As the fatal day dawned, numberless hordes moved towards the walls. The great ditches were soon filled with the dead bodies of thousands of the least serviceable soldiers, who had been driven from behind by the lances of the trained bands, that they might thus worry the patience and exhaust the resources of the brave defenders, without taxing the best of the Moslem troops. The carcasses of the slain made a highway for the living, over which they poured against the gate of St. Romanus. The four grim towers toppled beneath the pounding of great stone balls hurled from the cannon of Urban. The defenders were driven off the adjacent walls by the storms of bullets and arrows that swept them. At the critical moment the Janizaries, unwearied as yet by watching or fighting, twelve thousand strong, as compact a mass beneath the eye of the Sultan as the weapon he held in his hand, moved to where the breach was widest.
"The spoil to all! A province to him who first enters!" cried the Sultan, waving his iron battle mace. Hassan, the giant, first mounted the rampart, and fell pierced with arrows and crushed with stones. But through the gap his dying valor had made in the ranks of the foe first rushed the company of Ballaban.
In vain did the people crowd beneath the dome of St. Sophia, grasping with hopeless hope an ancient prophecy that at the extreme moment an angel would descend to rescue the city. Alas! only the angel of death came that day; and to none brought he more welcome news than to the Emperor,—"Thy prayer is answered; for thou hast fallen where the dead lie thickest!" Near the gateway of St. Romanus, where he had met the first of the invaders, under the piles of the dead, gashed by sabre strokes and crushed beneath the feet of the victors, lay the body of Constantine Palæologus, the noblest of the Cæsars of the Eastern Empire!
The Turks placed his ghastly head between the feet of the bronze horse, a part of the equestrian statue of Justinian, where it was reverently saluted even by the Moslems, who paused in the rage of the sack to think upon the virtue and courage of the unfortunate monarch.
Captain Ballaban had pressed rapidly through the city to the doors of St. Sophia. The oaken gates flew back under the axes of the Moslems. Monks and matrons, children and nuns, lords and beggars were crowded together, not knowing whether the grand dome would melt away and a legion of angels descend for their relief, or the vast enclosure would become a pen of indiscriminate slaughter. The motley and helpless misery excited the pity of the captors. Ballaban's voice rang through the arches, proclaiming safely to those who should submit. That he might the better command the scene, he made his way to the chancel in front of the grand altar. It was filled with the nuns, repeating their prayers. Among them was the fair Albanian. Her face was but partly toward him, yet he could never mistake that queenly head. She was addressing the Sisters. Holding aloft the bright shaft of a stiletto, she cried,—
"Let us give ourselves to heaven, but never to the harem!"
Ballaban paused an instant. But that instant seemed to him many minutes. As, under the lightning's flash, the whole moving panorama of the wide landscape seems to stand still, and paints vividly its prominent objects, however scattered, upon the startled eye of the beholders; so his mind marvellously quickened by the excitement, took in at once the long track of his own life. He saw a little child's hand wreathing him with flowers plucked beside a cottage on the Balkans; a lovely captive whose face was lit by the blazing home in a hamlet of Albania; a form of one at Sfetigrade lying still and faint with sickness, but radiant as with the beginning of transfiguration for the spirit life; and the queenly being who was borne in the palanquin through the gate of Phranza. But how changed! How much more glorious now! Earthly beauty had become haloed with the heavenly. He never had conceived of such majesty, such glory of personality, such splendor of character, as were revealed by her attitude, her eye, her voice, her purpose.
"But now," thought he, "the descending blade will change this utmost sublimity of being into a little heap of gory dust!"
All this flashed through his mind. In another instant his strong hand had caught the arm of the voluntary sacrifice. The stiletto, falling, caught in the folds of her garments, and then rang upon the marble floor of the chancel. Morsinia uttered a shriek and fell, apparently as lifeless as if the blade had entered her heart.
The Janizary stood astounded. A tide of feeling strange to him poured through his soul. For the first time in his life he felt a horror of war. Not thousands writhing on the battle field could blanch his cheek with pity for their pangs: but that one voice rang through and through him, and rent his heart with sympathetic agony. Her cry had become a cry of his own soul too.