SIR CHARLEROY; THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE AND KNIGHT OF SAINT MARY.
“’Tis quickly seen,
Whate’er he be, ’twas not what he had been;
That brow in furrowed lines had fixed at last,
And spoke of passion but of passion past.”
...
“Chained to excess, the slave of each extreme,
How woke he from the wildness of his dream?
Alas! he told not, but he did awake,
To curse the withered heart that would not break.”—“_Lara._”
The course of the knights fleeing from Acre was turned toward Nazareth.
There being but one way open to them, they took that way quickly and
with one accord. The fugitives from Acre represented various knightly
orders, but they were disorganized, without any definite destination and
without an authorized leader. Among them was Sir Charleroy de Griffin,
a knight famed for valor, a central and commanding personage; one that
would have attracted attention in almost any assembly of men. As he
went, so went the rest of the fleeing Christians, and when he reined in
his panting steed, after a time, at the top of a fir-crested knoll not
far from Nazareth, the knights following him did likewise. Then they
drew around him in a semi-circle, without command, and simultaneously,
as if to solicit his direction. They had followed the course he took
because he took it, and now with one accord they halted because he had
done so. There is to some a subtile influence that makes them leaders of
men; so the disorganized Crusaders, by an unvoiced but fully expressed
concession, admitted the leadership of this dashing horseman. Some may
designate this a triumph of personal magnetism, but be that as it may,
it was a fact that Sir Charleroy was chief. Sir Charleroy, just at the
time of the foregoing incident, presented an admirable study for the
philosopher or painter. From his saddle he was able to overlook leagues
of bright landscape, but he could not claim the protection of a foot of
it; for the first time in his life he yearned for home, now a spreading
sea, and a wall of death shut it out from him apparently for ever; by
circumstances absolute sovereign almost of the men about him, but doubt
and danger were confounding all his ability to give commands. He fell
into a train of thought, leaving his comrades to converse with their
pawing steeds and to questionings within themselves as to the future.
Sir Charleroy had reached an eminence in life, one of those points of
out-look where a man’s past meets him and demands review, that it may
explain the present. He believed that he had reached very nearly the end
of his career, and in that belief he began to weigh it for what it was
worth. In imagination he saw one writing the story of his life. Sir
Charleroy, the refugee, began faithfully to review Sir Charleroy, the
wayward youth, pleasure-seeker and reckless man. The former dictated
mentally to the imaginary scribe: “Write, Charleroy de Griffin was the
son of a stalwart French Baron, used to duels and trained to war. The boy
inherited from his father a splendid physique, of which he was unduly
proud, and a restless disposition that he never sincerely asked God to
control. By the death of the baron, his son, an infant, was left to the
sole tutelage of his English mother. The latter was of high birth, by
nature a noble woman, and in every way worthy of a better son than the
one whom he had turned out to be. She had idolized her brawny spouse in
his lifetime, and when she had recovered from the shock his death caused,
her yearning heart, little by little, turned from the idol in the tomb
to the child he had left her. Ere long she lived again in the rapture
of a love all absorbing, all bestowing, all ruling. She lavished her
affection on the youth, not because he was particularly lovable, for he
was not, but because he was the only one left her to love, and she was so
constituted that she must love; the necessity of loving to her made it
easy.
“Then there were many things in the features and form of her son that
reminded her of the man who, in brighter days, had won entirely her
maiden heart and her young wife love. The child was wont to wonder why
his mother embraced him as she did sometimes, with a wondering, startled,
wild, passionate embrace; but when he got older he discerned the meaning
of these outbreaks. He knew that the mother-heart was having a vision of
past wifehood, memory’s grace-given solace of widowhood. Besides this
the embraces were her appealings or warnings to death; her heart suddenly
seizing as if to shelter and save her last and only idol; for the thought
would sometimes come with shadows deep enough, that perhaps the boy
might also die. Such love would have been a prized wealth and blessing
to some; but in this case, on the one hand, it unfitted this mother for
the proper disciplining of this son, and this son though, sometimes, when
his conceit permitted it, realizing that the love was given, not won,
began to expect it as his due or despise it for its lavishness. In due
time he entered the period expressively designated, ‘The monster age.’
This is the time when expanding young life has outgrown the tenderness of
infancy and failed of putting on manly and womanly graces; a time when
there is a mighty ambition to put on the characteristics of adult life
and a mighty lack of ability gracefully to wear them. At this period,
perhaps, the majority of youths of both sexes, are interesting chiefly
for what they have been, or what it is hoped they will be. They feel,
conscious of their growing powers, great self-conceit, and with their
growth comes an expansion of their capacities and wants. The plenitude of
their wantings makes them avaricious, hence parsimonious toward others of
every thing, especially of gratitude. Reverence for elders, respect for
fathers, holy regard for mothers, tenderness toward women, chief charms
of youth, are buried in the tomb of other virtues by great, selfish,
ugly demons of desire. The monster age came to Charleroy in its full
virulence, but his mother discerned little of his monstrosity; what she
did discern, all unasked, she condoned. She believed all things, hoped
all things good of him, although seldom comforted by an expression or
act of gratitude on his part. She was to be pitied; but it may be said
that the lad was to be pitied almost as much as herself. It was the old
story over; she unconsciously went about destroying her own happiness
and though she would have willingly died if need be in his behalf, she
harmed him beyond estimate by her indulgent loving. Then the youth was
surrounded by those who sought the favor of the baroness by constantly
sounding in her ears, and in the ears of the boy, praises of the dead
baron. They told of his daring, they descanted upon his adventures, his
powers, his wisdom. He was the widow’s idol, and the incense was grateful
to her, but the worst of it was that they befooled the lad by continually
assuring him that he was the image of his father, and surely destined to
equal, if not surpass, his sire in deeds of valor. A dangerous burden is
wealth; whether it come as great name or great intellect, great physical
strength or as much gold, it is a fateful load which few can gracefully
support. The youth had wealth in all the foregoing directions; if he
had had a mother whose love loved wisely enough to save, if it need be
by pain, he might have been saved; but her love infatuated her. The
youth’s folly brought him frequently into shameful entanglements; but she
extricated him each time. Nobody ever heard of her even rebuking him; as
to chastising him, that were a thing abhorrent to her thoughts. His face
always bespoke his pardon in advance with her. She would have smitten
her husband’s corpse, as it lay in its coffin, as soon as she would have
smitten the one whose features constantly reminded her of him her heart
had held most dear. Then she hoped, with a mother’s large-hearted faith,
that each escapade would be the last. But as the youth grew older his
acts were bolder. Again and again, without notice and with heartless
inconsiderateness, he left his home to pursue some adventure, and again
and again, mother’s love followed him, ever to find him at last in some
sore plight, and then quickly to forgive him. By the time Charleroy had
reached his majority, the family fortune had been severely tried and
depleted in paying the penalty of his follies. He himself had become an
old young man, with too many gray hairs and too much experience for one
of his years.
“At that time, a few enthusiasts having determined to make one last
effort to secure the Holy Sepulcher, Charleroy de Griffin ardently
enlisted in the pre-doomed enterprise, allured largely by its very
desperateness. The crusade spirit was then a fitful dying flame
throughout Europe. England and France were left practically alone to
furnish the men and the money for the last crusade. Prince Edward of
France was its leader, and De Griffin, having in his veins the blood
of both of the supporting nations, a French name, a splendid physique,
together with a fearless, dashing temperament, was enthusiastically
hailed to the enlistment and pushed forward to leadership. ‘_Sir_
Charleroy de Griffin!’ smilingly called out Prince Edward, the day of
review, before the one set for departure. The young man’s comrades, many
of whom had been his associates in former days of wassail, hearing the
Prince’s word, shouted out with one accord, ‘Knighted! The prince has
knighted de Griffin! Hurrah for Sir Charleroy!’ The day following Sir
Charleroy bowed his head, as he stood on the quay ready to embark, to
receive the benediction of a bishop. As the sacrist laid his hands on the
young man’s head, the latter, throwing back his cloak, reverently touched
the cross he had attached to his bosom with his jeweled sword-hilt. The
young knight for a little while was very complacent; for he was enjoying
a sentimental emotion of virtue, arising from sophistries with which his
mind toyed. Some way he felt he had become a soldier of the holy Christ,
and somehow it seemed to him he was making atonement for past follies
by now placing himself side by side with the pious and noble. Though in
reality only bent on seeking excitement, adventure, change, he looked
forward to the rewards of conscience belonging alone to the penitent,
and to a possible public canonizing as one going forth to die for God.
A little piety paralleling one’s own desires is often made to do great
service in silencing the clamors from within. His proud, tearful mother
was by his side. Passionately she kissed his cross, then his brow, then
his eyes and then his lips; leaving on the brow the glistening, dewy
jewels that told the story of the heart which bade him stay, yet go. The
young knight was for once in his life very serious, but tearless. After
all this, in rapid steps, followed the disaster at Acre; the desperate
struggle outside the city; the flight toward Nazareth. Sir Charleroy
finally stands between the sea and the city, a mother’s idol ready to
be broken; at twenty-five, near the apparent apex and end of a life,
having had great opportunities, now, with all lost, he stands there an
epitome of paradoxes. He had made life a pursuit of pleasure only to
find the pursuit ending in misery; he had enlisted to serve the Prince
of Peace, but that service he had undertaken with the sword; he had
championed, as he said, the cause of Christ, the all-conquering, but he
meets utter defeat. He had taken for his patron saint Mary, after years
of libertinism. He elected Mary, he said, because his mother was so like
her. But Sir Charleroy’s mother demoralized her son by over-indulgence,
while Mary, though informed by Gabriel that her offspring was divine,
followed her child as a true mother, with the divinely appointed
authority of a mother, serenely, constantly directing his career up to
the feast of Jerusalem, where he began to reveal his divine commission.
Even then, motherhood affirmed its rights in the very presence of God
manifest, in the question: ‘_Son, why hast thou dealt thus?_’ Nor was
the right challenged, for ‘_he went down and was subject to_’ father
and mother!” At this point Sir Charleroy ceased mentally tracing his
own career, and lifting his eyes looked intently toward Nazareth. “Ah,”
he said, but so that none could hear his words, “my mother loved as
many another, in part selfishly, for the joy of abandoned love, and I
squander that patrimony like a spendthrift, to my harm. Mary’s love for
her son was like his for the world, a constant self-abnegation. That love
survives as an inspiration to the world. By these contrasts I explain my
failure in life, and the present is the natural sequence of the past.”
[Illustration: By Murillo.
THE BIRTH OF MARY.]