"I do believe he is no king, my Pedro," she said, "but only, as he says, a poor Morisco beggar. Let us rather try to help him. He hath no castles I am sure, and as for his armies----""His armies! there they come; look, sister!" cried little Pedro, breaking into his sister's words; "now will you believe me?" and following his gaze, Theresa herself started as she saw dashing down the mountain highway what looked to her unpractised eye like a whole band of Moorish cavalry with glimmering lances and streaming pennons.
Pedro faced the charge with drawn sword. Theresa knelt on the ground with silver crucifix upraised, expecting instant martyrdom, while the old Moorish tramp, Abd-el-'Aman, believing discretion to be the better part of valor, quietly dropped down by the side of the rocky roadway, for well he understood who were these latest comers.
The Moorish cavalry, which proved to be three Spaniards on horseback, drew up before the young crusaders.
"So, runaways, we have found you," cried one of them, as he recognized the children. "Come, Theresa, what means this folly?
Whither are you and Pedro bound?"
"We were even starting for a crusade against the Moor, Brother Jago," said Theresa, timidly, "but our Infidel friend here--why, where hath he gone?--says that there are neither Infidel castles nor Moorish armies now, and that therefore we may not be crusaders.""But I know that he doth lie, Brother Jago," cried little Pedro, more valiant still when he saw to what his Moorish cavalry was reduced. "He is the King of Cordova, come here to spy out the land, and I was about to cut off his head when you did disturb us."Big brother Jago de Cepeda and the two servants of his father's house laughed long and loudly.
"Crusaders and kings," he cried; "why, we shall have the Cid himself here, if we do but wait long enough.""Hush, brother," said young Pedro, confidentially, "say it not so loudly. I did tell the Infidel that I was Ruy Diaz of Bivar, the Cid Campeador--and he did believe me."And then the cavalry laughed louder than ever, and swooping down captured the young crusaders and set the truants before them on their uncomfortable Cordova saddles. Then, turning around, they rode swiftly back to Avila with the runaways, while the old Moor, glad to have escaped rough handling from the Christian riders, grasped his staff and plodded on toward Avila and Valladolid.
So the expedition for martyrdom and crusade came to an ignominious end. But the pious desires of little Theresa did not.
For, finding that martyrdom was out of the question, she proposed to her ever-ready brother that they should become hermits, and for days the two children worked away trying to build a hermitage near their father's house.
But the rough and heavy pieces of granite with which they sought to build their hermitage proved more than they could handle, and their knowledge of mason-work was about as imperfect as had been their familiarity with crusading and the country of the Moors.
"The stones that we piled one upon another," wrote Theresa herself in later years, "immediately fell down, and so it came to pass that we found no means of accomplishing our wish."The pluck and piety, however, that set this conscientious and sympathetic little girl to such impossible tasks were certain to blossom into something equally hard and unselfish when she grew to womanhood. And so it proved. Her much-loved but romance-reading mother died when she was twelve years old, and Theresa felt her loss keenly.
