492Maximilian stepped forward and addressed them. To each he gave a gold piece bearing his effigy. It was his last expenditure in that coin. He requested them earnestly, gently, to aim at his body, not at his head. He was thinking of his mother. He would not have her see him with mangled features. Then with a final reassuring word, he turned back to the wall.
They were going to place him between the other two, but with a smile and shake of the head, he would not have it so. His last act was for precedence. Affectionately he drew Miramon to the place of honor, so that Mejía was on the right, and himself on the left.
Then the fiscal of the Republic appeared, and read the military law. For any who should ask the lives of the condemned, death was prescribed. But if there was anything the condemned themselves wished to say....
Maximilian removed his hat. “Mexicans,” he said, “may my blood be the last to be spilled for this country’s welfare. Long live Independence! Long live Mexico!”
He spoke the words calmly, gravely, and having concluded, he carefully adjusted a large handkerchief, so that his beard might not be burned by the powder. Then he crossed his arms on his breast, and gazed steadily into the barrels of the leveled muskets, waiting.
A wave of motion, of tendons stiffening, passed along the thick wall of flesh. Against it the tide without swelled higher, stronger. Tension strained upward to the supreme crash. The quiet of a multitude is pain.
But the other two Imperialists had not spoken yet. Mejía shook his head passionately. He saw only his young wife with her babe, panting, stumbling through the dust. He held a crucifix, and would not take it from his lips. Miramon, however, raised his voice to protest against the charge of treason. Of that crime he died innocent. But he pardoned, as he hoped 493for pardon. Then he cried, “Long live Mexico! Long live the Emperor!”
Maximilian started. These were the words that he thought he should like to hear. But now they grated. They recalled the mistake he had lived, the anachronism of his life. They were scorpions. They stung like the needle in an ulcer. He turned sharply, in tearful reproach. But a sword flashed, the volley came, and the three men fell, as under a crushing rock, one against the wall; his head broken over upon his breast. The pert young officer pointed his blade at three convulsive bodies, and through each a last bullet sped, burying itself in the earth beneath. The crowd pressed, surged, stood on tiptoe.
There was one other among the spectators, but keeping himself hidden, whom Maximilian would have been concerned to see there. He was Driscoll. He came to watch the shriveled derelict, Murguía. He came to stand guard over a soul, Maximilian’s. What peace that soul had found should not be destroyed. And so he screened himself in the crowd, holding ready to crush a viper whose fangs were heavy with poison. When Maximilian paused and spoke to the old man, Driscoll was very near, near enough to hear, and to strike. But the old man had only wheezed and mumbled. Though why that old man did not utter a first word, though why he could not, will never be explained. But this much is true, that the ambushed soul, moving so calmly toward eternity, then stepping so near the coiled serpent, was yet its own guardian, unwittingly.