“Why else? If–if anything happens to Maximilian, France 420will be blamed. Oh why, why did you not escape this morning, while the road was open?”
For the first time during the interview the fire of high resolve leaped into the prince’s eyes. “But could I, in honor?” he demanded sternly. “Think of the townspeople, abandoned to the Liberal fury. Their Emperor, mademoiselle, means to face the end with them, here, in Querétaro.”
The dignity of his catastrophe was already beginning to appeal to him, to exalt him, even as the vision of a Hapsburg winning his empire had so often done before.
“But,” protested the girl, “if they capture Your Highness, if they–if they hold you for trial?”
She stopped, for Maximilian was laughing, and laughing heartily. The idea of hands laid on him, an Archduke of Austria–ha, he was grateful to her. Its very absurdity had given him the first relaxation of a laugh in months.
“Nevertheless,” persisted Jacqueline, whose heritage of a revolution was an obstinate bundle of these same absurdities, “nevertheless, I had hoped to save Your Highness with my news, since it is news that leaves no hope. Why not, then, escape? Treat for terms, do anything, only save your followers and–yourself, sire?”
But she found it impossible to sway him from this, his latest conceit. His new rôle, the more desperate it looked, only ensnared him as the more worthy. He contemplated the end serenely. As a military captain he was culling laurels against theatric odds. His heroic loyalty to a lost cause, with perhaps a little martyrdom (of personal inconvenience), how these would count and be not denied when he should return to his destiny in Europe!
His was even a mood to consort with lofty traits in others, and in a kind of poetic ecstasy he thought of Jacqueline’s steadfast devotion to her country’s glory. And he was moved again by the vague, chivalrous longing to bend the knee, to do her 421some knightly service. But–yes, he seemed to remember, there was such a service to be done, yet and yet–no, he had forgotten.
Then quite curiously, yet still without remembering, he dwelt in reverie on that man named Driscoll who had so filled the morning with valiant deeds.