"I know--"
"You know nothing! For you can ask me: Why? You know, you mean, of my dying mother's curse. But this you do not know--for you had fallen senseless,--that when she hurled the curse at you I wrenched myself free from my ropes, from my martyr's stake, sprang to her into the midst of the flames, clasped her in my arms, and wished to die with her. But she thrust me back out of the fire, crying: 'Live, live and avenge me--and all your kindred--and fulfil the curse upon that Vandal and all his people!' Again I pressed forward, clasped the dying woman's hand, and swore it. Your warriors tore me away from her; I saw her fall back into the flames, and my senses failed.
"But when I recovered consciousness, I was no longer a boy--I was the avenger! I saw, heard, and felt nothing but that last clasp of my mother's hand, her glance, and my vow. And I abjured my religion--apparently. And you, miserable Barbarians, made stupid by arrogance, you believed that I had done this from cowardice, from fear of torture and the flames! Oh, how often in former years I have felt your silent, scarcely-concealed contempt, you foolish simpleton, and borne it with mortal hatred, with a fury which burned my heart. Arrogant brood of vain fools! Cowardice, fear, to you the most infamous of insults, you attributed to me without hesitation. Blind fools! As if I did not suffer more, ten times more than death in the flames, during all these years, while ruling myself, enduring without a word of explanation the scorn of the Carthaginians, the Catholics, for my apostasy; stifling every emotion of hate and wrath and hope in my heart, that you might not perceive them, wearing an outward semblance of stone, while my whole soul was seething with fury, to serve you, to conduct your blasphemous service of God as your priest, bearing your insufferable boasting! For you Germans, without boasting aloud (your loud braggart is easily endured, we despise him), are silent boasters. You walk over the earth as if you must constantly crush something; you throw back your heads as if you were greeting and nodding to your ancestors in heaven: 'Yes, yes, the world belongs to us!' And that you do not know and feel it, while you are insulting us mortally by such conduct, because it is a matter of course--is the most unbearable thing about it. Oh, how I hate you!" He struck with his whip at the figure walking by his side, who received the blow, but did not seem to feel it. "You Barbarians, who, a few generations ago, were cattle-thieves on the frontier of our empire, whom we slaughtered, enslaved, threw to the beasts by hundreds of thousands,--naked, starving beggars who gratefully picked up the crumbs flung to them by Roman generosity,--hence with you all, all, you wolves, you bulls, you bears, whom only bestial strength and God's permission--as a punishment for our sins--allowed to break into the Roman Empire! Hence with you!" He again raised his whip to strike, but seeing a Herulian warrior's eye fixed threateningly upon him, he lowered his arm in embarrassment.
Gelimer remained silent, except for frequent sighs.
"And your conscience?" he now said very gently. "Has it never rebuked you? I since escaping the lion--I have trusted you entirely, I laid my heart in your hands, you became my confessor; did you feel no shame then?"
A scarlet flush dyed the priest's pallid face for an instant, but it passed like a flash of lightning. The next moment he answered:
"Yes! So foolish was my heart--often. Especially at first. But," he went on wrathfully, "I always conquered this weakness by saying to myself whenever I felt it, and your insulting arrogance made me feel it daily (oh, that Zazo! I hated him most of all): They deem you so base that, in the presence of the dead bodies of all your kindred, you abjured your faith! These insolent, incredibly stupid Barbarians--but it is arrogance, even more than stupidity--believe that you, you, the son of these parents, could really be devoted to them, could forget your martyrs, to serve them and their brutal, imperious splendor. They think that you can be so inconceivably base! Avenge yourself, punish them for this unbearable presumption! Oh, hate, too, is a joy, the hatred of nation for nation! And so long as a drop of blood flows in the veins of other nations, you Germans must be hated, unto death, until you are trampled under foot."
He dealt a heavy blow with his clenched fist upon the uncovered head of the tottering King. Gelimer did not look up, did not even start.
"What threat are you muttering in your beard?" asked Verus, bending toward him.
"I was only praying, 'As we forgive our debtors.' But perhaps that, too, is vanity, sin. Perhaps--you are not my debtor. Perhaps you are really," again he shuddered, "my angel, whom God sends, not to protect me, as I supposed in my vanity, but in punishment."