"I am here, Musa, dear brother of my husband!" said the lady, at his side. "Speak, and say you will master death as you mastered Iftikhar Eddauleh; that you will forgive this rash disobedience of mine which brought you all this woe!"
Musa's face wore one of its old, soft, melancholy smiles.
"Ah! Rose of Byzantium," said he, half whimsically, "do you think I am so great I can hurl back doom? I grow too proud with the praise. Forgive you? Forgive what—that you loved Richard Longsword, and wished to know it was well with him? No more of that. I forgive, if aught needs forgiving. As for dying, as well to be sped by Trenchefer as by any blade. It was written by Allah upon the canopy of the stars, and Allah does all things well."
"Ah, would God I could die in your stead, my brother, my brother," began Richard, while those terrible tears out of manliest grief would come.
"And the Star of the Greeks, what says she?" began Musa, again smiling. But he checked, when he saw the gust of sorrow sweeping across Mary's face. Then in a darker tone, he added, "No more of this, as you love me; no more, as I love you—love you both." His gaze was not on Richard, but on his wife. And the woman's heart first caught the strange stress of his voice and the light in his dimming eyes.
"Love me?" her words with a start.
Musa half raised his head from the pillows.
"Why shall I not say it now?" came the reply, almost proudly. "Loved you? I have ever loved you, truly as ever man loved, from the hour I saw your face, and heard your voice, when we plucked you from the Berbers." Then to Richard, "Dear brother, feel in my breast." And the Norman drew forth a soiled and folded bit of scarlet ribbon. "Do you remember, Star of the Greeks, the day you gave me this—when I held the lists against Iftikhar at Palermo? It has been at my lips each night since before I fell asleep. For I have loved you—have loved you—long." The words came very slowly now, for the flood of life was ebbing fast. But the Norman broke out:—
"Dear God, and all these years, my brother, you have not breathed this! I made mockery of your monkish state, and you smiled on, doing all to bring us two together and to give us joy!"
"Assuredly, can the outlaw kite make a nest for the lark? Had I loved her as little as Iftikhar loved her, I would have served brute passion alone; have made my love only of her beauty and her kisses. But I knew while she knelt to your Christ and I to my Allah, we could never love soul with soul. Therefore my joy was this, to see her grow more beautiful as your bride, brother that you are, though not in blood."