Yet, in spite of that, he could not but recognize that he had touched power; under a misapprehension the people had responded to him as never before; he had done what they regarded as a sporting thing in sending unpopular officialdom to the right-about; it was even possible that among theatrical circles when the exploit was talked of he was now known as "good old King Jack." All the same he did not feel that he had been good, and he wanted to make amends.
The highly colored conversations of Max, the talk about whipping-boys and Court jesters, and all those ancient divinities which had once hedged a King but were now mere barbed wire entanglements, had turned his attention toward certain medieval institutions the practice of which had lapsed, or had become reduced to a mere shadow of their former selves. And with a conscience ill at ease over the damage he had wrought to a season which he still regarded with a certain conventional reverence, his thoughts lighted upon Maundy Thursday, then less than a fortnight off.
He remembered having once watched from a private gallery in the royal chapel the impoverished ceremony which now did shabby duty for the old symbol of kingly humility and service. He had seen the vicarious sacrifice of silver pennies doled out by his almoners to a duplicated dozen of old men and women who had lost their better days in circumstances of the utmost respectability; and shocked at the poverty of the display he had been glad to learn that a more Christian gift of tea, clothes, snuff, and tobacco was added outside the Church door when the ceremony was over. But even so its ritual had not attracted him: it had lost its human values, and seemed to have been kept in life merely for archeological association.
Now on looking into the matter once more (the Encyclopedia Appendica gave him the required information) he was astonished to find that the old foot-washing ceremony of Holy Thursday was originally the chief function at which every year the Knights of the Holy Thorn were bound, if not unavoidably prevented, to appear and do service. Nay, when he turned to it, he found that it still stood so expressed in the Charter of the Order, and that each new Knight, upon admission thereto, swore solemnly to keep and observe the same—so help him God—faithfully unto his life's end.
If he had had any doubt before, the terms of that oath, which he himself had taken—probably without understanding it since it had been read to him in Latin—were sufficient to decide him. Without loss of time he sent word by his Comptroller-General to the Prime Minister that he intended in the following week to revive the full ceremony and to recall the Knights of the Thorn to the duties they had so long neglected. The ceremony, as of old, was to take place in public at noon outside the doors of the metropolitan cathedral.
"The King is going off his head," said the Comptroller-General by way of preface to the announcement with which he was charged; and the Prime Minister was ready to agree with him when he heard it.
"Preposterous!" he exclaimed.
"He has got chapter and verse for it," lamented the Comptroller-General.
"Can't you persuade him that it's a forgery?"
"It's in the oath," replied the other; "you yourself have taken it."