“If you and I could head an expedition,” he said, thoughtfully; “much toil need not fall on you.”
“Ah!” cried Fernando. “At such a time I should feel no hardships. I am not so full of my own conceit as to imagine myself a fit leader. Let me but fight under your banner; profit by your experience. Is not our prosperity a shame, while we suffer that unimaginable evil at our very gates?”
“It would consecrate all other efforts,” said Enrique, with the peculiar earnestness that always made his words weighty; “and to fight as we have always wished, side by side, in this holy war!”
“Yes. Alone I could do little! This hope has been my one aim, my prayer, through all the poor life that has borne so little fruit. Enrique, you have known it?”
“Yes. I know that you have never swerved from it. But you must not call your life fruitless, my Fernando.”
“Fruitful of impatience and discontent! In truth I am not worthy of this task.”
“Nevertheless,” said Enrique, with his grave smile, “let us together offer our unworthiness to Him Who will purge our sins away. So shall we win honour for ourselves and our brother.”
Self-devotion and personal glory were so united in the mind during the reign of chivalry, that it was not marvellous that these ardent souls did not quite distinguish between them. Enlightened as the princes of Avis were, they were, even Enrique, men of their own day. Their more personal aims of scientific discovery, missionary work, organised charity and the like, were experimental, and they could not set them quite on a level with the recognised privilege and the duty of distinguishing themselves in the battle-field. First, they must be soldiers, afterwards, men of science and philanthropists, and Fernando felt himself to have missed his vocation. The deep sense of religion, felt in especial by these two, offered them another and higher object. Perhaps the strong desire of self-devotion was the talent specially committed to the “ages of faith.” The evil they wished to remove was great and obvious, and Fernando did not consider that he might be doing the Church’s work perhaps as effectually in another way. He was humble enough in his estimate of himself; he had done the work at hand without a complaint; but the long-restrained wish, once entertained, swept all before it like a flood, and could see no obstacles and no objections. His natural tastes, his religious fervour, his wish for self-denial, and that self which he had not yet altogether learned to deny, all worked together, by the force of his strong will, to attain his object. Enrique loved him too well to oppose him, and moreover was to the full as impetuous, and more used to having his own way.