"It is only when they are drunk that they can do it. _I_ know." He spoke
as though he had tried it.

Before the minister had done the King was really angry. "Mr. Secretary,"
said he, "I don't care how many strikes there are, or how many Trades
Unions, or how many motions of censure from the gentlemen of the Labor
Party: they may motion to censure _me_ if they like! The man is dead,
and I was unfortunate enough to be a witness of his death. He died in an
attempt to do a laudable action." (Here the King was tempted to quote
the peroration from his favorite newspaper, but he checked himself: the
minister would not have understood.) "His wife," he went on, "is now a
widow, and his children are orphans; and if that twenty pounds may not
go to them, then I am not master of my own purse-strings, or"--he added
by way of finish--"of my own natural feelings and emotions as an
ordinary human being."

And before that burst of eloquence the Minister of the Interior was
abashed into silence, and retired from the royal presence discomfited.

The King's argument had heated him, like the royal furnace of
Nebuchadnezzar, seven times more than he was wont to be heated. He so
seldom argued with anybody, still less with his ministers: and here he
had been arguing with one or another of them for half the morning. He
almost felt as if something had happened to him; a touch of giddiness
seized him as he turned to retire to his private apartments; and the
thought struck him--if he was as much upset as this over a small
side-issue, what would he be like when he had done adding that luster to
the constitutional edifice which the nation in its crisis would
presently be demanding of him? The wear and tear were going to be
considerable.

Circumstance had departed as he retraced his steps to the domestic wing.
The lackeys, having done their ceremonial duty, had disappeared: he was
free to go unobserved. As he ascended the marble staircase which led
from the great hall toward the private apartments he was still thinking
of the steeplejack, the man who somehow seemed now to be an emblem of
himself. This man, set to the superfluous task of regilding the
weathercock of the Legislature, doing it in defiance of master craftsmen
and fellow-workmen, lured to do it because the cost of the hiring of the
scaffolding had become an expensive charge on the Board of Works, and
then, after the custom of the Trade, primed, emboldened, and made drunk
to do it, d