When Driscoll was gone, the Benemérito of America turned to the grinning hyena-like old man who was his visitor. His own dark features were passionless, impenetrable.
“You observe, señor,” he said, “that Justice does not require corrupting, nor even a memory. So let El Chaparrito add this to his philosophy, that he need not boast again of an infallible spur to civic loyalty, for he will never find it, nor I. And yet–there is patriotism.”
459CHAPTER XIX
In Articulo Mortis
“The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of the soul.... Man cannot be happy and strong until he lives in the present.”
–Emerson.
For Maximilian it was the eve of execution. The soul feels that there is much to decide at such a time, but under the nettling merciless load the soul will either flounder pitifully and decide nothing, else lie numb and in a half death vaingloriously believe that it has decided everything. So may the condemned be open-eyed or blind. Or, according to the police reporter, be either coward or stoic. But it really depends in large measure on whether realization be dulled, or no.
Maximilian had too late come to understand that his anointed flesh was violable at all. He learned it only when the death watch was actually set on his each remaining breath. And now he was en capilla, in the chapel of the doomed; he, Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, Count of Hapsburg, Prince of Lorraine, Emperor of Mexico, even He!
They had given him the tower room of Querétaro’s old Capuchin church, and against the wall was an improvised altar. But the sacrament waited. The tapers on the snow-white cloth were as yet unlighted. Instead the Most Serene Archduke–Emperor no longer–read from a battered volume of Universal History, which, with a book’s queer vagaries, had strayed into his cell. He read how Charles of England had died, then he paused, blinking at the two candles on the rough 460table. They were vague shapes, they were horrors, which he now began to see, as the visions of Truth so often are when hazily perceived.
He bitterly envied that unhappy Stuart, who, before his palace window, among Cavaliers and Roundheads, had died in majesty, the bright central figure in a tragedy of august magnitude. But for the Hapsburg how sordid, how mean, it all would be! He could see already the gaping, yellow faces, sympathetic in their stupidity. They would not really know that a prince was dying. The very guard with shouldered bayonet outside his door was a deserter, and it was this man, more than aught else, that gave him to chafe against his ignoble lot. The fellow never uttered a word, indeed; but he had a heavy, malignant eye, and each time he passed the large inner window that opened on the corridor he would look into the cell, as though to locate his prisoner. Then Maximilian could feel the insolent, mocking gleam upon himself, until for rage he clenched his fist.