“There is something in what you say,” Dame Niafer admitted. “Yet what is this nonsense about ‘the children of his body’? Have men any other implement, unknown to their wives, with which to beget children?”
Jurgen beamed. Jurgen, it was apparent, had found an enticing idea to play with.
“There is quite another sort of paternity, acquired without the need of troubling and upsetting any woman. So, for the perfect rounding off of our argument, we must consider also Dom Manuel’s children in the spirit, those lords who were of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion, and whose heroism was modeled so exactly after his fine example.”
Niafer replied, a little puzzled: “They were notable and pious persons, who were sent into all parts of the earth as the apostles of the Redeemer, and who will return again with Manuel.... But do you tell me just what you mean!”
“I mean that it was of rough and ungodly fighting-men that Dom Manuel’s example made these incomparable heroes. There was a time, madame,—a time to which we may now, in the proper spirit, refer without any impiety,—when their delight in battle was as vigorous as their moral principles were lax, a time when they jested at holy things, and when their chastity was defective.”
The Countess nodded. “I remember that time. It was an evil time, with no respectability in it: and I said so, from the first.”
“Yet do you consider what Dom Manuel’s example and teachings made, in the end, of his companions in this life! Do you consider the saintly deeds of Holden and of Anavalt, and how Ninzian was for so long the mainstay of all religion hereabouts—!”
“Ninzian was a holy person, and even among the apostles of Manuel he was perhaps the most devout. Nevertheless—”
But Jurgen now became more particular. “Do you consider how but fourteen years ago Donander died a martyr in conflict with the pagan Northmen, proving with his body’s loss the falsity and wickedness of their superstitions when in the sight of both armies Donander was raised up into heaven by seven angels in the same instant that a devil carried his adversary northward!”
“That miracle is attested. Yet—”