“Sacré––”
“And possibly he would brace his feelings to a second æsthetic horror as a rebuke for the first. In a word, my colonel, there will be one more body to follow–underground. Now is this quite clear, or–do you require my promise on it?”
The savage old brow manifested the desire to make her a victim as well, but in this extra blood-thirst she knew that Driscoll was safe. “I understand, Mademoiselle la Marquise,” he said, laying on heavily the suave gallantry of a Frenchman. “Yes, I understand. Prince Max values Your Ladyship’s good taste so highly–– Pardi, I believe he would certainly shoot me if you told him to.”
“Exactly,” Jacqueline coldly assented.
127“And Monsieur l’Americain may congratulate himself on the influence of mademoiselle, the arbiter elegantiarum–with His Majesty.”
“As Monsieur le Tigre may congratulate himself that the American does not understand this insult, sir.”
Behind her rose a dry hysterical cackle of renewed hope. “The Little Black Crow!” she exclaimed. “See, my colonel, he is not worth an execution all to himself, so do we all go back to contemplate Prince Max’s loving ovation.”
“The Emperor arrives!” she cried gayly, returning to the porch. With the others she was once more behind the remote column, an end of the rebosa hanging over her arm ready to be flung across her face. “But what–Hélas, I haven’t my Ritual with me.”–The Ritual classified every movement, every breath of the Court, as rigidly and with as little consciousness of humor as Linnæus did his flowers.–“It can’t be a Minor Palace Luncheon of the Third Class,” she mused, “and it isn’t Grand Court Mourning of the First Degree. Ha, I have it, He–that ‘H’ is a capital, please, not as a sacrilege, but to be Ritualistic–He is out on a voyage of the Minor Class, Small Service of Honor, Lesser Cortège. Now then, all’s comfortable; no room for plebeian misconceptions.”
On they came, each rigidly after his kind, a Noah’s procession of Dignitaries with the August Sovereign first of all. To bring on the majestic climax so early was illogical, of course, but dust having happened to be created before precedence, the Cortège was changed the other way round for a voyage, so that the First Category people breathed what the August Sovereign kicked up and kicked up some additional for the Second Category, and the Second did the same for the Third, and so on down to the Ninth, or “And all others,” who breathed the best they could and paid the bill.
Nothing preceded the royal coach except the royal escort, and that by exactly two hundred paces, in which interval a 128canonical obligation was laid on the dust to settle. It was a particularly gallant royal escort. The Empress’s Own, or the Dragoons, or Lancers, or Guardsmen, or Hussars, or whatever they were, were picked Mexicans; and they were frankly proud of their rich crimson tunics; also, perhaps, of their heavily fringed standard worked by Carlota herself. A cavalry detachment in fur caps with a feather completed the body guard. Mexico is a hot country, but that was no reason why an Austrian regiment should sacrifice its furry identity.