"Ah, then you have known accidents," Delane replied with outer
calmness, as he lit his pipe, trying in vain to keep his hand as steady
as his voice. "You have been in one perhaps. The effect, I have been
told, is----"

The power and sweetness in that resonant voice took his breath away as
he heard it break in upon his own uncertain accents:

"I have--fallen," the stranger replied impressively, as the rain and
wind wailed past the building mournfully, "yet a fall that was no part
of any accident. For it was no common fall," the man added with a
magnificent gesture of disdain, "while yet it broke my heart in two." He stooped a little as he uttered the next words with a crying pathos
that an outcast woman might have used. "I am," he said, "engulfed in
intolerable loneliness. I can never climb again." With a shiver impossible to control, half of terror, half of pity,
Delane moved a step nearer to the marvellous stranger. The spirit of
Ludwig, exiled and distraught, had gripped his soul with a weakening
terror; but now sheer beauty lifted him above all personal shrinking. There seemed some echo of lost divinity, worn, wild yet grandiose,
through which this significant language strained towards a personal
message--for himself. "In loneliness?" he faltered, sympathy rising in a flood. "For my Kingdom that is lost to me for ever," met him in deep,
throbbing tones that set the air on fire. "For my imperial ancient
heights that jealousy took from me----"

The stranger paused, with an indescribable air of broken dignity and
pain. Outside the tempest paused a moment before the awful elemental crash
that followed. A bellowing of many winds descended like artillery
upon the world. A burst of smoke rushed from the fireplace about them
both, shrouding the stranger momentarily in a flying veil. And Delane
stood up, uncomfortable in his very bones. "What can it be?" he asked
himself sharply. "Who is this being that he should use such language?" He watched alarm chase pity, aware that the conversation held something
beyond experience. But the pity returned in greater and ever greater
flood. And love surged through him too. It was significant, he
remembered afterwards, that he felt it incumbent upon himself to stand. Curious, too, how the thought of that mad, drowned monarch haunted
memory with such persistence. Some vast emotion that he could not name
drove out his subsequent words. The smoke had cleared, and a strange,
high stillness held the world. The rain streamed down in torrents,
isolating these two somehow from the haunts of men. And the Englishman
stared then into a countenance grown mighty with woe and loneliness. There stood darkly in it this incommunicable magnificence of pain that
mingled awe with the pity he had felt. The kingly eyes looked clear
into his own, completing his subjugation out of time. "I would follow
you," ran his thought upon its knees, "follow you with obedience for
ever and ever, even into a last damnation. For you are sublime. You
shall come again into your Kingdom, if my own small worship----"

Then blackness sponged the reckless thought away. He spoke in its place
a more guarded, careful thing:

"I am aware," he faltered, yet conscious that he bowed, "of standing
before a Great One of some world unknown to me. Who he may be I have
but the privilege of wondering. He has spoken darkly of a Kingdom that
is lost. Yet he is still, I see, a Monarch." And he lowered his head
and shoulders involuntarily. For an instant, then, as he said it, the eyes before him flashed their
original terrific lightnings. The darkness of the common world faded
before the entrance of an Outer Darkness. From gulfs of terror at his
feet rose shadows out of the night of time, and a passionate anguish as
of sudden madness seized his heart and shook it. He listened breathlessly for the words that followed. It seemed some
wind of unutterable despair passed in the breath from those non-human
lips:

"I am still a Monarch, yes; but my Kingdom is taken from me, for I
have no single subject. Lost in a loneliness that lies out of space
and time, I am become a throneless Ruler, and my hopelessness is more
than I can bear." The beseeching pathos of the voice tore him in two. The Deity himself, it seemed, stood there accused of jealousy, of sin
and cruelty. The stranger rose. The power about him brought the picture
of a planet, throned in mid-heaven and poised beyond assault. "Not
otherwise," boomed the startling words as though an avalanche found
syllables, "could I now show myself to--you." Delane was trembling horribly. He felt the next words slip off his
tongue unconsciously. The shattering truth had dawned upon his soul at
last. "Then the light you saw, and came to----?" he whispered. "Was the light in your heart that guided me," came the answer, sweet,
beguiling as the music in a woman's tones, "the light of your instant,
brief desire that held love in it." He made an opening movement with
his arms as he continued, smiling like stars in summer. "For you
summoned me; summoned me by your dear and precious belief: how dear,
how precious, none can know but I who stand before you." His figure drew up with an imperial air of proud dominion. His feet
were set among the constellations. The opening movement of his arms
continued slowly. And the music in his tones seemed merged in distant
thunder. "For your single, brief belief," he smiled with the grandeur of a
condescending Emperor, "shall give my vanished Kingdom back to me." And with an air of native majesty he held his hand out--to be kissed. The black hurricane of night, the terror of frozen peaks, the yawning
horror of the great abyss outside--all three crowded into the
Englishman's mind with a slashing impact that blocked delivery of
any word or action. It was not that he refused, it was not that he
withdrew, but that Life stood paralysed and rigid. The flow stopped
dead for the first time since he had left his mother's womb. The God
in him was turned to stone and rendered ineffective. For an appalling
instant God was _not_. He realised the stupendous moment. Before him, drinking his little soul
out merely by his Presence, stood one whose habit of mind, not alone
his external accidents, was imperial with black prerogative before the
first man drew the breath of life. August procedure was native to his
inner process of existence. The stars and confines of the universe
owned his sway before he fell, to trifle away the dreary little
centuries by haunting the minds of feeble men and women, by hiding
himself in nursery cupboards, and by grinning with stained gargoyles
from the roofs of city churches....

And the lad's life stammered, flickered, threatened to go out before
the enveloping terror of the revelation.