beads grow smaller and smaller in their cavernous sockets, and all the while they seemed to concentrate their intense fire. The others, except Lopez, thought it delirium, but Jacqueline would have named it the very blackest hate. “This man will live!” she said to herself, and shuddered.
Maximilian, seeing consciousness returned, spoke cheerily. “Ah, doctor, you will have him well and sound within a week, I know? Look to it, sir; a heroic veteran like this cannot be spared.”
A strange distortion wrapped the visage of suffering. “Could 416that be a smile?” Jacqueline wondered. But the Imperial party took its leave, and the tragedy lurking beneath was not revealed, as yet.
Through the throng waiting outside the hospital to acclaim him again as a prince victorious, Maximilian led the two girls to their coach, and went with them to the convent of Santa Clara, where he asked that they be received as guests by the sisters. Here, in the comfortless parloir of the retreat, he learned the reason of Jacqueline’s daring journey from the capital.
“I bring Your Highness,” said she, “the most spiteful news my feeble sex can ever bring.”
Again the involuntary plea for fair tidings swept his face.
“And, and that is, mademoiselle?”