Baldwin, however, did not marry the Bulgarian princess. The heroine who had rescued him was a Pagan woman, he was a disciple of Christ; but before they fled they had mutually plighted their troth—she to receive baptism at the first opportune moment, he, when this had been accomplished, to make her his wife.
When the time for fulfilling their pledges came, it found the infidel true to her vow, the Christian eager to be quit of his.
Was there no loophole? He took counsel with his Flemish friends. The Emperor was bound, they said, by his oath, but there was a gleam of hope; haply this Gentile woman would go the way of all flesh before she had accomplished hers.
Baldwin took the hint. On the eve of her intended baptism the hapless princess died. Retribution quickly followed. The murderer was presently entrapped by barbarians, who carried him off for a slave. Seven times he was sold from hand to hand, kicks and blows were his portion and indignities of every kind.
One day, when he was harnessed to a cart like some beast of burthen, he fell in with a company of German merchants who, learning his tale, had pity on him, and purchased his release. Filled with remorse at what he had done, he at once set out for Rome and confessed his sins to the Pope, who imposed on him a life-long penance. He then made his way back to his native land, and went and hid himself in the forest of Glançon.
Strange as it may seem, the knights and burghers of Valenciennes believed the old man’s tale, and stranger still, in their pity for his great misfortune, they forgot his great crime. They put on him a purple robe and thrust a sceptre into his hand, and called him father and chief. For them he was the hero of Constantinople, the sovereign who had showered blessings on them all, the Christian who had suffered long years of anguish at the hands of heathen men. In their eyes, the red aureole of martyrdom already glowed about his head, and they begged locks of his hair for relics, and treasured up the water in which he had bathed.
It was the same throughout the realm. The men of Flanders everywhere remembered that they had loved Baldwin and they all knew that they hated Jeanne, and now Baldwin the beloved was in the midst of them again. The evil days of his daughter had become as a tale that was told. Wherever he went he was greeted with wild demonstrations of joy. The great towns of Flanders received him with open arms. His journey from city to city was one long triumphal progress. Presently he reached Bruges, and here at Pentecost he held his Court, and, clad in imperial robes, with his own hands armed ten knights.
But this was not all. The neighbouring sovereigns acknowledged his claim. The ambassadors of the Duke of Limbourg and the Duke of Brabant waited on him in the capital, and Henry III. of England (April 11, 1225) sent to ‘his very dear friend Baldwin’ letters of greeting, of congratulation, and of sage advice. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘that the King of France hath despoiled both the one and the other of us; let us therefore make a league together against him.’
If Baldwin had taken up the thread of his old policy, and allied himself with England, his course of action would probably have been crowned with the success of former days, but he was now a broken-down old man, cowed with long years of servitude and the memory of a great crime, he had neither the courage nor the energy to do so, but fatuously threw himself into the arms of the very man against whom Henry had warned him.
In the midst of the unlooked-for good fortune which had up to now attended the enterprise which the hermit of Plancques had been so loth to undertake, one circumstance was a cause of no little grief and disquietude; his daughter had refused to recognize him, and had fled to France, and though the cloud on the horizon was no bigger than a man’s hand, it presaged, he foresaw, a deluge which would perhaps sweep him away.