How he prayed for the poor
wretches they were gone to attack!--ay, and for all of us--for me
also--There's enough of it. Such talk skills not now."
It was plain that Sir Eberhard had learnt more Christianity in the
hold of his Moorish pirate ship than ever in the Holy Roman Empire,
and a weight was lifted off his son's mind by finding that he had
vowed never to return to a life of violence, even though fancying a
life of penance in a hermitage the only alternative.
Ebbo asked if the Genoese merchant, Ser Gian Battista dei Battiste,
had indeed been one of his fellow-captives.
"Ha!--what?" and on the repetition, "Truly I knew him, Merchant Gian
as we used to call him; but you twang off his name as they speak it
in his own stately city."
Christina smiled. "Ebbo learnt the Italian tongue this winter from
our chaplain, who had studied at Bologna. He was told it would aid
in his quest of you."
"Tell me not!" said the traveller, holding up his hands in
deprecation; "the Junker is worse than a priest! And yet he killed
old Wolfgang! But what of Gian? Hold,--did not he, when I was with
him at Genoa, tell me a story of being put into a dungeon in a
mountain fortress in Germany, and released by a pair of young lads
with eyes beaming in the sunrise, who vanished just as they brought
him to a cloister? Nay, he deemed it a miracle of the saints, and
hung up a votive picture thereof at the shrine of the holy Cosmo and
Damian.
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