He spoke this time, indeed, as a man whose nerve was gone for ever. It was pitiable almost to tears. And Delane, unable to explain the amazing contradictions, felt recklessly, furiously drawn to this trapped wanderer with the mien of a king yet the air and speech sometimes of a woman and sometimes of an outcast child.
“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: