did not need to keep it longer. For word was brought to the breakfast
table that the young lady was not to be found.
Her room was empty. Her bed had not been slept in. The window was open!
The bird had flown!
Nearly every one was struck speechless, when the aunt who had slept
with her, suddenly regained her speech, and wringing her hands,
shrieked out, “The goblin! the goblin! She’s carried away by the
goblin!”
In a few words, she told of the dreadful scene in the garden; and all
concluded that the spectre must have carried off his bride. Two of the
servants said they had heard the clatter of horse’s hoofs down the
mountain-side about midnight, and had no doubt it was the black charger
of the spectre.
The poor baron was inconsolable. What sorrow to have his only child,
his daughter, carried off by a goblin! How terrible to have, perhaps,
goblin grandchildren! As usual, he was completely bewildered, and all
the castle was in an uproar.
The men were ordered to take horses, and hunt in every road and path
and by-way. The baron himself had just drawn on his jack-boots and
girded on his sword, when he glanced out the window, and paused because
of what he saw.
A lady was approaching the castle on horseback. Beside her, mounted on
a black charger, was a cavalier.
She galloped up to the gate, sprang from the horse, and running into
the castle, fell at the baron’s feet.
It was his lost daughter, and her companion--the spectre bridegroom.
The baron was astonished. He looked at his daughter, then at the
spectre, and almost doubted his eyes.
The spectre was wonderfully improved in appearance. His dress was
splendid, and set off his noble figure. He was no longer pale and sad.
His face was flushed with the joy of youth.
The mystery was soon cleared up. The cavalier (for you must have known
all along he was no goblin) told the whole story--how he had met his
young friend; how they had traveled together; how the young nobleman
had met his death. He said that the sight of the beautiful young lady
had made him forget everything except the desire to be near her. At
first, when the baron would not listen to his explanation, he thought
it would do no harm to accept the situation as it was.
If the baron’s family had not had a feud with his own family, he would
have explained everything after the banquet, but he feared that, under
the circumstances, he might never see the young lady again. When the
baron had told how the fair Lenora had been carried off by the goblin,
the idea of being a goblin himself came to him. And he said that he did
not feel exactly right about doing this, but his friends had told him
to remember the old saying that “everything was fair in love.”
The baron pardoned the young couple on the spot. The festival at the
castle was continued.
Only the aunt was disappointed. She who had told so many stories about
true ghosts, was embarrassed to find the only ghost which she had
actually seen should turn out to be a real live person, but she was
so happy at having her niece back again that her embarrassment was as
nothing.
But the niece was perfectly happy in having found him a real living
person, and--since they lived happily ever after--here the story ends.
* * * * *
“And another begins,” added the Story Lady, after a slight pause.
At the Story King’s nod of approval, she proceeded.
XXXI
ROBERT OF SICILY
THERE is an old legend of a proud king, named Robert of Sicily. This
legend tells of the greatest event of Robert’s life; and the poet,
Longfellow, has written a beautiful poem about it, which every one
should read. This is the story:
Robert, King of Sicily, was a very proud monarch and a very selfish
one. He spent most of his time enjoying himself, and gave little heed
to the wants of his people.
On St. John’s eve he attended vesper service with a great retinue of
knights and lords and pages. He was dressed most magnificently, and
proudly sat while the choir chanted some strange Latin words.
The king did not understand Latin, and turning to a learned clerk
nearby, he said, “What do those words mean?”
The clerk answered, “They mean,
‘He has put down the mighty from their seat,
And has exalted them of low degree!’”
The king laughed scornfully, and said, “It is well that such words are
sung in Latin, for there is no power on earth that can push me from my
throne.”
Then he leaned back yawning, and fell asleep.
When he awoke it was already night; the church was empty and all in
darkness.
The king was angry at finding himself alone. He groped his way toward
the great doors, but found them locked.
Then he thought of the windows, but they were high above his reach.
Then he became frightened and cried aloud. He listened, but all that he
heard was the resounding echoes of his cries, as they rang, again and
again, through the high, vaulted ceiling of the church.
He knocked with his fists against the doors, and swore awful oaths
against every one in his court. He became so angry that he tore his
magnificent robes into shreds. He had long since lost his hat and cloak.
At length the sexton of the church heard the noise, and he thought that
perhaps thieves were breaking into the church, so he lit his lantern
and went to the door. When he could make himself heard, he asked, “Who
is there?”
The king, half choked with rage, answered fiercely, “Open, ’tis I, the
king. Are you afraid?”
The frightened sexton muttered to himself: “It is some drunken beggar,
or some one crazy;” and, turning the great key, he flung open the doors.
A man in torn garments, without hat or cloak, rushed past him. He
neither looked at him nor spoke, but, leaping into the darkness,
vanished almost like a spectre from his sight.
Bareheaded, breathless, covered with dust and cobwebs, Robert strode on
through the darkness, and came to the palace gates. He rushed through
the courtyard, thrusting aside the guards and pages, and hurried up the
broad stairs. From hall to hall he passed in breathless speed, although
he heard voices and cries to stop him, until he came to the banquet
room, which was blazing with light.
There he stood motionless, speechless, amazed; for on the throne there
sat another king, wearing his crown, his robes, and even his signet
ring. He looked at first glance exactly like King Robert. He was of the
same height and the same form and features; but there was a gracious
beauty about him which Robert lacked.
King Robert stood there, gazing at him in anger and rage when he
looked up. With a glance of surprise and pity, he asked, “Who are you?”
Robert answered, “I am the king, and I have come to take my place; you
are an imposter who pretends to be king.”
At these words the angry guests sprang up with drawn swords, but the
man on the throne said, “No, not the king, but the king’s jester.
You shall from now on wear the bells and scalloped cape of the court
jester, and make fun for us all. Your companion shall be an ape.” Then
he turned away toward his guests.
Some of the servants came forward to take Robert away, and they were
quite deaf to his ravings and angry threats. With shouts of laughter
they pushed him on before them down the stairs, and mockingly bowed
before him, and pretended to honor him, all the while laughing and
tittering and making fun of him. They left him in a room in the stable
where at length, exhausted, he fell asleep.
The next morning, waking with the day’s first light, he thought to
himself: “I’ve had an ugly dream.” But the straw rustled when he turned
his head, and there were the jester’s cap and bells lying near. He
heard the horses champing in their stalls, and on looking around the
room saw the poor ape. So he remembered. It was no dream. His happy
life that he thought could not be changed, had vanished from him.
The days came and went. Under the rule of the new king the island
prospered as never before. Robert continued to be the jester, laughed
at and scorned. His only friend was the ape. His only food, what others
left.
Sometimes the other king would meet him, and ask, “Are you still the
king?” and always Robert would throw back his head and fling the answer
haughtily, “I am, I am the king!”
[Illustration: TOWARD THE VERY LAST, ROBERT, THE JESTER, RODE ON A
PIEBALD PONY]
Robert had two brothers; one was Valmond, Emperor of Allemaine, the
other was Pope Urbane. One day, almost three years after the wild
night that Robert had been locked in the church, ambassadors came from
Valmond, Emperor of Allemaine, bringing letters. The letters asked King
Robert to join his brother Valmond in a visit to their brother at Rome.
The ambassadors were received with great pleasure, and were presented
with many beautiful gifts of robes and jewels.
Then the king who was not King Robert went with them across the sea to
Italy. He was accompanied by a great retinue of knights, all dressed
in uniform, wearing gay plumes in their helmets. They rode horses with
jeweled bridles, and even wore golden spurs. They were followed by
pages and servants; and, toward the very last, Robert, the jester, rode
on a piebald pony, and behind was perched the ape. Through every town
they went they made much fun for the people, who followed along after,
laughing and poking fun at them. The company were received with great
pomp and ceremony, and the three brothers seemed delighted at being
together again.
Suddenly Robert burst through the crowd, and running up to them cried,
“I am the king! Do you not know me? Look at me. I am your brother,
Robert of Sicily. This man is but an imposter! He is not the king!”
The emperor and the pope looked at the angry worried jester for a long
moment; then the emperor laughed, and said, “What strange sport to keep
a crazy fellow for a jester!” and the poor baffled jester was hustled
back into the crowd.
Then came Easter Sunday, and the beauty and the solemnity of the Easter
services touched the hearts of all men. Robert was deeply moved. For
the first time in his life he saw what kind of man he had been. He saw
how selfish and proud and haughty he had been. He wished with all his
soul that he had been a better man, and he made up his mind that, no
matter what happened, he would never be so selfish and mean again.
Now, the visit ended; the grand visitors left Rome and journeyed
homeward. And when they were once more established, the king on the
throne sent for Robert. He motioned every one else out of the room and
beckoned Robert to draw near.
And when they were alone, he asked, “Art thou the king?”
Robert bowed his head, and folding his arms, said, “You know best. I
only know that I have sinned, and have been proud and selfish. Let me
go from here and try to make up in some way for the wrong which I have
done!”
And just as he finished saying this, there rose through the windows
loud and clear the words of the chant:
“He has put down the mighty from their seat,
And has exalted them of low degree!”
Then the man who was with Robert cried joyously. “I am not the king! I
am an angel! You are the king!”
When King Robert raised his eyes--lo! he was alone, but all dressed in
his magnificent apparel as of old; and when his courtiers came, they
found him kneeling upon the floor in silent prayer.
* * * * *
“Robert was fortunate,” said the Story King, “in learning his lesson
before it was too late.”
“Yes, indeed, he was,” answered the Story Lady. “The fourth story is of
a young man who repented when it was too late.”
XXXII
THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY
ONCE there was a man, a young officer in the United States Army, who
did a dreadful thing--he cursed his native country!
He pretended for a while that he did not care, when he was punished,
but in the end he was very, very sorry. Because he wore his uniform
without the official buttons, the sailors on the ships on which he was
imprisoned called him “Plain Buttons.”
His name was Philip Nolan. Lieutenant Nolan was as fine a young officer
as there was in the “Legion of the West,” as the Western division of
the United States Army was called in those early days, one hundred
years ago.
At that time the Mississippi valley was the Far West to most people,
and seemed a very distant land indeed. There were a number of forts
along the river and Nolan was stationed in one of these. Nolan’s
idol was the brilliant and dashing Aaron Burr, who visited the fort
several times between 1805 and 1807. He walked and talked with Nolan
and obtained a very strong influence over him. He got Nolan to take
him out in his skiff and show him something of the great river and the
plans for the new post; and by the time Burr’s visit was over Nolan was
enlisted body and soul in Burr’s disloyal schemes. From then on, though
he did not yet know it, Nolan lived as a man without a country.
Burr soon got into trouble with the government, and some of his friends
were tried for treason, Nolan among them. It became very plain during
the trial that Nolan would do anything Burr told him; that he would
obey Burr far quicker than his country in spite of his oath as an
officer of the army.
So when Colonel Morgan, who was president of the court, asked Nolan, at
the close of the trial, whether he wished to say anything to show that
he had always been faithful to the United States, he cried out, in a
fit of frenzy: “Curse the United States! I wish I may never hear of the
United States again!”
Probably he did not realize how the words would shock old Colonel
Morgan and the other members of the court. Half the officers who sat
with him had served through the Revolutionary War, and had risked their
lives, not to say their necks, cheerfully and loyally for the country
which Nolan so lightly cursed in his madness.
It may be said for Nolan that he had grown up in the West of those
days, then an almost unknown country. He had been educated on a
plantation, where the most welcome guests were Spanish officers and
French merchants from Orleans, who, to say the least, were unfriendly
to the United States. He had spent half his youth with an older
brother, hunting horses in Texas, which was not then a part of the
United States. In a word, the “United States” meant almost nothing to
him.
Yet there was little excuse for Nolan. He had sworn on his faith as a
Christian to be true to the United States. It was the United States
which gave him the uniform he wore and the sword by his side. Nay, Burr
cared nothing for poor Nolan, but had picked him out to aid him in his
wicked plots, only because of the uniform he wore. Of course, Nolan did
not know this, and it did not excuse him; but it does partly explain
why he cursed his country and wished that he might never hear her name
again.
He never did hear her name but once again. From that moment, September
23, 1807, till the day he died, May 11, 1863, he never heard her name
again. For that half-century and more he was a man without a country.
Colonel Morgan, as you may suppose, was terribly shocked. If Nolan had
compared George Washington to Benedict Arnold, or had cried, “God save
King George,” Morgan would not have felt worse. He called the court
into his private room, and returned in fifteen minutes, with a face
white as a sheet, to say:
“Prisoner, hear the sentence of the Court! The Court decides, subject
to the approval of the President, that you never hear the name of the
United States again.”
Nolan laughed; but nobody else laughed--the whole room was hushed dead
as night for a minute. Then Colonel Morgan added, “Mr. Marshall, take
the prisoner to Orleans in an armed boat and deliver him to the naval
commander there. Request him to order that no one shall mention the
United States to the prisoner while he is on board ship.”
Colonel Morgan himself went to Washington and President Jefferson
approved the sentence, so a plan was formed to keep Nolan constantly
at sea, far from his own country. The ships of our navy took few long
cruises then, but one ship was directed to carry the prisoner as far
away as it was going, then transfer him to another vessel before it
sailed for home. He was to be confined only so far as necessary to
prevent his escape and to make it certain that he never saw or heard of
his country again.
As soon as a vessel on which Nolan sailed was homeward bound, Nolan was
transferred to an outward-bound vessel for another cruise. At first he
made light of it--but in time he learned something he had not thought
of, perhaps--that there was no going home for him, even to a prison.
There were some twenty such transfers which took him all over the
world, but which kept him all his life at least some hundred miles from
the country he had hoped he might never hear of again.
[Illustration: HE FLUNG THE BOOK INTO THE SEA]
Nolan wore his uniform, but with plain buttons. He always had a sentry
before his door, but the men were as good to him as his sentence
permitted. No mess wanted to have him with them too steadily because
they could never talk about home matters when he was present--more than
half the talk men liked to have at sea. They took turns inviting him to
dinner, and the captain always asked him on Mondays. He could have any
books or papers not printed in America. Newspapers having any mention
of America had to be gone over and the allusions cut out. He used to
join the men as they were reading on deck and take his turn in reading
aloud.
Once when they were cruising around the Cape of Good Hope, somebody
got hold of Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” which was then new and
famous. Nolan was reading to the others when he came to this passage:
“Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?
“If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,--
Despite those titles, power and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self”----
Here the poor fellow choked, and could not go on, but started up and
flung the book into the sea and fled to his stateroom. It was two
months before he dared join the men again.
There was a change in Nolan after this. He never read aloud again,
unless it was the Bible or Shakespeare, or something else he was sure
of. He was always shy afterwards and very seldom spoke unless spoken
to, except to a very few friends. He generally had the nervous, tired
look of a heart-wounded man. Sometimes he tried to trap people into
mentioning his country, but he never succeeded; his sentence was too
well known among the men who had him in charge.
There was only one day on which, perhaps, he was really happy, except
when he knew his lonely life was closing. Once, during the war of 1812,
the ship on which he was staying had a fight with an English frigate.
A round shot from the enemy entered one of the ports and killed the
officer of the gun himself and many of the gun’s crew. Now you may
say what you choose about courage, but that is not a nice thing to
see. But, as the men who were not killed picked themselves up, and
as they and the surgeon’s people were carrying off the bodies, there
appeared Nolan, in his shirt sleeves, with the rammer in his hand, and,
just as if he had been the officer, told them off with authority--who
should go to the cock-pit with the wounded men, who should stay with
him--perfectly cheery, and with that way which makes men feel sure
all is right and is going to be right. And he finished loading the
gun with his own hands, aimed it, and bade the men fire. And there he
stayed, captain of that gun, keeping those fellows in spirits, till
the enemy struck--sitting on the carriage while the gun was cooling,
though he was exposed all the time,--showing them easier ways to handle
heavy shot--making the raw hands laugh at their own blunders--and
when the gun cooled again, getting it loaded and fired twice as often
as any other gun on the ship. The commodore walked forward by way of
encouraging the men, and Nolan touched his hat and said:
“I am showing them how we do this in the artillery, sir.”
“I see you are, and I thank you, sir,” the commodore said; “and I shall
never forget this day, sir, and you never shall, sir.”
And after the whole thing was over, and he had the Englishman’s sword,
in the midst of the state and ceremony of the quarter-deck, he said:
“Where is Mr. Nolan? Ask Mr. Nolan to come here.” And when Nolan came,
he said:
“Mr. Nolan, we are all very grateful to you; you are one of us to-day;
you will be named in the despatches.”
And then the commodore took off his own sword of ceremony, and gave it
to Nolan, and made him put it on. Nolan cried like a baby, and well he
might. He had not worn a sword since that infernal day at Fort Adams.
But always afterwards on occasions of ceremony, he wore that quaint old
French sword of the commodore’s.
The commodore did mention him in the despatches, and asked that he
might be pardoned. He wrote a special letter to the Secretary of War.
But nothing ever came of it.
At another time Nolan went with a young officer named Vaughan to
overhaul a dirty little schooner which had slaves on board. Nolan was
the only one who could speak Portuguese, the language used by the
slavers. There were but few of the negroes. Vaughan had their handcuffs
and ankle-cuffs knocked off and put these on the rascals of the
schooner’s crew. Then Nolan told the blacks that they were free, and
that Vaughan would take them to Cape Palmas.
Now, Cape Palmas was a long way from their native land, and they said,
“Not Palmas. Take us home, take us to our own country, take us to our
own pickaninnies and our own women.” One complained that he had not
heard from home for more than six months. It was terribly hard for
Nolan, but he translated these speeches, and told the negroes Vaughan’s
answer in some fashion.
“Tell them--yes, yes, yes!” Vaughan said. “Tell them they shall go to
the Mountains of the Moon, if they will. If I sail the schooner through
the Great White Desert, they shall go home!”
And then they all fell to kissing Nolan, and wanted to rub his nose
with theirs.
As they were being rowed back to the ship, he lay in the stern sheets
and said to a young midshipman of whom he was very fond:
“Youngster, let that show you what it is to be without a family,
without a home, and without a country. And if you are ever tempted to
say a word or do a thing that shall put a bar between you and your
family, your home, and your country, pray God in His mercy to take you
that instant home to His own heaven. Stick by your family, boy; forget
you have a self, while you do everything for them. Think of your home,
boy; write, and send, and talk about it. Let it be nearer and nearer to
your thought, the farther you have to travel from it; and rush back to
it when you are free, as that poor black slave is doing now. And for
your country, boy,” and the words rattled in his throat, “and for that
flag,” and he pointed to the ship, “never dream a dream but of serving
her as she bids you, though the service carry you through a thousand
hells. No matter what happens to you, no matter who flatters you or who
abuses you, never look at another flag, never let a night pass but you
pray God to bless that flag. Remember, boy, that behind all these men
you have to do with, behind officers, and government, and people even,
there is the country herself, your country, and that you belong to her
as you belong to your own mother. Stand by her, boy, as you would stand
by your mother, if those devils there had got hold of her to-day!”
And then Nolan added, almost in a whisper, “Oh, if anybody had said so
to me when I was of your age!”
Years passed on, and Nolan’s sentence was unrevoked, though his friends
had more than once asked for a pardon.
The end came when he had been upwards of fifty years at sea, and he
asked the ship’s doctor for a visit from Captain Danforth, whom he
liked. Danforth tells us about Nolan’s last hours and calls him “dear
old Nolan,” so we know his love was returned.