s_ a God! There is, there is!" One sharp
breath, and the mortal fear passed. In ghastly panic he crept back from
the brink, either of the atheist's despair or of the madman's chaos. But
the cost was heavy. Since God did exist, and God yet had failed him,
then it was the man's Divine Right that must be false. He, only a man,
had mistaken his Destiny. Nay, had he a Destiny? Or why, more than
another man? Here, then, was the cost. To keep his hope of Heaven, he
stepped down among the millions and millions. His Divine Right,
crumbling under the grandeur of partition among the millions, became for
himself the most infinitesimal of shares, neither greater nor less than
that of any other human being. But glorified now by the holy alchemy of
Charity, the tiny grain became divine indeed, and he beheld it as a
glowing spark, his own inalienable share in the rights of man. So, for a
moment, the poet prince knew again his old-time exultation. Even Truth,
he now perceived, had her sublimities.

But the pall of horror fell again. To-morrow he was to die. He was to
die because his life long he had sought to rob others of the tiny grain,
of their God-given dignity as men, and that too, even as they were
awaking to its possession. The vanity, the presumptuous, inconsistent
vanity of it all! Under the dark mediaeval cloak he had planned
enlightenment, he, who had tried to rule without parliament, without
constitution! He would have made a people believe in God's injustice, in
God's choice of a man like them to be a demigod over them. Hence the
blasphemous demigod had now to answer to human law. And it was meet and
right. Purgatory was beginning on the eve of his death.

He, the torch of Progress! Maximilian smiled scornfully on himself. He
was only a clod of grit caught in the world's great wheels. The foreign
substance had wrought a discordant screech for a moment, and then was
mercilessly ground into powder and thrust out of the bearings. He
pondered on the first days of the Family Group, when there was
extenuation; more, when there was necessity, for a king. At any rate the
monarch then earned, or could earn, his pomp and state by services
actually rendered. And now? The Hapsburg decided that there was not a
more contemptible parasite on the body politic. The crowned head was
simply the first among paupers. He had his bowl of porridge, which was
the civil list.

The doomed prince sank to a depth of shame that may not be conceived. H