Читать книгу The Missourian - Eugene P. Lyle - Страница 13

“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 65enjoyed 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 rôle 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 66telling 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, æsthetic 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 67plumed 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 68she meant to gain. But in her, who might suspect the consummate diplomat? Even then she was speaking to Murguía, 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.