THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH MAY BE PRODIGIOUSLY LONG THOUGHTS
"And many a Knot unravell'd by the Road;
But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate."
--_Omar._
Another young person, Jacqueline herself, was also pondering rather
soberly this morning. And her thoughts fitted as oddly with her piquant,
lightsome, cynical youth as the gloomily patriotic ones of the Storm
Centre did with his youth, which was robust and boyish and
swashbuckling. To judge from the way their brains worked now, both young
people might have been grave wielders of state affairs, instead of the
lad and the lass so heartily and pettily scorning each other a short
hour before.
Yes, the great rugged Missourian had his disdain too, and for none other
than the darling beauty of two imperial courts. The beauty would have
been vastly amused, no doubt, had she known of the phenomenon. But
knowing a little more, such as its source and the man himself, she must
have flushed and drooped, piteously hurt, as none in her own circle
could have wounded her. The shafts which flashed in that circle were
keenly barbed. They were the more merciless for being politely gilded.
But she understood, and despised, the point of view there. It was a dais
of velvet, of scarlet velvet. And a worldly little gentlewoman like the
Marquise Jeanne was not one to be unaware of the abyss beneath, of which
the flaming color was a symbol. But she rather enjoyed the darts, if
only to fling them back more dazzlingly tipped.
The perspective of the Missouri boy was different. And his disdain was
different. A titled belle mattered little with him, and was apart, like
the girl in a spectacular chorus. Operettas and royal courts were shows,
which real men and women paid to see, and to support. He was a
deep-breathing, danger-nourished man of life and of things that count.
And his only cynicism, and even that unconscious, was the dry honest
sort which sheer unpolished naturalness bears to all things trivial and
vain and artificial. One can readily understand, then, the attitude of
such a man toward a playactor off the stage; toward a playactor, that
is, who thinks to impress the great, wide, live world with the
superficial mannerisms of his little playacting world. Here was Din
Driscoll, Jack Driscoll, Trooper Driscoll, here he was, traveling near a
handsome young woman who for the moment had been cut off from her
precious wee sphere. And he saw her outside of it, playing coquettishly,
and to her own mind, seriously; playing bewitchingly her shallow role
patterned after life, yet without once realizing the counterfeit. The
Western country boy, whatever his Cavalier stock, had a Puritanical
backbone in common with the whole American race. And without being aware
of it, his personal, private bearing toward the light and airy French
girl was a sneer, a tolerant, good-natured and indifferent sneer.
However, Mademoiselle la Marquise was neither amused nor hurt, because,
quite simply, she rode in happy oblivion of the rustic and his standards
for the appraising of a girl. He looked very straight of neck and spine,
and she wondered if he had been cradled in a saddle, but that was all.
Now if Lieutenant-Colonel Driscoll had had the slightest glimpse of what
was actually passing through the winsome and supposedly silly little
head behind him, there is no reliable telling into what change of
opinion he might have been jostled. But this is certain, that if he had
known, he could have saved himself some rare adventures afterward.
In Jacqueline's musings there was poetry and there were politics. The
poetry justified the politics; moreover, was their inspiration. A
dilettante such as Jacqueline, aesthetic and delicately sensitive, was
naturally a lover of the beautiful in her search after emotions. A
sentiment for her surroundings came now as a matter of course. If she
turned, she beheld the chaparral plain stretching flatly back of her to
the sands and lagoons of the coast. If she flirted her whip overhead,
down hurtled a shower of bright yellow hail from the laden boughs. Her
nostrils told her of magnolias and orange blossoms; her eyes and ears,
of parrots and paroquets and every other conceit in fantastic plumage.
They were a restless kaleidoscope of colors blending with the foliage,
and from their turmoil they might have been quarreling myriads, and
never birds of a paradise. Little red monkeys grinned down at her as
they raced clutching among the branches, while a big bandy-legged sambo,
an exceedingly ill-tempered member of the same family, bawled his
reproaches in a tone gruesomely human. Now and then her horse reared
from an adder squirming underfoot, or she would see a torpid boa twined
sluggishly around a limb, as about a victim. Once in a jungle-like place
she experienced something akin to the prized ecstatic shudder as she
made out the sleek form of a jaguar slinking into the swamp. The ugliest
of the picturesque "properties" was a monstrous green iguana with his
prickly crest and horn and slimy eye, basking full five feet along a
rotten log.
But the things of horror merely gave to those of beauty a needed
contrast, and did not hurt the poetry in the least. They were every one
on the same grand, wild scale. As the palms, for instance, rising like
slender columns a hundred feet without a single branch. As yet other
palms, which were plumed at the summit like an ostrich wing; or as the
smaller ones at their base, spreading out into fans of emerald green.
Again, as the forest giants which far overhead were the arches of a
watercourse, like the nave of a Gothic cathedral. And even the parasite
vines were of the same Titan designing, for they bound the girders of
the vault in a dense mat of leaves and woven twigs, while underfoot the
carpet was soft inches deep with fern and moss. As for the
flowers--Jacqueline wanted to pluck them all, to wreathe the wondering
fawns, as ladies with picture hats do in the old frivolous rococo
fantasies. And as to that, she might have been one of those Watteau
ladies herself, so rich was the coloring there, and she in the
foreground so white, so soft of skin, so sylvan and aristocratic a
shepherdess.
And then it was a thing for wonderment, that beyond, where the mountains
were, all this world changed, yet changed to another as strange and
vast. And that still farther on there stretched yet other regions, and
each one different, and each no less marvelous and grand. A bewildering
prodigality of Nature, spelling the little word "romance"! Jacqueline's
lip quivered as she gazed and imagined, and as the poetry of it filled
her soul. But of a sudden the little woman sighed. It was a sigh of
rebellion. And just here the politics leaped forth, inspired of the wild
thrilling beauty of the world.
"To think," she half cried, "that we are losing this--all this! And yet
we have won it! Mon Dieu, have we not won it? Yet for whom, alas?
Maximilian?--Faw, an ungrateful puppet such as that, to have, to take
from us, such as--this! Now suppose," her lips formed the unuttered
words, while her gray eyes closed to a narrowing cunning, "just suppose
that we--that someone--reminds His Majesty how ingratitude falls short
of courtesy between emperors."
The boy's thoughts were of the country he had lost. Those of the
resplendent and wayward butterfly were of an empire she meant to gain.
But in her, who might suspect the consummate diplomat? Even then she was
speaking to Murguia, asking if it were not time that Fra Diavolo
remembered his engagements. Driscoll heard the query, and his comment
was a mental shrug of the shoulders.