Graham's Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. 5, November 1852

As the last note of the Libera died away, the trumpets sounded, the assistant priests took their places, the two combatants returned to their chargers, and replaced themselves in their saddles, remaining immovable, with their lances in rest, and their bucklers on their arms, guarding their breasts, like two equestrian statues, till the flourish of trumpets ceased, and the emperor, rising from his throne, and stretching forth his sceptre, pronounced, in a loud voice, the words “Laissez aller.”[5 - “You may go.” This was the signal at trials by battle, passes of arms, and tournaments, for the combatants to engage.]

The two combatants careered against each other with the same courage, but very different fortune; for scarcely had the heavy battle-steed of Guthram de Falkemberg run a third part of the course, when, clearing double the space with three bounds of his charger, the Count of Barcelona was upon him. For an instant nothing was seen but a dreadful shock, a lance shivered in a thousand splinters, and a confused vision of men and horses; another moment, the horse of Guthram rose without his rider, while the corpse of his master, pierced through with his adversary’s lance, lay bleeding on the sand. The Count of Barcelona ran to the horse of his fallen adversary, seized him by the reins, and backing the reluctant animal, forced him to touch with the croup the barriers of the field; this manœuvre, according to the known laws of chivalry, being a sign of mercy given by the victor to the conquered knight, whereby he gave his foe permission to rise, who was indeed conquered; but the generosity of the brave champion was of no avail to him; Guthram de Falkemberg would rise no more, till the sound of the last trumpet summoned his perjured soul to judgment.

A cry of joy broke from the vast multitude, whose wishes and prayers had been all along for the gallant and beautiful young knight. The emperor rose and cried, “Well struck;” Douce waved her scarf; the empress fell on her knees and gave thanks to God for her deliverance. Then the hangman descended slowly from his stand, unbound the helmet from the recreant knight, which he flung on the ground; after which he dragged the corpse by the hair of the head to the bier, and returning to the end of the lists remounted the pile.

The count went to salute the emperor, the empress, and the fair Marchioness of Provence; then, returning to his post as champion, he once more addressed the monarch: – “Saving, Sir Emperor, your pleasure,” cried he, in a loud voice, “will you please to cause Walter de Than to be summoned into the lists?”

“Let Walter de Than be introduced,” replied the emperor.

The barrier unclosed a second time, and Walter de Than entered the lists, armed cap-a-pied, and mounted as ready to make his false accusation good; but when he saw near him Guthram de Falkemberg, stretched on the bier, and remarked that a single thrust from the lance of the Champion of God had sent him to his dread account, instead of advancing to the altar, to take his lying oath, he rode up to the emperor, and, alighting from his horse, said: – “Sir Emperor, I cannot obey your summons to the field; for nothing shall induce me to maintain the cause I have taken, for it is a false and accursed one, as, indeed, God, by his judgment on my sinful companion, has decided it to be. I, therefore, throw myself upon your mercy, that of the innocent empress, and the unknown knight – and a noble one he is – while I proclaim before the court and this assembly, that the whole charge brought by Guthram de Falkemberg and myself against my lady empress is false throughout; and that we were induced and suborned to calumniate her by Prince Henry, your second son, who, fearing lest you should finally prefer to him the babe of which your imperial spouse was then pregnant, devised this conspiracy against the life and honor of his stepmother, and the child she would bear. His gifts and promises corrupted us from our fidelity as true knights and loyal subjects. In virtue of this frank confession, I therefore implore your grace and mercy.”

“You deserve no more mercy than the empress would have found, if she had not obtained from God a champion,” replied the emperor. “Go, then, to her, and at her feet implore for pardon, for she alone can restore your life and honor.”

Walter de Than crossed the lists amidst the hisses, groans, and yells of the spectators, and knelt down before the rescued empress, who was tenderly caressing her infant son, whom she regarded with the expression of a Madonna.

“Madam,” said the recreant knight, “I come, by the command of my lord the emperor, to entreat your clemency; for, since I plead guilty to the wrong of preferring a false and calumnious charge against your honor and the legitimacy of my lord prince, you can do what you please with the criminal.”

“Friend,” replied the young empress, “you may depart in health and safety for me. I will take no vengeance upon you; God will deal with you according to his own pleasure and justice. Go, then; but never let me behold you in Germany again.”

Walter de Than rose and departed, and from that day was seen in the imperial realms no more.

Then the emperor ordered the gate to be opened for the conqueror, who entered the lists once more; but this time looked round in vain for an enemy.

“Lord Knight,” said the emperor to the Count of Barcelona, “Walter de Than will not fight with you. He has confessed his guilt to me, and demanded mercy; and I sent him to the empress, who has granted him his life, on the condition of his leaving my dominions forever. She was too joyful and too full of gratitude for the deliverance God had granted her by your arm to be severe to him.”

“Since it is so with him, I am satisfied,” replied the Count of Barcelona; “and I ask no more.”

Then the emperor descended from his throne, and, leading the charger of the victor by the bridle, in this manner conducted the count to the empress. “Madam,” said he, “behold the knight who has so valiantly defended your righteous cause. You must give one hand to him, and the other to me, that we may conduct him to my throne, where we must all three remain, while justice be done to the corpse of Guthram de Falkemberg; after which, we shall in like manner lead you to the palace, where we will both endeavor to render him all the honor we can, in order to retain him as our welcome guest as long as we can prevail with him to remain at our court.”

The empress quitted her station of doubt and shame, to kneel before the emperor, who raised and embraced her before the vast assembly, as a proof to them that she had recovered his confidence and love. Then he took one of her hands, and the Count of Barcelona the other, and in this manner she was conducted to the throne, upon which the emperor took his seat, placing her on his right hand, and the Champion of God on his left. As soon as they were seated, the hangman came into the lists a second time, and, approaching the corpse of Guthram de Falkemberg, cut with a knife the links of his armor, which he divided piece by piece, throwing them about the lists, with these contemptuous words: – “This is the helmet of a coward; this is the cuirass of a coward; this is the buckler of a coward.” When the hangman had stripped the body in this manner, his two assistants entered with a horse dragging a hurdle, to which they attached the corpse, which was then dragged through every street in Cologne to the public gibbet, where it was hanged by the heels, in order that everybody might come and see the dreadful wound through which the sinful soul of the recreant knight, Sir Guthram de Falkemberg, had issued forth to its dread account. And all who looked upon the guilty dead declared that only the just judgment of God could have enabled such a young and gentle cavalier to overcome such a great and renowned warrior in the trial by battle.

The emperor and empress brought the Champion of God to their palace, where they made him a great feast; and, in order to do him honor, placed him at dinner at their own table, and by their side, and declared that they never intended to part with him. Now, the count wanted to return to his own good city of Barcelona, which he had left two months before with more chivalry than prudence. So, mindful of his duty as a sovereign, after he had done his devoir as a knight-errant, he stole out of the palace by night; and, having ordered hay and corn to be given his good steed at the hostelrie, and commanded his squire to groom him, he departed with great secrecy from Cologne, which he left that same night for his own dominions.

The next day, the emperor, missing the count from his table, sent a messenger to the hostel, where he supposed his summons to breakfast would find him. He was soon informed of the departure of his guest, who was supposed to be at least a dozen miles from Cologne by that time. The messenger soon returned to the emperor, to whom he said: – “Sire, the knight who fought for my lady the empress is gone, no one knows whither.”

At this unexpected news Henry turned to the empress, and, in a voice which betrayed his displeasure, said: – “Madam, you have heard what this person has told me. I find your champion quitted Cologne last night, without leaving any trace by which he can be discovered and brought back.”

“Oh, my dear lord!” exclaimed the empress, “you will be still more grieved when you learn the quality of this knight, with which, at present, I think you are unacquainted.”

“No,” replied the emperor; “he has told me nothing more than that he was a Spanish count.”

“Sire, the knight who did battle for me is the noble Count of Barcelona, whose renown is already so great that it exceeds even his lofty rank.”

“How!” cried the emperor, “is this unknown knight no other than Raymond de Berenger. God indeed, sent him to my aid, madam; for the imperial crown has never been so highly honored before. He, however, makes me pay him very dearly by the disgrace and shame his sudden departure has cast upon me. I declare, madam, that I will not receive you into my love and favor till you find and bring him back to my court. Go away yourself for your journey as quickly as you can; for I will either see you with him, or see you no more.”

“It shall be so, since you command it, sire,” replied the empress, who was too well accustomed to the hasty manner and arbitrary disposition of her consort to contest his will, however unreasonable that will might appear to her. She had noticed the marked attention the handsome count had paid to her beautiful maid of honor, Douce, Marchioness of Provence, and, therefore, determined to include her in her train, which consisted of a hundred noble matrons, a hundred young damsels of quality, and a hundred knights; for Praxida resolved to travel in a style suitable to her lofty rank; and she used such expedition, that in two months from the time of her departure she found herself in the noble city of Barcelona. The astonishing report that the Empress of Germany, with a splendid retinue, had arrived at the principal hostelrie, quickly reached the noble count, who knew not how to credit it; till, mounting his horse, he rode thither, and recognized at the first glance the fair lady for whom he had lately fought. The delivered and deliverer met with equal joy, and, after the first salutation, the lord count, kneeling at the feet of the empress, asked “to what fortunate chance he owed the pleasure of seeing her in his own dominions.”

“Lord count,” replied the empress, “the emperor, my spouse, will not permit me to return to his court without you, for your presence at Cologne can alone restore to me his love and favor. Indeed, ever since he has known the honor the noble Count of Barcelona did the imperial crown by becoming my champion, he has resolved to share in no festivities till that happy day when he can welcome you to his court, and thank you for that act of courtesy in a manner befitting your high degree. Therefore, if you wish me to be once more recognized as Empress of Germany, you must hearken to my humble prayer, and accompany me to Cologne.”

Upon hearing these words, the count once more knelt down, and presenting both his hands, in the manner of a prisoner awaiting his fetters, saying, “Madam, it is for you to command, and me to obey; do with me as with a prisoner.”

The empress immediately took a golden chain, whose links encompassed her throat eight times, unwound it, and clasped one end round the right wrist of the Count of Barcelona, while she gave the other to the fair Marchioness of Provence, in whose gentle keeping she willed the captive to remain during the homeward journey. The prisoner, on his part, declared that he was too well satisfied with his guardian to wish to break her chains, unless she were pleased to permit him to relinquish them for a time.

Three days after this interview, the Empress of Germany quitted Barcelona, with her retinue of three hundred noble knights and ladies, bringing with her its chivalrous sovereign, in a chain of gold, held by her fair maid of honor; and in this manner traversed Roussillon, Languedoc, Dauphiny, Switzerland, and Luxembourg; the lord count, according to his vow, neither breaking his chain, nor showing any inclination to do so.

The cortége of the empress was met, five leagues from Cologne, by the emperor, who, being apprised of the coming of the Count of Barcelona, came to welcome him. As soon as he saw the brave cavalier who had saved the honor of his dearly-beloved wife, Henry IV. alighted; Raymond Berenger did the same, though still held in the chain of gold by the Marchioness of Provence. The emperor then warmly embraced and thanked him for the honorable service he had done him, by waging the battle of the Empress Praxida, and besought him to name his reward.

“My lord emperor,” replied the count, “will you be pleased to command the Marchioness of Provence never to let me go, for, since I cannot depart from her wardship without her good pleasure, I think she ought not to quit mine; that thus, being fast linked together for the rest of our lives, we may never be divided from each other in this world, nor in that which is to come.”

Douce of Provence blushed, and even thought proper to make some maidenly opposition to an arrangement so pleasing to herself. The emperor, however, intimated to her, that, being her suzerain, whatever he chose to command she must obey. He therefore fixed the marriage for that day week; and Douce of Provence was so submissive a vassal, that she never even thought of requesting her lord paramount for the delay of a single day. It was in this manner that Raymond Berenger, Count of Barcelona, won the fair heiress, and became possessed of the marquisate and lands of Provence.[6 - Henry the Fourth of Germany was subject to fits of jealousy, for which failing he once received personal chastisement, at the fair hands of the empress and her ladies, on a certain occasion on which he had concealed himself in his wife’s apartment, disguised as a foreign knight when his intrusion was resented and punished by severe buffettings from the incensed female court, who either did not recognize the emperor, or pretended to mistake him for a robber. Empresses of Germany appear to have been often the mark for false and murderous accusations; since, nearly a century before this period, the Empress Cunegonda was delivered from the pile by the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, who entered the lists as the Champion of God, and successfully defended her honor. —Trans.]

THE LUCKY PENNY

—

BY MRS. S. C. HALL

—

(Continued from page 423.)

CHAPTER III

There are some women who never lose the habit of blushing; it is lovely in the young, and indicates extreme sensitiveness in the old. Richard inherited his mother’s blushes before they had faded from her own cheeks. The transparency of Mrs. Dolland’s complexion was noticed by Mr. Whitelock; it contrasted well with the dust-covered pages of his books; yet he wondered why her color came and went, and why her lips trembled.

“Nothing wrong with Richard, I hope?” he said.

“I hope not, sir; and that is what I wanted to speak with you about, if you will be so good as to have a little patience with me. I am a simple woman, I know, sir; my husband (ah! you would have understood him) always said I was; but the simple are sometimes wise unto salvation. You live, sir, like a Christian – you never keep open after six on Saturdays – so that my boy gets home early, and not too much worn with fatigue to enjoy the rest and perform the duties of the Sabbath; and, on Sunday, it does him good (he says) to see you in church before the bell has done ringing. I am sure, sir, you are a Christian.”

“I hope so; I am a believer; but many a believer does not live as becomes a follower of Christ,” replied Mr. Whitelock.

“My husband, sir, was one of those who suffered long, and was kind, and thought no evil; in short, sir, you can read his character in 1 Corinthians, chap. xiii. I owe him more than woman ever owed to man. His unfortunate attachment to me lost him his position in society: his father never forgave him for marrying a farmer’s daughter. I thought that I did right, because he, just one-and-twenty, said he could bend his lot to mine, and laugh at poverty, and not live without me, and such like things – as, perhaps, you have said yourself before you were married.”

“I beg your pardon, my good woman,” interrupted the bookseller, “but I never was married, and never uttered such absurdities in my life.”

Mrs. Dolland colored, and twisted the end of her shawl round her finger.

“Lucky, sir – lucky for you – and for – but I beg your pardon; perhaps you never were in love.”

Mr. Whitelock fidgeted, and grumbled something, and the widow’s instinct made her comprehend that he did not relish her conjectures. She continued —

“I believed every word he said: I could not understand his sacrifice, because I had never moved in his sphere; I thought it a fine thing to marry for love, and out-stare poverty. I did not know that the gaze of its stony eyes, and the clutch of its bony hands might drive him to his grave. They said he was consumptive from his birth: I don’t believe it; I know that labor and want take its form. I went to his father; I knelt to him; I told him I would leave my husband – go where they should never hear my name – if he would only receive him and his son; I did, indeed, sir; but he turned from me with cruel words. And, though he knew he was teaching a few poor scholars, just for bread, so he left him – and so he died. I only wish that young, poor girls, who think it a fine thing to many a gentleman, could know the misery it brings: the hardest lot can be borne alone; but to bring another to it, and that other the one you would die to make happy —Oh! that is the hardest of all things to bear! I beg your pardon, sir; but if I did not begin from the first, you could not understand my feelings.”

She wiped away her tears, and Mr. Whitelock told her to proceed. He was so much interested in her tale, told in her simple manner, in her soft voice – a voice so full of that low intonation, which is distinct even in its murmurs – that he could not help wishing some one of his favorite novelists, people who, long ago, wrote the most innocent tales in five or seven volumes, were there to hear it. By his own dreamy abstraction, she was transformed into a young shepherdess, tying a blue ribbon round a lamb’s neck; and the vision, with its adjuncts of green fields and purling brooks – which he never saw more than twice a-year – with an enraptured youth leaning over a stile, and the village church steeple peering above the distant trees, was only dispelled by her resuming her unaffected narrative.

“And speaking as I was, sir, of understanding the feelings, I know that to the last I never quite understood those of my husband. I can’t tell if it was because of the difference of our birth, or of our bringing up, or of both; though, as to the birth, his father had been a poor man once, and got rich, some said, not over rightly – though I can’t quite believe that of my dear husband’s father. I never, as I said, quite understood my husband; for, to the last, I know I gave him pain, by little ways which he never complained of, and I knew not how to change; but what I could understand was his PIETY. He lived the last year of his life, a life of such faith and hope, that the world seemed to fold itself away from him like a vapor, and he looked upon all that stood between Christ and him as evil. He delighted to teach our child texts of Scripture; and even the wise-like copies which he used to set him from Poor Richard’s Almanac faded from his memory toward the last, though Bible words remained with him, and scraps of Watts’s hymns, and long passages of holy poetry; but what he dwelt upon was the future of his child. At that time I got constant work as an embroideress. But the last year he might be said to be more in heaven than on earth: the world was not with him; only hour by hour he used to call me to him and say – ‘Remember our great salvation,’ and the next minute he would pray me, clasping my hands within his, not to care about the little lad’s learning, so that he could win Christ. He would go on, adding scripture to scripture, to prove that all this world is nothing worth without that which insures eternal life. He desired neither riches, nor honors, nor wealth, nor learning for that boy – nothing but his becoming wise unto salvation. Sir, I understood that—that came home to me. Now, sir, the lad is a good lad – tender and loving to me his mother, and, I believe, dutiful to you, sir, though the person below did hint, rather than say, things which I own gave me concern just now – things which make me fear he may not be altogether what I hope; but he is young, and – ”

“It is only Matty’s unfortunate manner,” interrupted the bookseller. “She does not mean it: she has an ugly trick of insinuating evil where she means good.”