But clear down to
our time when people ceased to believe in ghosts, the fratricide was
seen at night hunting through the woods, coal-black and on a white
horse, with three fiery dogs trailing after; and blue flames burned
over the sea where they vanished. That was how the superstition of
the people judged the man whom the nobles and the priests made
king, red-handed.
Christopher, the youngest of the three brothers, was king last. His
end was no better than that of the rest. Indeed, it was worse.
Hardly yet forty years old, he died--poisoned, it was said, by the
Abbot Arnfast, in the sacrament as he knelt at the altar-rail in the
Ribe cathedral. He was buried in the chancel where the penitents
going to the altar walk over his grave. So, of all Valdemar's four
sons, not one died a peaceful, natural death. But kings they all
were.
Valdemar was laid in Ringsted with his great father. He sleeps
between his two queens. Dagmar's grave was disturbed in the late
middle ages by unknown vandals, and the remains of Denmark's
best-loved queen were scattered. Only a golden cross, which she had
worn in life, somehow escaped, and found its way in course of time
into the museum of antiquities at Copenhagen, where it now is, its
chief and priceless treasure.
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