For the first time he realized the dignity of woman's character. This woman was not even wounded. She had fallen beneath the stroke of a thought, a sentiment, a woman's notion of her honor! The women he had known had no such fatal scruples. Other captive beauties soon became accustomed to their new surroundings. Many even offered to buy with their charms an exchange of poverty for the luxuries of the harem of Pashas and wealthy Moslems. Was this a solitary woman's tragedy of virtue? Or was it some peculiar teaching of the Christian's faith that inspired her to such heroism? However it came, the man knew that with her it was a mighty reality; this instinct of virtue; this sanctity of person.
And this woman was his dream made real! A celestial ideal which he had touched!
The man's brain reeled with the shock of these tenderer and deeper feelings, coming after the wildness of the battle rage. He grasped the altar for support. The blood seemed to have ceased to bound in his veins, the temples to be pulseless; a band to have been drawn tightly about his brain so as to paralyze its action. He felt himself falling. A deathly sickness spread through his frame. He was sure he had fainted. He thought he must have been unconscious for a while. Yet when he opened his eyes, the soldier near him was in the same attitude of dragging a nun by her wrists as when he last saw him. Time had stood still with his pulses. He shuddered at the cruelty on every side, as the shrieks from the high galleries were answered by those in distant alcoves and from the deep crypt. He watched the groups of old men and children, monks and senators, nuns and courtesans, tied together and dragged away, some for slaughter, some for princely ransom, some for shame.
The building was well emptied when the Sultan entered.
He at once advanced to the altar and proclaimed:
"God is God; there is but one God, and Mahomet is the apostle of God!"
"But whom have we here, Captain Ballaban?"
"Your Majesty, I am guarding a beautiful captive whom I would not have fall into the hands of the common soldiers; I take it, of high estate," replied the Janizary, knowing that such an introduction to the royal attention alone could save her from the fate which awaited the unhappy maidens, most of whom were liable to be sold to brutal masters and transported to distant provinces.
The Sultan gazed upon the partly conscious woman, and commanded,——
"Let her be veiled! Seek out a goodly house. Find the Eunuch Tamlich." Ballaban shuddered at this command, and was about to reply, when his judgment suggested that he was impotent to dispute the royal will except by endangering the life or the welfare of his captive.