CHAPTER XXII
The day after Gelimer's surrender Fara's camp was broken up and the train of victors and captives began the march to Carthage. Couriers were despatched in advance to Belisarius.
At the head rode Fara, Procopius, and the other leaders on horses and camels; in the centre were led the captive Vandals, bound, for the sake of precaution, hand and foot with chains which permitted walking and even riding, but not running, and surrounded by foot-soldiers; the Hun cavalry formed the rear. So, resting at night in tents, they slowly traversed in fourteen days the road over which, in their swift pursuit, they had gone in eight.
Verus usually rode alone; he avoided the Vandals, and the Byzantines shunned him.
On the second day after the departure from Mount Pappua,--Fara and Procopius were far in advance,--at a turn in the road, the priest checked his horse and waited. The prisoners approached. Many a fettered hand was raised against him, many a curse was called down on his head; he neither saw nor heard. At last, holding in his manacled right hand a staff that extended into a cross, Gelimer tottered forward on foot. Verus urged his horse through the ranks of the guards, and now rode close beside him; the prisoner looked up.
"You, Verus!"
He shuddered.
"Yes, I, Verus. I waited for you here--you and this hour,--this hour which at last has come, slowly, lingeringly; this hour for which I have wished, longed, labored by prayer, by counsel and action, for which alone I have lived, suffered, struggled during years and tens of years."
"And why, O Verus, why? What injury have I done you?"
Verus uttered a shrill laugh, and reined in his horse, stopping suddenly.
Gelimer started. He had rarely seen this man smile, never had he heard him laugh aloud.
"Why? Ha! ha! You can still ask? Why? Because--But to answer this question I should have to repeat the whole story of our--the Romans', the Catholics'--sufferings from the first step which Genseric took upon this soil. Why? Because I am the avenger, the requiter of the hundred years of crime called 'the Vandal kingdom in Africa.' Hear it, ye saints in Heaven! This man--he was present when all my kindred were horribly murdered, and he asks why I have hated and, so far as I had power, destroyed him and his people?"
"I know--"
"You know nothing! For you can ask me: Why? You know, you mean, of my dying mother's curse. But this you do not know--for you had fallen senseless,--that when she hurled the curse at you I wrenched myself free from my ropes, from my martyr's stake, sprang to her into the midst of the flames, clasped her in my arms, and wished to die with her. But she thrust me back out of the fire, crying: 'Live, live and avenge me--and all your kindred--and fulfil the curse upon that Vandal and all his people!' Again I pressed forward, clasped the dying woman's hand, and swore it. Your warriors tore me away from her; I saw her fall back into the flames, and my senses failed.
"But when I recovered consciousness, I was no longer a boy--I was the avenger! I saw, heard, and felt nothing but that last clasp of my mother's hand, her glance, and my vow. And I abjured my religion--apparently. And you, miserable Barbarians, made stupid by arrogance, you believed that I had done this from cowardice, from fear of torture and the flames! Oh, how often in former years I have felt your silent, scarcely-concealed contempt, you foolish simpleton, and borne it with mortal hatred, with a fury which burned my heart. Arrogant brood of vain fools! Cowardice, fear, to you the most infamous of insults, you attributed to me without hesitation. Blind fools! As if I did not suffer more, ten times more than death in the flames, during all these years, while ruling myself, enduring without a word of explanation the scorn of the Carthaginians, the Catholics, for my apostasy; stifling every emotion of hate and wrath and hope in my heart, that you might not perceive them, wearing an outward semblance of stone, while my whole soul was seething with fury, to serve you, to conduct your blasphemous service of God as your priest, bearing your insufferable boasting! For you Germans, without boasting aloud (your loud braggart is easily endured, we despise him), are silent boasters. You walk over the earth as if you must constantly crush something; you throw back your heads as if you were greeting and nodding to your ancestors in heaven: 'Yes, yes, the world belongs to us!' And that you do not know and feel it, while you are insulting us mortally by such conduct, because it is a matter of course--is the most unbearable thing about it. Oh, how I hate you!" He struck with his whip at the figure walking by his side, who received the blow, but did not seem to feel it. "You Barbarians, who, a few generations ago, were cattle-thieves on the frontier of our empire, whom we slaughtered, enslaved, threw to the beasts by hundreds of thousands,--naked, starving beggars who gratefully picked up the crumbs flung to them by Roman generosity,--hence with you all, all, you wolves, you bulls, you bears, whom only bestial strength and God's permission--as a punishment for our sins--allowed to break into the Roman Empire! Hence with you!" He again raised his whip to strike, but seeing a Herulian warrior's eye fixed threateningly upon him, he lowered his arm in embarrassment.
Gelimer remained silent, except for frequent sighs.
"And your conscience?" he now said very gently. "Has it never rebuked you? I since escaping the lion--I have trusted you entirely, I laid my heart in your hands, you became my confessor; did you feel no shame then?"
A scarlet flush dyed the priest's pallid face for an instant, but it passed like a flash of lightning. The next moment he answered:
"Yes! So foolish was my heart--often. Especially at first. But," he went on wrathfully, "I always conquered this weakness by saying to myself whenever I felt it, and your insulting arrogance made me feel it daily (oh, that Zazo! I hated him most of all): They deem you so base that, in the presence of the dead bodies of all your kindred, you abjured your faith! These insolent, incredibly stupid Barbarians--but it is arrogance, even more than stupidity--believe that you, you, the son of these parents, could really be devoted to them, could forget your martyrs, to serve them and their brutal, imperious splendor. They think that you can be so inconceivably base! Avenge yourself, punish them for this unbearable presumption! Oh, hate, too, is a joy, the hatred of nation for nation! And so long as a drop of blood flows in the veins of other nations, you Germans must be hated, unto death, until you are trampled under foot."
He dealt a heavy blow with his clenched fist upon the uncovered head of the tottering King. Gelimer did not look up, did not even start.
"What threat are you muttering in your beard?" asked Verus, bending toward him.
"I was only praying, 'As we forgive our debtors.' But perhaps that, too, is vanity, sin. Perhaps--you are not my debtor. Perhaps you are really," again he shuddered, "my angel, whom God sends, not to protect me, as I supposed in my vanity, but in punishment."
"I was not your good angel," laughed the other.
"But--if I may ask--?"
"Ask on! I want to enjoy this hour to the utmost."
"If you hated me so bitterly, desired to avenge your mother on me, why did you carry on this game for so many long years? Often and often,--when I lay helpless in the lion's power, you might have killed me, so why--?"
"A stupid question! Have you not understood even yet? Fool! True, I hated you, but even more--your nation. To kill you had its charm. And I struggled sorely with my hate at that time, in order not to kill you instead of the lion."
"I saw that."
"But I perceived: here, in this man, lives the soul of the Vandal people. To raise him to the throne, and then rule him, is to rule his people. If I should kill him now, I should drive Hilderic to a secret treaty with Constantinople. Zazo, Gibamund, others, will resist long and bravely. But if this man, who, above all, could save his people, should become king, and then, as king, be in my power, his countrymen will be most surely lost. If it should become necessary to kill him, an opportunity can probably always be found. Far better than to murder him is through him to rule--and ruin--the Vandal nation!"
Then Gelimer groaned aloud and, staggering, involuntarily caught at the horse's neck for support. Verus thrust his hand aside; he stumbled and fell on the sand, but instantly rose and pursued his way.
"Did the priest strike you. King?" cried the Herulian, threateningly.
"No, my friend."
But Verus went on:
"Hilderic must be removed from the throne, for he would not implicitly obey my will. He demanded all sorts of indulgences for the Vandals, and Justinianus was ready to grant them. But I desired not only to make Gelimer and his Vandals subjects of the Emperor,--I wanted to destroy them. Your rough brother discovered my intercourse with Pudentius; if I had been searched at that time, if Pudentius's letter had been found, all would have been lost. Instead, I gave it to him; I betrayed his hiding-place, but I knew he was already outside the walls, mounted on my best racer.
"The King and you both entered the trap of my warnings. I rejoiced at your readiness to believe in Hilderic's guilt, because you--desired it; because with secret, though repressed eagerness, you longed for the crown. Even though you dethroned Hilderic in good faith, how alert, how ardent you were to secure the throne! I aided, I saw you strike down poor Hoamer, who was perfectly right when he denied Hilderic's purpose of murder. You called the duel a judgment of God, you believed you thereby served Heaven's justice, and you served only your own lust for power and, through it, me! Your passion--stimulated by Satan, not God--gave you the impulse, the swift strength of arm, to which Hoamer instantly succumbed. It was a devil's judgment, a victory of hell, not a decree of God. Now I became your chancellor; that is, your destroyer. I quarrelled openly with the Emperor; I negotiated secretly with the Empress. I sent your fleet to Sardinia, after learning the day before that Belisarius had set sail with his army. After the battle of Decimum, I advised you to shut yourself with your troops in Carthage. The game would then have been over six months earlier, but this one move failed,--you would not accept my counsel. I was obliged to guard against Hilderic's vindicating himself, so I took out of the chest before I let Hilderic search it, the warning letter, which I had dictated. But I could permit no scion of Genseric's race to live: Justinian would have received your two captives with honors after the victory of Belisarius! I had them killed by my freedman and secured his escape. But you--I had long reserved it for the hour of your greatest supremacy, in case of the most extreme peril of our plans--you I crushed at the right moment by the revelation that you had dethroned Hilderic without cause and then murdered him. But my mother's curse and my oath would not be fulfilled until you walked in chains as Justinian's captive.
"Therefore, to prevent your escape, I shared all the suffering, all the privations, of these last three months. Letters from King Theudis, directly after the battle of Decimum, had offered you rescue through the coast tribes by the galleys of the Visigoths. You never saw those letters; I suppressed them. Not until deliverance really beckoned, when you already stretched your hand toward it, did I strip off the mask to destroy you utterly. Now I shall see you kiss Justinian's feet in the hippodrome at Constantinople; this is the final consummation of my mother's curse, my oath, and my people's vengeance."
He ceased, his face glowing, his eyes flashing down at the prisoner.
Gelimer stooped and kissed the shoe in Verus's stirrup.
"I thank you. So you are God's rod which struck and felled me. I thank God and you for every blow, as I thanked God and you when I believed you to be my guardian spirit. And if, meanwhile, you have committed any sin against me, against my people,--I know not how to express it,--may God forgive you, as I do."