Gelimer started. He had rarely seen this man smile, never had he heard him laugh aloud. "Why? Ha! ha! You can still ask? Why? Because--But to answer this question I should have to repeat the whole story of our--the Romans', the Catholics'--sufferings from the first step which Genseric took upon this soil. Why? Because I am the avenger, the requiter of the hundred years of crime called 'the Vandal kingdom in Africa.' Hear it, ye saints in Heaven! This man--he was present when all my kindred were horribly murdered, and he asks why I have hated and, so far as I had power, destroyed him and his people?" "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.