CHAPTER III.
"TOUCH ME AT YOUR PERIL!"
King Matthias had been elected to the throne of Hungary in 1457, when hewas at most but eighteen years old. But if any of the great noblesfancied that they were going to do just as they liked with him becausehe was so young, they soon found themselves very much mistaken.
He speedily dismissed the governor who had been appointed to look afterhim and the kingdom for the first five years; and having once taken thereins 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 otherenemies, he was very frequently, almost constantly, at war with externalfoes; and there was also very much to be done to bring things into orderwithin the kingdom. He was by no means satisfied to let things go on asthey had been doing. He wanted his people to be educated andcultivated; for he was highly educated himself, and delighted tosurround himself with learned men and distinguished artists.
He wanted to have a grand library, a large university, and a learnedsociety of scholars in Buda, that Hungary might take her place among theother nations of Europe in the matter of learning. But he wanted also toimprove the condition of trade, arts, and manufactures; and, regardlessof expense, he sent to foreign lands, especially Italy, formaster-craftsmen to come and train the apprentices, whenever he saw thatthey needed better teaching than was to be had just then from theirfellow-countrymen.
Clocks were by no means common articles at this time in other lands, andthe first clock that kept good time in England is said to have been thatset up at Hampton Court many years later--that is, in 1530. But in thereign of Matthias, clocks made their appearance on many of the castletowers in Hungary; and, thanks to the king's encouragement and theenergetic measures he took, it was not long before Hungarian craftsmenbecame so famous that the Grand Duke of Moscow asked to have goldsmiths,gun-founders, land-surveyors, miners, architects, and others sent to himfrom Hungary.
But where is the use of arts, crafts, and manufactures--how indeed canthey flourish--where there is a dearth of food?
What with enemies without and enemies within, there were extensivedistricts in some parts of Hungary, and among them some of the royaldomains, which were little better than wildernesses when the king cameto the throne. Villages had been burned down, the inhabitants drivenaway, and the land left desolate in many parts; and in order to temptthe people back, and induce others to come and settle in these desertedspots, the king caused it to be proclaimed at the fairs that land mightbe had rent-free by those who would undertake to cultivate it, and thatfor a certain number of years they should be exempt from taxes of allsorts.
The king did all he could to induce the great landed nobles to followhis example in these matters, and to pay more heed to the cultivation oftheir property, and to the peasants who laboured for them, than they hadbeen in the habit of doing.
One day, so the story goes, he invited a number of distinguished noblesto dine with him in one of the northerly counties, and when the meal wasended he distributed among them a number of pick-axes and spades, andtaking one himself, called on them to join him in clearing away theunderwood and digging up the ground.
The active young king, who was well accustomed to exert himself, workedaway energetically; but the well-fed, self-indulgent lords almost meltedaway, the labour made them so hot, and very soon they were completelyexhausted.
"That's enough, my friends," said the king, observing the state theywere in. "Now we know a little of what it costs the peasants to producethat which we waste in idleness while they live in poverty. They arehuman beings like ourselves, yet we often treat them worse than we doour horses and dogs."
The spot where Matthias read his nobles this wholesome lesson is stillpointed out in Goemoer.
But indeed some of them needed sharper teaching than this, and Matthiasdid not scruple to give it them.
Where was the use of the peasant's ploughing and sowing his fields orplanting and tending his orchards and vineyards, where was the use oftrying to encourage trade and manufactures, when at any moment thefarmer, merchant, peddler, might be set upon and robbed of all hishardly-earned goods? Yet so it was; for in some parts of the country,especially in the north, there were robber-knights and freebootingnobles, chiefly Bohemians, who had been invited into the country duringthe civil wars, and now, finding their occupation gone, had builtthemselves strongholds among the mountains, from which they issued forthto plunder and rob and often to murder travellers, traders, farmers, andany one they could lay hands on. Yet these same robbers were many ofthem men of noble birth, and there were some who were not ashamed tomake their appearance in the courts of law, and to help in bringingsmaller thieves and robbers to justice.
Now King Matthias was so true a lover of justice that his name hasbecome a proverb, and when he died there was a general sigh andexclamation, "Matthias is dead! justice is fled!" It was not likely,therefore, that he was going to tolerate robbers merely because theywere nobles; and after giving them fair warning--for he would be justeven to them--he destroyed their castles, and hung a few of them ontheir own towers by way of example to the rest, who did not fail toprofit by it and amend their ways: so that by the end of his reigntravellers could pass from one end of the kingdom to the other inperfect safety, and the peasants could gather in their crops withoutfear of having them taken from them by violence.
At the time when our story begins, the war against the robbers was beingcarried on with great energy, and the king's generals were busilyengaged in storming their strongholds.
But like many another monarch who has had the welfare of his people atheart, Matthias was very fond of going about among them and seeing forhimself, with his own eyes, what was the real state of affairs and whatwere their needs and wrongs. More than once on these secret expeditionsit had happened to him to come across men of humble birth, whom, likeMiska the beggar boy, he fancied capable of being turned to valuableaccount, and took accordingly into his service. And his shrewd eyeseldom deceived him.
Did not Paul Kinizsi the giant, for instance, turn out to be one of hismost famous generals? And yet he was only a miller's boy to beginwith--a miller's boy, but an uncommonly strong one; for when the kingfirst saw him, he was holding a millstone in one hand and cutting itwith the other--a proof of strength which made the king think he waswasted on the mill, and would be a valuable acquisition to the army, ashe certainly proved to be.
Something more and better than mere brute strength had attracted him inMiska, and had induced him to send the boy on his hazardous mission toMr. 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 wasMr. Samson's turn.
But being an uncommon character himself, Matthias was attracted byanything uncommon and out of the way in other people. He was fond, too,of unravelling mysteries, and therefore, much as he hated lawlessnessand robbery, and greatly as he was exasperated by some of Mr. Samson'ssecret doings, nevertheless the man appeared by all accounts to be sucha very strange, remarkable being that the king's curiosity was whetted,and after himself paying a secret visit to the eccentric "Cube," as hecalled the odd-looking castle, he resolved to try what mild measureswould do, before proceeding to extremities.
Whether Miska had succeeded in getting into the robber's nest or not theking had no means of finding out, but his first step was to have asummons nailed up in the middle of all the four sides of the grimcastle. 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 whentheir work was done without having seen any one. But some one or otherhad 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 itwas:--
"_Surrender._"
The day following the answer appeared:--
"_Not yet._"
About a week after this last reply, a company of soldiers, under thecommand of General Zokoli, surrounded the ill-omened castle, which stoodout grey and silent against the rose-coloured mists which ushered in thesunrise.
The general had given orders for the scaling-ladders to be put up, whenall at once a huge raven-black banner rose up from the centre of thebuilding with a shining death's-head displayed upon it, and beneath thisthe 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 beenseen climbing the ladders on one side of the "Cube." As soon as theyreached the top of the wall, which was also the ridge of the roof, itturned on a hinge, or rather sprang open like a trap-door, as if it hadbeen touched by a conjuring rod, and disclosed to their astonished eyesthe gaping mouths of three rows of guns ranged close together.
Now came a blast, loud and deep, like the sound of some giant trumpet ororgan-pipe, and then what appeared like a long fiery serpent darted fromone corner of the building to the other, and was followed the nextmoment by the thundering roar of a couple of thousand guns.
There was one loud, terrible cry, and when the cloud of smoke clearedaway, a couple of hundred men were to be seen lying dead and maimedround about the castle.
The king had given Zokoli strict orders to spare his men as much aspossible. He ordered one more assault on the same side therefore,thinking that the defenders would not have had time to reload theirguns. But again a couple of hundred of the besiegers fell a uselesssacrifice to the experiment; and unwilling to waste any more lives,General Zokoli retired, completely baffled and much mortified, to reportwhat had happened. And then the king's anger blazed forth, and heexclaimed,--
"Wait, and I'll teach you, Samson!"