"Do you really understand how great a hardship it is?" retorted the king to his friend. "Will you share it with me?"
"Share it with you?" asked the priest.
"Yes! as it appears that I must consent to be Head of the World Temporal—will you consent to be the Head of the World Spiritual? In short, will you consent to be Archbishop of Bohemia?"
"Leave the little church that I love, and the kind, simple hearts in my care, given into my keeping by the goodness of God...." asked the priest.
"To be the spiritual shepherd," answered the king, not without irony, "of the sad flocks of souls that wander, without pastor, the strange streets of lost cities...."
The king paused, and added, with his sad, understanding smile, "and to sit on a gold throne, in a great cathedral, filled with incense and colored windows."
And the priest smiled back; for the king and the priest were old friends and understood and loved each other.
At that moment there came a sound of trumpets through the quiet boughs, and the priest, rising and looking through the window, saw a procession of gilded carriages, from the first of which stepped out a dignified man with white hair and many years, and robed in purple and ermine.
"It is your Prime Minister, and your court," answered the priest to the mute question of the king. And again they smiled together; but the smile on the face of the king was weary beyond all human words: because of all the perils that beset a man, the one peril he had feared was the peril of being made a king, of all the sorrows that sorrow, of all the foolishness that foolishness; for vanity had long since passed away from his heart, and the bees and the blossoms of his garden seemed just as worthy of his care as that swarming hive of ambitious human wasps and earwigs over which he was thus summoned by sound of trumpet, that happy summer afternoon—to be the king. Think of being the king of so foul a kingdom—when one might be the king—of a garden.
But in spite of his reluctance, the good duke at length admitted the truth urged upon him by the good priest—that there are sacred duties inherited by those born in high places and to noble destinies from which there is no honorable escape, and, on the priest agreeing to be the Archbishop of Bohemia, he resigned himself to being its king. Thereupon he received all the various dignitaries and functionaries that could so little have understood his heart—having in the interval recovered his lost temper—with all the graciousness for which he was famous, and appointed a day—as far off as possible—when he would set out, with all his train, for his coronation in the capital, a journey of many leagues.