The Scarlet Banner Part 21

"It concerns the prisoners in the dungeons of the citadel. When, against the entreaties of the whole nation and Zazo's urgency especially, Gelimer protected the lives of Hilderic and Euages, changing the sentence of death p.r.o.nounced by the Council of the Nation to imprisonment, he was obliged to promise Zazo that at least he would never liberate the prisoners without his consent."

"I wished to release them now. But Zazo has my promise, and he could not be softened."

"He is right,--a rare instance," said Verus.

"What? You, the priest, counsel against pity and pardon?" asked Hilda, in astonishment.

"I am also chancellor of this kingdom. The former King would be far too dangerous if he were set at liberty. Romans, Catholics,--he is said secretly to have joined this church,--might gather round him, and 'the rightful King of the Vandals' would be a much-desired weapon against the 'Tyrant' Gelimer. The prisoners will be better off where they are.

Their lives are safe--"

"They have repeatedly requested an audience; they wish to justify themselves. These pet.i.tions--"

"Were always granted. I have heard them myself."

"What resulted from them?"

"Nothing that I did not already know. Did you not feel the armor under Hilderic's robe, wrest the dagger from his hand yourself?"

"Alas, yes! Yet I so easily distrust myself. Ambition, desire for this crown (one of my heaviest sins), made me only too ready to believe in Hilderic's guilt. And now the captive King, protesting his innocence, appealing to a warning letter received by him on that day, which would explain and prove everything, requests another trial. Yet you have fulfilled the prisoner's wish and searched for it in the place he named?"

"Certainly," said Verus, quietly, his lifeless features growing even more rigid, more sternly controlled. "That letter is an invention. As Hilderic repeatedly a.s.serted that he had concealed it in a secret drawer of 'Genseric's Golden Chest,'--you know the coffer, Gibamund?--I searched the whole chest with my own hands and alone. I even found the secret drawer and opened it; nothing of the kind was there. Nay, at the prisoner's earnest entreaties, I had the coffer carried to his dungeon and examined by himself in the presence of witnesses. He, too, found nothing."

"And no one could have previously removed the letter?" asked Gelimer.

"You and I alone have the keys to the chest which contains the most important doc.u.ments. But I must leave you now," said the priest. "I have many letters to write to-night. Farewell!"

"I thank you, my Verus. May the angel of the Lord watch over me in Heaven as faithfully as you watch and care for me on earth."

The priest closed his eyes a moment, then smiling faintly, nodded, saying: "That is my prayer also."

He glided noiselessly across the threshold.

CHAPTER XXI

Hilda followed Verus's retreating figure with a long, long look; at last, with a slight shake of her beautiful head, she went up to Gelimer and said: "Do not be angry, my King, if I ask a question which nothing gives me the right to utter, except my anxiety for your welfare, and that of all our people."

"And my love for you, brave sister-in-law," replied Gelimer, gently stroking her flowing golden hair, and seating himself on the couch again. "For," he added, smiling, "though you are a wicked pagan and often cherish--as I well know--secret resentment, nay, animosity, against me, I love you, foolish, impetuous young heart."

She sank down at his feet, on a high, soft cushion covered with leopard skins, while Gibamund paced slowly up and down the s.p.a.cious hall, often gazing out through the lofty arched window over the wide sea. No light was burning in the apartment; but the full moon, which meanwhile had risen above the dark flood and the harbor wall, poured in the full splendor of her rays, which, falling on the features of the three n.o.ble human beings, illumined them with a spectral light.

"I will not," Hilda began, "as Zazo and my Gibamund have repeatedly done, until you wrathfully forbade it, warn you against this priest, who--"

With neither impatience nor anger, Gelimer interrupted: "Who first discovered the wiles of Pudentius; who revealed to us the treachery of Hilderic; to whom alone I am indebted for my escape from a.s.sa.s.sination that night; who has saved the kingdom of the Vandals from the snare."

Gibamund paused in his walk.

"Yes, it is true. I had almost said, _unfortunately_ true. For I would rather have owed it to any other man."

"It is so strikingly true that even our Zazo, who at first accused him harshly to me, could scarcely find any objection to mutter, when I took the brilliant man among my councillors and intrusted to him (for he is an expert in letter-writing) the care of the correspondence. And how unweariedly he has toiled since, priest and chancellor at the same time! I marvel at the number of papers he lays before me every morning; I do not believe he sleeps three hours."

"Men who neither sleep nor fight, drink nor kiss, are unnatural to me,"

cried Gibamund, laughing.

"I do not warn," said Hilda, "but I ask"--she laid her hand lightly on the King's arm--"how does it happen, how is it possible, that you, the warlike Prince of the Vandals, loved this gloomy Roman, this renegade, better than all who stood nearest to you?"

"There you are mistaken, fair Hilda," smiled the King, stroking her hand.

"Yes," she answered, correcting herself; "doubtless you love Ammata better; he is the apple of your eye."

"My father, on his death-bed, confided this brother (he was then only a prattling boy) to my care. I cherished him in my inmost heart, and reared him as though he were my own child," said Gelimer, tenderly. "It is not love," he went on, "that binds me to Verus. What constrains me to revere in him my guardian spirit on earth, to look up to him with ardent grat.i.tude, with blind, credulous trust, is the confidence, nay, the superhuman certainty: yes," here he shuddered slightly, "it is a revelation of G.o.d, a miracle."

"A miracle?" Hilda repeated.

"A revelation?" Gibamund asked incredulously, stopping before them.

"Both," replied the King. "Only, to understand it, you must know more, you must know all, you must learn how my mind, my soul, was tossed to and fro by conflicting powers; you must live through with me once more my wanderings, my perils, and my deliverance. Yes, and you shall, you who are my nearest and dearest, now and here; who knows when the impending war will grant us another hour of leisure?

"Even in my earliest childhood, my father told me, I was not like ordinary children; I dreamed, I asked questions beyond my years. Then, it is true, came the happy days of boyhood: arms, arms, and again arms, my only sport, my only labor, my only study. At that time I grew to the power and the pleasure in the use of weapons--" his eyes flashed in the moonlight.

"Which made you the hero of your people," cried Gibamund.

"But suddenly an end came. By chance the leader of the hundred who was commanded to execute the order fell sick, and I was next in the list: I, a lad of sixteen, was sent with my troop to witness the terrible tortures of Romans, Catholics, who would not abjure their faith, in the courtyard of this citadel. The shrieks of agony which pierced through the thick walls had repeatedly roused the Carthaginians to insurrection; it was absolutely necessary to guard the dungeons. I had heard that such things were done; I was told that they were needful; that the Catholics were all traitors to the kingdom, and the rack was used only to compel them to reveal the secrets of their disloyal plans.

But I had never witnessed the scene. Now suddenly I beheld it. The boy of sixteen was himself the commander of the executioners. Horrible!

horrible! About a hundred persons, among them women, old men, boys and girls scarcely as old as I. I commanded a halt. 'By order of the King!'

replied the Arian priest. I wanted to rush to the aid of the tortured prisoners. Alas! Verus's whole family were among the victims. I wanted to tear his gray-haired mother from the stake, from the ascending flames, amid which, in spite of her iron chains, she writhed, shrieking in unutterable agony. My own soldiers held me! 'By order of the King!'

they shouted. I struck about me, I foamed, I raged. In vain! I shut my eyes that I might see the terrible scene no longer! But ah--"

The King hesitated and pa.s.sed his hand across his brow. Then he went on,--

"My name, in a shrill scream, reached my ear. I involuntarily opened my eyes again and saw, stretched toward me, the naked, fettered, arm of the gray-haired woman. 'Curses on you, Gelimer!' she shrieked. 'Curses on you upon earth and in h.e.l.l! Curses on all you Asdings! Curses on the Vandal people and kingdom! G.o.d's vengeance for your own and your fathers' sins shall pursue you from childhood to old age. Curses, curses on you, murderer Gelimer!' And I saw her eyes, horribly disfigured by suffering and hate, piercing mine. Then I sank down in the convulsions which, later, often attacked me, and lay gasping under the burden of the thought: even though I myself am free from sin, the despairing woman cursed me as she died; she bore the curse to the throne of G.o.d. I must bear the burden of guilt of all our family." He trembled, beads of perspiration stood on his brow.

"For G.o.d's sake, brother, stop! Your illness might return."

But Gelimer continued: "When I came to my senses, I was no longer a youth; I was an old man; or crushed, half mad, as you will call it. I threw off my sword-belt, helmet, shield, and all my weapons, and--oh, never shall I forget it--that one terrible word alone pressed through my poor brain, deadening all else: 'Sin--the curse of sin rests upon me, my family, my people!'

"I sought comfort. I seized the Bible. I had been taught that G.o.d speaks to us through the oracles of the Sacred Book. With a sharp dagger in my hand I unrolled the pa.s.sages of Holy Writ. I appealed to G.o.d. 'O Lord, wilt Thou really punish me for the sins of my ancestors?'

I struck haphazard with my dagger at the open page; it pierced the verse: 'For I the Lord thy G.o.d am a jealous G.o.d, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.'

"I almost died of terror. Once more I controlled myself. From the street below rose the blast of the Vandal horns; glittering in brilliant armor, our hors.e.m.e.n were going out to battle with the Moors.

That was my joy, my pride. Twice already I myself had mingled in the victorious conflict. My heart, my courage, my joy in life, revived. I said to myself: 'Even though all pleasure is forever dead to me, my people, the Vandal kingdom, the hero's duty to live, to fight, to die for his country, summon me. Is this, too, nothing? Is sin, too, an idle nothing?' Again, in another place, I questioned the word of G.o.d. I closed the roll, opened it again, and my dagger's point touched the words: All is vanity!

"Then I sank down in despair. So people and country and heroism, which our ancestors had fostered and praised as at once the highest duty and the greatest pleasure,--this, too, is vanity, is sin before the eyes of the Lord."

"It is a cruel chance," said Gibamund, wrathfully.

"And it is folly to believe it," cried Hilda. "O Gelimer, thou hero, grandson of Genseric, does not every pulsation of your heart give the lie to this gloomy delusion." She sprang up, throwing back her flowing hair and fixing a fiery glance upon him.