Chillingly came the whisper of the brown man: "Poor fool! O shuddering, stiff-necked fool! and have you not just seen that which you may not ever quite forget?"
"None the less, I think there is something in me which will endure. I am fettered by cowardice, I am enfeebled by disastrous memories; and I am maimed by old follies. Still, I seem to detect in myself something which is permanent and rather fine. Underneath everything, and in spite of everything, I really do seem to detect that something. What rôle that something is to enact after the death of my body, and upon what stage, I cannot guess. When fortune knocks I shall open the door. Meanwhile I tell you candidly, you brown man, there is something in Jurgen far too admirable for any intelligent arbiter ever to fling into the dustheap. I am, if nothing else, a monstrous clever fellow: and I think I shall endure, somehow. Yes, cap in hand goes through the land, as the saying is, and I believe I can contrive some trick to cheat oblivion when the need arises," says Jurgen, trembling, and gulping, and with his eyes shut tight, but even so, with his mind quite made up about it. "Of course you may be right; and certainly I cannot go so far as to say you are wrong: but still, at the same time—"
"Now but before a fool's opinion of himself," the brown man cried, "the Gods are powerless. Oh, yes, and envious, too!"
And when Jurgen very cautiously opened his eyes the brown man had left him physically unharmed. But the state of Jurgen's nervous system was deplorable.
20.
Efficacy of Prayer
Jurgen went in a tremble to the Cathedral of the Sacred Thorn in Cameliard. All night Jurgen prayed there, not in repentance, but in terror. For his dead he prayed, that they should not have been blotted out in nothingness, for the dead among his kindred whom he had loved in boyhood, and for these only. About the men and women whom he had known since then he did not seem to care, or not at least so vitally. But he put up a sort of prayer for Dame Lisa—"wherever my dear wife may be, and, O God, grant that I may come to her at last, and be forgiven!" he wailed, and wondered if he really meant it.
He had forgotten about Guenevere. And nobody knows what were that night the thoughts of the young Princess, nor if she offered any prayers, in the deserted Hall of Judgment.
In the morning a sprinkling of persons came to early mass. Jurgen attended with fervor, and started doorward with the others. Just before him a merchant stopped to get a pebble from his shoe, and the merchant's wife went forward to the holy-water font.
"Madame, permit me," said a handsome young esquire, and offered her holy water.