"Yes, it is true. I had almost said, unfortunately true. For I would rather have owed it to any other man."
"It is so strikingly true that even our Zazo, who at first accused him harshly to me, could scarcely find any objection to mutter, when I took the brilliant man among my councillors and intrusted to him (for he is an expert in letter-writing) the care of the correspondence. And how unweariedly he has toiled since, priest and chancellor at the same time! I marvel at the number of papers he lays before me every morning; I do not believe he sleeps three hours."
"Men who neither sleep nor fight, drink nor kiss, are unnatural to me," cried Gibamund, laughing.
"I do not warn," said Hilda, "but I ask"--she laid her hand lightly on the King's arm--"how does it happen, how is it possible, that you, the warlike Prince of the Vandals, loved this gloomy Roman, this renegade, better than all who stood nearest to you?"
"There you are mistaken, fair Hilda," smiled the King, stroking her hand.
"Yes," she answered, correcting herself; "doubtless you love Ammata better; he is the apple of your eye."
"My father, on his death-bed, confided this brother (he was then only a prattling boy) to my care. I cherished him in my inmost heart, and reared him as though he were my own child," said Gelimer, tenderly. "It is not love," he went on, "that binds me to Verus. What constrains me to revere in him my guardian spirit on earth, to look up to him with ardent gratitude, with blind, credulous trust, is the confidence, nay, the superhuman certainty: yes," here he shuddered slightly, "it is a revelation of God, a miracle."
"A miracle?" Hilda repeated.
"A revelation?" Gibamund asked incredulously, stopping before them.
"Both," replied the King. "Only, to understand it, you must know more, you must know all, you must learn how my mind, my soul, was tossed to and fro by conflicting powers; you must live through with me once more my wanderings, my perils, and my deliverance. Yes, and you shall, you who are my nearest and dearest, now and here; who knows when the impending war will grant us another hour of leisure?