Читать книгу: «The Dove in the Eagle's Nest», страница 21
CHAPTER XXIV
OLD IRON AND NEW STEEL
The clear sunshine of early summer was becoming low on the hillsides. Sparkling and dimpling, the clear amber-coloured stream of the Braunwasser rippled along its stony bed, winding in and out among the rocks so humbly that it seemed to be mocked by the wide span of the arch that crossed it in all the might of massive bulwarks, and dignified masonry of huge stones.
Some way above, a clearing of the wood below the mountain showed huts, and labourers apparently constructing a mill so as to take advantage of the leap of the water from the height above; and, on the left bank, an enclosure was traced out, within which were rising the walls of a small church, while the noise of the mallet and chisel echoed back from the mountain side, and masons, white with stone-dust, swarmed around.
Across the bridge came a pilgrim, marked out as such by hat, wallet, and long staff, on which he leant heavily, stumbling along as if both halting and footsore, and bending as one bowed down by past toil and present fatigue. Pausing in the centre, he gazed round with a strange disconcerted air—at the castle on the terraced hillside, looking down with bright eyes of glass glittering in the sunshine, and lighting up even that grim old pile; at the banner hanging so lazily that the tinctures and bearings were hidden in the folds; then at the crags, rosy purple in evening glow, rising in broad step above step up to the Red Eyrie, bathed in sunset majesty of dark crimson; and above it the sweep of the descending eagle, discernible for a moment in the pearly light of the sky. The pilgrim’s eye lighted up as he watched it; but then, looking down at bridge, and church, and trodden wheel-tracked path, he frowned with perplexity, and each painful step grew heavier and more uncertain.
Near the opposite side of the enclosure there waited a tall, rugged-looking, elderly man with two horses—one an aged mare, mane, tail, and all of the snowiest silvery white; the other a little shaggy dark mountain pony, with a pad-saddle. And close to the bank of the stream might be seen its owner, a little girl of some seven years, whose tight round lace cap had slipped back, as well as her blue silk hood, and exposed a profusion of loose flaxen hair, and a plump, innocent face, intent upon some private little bit of building of her own with some pebbles from the brook, and some mortar filched from the operations above, to the great detriment of her soft pinky fingers.
The pilgrim looked at her unperceived, and for a moment was about to address her; but then, with a strange air of repulsion, dragged himself on to the porch of the rising church, where, seated on a block of stone, he could look into the interior. All was unfinished, but the portion which had made the most progress was a chantry-chapel opposite to the porch, and containing what were evidently designed to be two monuments. One was merely blocked out, but it showed the outline of a warrior, bearing a shield on which a coiled serpent was rudely sketched in red chalk. The other, in a much more forward state, was actually under the hands of the sculptor, and represented a slender youth, almost a boy, though in the full armour of a knight, his hands clasped on his breast over a lute, an eagle on his shield, an eagle-crest on his helmet, and, under the arcade supporting the altar-tomb, shields alternately of eagles and doves.
But the strangest thing was that this young knight seemed to be sitting for his own effigy. The very same face, under the very same helmet, only with the varied, warm hues of life, instead of in cold white marble, was to be seen on the shoulders of a young man in a gray cloth dress, with a black scarf passing from shoulder to waist, crossed by a sword-belt. The hair was hidden by the helmet, whose raised visor showed keen, finely-cut features, and a pair of dark brown eyes, of somewhat grave and sad expression.
“Have a care, Lucas,” he presently said; “I fear me you are chiselling away too much. It must be a softer, more rounded face than mine has become; and, above all, let it not catch any saddened look. Keep that air of solemn waiting in glad hope, as though he saw the dawn through his closed eyelids, and were about to take up his song again!”
“Verily, Herr Freiherr, now the likeness is so far forward, the actual sight of you may lead me to mar it rather than mend.”
“So is it well that this should be the last sitting. I am to set forth for Genoa in another week. If I cannot get letters from the Kaisar, I shall go in search of him, that he may see that my lameness is no more an impediment.”
The pilgrim passed his hand over his face, as though to dissipate a bewildering dream; and just then the little girl, all flushed and dabbled, flew rushing up from the stream, but came to a sudden standstill at sight of the stranger, who at length addressed her. “Little lady,” he said, “is this the Debateable Ford?”
“No; now it is the Friendly Bridge,” said the child.
The pilgrim started, as with a pang of recollection. “And what is yonder castle?” he further asked.
“Schloss Adlerstein,” she said, proudly.
“And you are the little lady of Adlerstein Wildschloss?”
“Yes,” again she answered; and then, gathering courage—“You are a holy pilgrim! Come up to the castle for supper and rest.” And then, springing past him, she flew up to the knight, crying, “Herr Freiherr, here is a holy pilgrim, weary and hungry. Let us take him home to the mother.”
“Did he take thee for a wild elf?” said the young man, with an elder-brotherly endeavour to right the little cap that had slidden under the chin, and to push back the unmanageable wealth of hair under it, ere he rose; and he came forward and spoke with kind courtesy, as he observed the wanderer’s worn air and feeble step. “Dost need a night’s lodging, holy palmer? My mother will make thee welcome, if thou canst climb as high as the castle yonder.”
The pilgrim made an obeisance, but, instead of answering, demanded hastily, “See I yonder the bearing of Schlangenwald?”
“Even so. Schloss Schlangenwald is about a league further on, and thou wilt find a kind reception there, if thither thou art bent.”
“Is that Graff Wolfgang’s tomb?” still eagerly pursued the pilgrim; and receiving a sign in the affirmative, “What was his end?”
“He fell in a skirmish.”
“By whose hand?”
“By mine.”
“Ha!” and the pilgrim surveyed him with undisguised astonishment; then, without another word, took up his staff and limped out of the building, but not on the road to Schlangenwald. It was nearly a quarter of an hour afterwards that he was overtaken by the young knight and the little lady on their horses, just where the new road to the castle parted from the old way by the Eagle’s Ladder. The knight reined up as he saw the poor man’s slow, painful steps, and said, “So thou art not bound for Schlangenwald?”
“I would to the village, so please you—to the shrine of the Blessed Friedmund.”
“Nay, at this rate thou wilt not be there till midnight,” said the young knight, springing off his horse; “thou canst never brook our sharp stones! See, Thekla, do thou ride on with Heinz to tell the mother I am bringing her a holy pilgrim to tend. And thou, good man, mount my old gray. Fear not; she is steady and sure-footed, and hath of late been used to a lame rider. Ah! that is well. Thou hast been in the saddle before.”
To go afoot for the sake of giving a lift to a holy wayfarer was one of the most esteemed acts of piety of the Middle Age, so that no one durst object to it, and the palmer did no more than utter a suppressed murmur of acknowledgment as he seated himself on horseback, the young knight walking by his rein. “But what is this?” he exclaimed, almost with dismay. “A road to the castle up here!”
“Yes, we find it a great convenience. Thou art surely from these parts?” added the knight.
“I was a man-at-arms in the service of the Baron,” was the answer, in an odd, muffled tone.
“What!—of my grandfather!” was the exclamation.
“No!” gruffly. “Of old Freiherr Eberhard. Not of any of the Wildschloss crew.”
“But I am not a Wildschloss! I am grandson to Freiherr Eberhard! Oh, wast thou with him and my father when they were set upon in the hostel?” he cried, looking eagerly up to the pilgrim; but the man kept his broad-leaved hat slouched over his face, and only muttered, “The son of Christina!” the last word so low that Ebbo was not sure that he caught it, and the next moment the old warrior exclaimed exultingly, “And you have had vengeance on them! When—how—where?”
“Last harvest-tide—at the Debateable Strand,” said Ebbo, never able to speak of the encounter without a weight at his heart, but drawn on by the earnestness of the old foe of Schlangenwald. “It was a meeting in full career—lances broken, sword-stroke on either hand. I was sore wounded, but my sword went through his collar-bone.”
“Well struck! good stroke!” cried the pilgrim, in rapture. “And with that sword?”
“With this sword. Didst know it?” said Ebbo, drawing the weapon, and giving it to the old man, who held it for a few moments, weighed it affectionately, and with a long low sigh restored it, saying, “It is well. You and that blade have paid off the score. I should be content. Let me dismount. I know my way to the hermitage.”
“Nay, what is this?” said Ebbo; “thou must have rest and food. The hermitage is empty, scarce habitable. My mother will not be balked of the care of thy bleeding feet.”
“But let me go, ere I bring evil on you all. I can pray up there, and save my soul, but I cannot see it all.”
“See what?” said Ebbo, again trying to see his guest’s face. “There may be changes, but an old faithful follower of my father’s must ever be welcome.”
“Not when his wife has taken a new lord,” growled the stranger, bitterly, “and he a Wildschloss! Young man, I could have pardoned aught else!”
“I know not who you may be who talk of pardoning my lady-mother,” said Ebbo, “but new lord she has neither taken nor will take. She has refused every offer; and, now that Schlangenwald with his last breath confessed that he slew not my father, but sold him to the Turks, I have been only awaiting recovery from my wound to go in search of him.”
“Who then is yonder child, who told me she was Wildschloss?”
“That child,” said Ebbo, with half a smile and half a blush, “is my wife, the daughter of Wildschloss, who prayed me to espouse her thus early, that so my mother might bring her up.”
By this time they had reached the castle court, now a well-kept, lordly-looking enclosure, where the pilgrim looked about him as one bewildered. He was so infirm that Ebbo carefully helped him up the stone stairs to the hall, where he already saw his mother prepared for the hospitable reception of the palmer. Leaving him at the entrance, Ebbo crossed the hall to say to her in a low voice, “This pilgrim is one of the old lanzknechts of my grandfather’s time. I wonder whether you or Heinz will know him. One of the old sort—supremely discontented at change.”
“And thou hast walked up, and wearied thyself!” exclaimed Christina, grieved to see her son’s halting step.
“A rest will soon cure that,” said Ebbo, seating himself as he spoke on a settle near the hall fire; but the next moment a strange wild low shriek from his mother made him start up and spring to her side. She stood with hands clasped, and wondering eyes. The pilgrim—his hat on the ground, his white head and rugged face displayed—was gazing as though devouring her with his eyes, murmuring, “Unchanged! unchanged!”
“What is this!” thundered the young Baron. “What are you doing to the lady?”
“Hush! hush, Ebbo!” exclaimed Christina. “It is thy father! On thy knees! Thy father is come! It is our son, my own lord. Oh, embrace him! Kneel to him, Ebbo!” she wildly cried.
“Hold, mother,” said Ebbo, keeping his arm round her, though she struggled against him, for he felt some doubts as he looked back at his walk with the stranger, and remembered Heinz’s want of recognition. “Is it certain that this is indeed my father?”
“Oh, Ebbo,” was the cry of poor Christina, almost beside herself, “how could I not be sure? I know him! I feel it! Oh, my lord, bear with him. It is his wont to be so loving! Ebbo, cannot you see it is himself?”
“The young fellow is right,” said the stranger, slowly. “I will answer all he may demand.”
“Forgive me,” said Ebbo, abashed, “forgive me;” and, as his mother broke from him, he fell upon his knee; but he only heard his father’s cry, “Ah! Stine, Stine, thou alone art the same,” and, looking up, saw her, with her face hidden in the white beard, quivering with a rapture such as he had never seen in her before. It seemed long to him ere she looked up again in her husband’s face to sob on: “My son! Oh! my beautiful twins! Our son! Oh, see him, dear lord!” And the pilgrim turned to hear Ebbo’s “Pardon, honoured father, and your blessing.”
Almost bashfully the pilgrim laid his hand on the dark head, and murmured something; then said, “Up, then! The slayer of Schlangenwald kneeling! Ah! Stine, I knew thy little head was wondrous wise, but I little thought thou wouldst breed him up to avenge us on old Wolfgang! So slender a lad too! Ha! Schneiderlein, old rogue, I knew thee,” holding out his hand. “So thou didst get home safe?”
“Ay, my lord; though, if I left you alive, never more will I call a man dead,” said Heinz.
“Worse luck for me—till now,” said Sir Eberhard, whose tones, rather than his looks, carried perfect conviction of his identity. It was the old homely accent, and gruff good-humoured voice, but with something subdued and broken in the tone. His features had grown like his father’s, but he looked much older than ever the hale old mountaineer had done, or than his real age; so worn and lined was his face, his skin tanned, his eyelids and temples puckered by burning sun, his hair and beard white as the inane of his old mare, the proud Adlerstein port entirely gone. He stooped even more without his staff than with it; and, when he yielded himself with a sigh of repose to his wife’s tendance, she found that he had not merely the ordinary hurts of travelling, but that there were old festering scars on his ankles. “The gyves,” he said, as she looked up at him, with startled, pitying eyes. “Little deemed I that they would ever come under thy tender hands.” As he almost timidly smoothed the braid of dark hair on her brow—“So they never burnt thee for a witch after all, little one? I thought my mother would never keep her hands off thee, and used to fancy I heard the crackling of the flame.”
“She spared me for my children’s sake,” said Christina; “and truly Heaven has been very good to us, but never so much as now. My dear lord, will it weary thee too much to come to the castle chapel and give thanks?” she said, timidly.
“With all my heart,” he answered, earnestly. “I would go even on my knees. We were not without masses even in Tunis; but, when Italian and Spaniard would be ransomed, and there was no mind of the German, I little thought I should ever sing Brother Lambert’s psalm about turning our captivity as rivers in the south.”
Ebbo was hovering round, supplying all that was needed for his father’s comfort; but his parents were so completely absorbed in one another that he was scarcely noticed, and, what perhaps pained him more, there was no word about Friedel. He felt this almost an injustice to the brother who had been foremost in embracing the idea of the unknown father, and scarcely understood how his parents shrank from any sorrowful thought that might break in on their new-found joy, nor that he himself was so strange and new a being in his father’s eyes, that to imagine him doubled was hardly possible to the tardy, dulled capacity, which as yet seemed unable to feel anything but that here was home, and Christina.
When the chapel bell rang, and the pair rose to offer their thanksgiving, Ebbo dutifully offered his support, but was absolutely unseen, so fondly was Sir Eberhard leaning on his wife; and her bright exulting smile and shake of the head gave an absolute pang to the son who had hitherto been all in all to her.
He followed, and, as they passed Friedmund’s coffin, he thought his mother pointed to it, but even of this he was uncertain. The pair knelt side by side with hands locked together, while notes of praise rose from all voices; and meantime Ebbo, close to that coffin, strove to share the joy, and to lift up a heart that would sink in the midst of self-reproach for undutifulness, and would dislike the thought of the rude untaught man, holding aloof from him, likely to view him with distrust and jealousy, and to undo all he had achieved, and further absorbing the mother, the mother who was to him all the world, and for whose sake he had given his best years to the child-wife, as yet nothing to him.
It was reversing the natural order of things that, after reigning from infancy, he should have to give up at eighteen to one of the last generation; and some such thought rankled in his mind when the whole household trooped joyfully out of the chapel to prepare a banquet for their old new lord, and their young old lord was left alone.
Alone with the coffin where the armour lay upon the white cross, Ebbo threw himself on his knees, and laid his head upon it, murmuring, “Ah, Friedel! Friedel! Would that we had changed places! Thou wouldst brook it better. At least thou didst never know what it is to be lonely.”
“Herr Baron!” said a little voice.
His first movement was impatient. Thekla was apt to pursue him wherever he did not want her; but here he had least expected her, for she had a great fear of that coffin, and could hardly be brought to the chapel at prayer times, when she generally occupied herself with fancies that the empty helmet glared at her. But now Ebbo saw her standing as near as she durst, with a sweet wistfulness in her eyes, such as he had never seen there before.
“What is it, Thekla?” he said. “Art sent to call me?”
“No; only I saw that you stayed here all alone,” she said, clasping her hands.
“Must I not be alone, child?” he said, bitterly. “Here lies my brother. My mother has her husband again!”
“But you have me!” cried Thekla; and, as he looked up between amusement and melancholy, he met such a loving eager little face, that he could not help holding out his arms, and letting her cling to him. “Indeed,” she said, “I’ll never be afraid of the helmet again, if only you will not lay down your head there, and say you are alone.”
“Never, Thekla! while you are my little wife,” said he; and, child as she was, there was strange solace to his heart in the eyes that, once vacant and wondering, had now gained a look of love and intelligence.
“What are you going to do?” she said, shuddering a little, as he rose and laid his hand on Friedel’s sword.
“To make thee gird on thine own knight’s sword,” said Ebbo, unbuckling that which he had so long worn. “Friedel,” he added, “thou wouldst give me thine. Let me take up thy temper with it, thine open-hearted love and humility.”
He guided Thekla’s happy little fingers to the fastening of the belt, and then, laying his hand on hers, said gravely, “Thekla, never speak of what I said just now—not even to the mother. Remember, it is thy husband’s first secret.”
And feeling no longer solitary when his hand was in the clasp of hers, he returned to the hall, where his father was installed in the baronial chair, in which Ebbo had been at home from babyhood. His mother’s exclamation showed that her son had been wanting to her; and she looked fuller than ever of bliss when Ebbo gravely stood before his father, and presented him with the good old sword that he had sent to his unborn son.
“You are like to use it more than I,—nay, you have used it to some purpose,” said he. “Yet must I keep mine old comrade at least a little while. Wife, son, sword, should make one feel the same man again, but it is all too wonderful!”
All that evening, and long after, his hand from time to time sought the hilt of his sword, as if that touch above all proved to him that he was again a free noble in his own castle.
The story he told was thus. The swoon in which Heinz had left him had probably saved his life by checking the gush of blood, and he had known no more till he found himself in a rough cart among the corpses. At Schlangenwald’s castle he had been found still breathing, and had been flung into a dungeon, where he lay unattended, for how long he never knew, since all the early part of the time was lost in the clouds of fever. On coarse fare and scanty drink, in that dark vault, he had struggled by sheer obstinacy of vitality into recovery. In the very height of midsummer alone did the sun peep through the grating of his cell, and he had newly hailed this cheerful visitor when he was roughly summoned, placed on horseback with eyes and hands bound, and only allowed sight again to find himself among a herd of his fellow Germans in the Turkish camp. They were the prisoners of the terrible Turkish raid of 1475, when Georg von Schenk and fourteen other noblemen of Austria and Styria were all taken in one unhappy fight, and dragged away into captivity, with hundreds of lower rank.
To Sir Eberhard the change had been greatly for the better. The Turk had treated him much better than the Christian; and walking in the open air, chained to a German comrade, was far pleasanter than pining in his lonely dungeon. At Adrianople, an offer had been made to each of the captives, if they would become Moslems, of entering the Ottoman service as Spahis; but with one voice they had refused, and had then been draughted into different divisions. The fifteen nobles, who had been offered for ransom, were taken to Constantinople, to await its arrival, and they had promised Sir Eberhard to publish his fate on their return to their homes; and, though he knew the family resources too well to have many hopes, he was rather hurt to find that their promise had been unfulfilled.
“Alas! they had no opportunity,” said Ebbo. “Gulden were scarce, or were all in Kaisar Friedrich’s great chest; the ransoms could not be raised, and all died in captivity. I heard about it when I was at Wurms last month.”
“The boy at Wurms?” almost gasped Sir Eberhard in amaze.
“I had to be there about matters concerning the Wildschloss lands and the bridge,” said Ebbo; “and both Dankwart von Schlangenwald and I made special inquiries about that company in case you should have shared their fate. I hoped to have set forth at that time, but the Kaisar said I was still too lame, and refused me license, or letters to the Sultan.”
“You would not have found me,” said his father, narrating how he with a large troop of captives had been driven down to the coast; where they were transferred to a Moorish slave-dealer, who shipped them off for Tunis. Here, after their first taste of the miseries of a sea life, the alternative of Islam or slavery was again put before them. “And, by the holy stone of Nicæa,” said Sir Eberhard, “I thought by that time that the infidels had the advantage of us in good-will and friendliness; but, when they told me women had no souls at all, no more than a horse or dog, I knew it was but an empty dream of a religion; for did I not know that my little Ermentrude, and thou, Stine, had finer, clearer, wiser souls than ever a man I had known? ‘Nay, nay,’ quoth I, ‘I’ll cast in my lot where I may meet my wife hereafter, should I never see her here.’” He had then been allotted to a corsair, and had thenceforth been chained to the bench of rowers, between the two decks, where, in stifling heat and stench, in storm or calm, healthy or diseased, the wretched oarsmen were compelled to play the part of machinery in propelling the vessel, in order to capture Christian ships—making exertions to which only the perpetual lash of the galley-master could have urged their exhausted frames; often not desisting for twenty or thirty hours, and rowing still while sustenance was put into their mouths by their drivers. Many a man drew has last breath with his last stroke, and was at the first leisure moment hurled into the waves. It was the description that had so deeply moved Friedel long ago, and Christina wept over it, as she looked at the bowed form once so proud and free, and thought of the unhealed scars. But there, her husband added, he had been chained next to a holy friar of German blood, like himself a captive of the great Styrian raid; and, while some blasphemed in their misery, or wildly chid their patron saints, this good man strove to show that all was to work out good; he had a pious saying for all that befell, and adored the will of God in thus purifying him; “And, if it were thus with a saint like him, I thought, what must it be with a rough freebooting godless sinner such as I had been? See”—and he took out a rosary of strung bladders of seaweed; “that is what he left me when he died, and what I meant to have been telling for ever up in the hermitage.”
“He died, then?”
“Ay—he died on the shore of Corsica, while most of the dogs were off harrying a village inland, and we had a sort of respite, or I trow he would have rowed till his last gasp. How he prayed for the poor wretches they were gone to attack!—ay, and for all of us—for me also—There’s enough of it. Such talk skills not now.”
It was plain that Sir Eberhard had learnt more Christianity in the hold of his Moorish pirate ship than ever in the Holy Roman Empire, and a weight was lifted off his son’s mind by finding that he had vowed never to return to a life of violence, even though fancying a life of penance in a hermitage the only alternative.
Ebbo asked if the Genoese merchant, Ser Gian Battista dei Battiste, had indeed been one of his fellow-captives.
“Ha!—what?” and on the repetition, “Truly I knew him, Merchant Gian as we used to call him; but you twang off his name as they speak it in his own stately city.”
Christina smiled. “Ebbo learnt the Italian tongue this winter from our chaplain, who had studied at Bologna. He was told it would aid in his quest of you.”
“Tell me not!” said the traveller, holding up his hands in deprecation; “the Junker is worse than a priest! And yet he killed old Wolfgang! But what of Gian? Hold,—did not he, when I was with him at Genoa, tell me a story of being put into a dungeon in a mountain fortress in Germany, and released by a pair of young lads with eyes beaming in the sunrise, who vanished just as they brought him to a cloister? Nay, he deemed it a miracle of the saints, and hung up a votive picture thereof at the shrine of the holy Cosmo and Damian.”
“He was not so far wrong in deeming one of the lads near of kin to the holy ones,” said Christina, softly.
And Ebbo briefly narrated the adventure, when it evidently appeared that his having led at least one foray gave his father for the first time a fellow-feeling for him, and a sense that he was one of the true old stock; but, when he heard of the release, he growled, “So! How would a lad have fared who so acted in my time? My poor old mother! She must have been changed indeed not to have scourged him till he had no strength to cry out.”
“He was my prisoner!” said Ebbo, in his old defiant tone; “I had the right.”
“Ah, well! the Junker has always been master here, and I never!” said the elder knight, looking round rather piteously; and Ebbo, with a sudden movement, exclaimed, “Nay, sir, you are the only lord and master, and I stand ready to be the first to obey you.”
“You! A fine young book-learned scholar, already knighted, and with all these Wildschloss lands too!” said Sir Eberhard, gazing with a strange puzzled look at the delicate but spirited features of this strange perplexing son. “Reach hither your hand, boy.”
And as he compared the slender, shapely hand of such finely-textured skin with the breadth of his own horny giant’s paw, he tossed it from him, shaking his head with a gesture as if he had no commands for such feminine-looking fingers to execute, and mortifying Ebbo not a little. “Ah!” said Christina, apologetically, “it always grieved your mother that the boys would resemble me and mine. But, when daylight comes, Ebbo will show you that he has not lost the old German strength.”
“No doubt—no doubt,” said Sir Eberhard, hastily, “since he has slain Schlangenwald; and, if the former state of things be at an end, the less he takes after the ancient stock the better. But I am an old man now, Stine, though thou look’st fair and fresh as ever, and I do not know what to make of these things. White napery on the table; glass drinking things;—nay, were it not for thee and the Schneiderlein, I should not know I was at home.”
He was led back to his narration, and it appeared that, after some years spent at the oar, certain bleedings from the lungs, the remains of his wound, had become so much more severe as to render him useless for naval purposes; and, as he escaped actually dying during a voyage, he was allowed to lie by on coming into port till he had in some degree recovered, and then had been set to labour at the fortifications, chained to another prisoner, and toiling between the burning sand and burning sun, but treated with less horrible severity than the necessities of the sea had occasioned on board ship, and experiencing the benefit of intercourse with the better class of captives, whom their miserable fate had thrown into the hands of the Moors.
It was a favourite almsdeed among the Provençals, Spaniards, and Italians to send money for the redemption of prisoners to the Moors, and there was a regular agency for ransoms through the Jews; but German captives were such an exception that no one thought of them, and many a time had the summons come for such and such a slave by name, or for five poor Sicilians, twenty Genoese, a dozen Marseillais, or the like, but still no word for the Swabian; till he had made up his mind that he should either leave his bones in the hot mud of the harbour, or be only set free by some gallant descent either of the brave King of Portugal, or of the Knights of Rhodes, of whom the captives were ever dreaming and whispering.
