487Back in that childhood hour he had lain for a while quite inconsolable, until his mother came again, and rested her hand on his head, and told him–“Why, one would think the little goose was going away forever!” It was broad daylight by now, too; and wholly comforted, he had sprung up, joyfully alive. Eternity did not worry him any more for a week.
But the awakening of this later morning, in a Mexican prison! And when he understood that the old familiar fantasy was become a fact! When he remembered how once he had been consoled in his boyhood! For a moment the sense of loss and of helplessness was stifling, and he yearned–yearned frantically, as he never had as a boy–for the touch of his mother’s hand, for her voice, so low and sweet. The horrid cruelty he could not, during that moment, bear. He felt that he must cry out for her, like a very child. And though he wept, it was the man, and the man’s despair that his was not now the boy’s need of comfort.
But when they came in the first dawn and knocked at his door, they found him serene, untroubled, and only the wonted shade of melancholy on his brow. He greeted them courteously, and was desirous that they should have no unnecessary difficulties on his account. Being dressed already, punctiliously, and in black, he himself went to call Miramon and Mejía, and brought them to his own cell, where they received the last sacrament together.
Later the three condemned were at breakfast–bread, chicken, a little wine and a cup of coffee–when horses’ hoofs rang abruptly in the street below, and as abruptly ceased under their window. There was a command, and sabres rasped against their scabbards to gain the light. Maximilian raised eyes filled with pity to his two companions. Mejía, an Indian thoroughly, made a gesture of impatience. The handsome Miramon, of French blood, shrugged his shoulders. Then both glanced timidly in their turn at Maximilian, and each 488finding a hand stretched forth, grasped it silently. But the priests of the condemned, who were waiting apart, felt their blood turn to icy beads. For them the quick metallic gust of strident life down in the street had the merciless quality of hammering upon a coffin lid.
Troops filed up the stairs, and along the corridor. They halted, faced the door, grounded arms. An officer stepped out, fumbled with a document, and read the death sentence. Maximilian gently released himself from one and another of those present, and turning to the Austrian physician, handed him his wedding ring. “You will give it to my mother,” he said. Father Soria’s eyes filled with tears, one plump fist clenched pathetically. Maximilian passed an arm over the good man’s shoulder, and with him walked out among the soldiers. He nodded to them encouragingly, and so started on his little journey.
Three ramshackle public hacks, set high over wabbling wheels, and drawn by mules, waited at the door. Maximilian smiled an apology as he motioned Father Soria to precede him into the first. The troops used their spurs. A whip cracked. The springs jolted. Everywhere, on the curbs, in windows, on housetops, there were people. The archduke had the impression of breath tensely held, and of eyes, eyes strained, curious, and awed, like those of children who witness suffering and cannot understand.
Passing the convent of Santa Clara, Maximilian peered upward at the windows; and, as he hoped, he saw Jacqueline. She was leaning far out, and tremulously poised. Tender compassion was in every line of her tense body, but as their gaze met she tried to smile, bravely and cheerfully, and until the hack swung round the corner, there was her hand waving him farewell. The little journey might have been, a fête, and somehow, he was comforted.
“I wonder,” he mused, “if I’ve done very much for her, 489after all. Or for that American, named Driscoll? Will she–” He shook his head, and sighed. “No, she is not the lass to have him, not after my little scene of last night. But, the choice does rest with her, now. And for a girl, that is everything.–Alas, poor young man!”
His rueful prophecies were that moment interrupted by a woman’s scream. It rose piercingly over the clatter of their march. Maximilian put out his head and looked back. The woman was running beside Mejía’s hack, panting, stumbling through the dust, her black hair streaming. She held a babe in her rebosa, but with her free hand she clutched weakly at the spokes. To the clumsy, pitying soldiers who would force her away, she cried again, “Mercy ... Mercy ... Mercy....” A low murmuring grew on every side. Maximilian flung open his cab door. But the same instant it was slammed against him. He sank to his seat, with a stare of dumb pain in his eyes that the priest beside him never afterward forgot. The woman back there was Mejía’s wife. And Maximilian had had one glimpse of the husband’s face. It was a face stretched to agony, deadened to the color of lead.
“May I, may I–pay for this!” moaned the one-time Emperor. “O God, grant Thou that I do pay for this, hereafter!”