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."