CHAPTER XII.
Love and Marriage—The Knight and the Three Questions—Racing for a Wife—Jonathan and the Three Talismans—Tale of the Dwarf and the Three Soldiers—Conclusion.
“I have been very much surprised at the almost entire absence of compulsory marriages from your tales; marriage, indeed, is the staple incident of the story, but the course of love seems to be allowed to run almost too smooth.”
“Why, Herbert,” said Frederick Thompson, with a smile, “were it not rank heresy to suppose that power, and wealth, and policy influenced marriages in those romantic days, when knights performed impossibilities, and ladies sang love ditties from high towers?”
“You must not delude yourselves that ladies were married in the tenth and eleventh centuries on principles very widely differing from those now prevailing. I could give you far worse examples than the wondrous nineteenth century furnishes.”
“What!” exclaimed Herbert, “worse examples than eighty linked to eighteen because their properties adjoined? or a spendthrift title propped up by a youthful heiress, because the one wanted money and the other rank?”
“Hilloa, Master Reginald Herbert, methinks we speak feelingly; is there not something of the accepted loverand disappointed son-in-law in that exalted burst of indignation, eh, Lathom? can it be true that
“‘The lady she was willing.But the baron he sayNO’?”
“‘The lady she was willing.But the baron he sayNO’?”
“‘The lady she was willing.But the baron he sayNO’?”
“‘The lady she was willing.
But the baron he sayNO’?”
“Be it as it may,” said Lathom, “we will solace our friend with an example or two of the approved ways of lady-winning in the tenth century. Which shall it be, the case of a successful racer or a clever resolver of riddles?”
“Oh, I will answer for Reginald; pray leave Miss Atalanta for the present, and favor us with the resolver of hard questions.”
Here begins the tale of