Jacqueline, Driscoll, both spoke at once. But the girl flashed on the man an angry command for silence.
“Enough, enough!” she cried, “Let me speak, then end it. Whatever others may think, Your Highness extends me his respect? Bien, but that gives me a certain right, which is the right to consider just one thing in answering the question of Your Highness–just one lone, little thing.”
“And that?”
“Is–is whether or not I have the honor to love Your Highness. Oh, the shame in such sacrifice, the shame you put on me! You should have known my answer already.”
Her answer? Driscoll stirred uneasily. What, indeed, was her answer?
“Yet later, mademoiselle,” pursued her inflexible suitor, “when others aspire to your hand, there might come one for whom your answer would be favorable. How then, if this suitor, when pausing to hear what the world says of you––”
“He’d choke it down the world’s throat!” Driscoll burst forth. “He alone need know it’s a lie.”
Jacqueline started as she heard him speak, but the glad and unintended look she gave him changed as quick as thought to haughty resentment. After all, he was still there.
479“But how else,” Maximilian persisted, “can such a man know so much?”
Then, a captive absolute to his lofty idea, the poet prince pleaded for it as one inspired. All things worked, as by Heaven’s own will, to sanction what he proposed. There was Charlotte’s death. There was his own. Dying, he was still a Mexican, and might wed in any station he chose. While if he lived, as an archduke of Austria he could not. But he detested life. With it he had bettered no one. Yet by his death he hoped to save more than life to another. This other was the girl before him. He had wrecked her dearest ambition. For France’s sake she would have lured him from peril. For that, and that alone, she had sacrificed her name. Such accounted for their interview at Cuernavaca. Such accounted for her coming to Querétaro. Yet through his own blind weakness she had failed. France had lost Mexico, he his life, and she–her happiness. But the last could yet be restored. And why not purchase it with his death, since he must have died in any case?