At dawn he too was to die, and because he too had craved a sceptre. Yet, and yet, he had meant to be an instrument of good. Born of kings, anointed by the Vicar of Christ, he had come as agent from the Almighty. But God had failed to sustain him, God had–again the blue eyes raised, but dry now, and stark in terror. “Yes, yes, yes,” so his reeling soul cried to him, “there is 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 463 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 mediæval 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. He was humanity’s puny infant. He had dawdled among men centuries older than himself. His 464whole being was out of harmony with the universe. Fate had held his soul fast during those Dark Ages when he might have striven nobly, and now had cast it forth, an anachronism. It was a soul misplaced in eternity. The dire realization grew and grew, and with it the tragic agony, until with a sudden and the bitterest of cries he flung up his arms and fell heavily across the table.

“My life!” he moaned in piteous begging for something he might not have. “My life, to live my life over again!”

In the first light of morning Escobedo came. The Republican general unfolded a paper, and began to read. But instead of the death sentence, it was reprieve. President Juarez had postponed execution for three days.

“Three days?” Maximilian repeated, wearily shaking his head. “If your Republic could give me as many centuries, but three days!–Three days, in which to live my life!”

465CHAPTER XX
Knighthood’s Belated Flower

“Trusting to shew, in wordès few,
That men have an ill use
(To their own shame) women to blame,
And causeless them accuse.”