“Why not? As you know well, we Vikings are all brothers, and all know each other’s counsel, from ship to ship and port to port.” Then the two young men looked each other in the face, and each saw that the other was a man who would suit him. “Skall to the Viking!” cried Robert, aping, as was his fancy, the Norse rovers’ slang. “Will you come with me to Holland?” “You must ask my young lord there,” and he pointed to Arnulf. “I am his man now, by all laws of honor.” A flush of jealousy passed over Robert’s face. He, haplessly for himself, thought that he had a grievance. The rights of primogeniture--_droits d’ainesse_--were not respected in the family of the Baldwins as they should have been, had prudence and common sense had their way. No sacred or divine right is conferred by the fact of a man’s being the first-born son. If Scripture be Scripture, the “Lord’s anointed” was usually rather a younger son of talent and virtue; one born, not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit, like David and Solomon. And so it was in other realms besides Flanders during the middle age. The father handed on the work--for ruling was hard work in those days--to the son most able to do it. Therefore we can believe Lambert of Aschaffenbourg when he says, that in Count Baldwin’s family for many ages he who pleased his father most took his father’s name, and was hereditary prince of all Flanders; while the other brothers led an inglorious life of vassalage to him. But we can conceive, likewise, that such a method would give rise to intrigues, envyings, calumnies, murders, fratracidal civil wars, and all the train of miseries which for some years after this history made infamous the house of Baldwin, as they did many another noble house, till they were stopped by the gradual adoption of the rational rule of primogeniture. So Robert, who might have been a daring and useful friend to his brother, had he been forced to take for granted from birth that he was nobody, and his brother everybody,--as do all younger sons of English noblemen, to their infinite benefit,--held himself to be an injured man for life, because his father called his first-born Baldwin, and promised him the succession,--which indeed he had worthily deserved, according to the laws of Mammon and this world, by bringing into the family such an heiress as Richilda and such a dowry as Mons. But Robert, who thought himself as good as his brother,--though he was not such, save in valor,--nursed black envy in his heart. Hard it was to him to hear his elder brother called Baldwin of Mons, when he himself had not a foot of land of his own. Harder still to hear him called Baldwin the Good, when he felt in himself no title whatsoever to that epithet. Hardest of all to see a beautiful boy grow up, as heir both of Flanders and of Hainault.