I sent Merlin home on a shutter. He had caved
in and gone down like a landslide when I pronounced
that fearful name, and had never come to since.
He never had heard that name before,—neither
had I—but to him it was the right one.
Any jumble would have been the right one. He
admitted, afterward, that that spirit’s own
mother could not have pronounced that name better than
I did. He never could understand how I survived
it, and I didn’t tell him. It is only
young magicians that give away a secret like that.
Merlin spent three months working enchantments to try
to find out the deep trick of how to pronounce that
name and outlive it. But he didn’t arrive.
When I started to the chapel, the populace uncovered
and fell back reverently to make a wide way for me,
as if I had been some kind of a superior being—and
I was. I was aware of that. I took along
a night shift of monks, and taught them the mystery
of the pump, and set them to work, for it was plain
that a good part of the people out there were going
to sit up with the water all night, consequently it
was but right that they should have all they wanted
of it. To those monks that pump was a good deal
of a miracle itself, and they were full of wonder
over it; and of admiration, too, of the exceeding
effectiveness of its performance.
It was a great night, an immense night. There
was reputation in it. I could hardly get to sleep
for glorying over it.
CHAPTER XXIV
A RIVAL MAGICIAN
My influence in the Valley of Holiness was something
prodigious now. It seemed worth while to try
to turn it to some valuable account. The thought
came to me the next morning, and was suggested by
my seeing one of my knights who was in the soap line
come riding in. According to history, the monks
of this place two centuries before had been worldly
minded enough to want to wash. It might be that
there was a leaven of this unrighteousness still remaining.
So I sounded a Brother:
“Wouldn’t you like a bath?”
He shuddered at the thought—the thought
of the peril of it to the well—but he said
with feeling:
“One needs not to ask that of a poor body who
has not known that blessed refreshment sith that he
was a boy. Would God I might wash me! but it
may not be, fair sir, tempt me not; it is forbidden.”
And then he sighed in such a sorrowful way that I
was resolved he should have at least one layer of
his real estate removed, if it sized up my whole influence
and bankrupted the pile. So I went to the abbot
and asked for a permit for this Brother. He
blenched at the idea—I don’t mean
that you could see him blench, for of course you couldn’t
see it without you scraped him, and I didn’t
care enough about it to scrape him, but I knew the
blench was there, just the same, and within a book-cover’s
thickness of the surface, too—blenched,
and trembled. He said:
