CHAPTER XLII.
Constantine, after his escape from the Sultan's tent, where he had been taken for the demented Ballaban, was unable to enter Constantinople before it fell. His heart was torn with agonizing solicitude for the fate of Morsinia. He knew too well the determination of the dauntless girl in the event of her falling into the hands of the Turks. Filling his dreams at night, and rising before him as a terrible apparition by day, was that loved form, a suicide empurpled with its own gore. Yet love and duty led him to seek her, or at least to seek the certainty of her fate. He therefore disguised himself as a Moslem and mingled with the throng of soldiers and adventurers who entered the city under its new possessors. He wandered for hours about the familiar streets, that, perchance, he might come upon some memorial of her. The secrets of the royal harem he could not explore, even if suspicion led his thought thither. The proximity of the residence of Phranza was guarded by the immediate servants of the Sultan, so that he was deprived of even the fond misery of visiting the scenes so associated with his former joy.
In passing through one of the narrowest and foulest streets—the only ones that had been left undisturbed by the Vandalism of the conquerors—he came upon an old woman, hideous in face and decrepit, whom he remembered as a beggar at the gate of Phranza. From her he learned many stories of the last hours of the siege.
According to her story she had gone among the first to St. Sophia. When the Moslems entered they tied her by a silken girdle to the person of the Grand Chamberlain, and, amid the jeers of the soldiers, marched them together to the Hippodrome. She remembered the Sultan as he rode on his horse,—how he struck with his battle hammer one of the silver heads of the bronze serpents, and cried: "So I smite the heads of the kingdoms!" Just as he did so he turned, and saw her in her rags tied to the courtly-robed lord, and in an angry voice commanded that the princely man be loosed from contact with the filthy hag. Phranza was taken away: but nobody cared to take her away. She was trampled by the crowd, but lived. And nobody thought of turning her out of her hovel home. She was as safe as is a rat when the robbers have killed the nobler inmates of a house.
The woman said that she had heard that the daughter of Phranza was sent away somewhere to an island home. But the Albanian Princess,—Yes, she knew her well; for no hand used to drop so bountifully the alms she asked, or said so kindly "Jesu pity you, my good woman!" as did that beautiful lady. The beggar declared that she stood near her by the altar in St. Sophia. "She looked so saintly there! There was a real aureole about her head as she prayed, so she was a saint indeed. Then she raised her dagger!" But the wretched watcher could watch no longer, though she heard her cry, so wild that she would never cease to hear it.
The beggar ceased her story; all her words had cut through her listener's heart as if they had been daggers.
"It is well!" he said, "I will go to Albania. Among those who loved her I will worship her memory; and, under Castriot, I will seek my revenge."