But Verus went on:
"Hilderic must be removed from the throne, for he would not implicitly obey my will. He demanded all sorts of indulgences for the Vandals, and Justinianus was ready to grant them. But I desired not only to make Gelimer and his Vandals subjects of the Emperor,--I wanted to destroy them. Your rough brother discovered my intercourse with Pudentius; if I had been searched at that time, if Pudentius's letter had been found, all would have been lost. Instead, I gave it to him; I betrayed his hiding-place, but I knew he was already outside the walls, mounted on my best racer.
"The King and you both entered the trap of my warnings. I rejoiced at your readiness to believe in Hilderic's guilt, because you--desired it; because with secret, though repressed eagerness, you longed for the crown. Even though you dethroned Hilderic in good faith, how alert, how ardent you were to secure the throne! I aided, I saw you strike down poor Hoamer, who was perfectly right when he denied Hilderic's purpose of murder. You called the duel a judgment of God, you believed you thereby served Heaven's justice, and you served only your own lust for power and, through it, me! Your passion--stimulated by Satan, not God--gave you the impulse, the swift strength of arm, to which Hoamer instantly succumbed. It was a devil's judgment, a victory of hell, not a decree of God. Now I became your chancellor; that is, your destroyer. I quarrelled openly with the Emperor; I negotiated secretly with the Empress. I sent your fleet to Sardinia, after learning the day before that Belisarius had set sail with his army. After the battle of Decimum, I advised you to shut yourself with your troops in Carthage. The game would then have been over six months earlier, but this one move failed,--you would not accept my counsel. I was obliged to guard against Hilderic's vindicating himself, so I took out of the chest before I let Hilderic search it, the warning letter, which I had dictated. But I could permit no scion of Genseric's race to live: Justinian would have received your two captives with honors after the victory of Belisarius! I had them killed by my freedman and secured his escape. But you--I had long reserved it for the hour of your greatest supremacy, in case of the most extreme peril of our plans--you I crushed at the right moment by the revelation that you had dethroned Hilderic without cause and then murdered him. But my mother's curse and my oath would not be fulfilled until you walked in chains as Justinian's captive.
"Therefore, to prevent your escape, I shared all the suffering, all the privations, of these last three months. Letters from King Theudis, directly after the battle of Decimum, had offered you rescue through the coast tribes by the galleys of the Visigoths. You never saw those letters; I suppressed them. Not until deliverance really beckoned, when you already stretched your hand toward it, did I strip off the mask to destroy you utterly. Now I shall see you kiss Justinian's feet in the hippodrome at Constantinople; this is the final consummation of my mother's curse, my oath, and my people's vengeance."
He ceased, his face glowing, his eyes flashing down at the prisoner.
Gelimer stooped and kissed the shoe in Verus's stirrup.
"I thank you. So you are God's rod which struck and felled me. I thank God and you for every blow, as I thanked God and you when I believed you to be my guardian spirit. And if, meanwhile, you have committed any sin against me, against my people,--I know not how to express it,--may God forgive you, as I do."
CHAPTER XXIII
Procopius to Cethegus:
HE went all the way to Carthage on foot, declining horse or camel, remaining silent or praying aloud in Latin, no longer in the Vandal language. Fara offered him suitable garments instead of the worn, half-tattered purple mantle which he had on his bare body. The captive declined, and asked for a penitent's girdle, with sharp points on the inside, such as the hermits wear in the desert. We did not know how to obtain such crazy gear, and Fara probably disapproved the wish, so the "Tyrant" himself made one from a cast-off horse-bridle which he found and the hard, sharp thorns of the desert acacia. Close to the gate of his capital, his strength failed, and he fell, face downward, in the road. Verus stopped behind him, hesitating. I believe he meant to set his foot on the King's neck; but Fara, who probably had the same suspicion, roughly pushed the priest forward, and raised the monarch with kind words. Directly beyond the Numidian gate, in the spacious square in the Aklas suburb, Belisarius had assembled the larger portion of his army, filling three sides; the fourth, facing the gate, remained open. Opposite the entrance, on a raised seat, the General, in full armor, sat throned; above his head rose the imperial field standards; at his feet lay the scarlet flags and pennons of the Vandals which we had captured by the dozen; every thousand had them. Only the great royal banner was missing; it was never found. Around Belisarius stood the leaders of his victorious bands, with many bishops and priests, then the Senators, aristocratic citizens of Carthage and the other cities, some of whom had returned from exile or flight during the past few months; Pudentius of Tripolis and his son were among them, rejoicing. To the left of Belisarius, on purple coverlets at his feet, lay heaped and poured in artistic confusion the royal treasure of the Vandals: many chairs of solid gold, the chariot of the Vandal Queen, a countless multitude of treasures of every description,--how the jewels glittered under the radiant African sun,--the whole silver table service of the King, weighing many thousand pounds, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the royal household, besides weapons, countless weapons from Genseric's armories; old Roman banners, too, which, after a captivity of years, were again released; weapons enough in the hands of brave men to conquer the whole globe; Roman helmets with proudly curved crests, German boar and buffalo helmets, Moorish shields covered with panther skins, Moorish fillets with waving ostrich plumes, breastplates of crocodile skin,--who can enumerate the motley variety? But at the right of Belisarius, with their hands bound behind their backs, stood the prisoners of the highest rank, men, and also many women, beautiful in face and figure,--the whole picture, however, was inclosed, as though in an iron frame, by our squadrons of horsemen and the dense ranks of our foot-soldiers. How the horses neighed; how the plumes in the helmets waved; how the metal clanked and glittered with dazzling brightness! A magnificent spectacle which must fill with rapture the heart of every man who did not view it as a captive. Behind our warriors crowded eagerly the populace of Carthage, taught by many a blow with the handle of a spear that it had nothing to say, and bore no part in this celebration of its own and Africa's deliverance.