"TOUCH ME AT YOUR PERIL!"
King Matthias had been elected to the throne of Hungary in 1457, when he
was at most but eighteen years old. But if any of the great nobles
fancied that they were going to do just as they liked with him because
he was so young, they soon found themselves very much mistaken.
He speedily dismissed the governor who had been appointed to look after
him and the kingdom for the first five years; and having once taken the
reins into his own hands, held them firmly as long as he lived.
And he had no easy, idle life of it: for what with the Turks and other
enemies, he was very frequently, almost constantly, at war with external
foes; and there was also very much to be done to bring things into order
within the kingdom. He was by no means satisfied to let things go on as
they had been doing. He wanted his people to be educated and
cultivated; for he was highly educated himself, and delighted to
surround himself with learned men and distinguished artists.
He wanted to have a grand library, a large university, and a learned
society of scholars in Buda, that Hungary might take her place among the
other nations of Europe in the matter of learning. But he wanted also to
improve the condition of trade, arts, and manufactures; and, regardless
of expense, he sent to foreign lands, especially Italy, for
master-craftsmen to come and train the apprentices, whenever he saw that
they needed better teaching than was to be had just then from their
fellow-countrymen.
Clocks were by no means common articles at this time in other lands, and
the first clock that kept good time in England is said to have been that
set up at Hampton Court many years later--that is, in 1530. But in the
reign of Matthias, clocks made their appearance on many of the castle
towers in Hungary; and, thanks to the king's encouragement and the
energetic measures he took, it was not long before Hungarian craftsmen
became so famous that the Grand Duke of Moscow asked to have goldsmiths,
gun-founders, land-surveyors, miners, architects, and others sent to him
from Hungary.
But where is the use of arts, crafts, and manufactures--how indeed can
they flourish--where there is a dearth of food?
What with enemies without and enemies within, there were extensive
districts in some parts of Hungary, and among them some of the royal
domains, which were little better than wildernesses when the king came
to the throne. Villages had been burned down, the inhabitants driven
away, and the land left desolate in many parts; and in order to tempt
the people back, and induce others to come and settle in these deserted
spots, the king caused it to be proclaimed at the fairs that land might
be had rent-free by those who would undertake to cultivate it, and that
for a certain number of years they should be exempt from taxes of all
sorts.
The king did all he could to induce the great landed nobles to follow
his example in these matters, and to pay more heed to the cultivation of
their property, and to the peasants who laboured for them, than they had
been in the habit of doing.
One day, so the story goes, he invited a number of distinguished nobles
to dine with him in one of the northerly counties, and when the meal was
ended he distributed among them a number of pick-axes and spades, and
taking one himself, called on them to join him in clearing away the
underwood and digging up the ground.
The active young king, who was well accustomed to exert himself, worked
away energetically; but the well-fed, self-indulgent lords almost melted
away, the labour made them so hot, and very soon they were completely
exhausted.
"That's enough, my friends," said the king, observing the state they
were in. "Now we know a little of what it costs the peasants to produce
that which we waste in idleness while they live in poverty. They are
human beings like ourselves, yet we often treat them worse than we do
our horses and dogs."
The spot where Matthias read his nobles this wholesome lesson is still
pointed out in Goemoer.
But indeed some of them needed sharper teaching than this, and Matthias
did not scruple to give it them.
Where was the use of the peasant's ploughing and sowing his fields or
planting and tending his orchards and vineyards, where was the use of
trying to encourage trade and manufactures, when at any moment the
farmer, merchant, peddler, might be set upon and robbed of all his
hardly-earned goods? Yet so it was; for in some parts of the country,
especially in the north, there were robber-knights and freebooting
nobles, chiefly Bohemians, who had been invited into the country during
the civil wars, and now, finding their occupation gone, had built
themselves strongholds among the mountains, from which they issued forth
to plunder and rob and often to murder travellers, traders, farmers, and
any one they could lay hands on. Yet these same robbers were many of
them men of noble birth, and there were some who were not ashamed to
make their appearance in the courts of law, and to help in bringing
smaller thieves and robbers to justice.
Now King Matthias was so true a lover of justice that his name has
become a proverb, and when he died there was a general sigh and
exclamation, "Matthias is dead! justice is fled!" It was not likely,
therefore, that he was going to tolerate robbers merely because they
were nobles; and after giving them fair warning--for he would be just
even to them--he destroyed their castles, and hung a few of them on
their own towers by way of example to the rest, who did not fail to
profit by it and amend their ways: so that by the end of his reign
travellers could pass from one end of the kingdom to the other in
perfect safety, and the peasants could gather in their crops without
fear of having them taken from them by violence.
At the time when our story begins, the war against the robbers was being
carried on with great energy, and the king's generals were busily
engaged in storming their strongholds.
But like many another monarch who has had the welfare of his people at
heart, Matthias was very fond of going about among them and seeing for
himself, with his own eyes, what was the real state of affairs and what
were their needs and wrongs. More than once on these secret expeditions
it had happened to him to come across men of humble birth, whom, like
Miska the beggar boy, he fancied capable of being turned to valuable
account, and took accordingly into his service. And his shrewd eye
seldom deceived him.
Did not Paul Kinizsi the giant, for instance, turn out to be one of his
most famous generals? And yet he was only a miller's boy to begin
with--a miller's boy, but an uncommonly strong one; for when the king
first saw him, he was holding a millstone in one hand and cutting it
with the other--a proof of strength which made the king think he was
wasted on the mill, and would be a valuable acquisition to the army, as
he certainly proved to be.
Something more and better than mere brute strength had attracted him in
Miska, and had induced him to send the boy on his hazardous mission to
Mr. Jason Samson.
Nothing, of course, had been heard of him since he started, and now,
sundry other robbers having been disposed of or reduced to order, it was
Mr. Samson's turn.
But being an uncommon character himself, Matthias was attracted by
anything uncommon and out of the way in other people. He was fond, too,
of unravelling mysteries, and therefore, much as he hated lawlessness
and robbery, and greatly as he was exasperated by some of Mr. Samson's
secret doings, nevertheless the man appeared by all accounts to be such
a very strange, remarkable being that the king's curiosity was whetted,
and after himself paying a secret visit to the eccentric "Cube," as he
called the odd-looking castle, he resolved to try what mild measures
would do, before proceeding to extremities.
Whether Miska had succeeded in getting into the robber's nest or not the
king had no means of finding out, but his first step was to have a
summons nailed up in the middle of all the four sides of the grim
castle. It ran as follows:--
"All good to you from God, Mr. Jason Samson!
"Present yourself in Buda on the third day of the
coming year, and give an account of your stewardship.
"MATTHIAS, the King."
The men charged with affixing this to the castle walls withdrew when
their work was done without having seen any one. But some one or other
had seen and read the summons; for when they returned the next morning,
it had been torn down, and in its place, also affixed to the four sides,
appeared these words:--
"_Some other time._"
A week after this bold answer another summons was put up. This time it
was:--
"_Surrender._"
The day following the answer appeared:--
"_Not yet._"
About a week after this last reply, a company of soldiers, under the
command of General Zokoli, surrounded the ill-omened castle, which stood
out grey and silent against the rose-coloured mists which ushered in the
sunrise.
The general had given orders for the scaling-ladders to be put up, when
all at once a huge raven-black banner rose up from the centre of the
building with a shining death's-head displayed upon it, and beneath this
the words:--
"_Touch me at your peril!_"
Zokoli ordered the assault to be sounded, and soon the brave soldiers,
always accustomed to be victorious wherever they went, might have been
seen climbing the ladders on one side of the "Cube." As soon as they
reached the top of the wall, which was also the ridge of the roof, it
turned on a hinge, or rather sprang open like a trap-door, as if it had
been touched by a conjuring rod, and disclosed to their astonished eyes
the gaping mouths of three rows of guns ranged close together.
Now came a blast, loud and deep, like the sound of some giant trumpet or
organ-pipe, and then what appeared like a long fiery serpent darted from
one corner of the building to the other, and was followed the next
moment by the thundering roar of a couple of thousand guns.
There was one loud, terrible cry, and when the cloud of smoke cleared
away, a couple of hundred men were to be seen lying dead and maimed
round about the castle.
The king had given Zokoli strict orders to spare his men as much as
possible. He ordered one more assault on the same side therefore,
thinking that the defenders would not have had time to reload their
guns. But again a couple of hundred of the besiegers fell a useless
sacrifice to the experiment; and unwilling to waste any more lives,
General Zokoli retired, completely baffled and much mortified, to report
what had happened. And then the king's anger blazed forth, and he
exclaimed,--
"Wait, and I'll teach you, Samson!"