"Your discourse upon that occasion was both learned and eloquent; but it did not really touch the subject that had brought us together."
"How would you define the subject?" inquired his Grace.
"The subject on which I hoped to be instructed," said the Prince, "was the real meaning of Chivalry as expressed in the Order of the Thorn, and the reason why I was deemed worthy to be made a knight of it. There had already been some comment owing to the fact that the honor was not conferred immediately on the attainment of my majority. Perhaps my shortened career at college had something to do with it—perhaps the fact that I had brothers who were older and worthier than myself. I am not in the least blaming my father for the delay; rather am I now inclined to be grateful. But that year the death of my two brothers created more than a vacancy: and any further postponement would, I suppose, have made the omission too pointed. I stepped into those dead shoes."
"What a talker the man is!" said the Archbishop to himself. But etiquette held him bound, and there he was obliged to sit, looking interested and attentive, while Max went on.
II
"For some reason or another—perhaps because it was the one thing for which, in spite of legitimate expectations, I had been kept waiting—I conceived for the honor, when it was bestowed on me, a sentimental regard which I did not experience toward my other titles. They had all dropped upon me without any merit on my part; for this one honor I felt in some curious way that I was not worthy. It may have been that feeling of unworthiness which made me, before the date of my investiture, study the history of the Order and the legend of its origin. I had hoped that you would touch upon that legend, and give it some modern application. I wonder now whether your Grace is aware of the legend; or whether I, indeed, am not the only Knight of the Order who has troubled to think anything about it."
"I fancy," said the Archbishop, "that the legend you refer to has a flavor of medieval Romanism that would hardly commend itself to modern ears."
The Prince smiled bitterly. "Your Grace persuades me," he said, "to tell the story myself. At the point where it does not commend itself I shall be glad to hear your criticism.
"The Founder—or ought I not rather to say the first Knight?—of the Order was (if the story be true) a certain ancestor of our royal house who had spent the greater part of his life in wars of unjust aggression. To atone for them—or for other things which weighed more heavily on his conscience—he went late in life on a crusade to the Holy Land; and after being there handsomely trounced by the infidel, was returning in dejection to the sea-coast with the mutinous remnant of his following, when the founding of the Order of the Thorn occurred to him.
"It occurred to him thus: this at all events was his own account of it. He had become separated from his company of knights, darkness was coming on—when, as he spurred his tired steed with little mercy for its exhausted condition, he passed by the roadside a beggar who cried out to him for charity. But the charity asked for was not alms, but only the withdrawal from the mendicant's foot of a thorn which troubled him.