“Did I not tell you that you would find her sleeping?” he said, with his bitter, chuckling laugh. “Call on her, Sir Knight; call on her! Love, they say, can bridge great gulfs—even that between severed neck and bosom.”
With the silver lamp in his hand Godwin smote, and the man went down like a felled ox, leaving him once more in silence and in darkness.
For a moment Godwin stood thus, till his brain was filled with fire, and he too fell—fell across the corpse of Masouda, and there lay still.
Chapter XXII.
At Jerusalem
Godwin knew that he lay sick, but save that Masouda seemed to tend him in his sickness he knew no more, for all the past had gone from him. There she was always, clad in a white robe, and looking at him with eyes full of ineffable calm and love, and he noted that round her neck ran a thin, red line, and wondered how it came there.
He knew also that he travelled while he was ill, for at dawn he would hear the camp break up with a mighty noise, and feel his litter lifted by slaves who bore him along for hours across the burning sand, till at length the evening came, and with a humming sound, like the sound of hiving bees, the great army set its bivouac. Then came the night and the pale moon floating like a boat upon the azure sea above, and everywhere the bright, eternal stars, to which went up the constant cry of “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! God is the greatest, there is none but He.”
“It is a false god,” he would say. “Tell them to cry upon the Saviour of the World.”
Then the voice of Masouda would seem to answer:
“Judge not. No god whom men worship with a pure and single heart is wholly false. Many be the ladders that lead to heaven. Judge not, you Christian knight.”
At length that journey was done, and there arose new noises as of the roar of battle. Orders were given and men marched out in thousands; then rose that roar, and they marched back again, mourning their dead.