“The king, by his silence, still stands to the
terms.” Then I lifted up my hands—stood
just so a moment—then I said, with the
most awful solemnity: “Let the enchantment
dissolve and pass harmless away!”
There was no response, for a moment, in that deep
darkness and that graveyard hush. But when the
silver rim of the sun pushed itself out, a moment
or two later, the assemblage broke loose with a vast
shout and came pouring down like a deluge to smother
me with blessings and gratitude; and Clarence was
not the last of the wash, to be sure.
MERLIN’S TOWER
Inasmuch as I was now the second personage in the
Kingdom, as far as political power and authority were
concerned, much was made of me. My raiment was
of silks and velvets and cloth of gold, and by consequence
was very showy, also uncomfortable. But habit
would soon reconcile me to my clothes; I was aware
of that. I was given the choicest suite of apartments
in the castle, after the king’s. They
were aglow with loud-colored silken hangings, but
the stone floors had nothing but rushes on them for
a carpet, and they were misfit rushes at that, being
not all of one breed. As for conveniences, properly
speaking, there weren’t any. I mean little
conveniences; it is the little conveniences that make
the real comfort of life. The big oaken chairs,
graced with rude carvings, were well enough, but that
was the stopping place. There was no soap, no
matches, no looking-glass—except a metal
one, about as powerful as a pail of water. And
not a chromo. I had been used to chromos for
years, and I saw now that without my suspecting it
a passion for art had got worked into the fabric of
my being, and was become a part of me. It made
me homesick to look around over this proud and gaudy
but heartless barrenness and remember that in our
house in East Hartford, all unpretending as it was,
you couldn’t go into a room but you would find
an insurance-chromo, or at least a three-color God-Bless-Our-Home
over the door; and in the parlor we had nine.
But here, even in my grand room of state, there wasn’t
anything in the nature of a picture except a thing
the size of a bedquilt, which was either woven or
knitted (it had darned places in it), and nothing in
it was the right color or the right shape; and as
for proportions, even Raphael himself couldn’t
have botched them more formidably, after all his practice
on those nightmares they call his “celebrated
Hampton Court cartoons.” Raphael was a
bird. We had several of his chromos; one was
his “Miraculous Draught of Fishes,” where
he puts in a miracle of his own—puts three
men into a canoe which wouldn’t have held a
dog without upsetting. I always admired to study
R.’s art, it was so fresh and unconventional.
