Messages came from the King and from the other Infantes, to know what had caused the sudden extinction of Dom Enrique’s lantern, and in the answering of these no one thought of Fernando till Enrique missed him, and, hastily looking for him, found him on the bench where they had been sitting, half fainting with the pain of his burnt fingers.
“I did not think of it at first,” he said; “and then if I am a soldier I must bear pain.”
Enrique could not understand how he had been hurt; and when he heard the story, declared that Fernando’s courage had saved the ship, and then turned on Northberry with one of his rare outbursts of anger. Could he not see that Dom Fernando was burnt when he took the flaming wood from him!
Enrique was habitually gentle; but there was an intensity in his displeasure when it was once roused, which was not easily forgotten.
“I hid my hand behind me; it did not hurt me much,” said Fernando, who was reviving. “Señor Northberry could not see.”
“Dom Fernando is as true a soldier as yourself, my lord,” said Northberry.
“I know it,” returned Enrique; but he said no more, only anxiously watching while one of his chaplains, Father José, who, like most priests, was something of a surgeon, bound up the injured hand, saying that it was after all but a trifle.
He would hardly, for the rest of the voyage, let Fernando out of his sight; though the boy, exceedingly anxious to prove that he was able to bear such trifling casualties of war, resolutely concealed all the ill-effects which the adventure caused to his delicate constitution.