Lazurac flung him the letter, with a sense of gratified spite and hatred, and the prisoners were suffered to withdraw. What mattered the scene that had passed to Fernando; what mattered insult and hardship, compared to the sorrow and anguish of heart of reading of the beloved brother’s illness and death! Tears such as all his suffering had never wrong from him flowed fast as he read, and for the first time he was unable to comfort and support his followers, who all knew that a much blacker cloud had fallen on them, and that their chances of deliverance were lessened by this blow.
“My son,” said Father José, tenderly, “our beloved king suffered much grief and anxiety. We may think of him now in the rest of Paradise.”
“Grief and anxiety which I helped to cause,” sighed Fernando. “Doubtless it is well; but now, submission is hard.”
And when the prince was thus cast down, the spirits of the whole party failed utterly, and one after another fell into disgrace with their tyrants, and suffered accordingly. At last, after a second night of tears and anguish, Fernando regained the mastery over himself, and before they started on their day of toil he called his friends around him, and thus spoke—
“My friends, I think we must put hope away. It was my dear brother’s earnest wish to free us by ransom, by force, or even by the yielding of the Christian city, for which, for my part, I think our poor lives were a bad exchange. But what he could not do, our bereaved country in its hour of trial will fail to accomplish. So pardon me my share in your sorrows, my rashness first, and now that I cannot bring myself to beg our freedom at the price they ask. Could I but bear it all—could I but make in our own land such a home and rest as you deserve! But there remaineth a rest for us all, where my brother is gone before. So let us pray, my friends, that the will of the Lord may be perfectly fulfilled in us; let us in utter submission find peace at last. For there is an end to our trial, and a home from which we shall not be shut out.”
And so Fernando wholly, and the others as far as they might, gave up the restless hope of freedom, and set themselves to bear the suffering of each day as it passed, not looking to the morrow. And so there came to them in the midst of their toiling, driven lives, some still and peaceful moments, some inward consolations that carried them through.
Their lives were very monotonous, chiefly varied by the sickness of one or other, often of Fernando himself, which held them solitary prisoners in the miserable, airless lodging where they dwelt, or by a different overlooker at their toil, or a change in the part of the gardens where they pursued it. Now and then, too, they saw their old friend the Majorcan merchant, who brought them little comforts; on which occasions Fernando’s appetite was often found to fail, and he would beg some other to take his share.
They had very little opportunity of intercourse with the other slaves, by whom a chance word or look from Fernando was highly valued; but since the Moors were not all fiends incarnate, Fernando’s faultless life and ready performance of all that was allotted to him won him some favour from his masters, and with some of them a little courteous intercourse. Their lot, with its toil, squalor, and hardship, was bad indeed, but endurable when not made worse by wilful cruelties.
Soon after the news of the king’s death, Fernando and Manoel, alone of their party, were digging out the ground for some new fountains in the ladies’ garden. Their overseer was a certain Hassan, the mildest of his race, and he was superintending the other prisoners at a little distance, sitting cross-legged on a bank, smoking his hookah.
Princess Zarah and her maidens were seated at some distance, watching the alterations. Manoel worked slowly, and paused often for breath.