Pilgrims in those days were frequently made the bearers of special messages between distant friends; but this poor young orphan princess could think of no one from whom a message to her might come, Nevertheless, she simply said: "Say on." In the same low tone the beggar continued, "Clovis, King of the Franks, sends thee greeting."
The girl looked up now, thoroughly surprised. This beggar must be a madman, she thought. But the eyes of the pilgrim looked at her rea.s.suringly, and he said: "In token whereof, he sendeth thee this ring by me, his confidant and comitatus,(1) Aurelian of Soissons."
(1) One of the king"s special body-guard, from which comes the t.i.tle comp, count.
The Princess Clotilda took, as if in a dream, the ring of transparent jacinth set in solid gold, and asked quietly:
"What would the king of the Franks with me?"
"The king, my master, hath heard from the holy Bishop Remi and the good priest Ugo of thy beauty and discreetness," replied Aurelian; "and likewise of the sad condition of one who is the daughter of a royal line. He bade me use all my wit to come nigh to thee, and to say that, if it be the will of the G.o.ds, he would fain raise thee to his rank by marriage."
Those were days of swift and sudden surprises, when kings made up their minds in royal haste, and princesses were not expected to be surprised at whatever they might hear. And so we must not feel surprised to learn that all the dreams of her younger days came into the girl"s mind, and that, as the record states, "she accepted the ring with great joy."
"Return promptly to thy lord," she said to the messenger, "and bid him, if he would fain unite me to him in marriage, to send messengers without delay to demand me of my uncle, King Gundebald, and let those same messengers take me away in haste, so soon as they shall have obtained permission."
For this wise young princess knew that her uncle"s word was not to be long depended upon, and she feared, too, that certain advisers at her uncle"s court might counsel him to do her harm before the messengers of King Clovis could have conducted her beyond the borders of Burgundy.
Aurelian, still in his pilgrim"s disguise, for he feared discovery in a hostile country, hastened back to King Clovis, who, the record says, was "pleased with his success and with Clotilda"s notion, and at once sent a deputation to Gundebald to demand his niece in marriage."
As Clotilda foresaw, her uncle stood in too much dread of this fierce young conqueror of the north to say him nay. And soon in the palace at Lyons, so full of terrible memories to this orphan girl, the courteous Aurelian, now no longer in beggar"s rags, but gorgeous in white silk and a flowing sagum, or mantle of vermilion, publicly engaged himself, as the representative of King Clovis, to the Princess Clotilda; and, according to the curious custom of the time, cemented the engagement by giving to the young girl a sou and a denier.(1)
(1) Two pieces of old French coin, equalling about a cent and a mill in American money.
"Now deliver the princess into our hand, O king," said the messenger, "that we may take her to King Clovis, who waiteth for us even now at Chalons to conclude these nuptials."
So, almost before he knew what he was doing, King Gundebald had bidden his niece farewell; and the princess, with her escort of Frankish spears, was rumbling away in a clumsy basterne, or covered ox-wagon, toward the frontier of Burgundy.
But the slow-moving ox-wagon by no means suited the impatience of this shrewd young princess. She knew her uncle, the king of Burgundy, too well. When once he was roused to action, he was fierce and furious.
"Good Aurelian," she said at length to the king"s amba.s.sador, who rode by her side: "if that thou wouldst take me into the presence of thy lord, the king of the Franks, let me descend from this carriage, mount me on horseback, and let us speed hence as fast as we may, for never in this carriage shall I reach the presence of my lord, the king."
And none too soon was her advice acted, upon for, the counsellors of King Gundebald, noticing Clotilda"s anxiety to be gone, concluded that, after all, they had made a mistake in betrothing her to King Clovis.
"Thou shouldst have remembered, my lord," they said, "that thou didst slay Clotilda"s father, her mother, and the young princes, her brothers.
If Clotilda become powerful, be sure she will avenge the wrong thou hast wrought her."
And forthwith the king sent off an armed band, with orders to bring back both the princess and the treasure he had sent with her as her marriage portion. But already the princess and her escort were safely across the Seine, where, in the Campania, or plain-country,--later known as the province of Champagne--she met the king of the Franks.
I am sorry to be obliged to confess that the first recorded desire of this beautiful, brave, and devout young maiden, when she found herself safely among the fierce followers of King Clovis, was a request for vengeance. But we must remember, girls and boys, that this is a story of half-savage days when, as I have already said, the desire for revenge on one"s enemies was common to all.
From the midst of his skin-clad and green-robed guards and n.o.bles, young Clovis--in a dress of "crimson and gold, and milk-white silk," and with his yellow hair coiled in a great top-knot on his uncovered head--advanced to meet his bride.
"My lord king," said Clotilda, "the bands of the king of Burgundy follow hard upon us to bear me off. Command, I pray thee, that these, my escort, scatter themselves right and left for twoscore miles, and plunder and burn the lands of the king of Burgundy."
Probably in no other way could this wise young girl of seventeen have so thoroughly pleased the fierce and warlike young king. He gladly ordered her wishes to be carried out, and the plunderers forthwith departed to carry out the royal command.
So her troubles were ended, and this prince and princess,--Hlodo-wig, or Clovis (meaning the "warrior youth"), and Hlodo-hilde, or Clotilda (meaning the "brilliant and n.o.ble maid"),--in spite of the wicked uncle Gundebald, were married at Soissons, in the year 493, and, as the fairy stories say, "lived happily together ever after."
The record of their later years has no place in this sketch of the girlhood of Clotilda; but it is one of the most interesting and dramatic of the old-time historic stories. The dream of that sad little princess in the old convent at Geneva, "to make her boy-hero a Christian, and to be revenged on the murderer of her parents," was in time fulfilled. For on Christmas-day, in the year 493, the young king and three thousand of his followers were baptized amid gorgeous ceremonial in the great church of St. Martin at Rheims.
The story of the young queen"s revenge is not to be told in these pages.
But, though terrible, it is only one among the many tales of vengeance that show us what fierce and cruel folk our ancestors were, in the days when pa.s.sion instead of love ruled the hearts of men and women, and of boys and girls as well; and how favored are we of this nineteenth century, in all the peace and prosperity and home happiness that surround us.
But from this conversion, as also from this revenge, came the great power of Clovis and Clotilda; for, ere his death, in the year 511, he brought all the land under his sway from the Rhine to the Rhone, the ocean and the Pyrenees; he was hailed by his people with the old Roman t.i.tles of Consul and Augustus, and reigned victorious as the first king of France. Clotilda, after years of wise counsel and charitable works, upon which her determination for revenge seems to be the only stain, died long after her husband, in the year 545, and to-day, in the city of Paris, which was even then the capital of new France, the church of St.
Clotilda stands as her memorial, while her marble statue may be seen by the traveller in the great palace of the Luxembourg.
A typical girl of those harsh old days of the long ago,--loving and generous toward her friends, unforgiving and revengeful to her enemies,--reared in the midst of cruelty and of charity, she did her duty according to the light given her, made France a Christian nation, and so helped on the progress of civilization. Certainly a place among the world"s historic girls may rightly be accorded to this fair-haired young princess of the summer-land of France, the beautiful Clotilda of Burgundy.
WOO OF Hw.a.n.g-HO.: THE GIRL OF THE YELLOW RIVER.
(Afterwards the Great Empress Woo of China.) A.D. 635.
Thomas the Nestorian had been in many lands and in the midst of many dangers, but he had never before found himself in quite so unpleasant a position as now. Six ugly Tartar hors.e.m.e.n with very uncomfortable-looking spears and appalling shouts, and mounted on their swift Kirghiz ponies, were charging down upon him, while neither the rushing Yellow River on the right hand, nor the steep dirt-cliffs on the left, could offer him shelter or means of escape. These dirt-cliffs, or "loess," to give them their scientific name, are remarkable banks of brownish-yellow loam, found largely in Northern and Western China, and rising sometimes to a height of a thousand feet. Their peculiar yellow tinge makes every thing look "hw.a.n.g" or yellow,--and hence yellow is a favorite color among the Chinese. So, for instance, the emperor is "Hw.a.n.g-ti"--the "Lord of the Yellow Land"; the imperial throne is the "Hw.a.n.g-wei" or "yellow throne" of China; the great river, formerly spelled in your school geographies Hoang-ho, is "Hw.a.n.g-ho," the "yellow river," etc.
These "hw.a.n.g" cliffs, or dirt-cliffs, are full of caves and crevices, but the good priest could see no convenient cave, and he had therefore no alternative but to boldly face his fate, and like a brave man calmly meet what he could not avoid.
But, just as he had singled out, as his probable captor, one peculiarly unattractive-looking horseman, whose crimson sheepskin coat and long horsetail plume were streaming in the wind, and just as he had braced himself to meet the onset against the great "loess," or dirt-cliff, he felt a twitch at his black upper robe, and a low voice--a girl"s, he was confident--said quickly:
"Look not before nor behind thee, good O-lopun, but trust to my word and give a backward leap."
Thomas the Nestorian had learned two valuable lessons in his much wandering about the earth,--never to appear surprised, and always to be ready to act quickly. So, knowing nothing of the possible results of his action, but feeling that it could scarcely be worse than death from Tartar spears, he leaped back, as bidden.
The next instant, he found himself flat upon his back in one of the low-ceiled cliff caves that abound in Western China, while the screen of vines that had concealed its entrance still quivered from his fall.
Picking himself up and breathing a prayer of thanks for his deliverance, he peered through the leafy doorway and beheld in surprise six much astonished Tartar robbers regarding with looks of puzzled wonder a defiant little Chinese girl, who had evidently darted out of the cave as he had tumbled in. She was facing the enemy as boldly as had he, and her little almond eyes fairly danced with mischievous delight at their perplexity.
At once he recognized the child. She was Woo (the "high-spirited" or "dauntless one"), the bright young girl whom he had often noticed in the throng at his mission-house in Tung-Chow,--the little city by the Yellow River, where her father, the bannerman, held guard at the Dragon Gate.
He was about to call out to the girl to save herself, when, with a sudden swoop, the Tartar whom he had braced himself to resist, bent in his saddle and made a dash for the child. But agile little, Woo was quicker than the Tartar horseman. With a nimble turn and a sudden spring, she dodged the Tartar"s hand, darted under his pony"s legs, and with a shrill laugh of derision, sprang up the sharp incline, and disappeared in one of the many cliff caves before the now doubly baffled hors.e.m.e.n could see what had become of her.
With a grunt of discomfiture and disgust, the Tartar riders turned their ponies" heads and galloped off along the road that skirted the yellow waters of the swift-flowing Hw.a.n.g-ho. Then a little yellow face peeped out of a cave farther up the cliff, a black-haired, tightly braided head bobbed and twitched with delight, and the next moment the good priest was heartily thanking his small ally for so skilfully saving him from threatened capture.
It was a cool September morning in the days of the great Emperor Tai, twelve hundred and fifty years ago. And a great emperor was Tai-tsung, though few, if any, of my young readers ever heard his name. His splendid palace stood in the midst of lovely gardens in the great city of Chang-an,--that old, old city that for over two thousand years was the capital of China, and which you can now find in your geographies under its modern name of Singan-foo. And in the year 635, when our story opens, the name of Tai-tsung was great and powerful throughout the length and breadth of Chung Kwoh--the "Middle Kingdom," as the Chinese for nearly thirty centuries have called their vast country--while the stories of his fame and power had reached to the western courts of India and of Persia, of Constantinople, and even of distant Rome.
It was a time of darkness and strife in Europe. Already what historians have called the Dark Ages had settled upon the Christian world. And among all the races of men the only nation that was civilized, and learned, and cultivated, and refined in this seventh century of the Christian era, was this far eastern Empire of China, where schools and learning flourished, and arts and manufactures abounded, when America was as yet undiscovered and Europe was sunk in degradation.
And here, since the year 505, the Nestorians, a branch of the Christian Church, originating in Asia Minor in the fifth century, and often called "the Protestants of the East," had been spreading the story of the life and love of Christ. And here, in this year of grace 635, in the city of Chang-an, and in all the region about the Yellow River, the good priest Thomas the Nestorian, whom the Chinese called O-lo-pun--the nearest approach they could give to his strange Syriac name--had his Christian mission-house, and was zealously bringing to the knowledge of a great and enlightened people the still greater and more helpful light of Christianity.
"My daughter," said the Nestorian after his words of thanks were uttered; "this is a gracious deed done to me, and one that I may not easily repay. Yet would I gladly do so, if I might. Tell me what wouldst thou like above all other things?"
The answer of the girl was as ready as it was unexpected.
"To be a boy, O master!" she replied. "Let the great Shang-ti,(1) whose might thou teachest, make me a man that I may have revenge."