‘Run through? I am as sound in the hide as a crocodile, said Raphael, laughing.
‘Probably the fellow took the butt instead of the point, in his hurry. So goes a cavalry scuffle. I saw you hit three or four fellows running with the flat of your sword.’
Ah, that explains,’ said Raphael, why, I thought myself once the best swordsman on the Armenian frontier....’
‘I suspect that you were thinking of some one besides the Moors,’ said Synesius, archly pointing to the litter; and Raphael, for the first time for many a year, blushed like a boy of fifteen, and then turned haughtily away, and remounted his horse, saying, ‘Clumsy fool that I was!’
‘Thank God rather that you have been kept from the shedding of blood,’ said the stranger bishop, in a soft, deliberate voice, with a peculiarly clear and delicate enunciation. ‘If God have given us the victory, why grudge His having spared any other of His creatures besides ourselves?’
‘Because there are so many the more of them left to ravish, burn, and slay,’ answered Synesius. ‘Nevertheless, I am not going to argue with Augustine.’
Augustine! Raphael looked intently at the man, a tall, delicate-featured personage, with a lofty and narrow forehead, scarred like his cheeks with the deep furrows of many a doubt and woe. Resolve, gentle but unbending, was expressed in his thin close-set lips and his clear quiet eye; but the calm of his mighty countenance was the calm of a worn-out volcano, over which centuries must pass before the earthquake-rents be filled with kindly soil, and the cinder-slopes grow gay with grass and flowers. The Jew’s thoughts, however, were soon turned into another channel by the hearty embraces of Majoricus and his son.
‘We have caught you again, you truant!’ said the young Tribune; ‘you could not escape us, you see, after all.’
‘Rather,’ said the father, ‘we owe him a second debt of gratitude for a second deliverance. We were right hard bested when you rode up.’
‘Oh, he brings nothing but good with him whenever he appears; and then he pretends to be a bird of ill-omen,’ said the light-hearted Tribune, putting his armour to rights.