“What high-born lady would take such terms?” asked Balian in dismay.  “Rather, I think, would she choose to die by her own hand than by that of your hangman, since she can never abjure her faith.”

“And thereby doom eighty thousand of her fellow Christians, who must accompany her to that death,” answered Saladin sternly.  “Know, Sir Balian, I swear it before Allah and for the last time, that if my niece Rosamund does not come, of her own free will, unforced by any, Jerusalem shall be put to sack.”

“Then the fate of the holy city and all its inhabitants hangs upon the nobleness of a single woman?” stammered Balian.

“Ay, upon the nobleness of a single woman, as my vision told me it should be.  If her spirit is high enough, Jerusalem may yet be saved.  If it be baser than I thought, as well may chance, then assuredly with her it is doomed.  I have no more to say, but my envoys shall ride with you bearing a letter, which with their own hands they must present to my niece, the princess of Baalbec.  Then she can return with them to me, or she can bide where she is, when I shall know that I saw but a lying vision of peace and mercy flowing from her hands, and will press on this war to its bloody end.”

Within an hour Balian rode to the city under safe conduct, taking with him the envoys of Saladin and the letter, which they were charged to deliver to Rosamund.

It was night, and in their lamp-lit chapel the Virgins of the Holy Cross upon bended knees chanted the slow and solemn Miserere.  From their hearts they sang, to whom death and dishonour were so near, praying their Lord and the merciful Mother of God to have pity, and to spare them and the inhabitants of the hallowed town where He had dwelt and suffered, and to lead them safe through the shadow of a fate as awful as His own.  They knew that the end was near, that the walls were tottering to their fall, that the defenders were exhausted, and that soon the wild soldiers of Saladin would be surging through the narrow streets.

Then would come the sack and the slaughter, either by the sword of the Saracens, or, perchance, if these found time and they were not forgotten, more mercifully at the hands of Christian men, who thus would save them from the worst.

Their dirge ended, the abbess rose and addressed them.  Her bearing was still proud, but her voice quavered.

“My daughters in the Lord,” she said, “the doom is almost at our door, and we must brace our hearts to meet it.  If the commanders of the city do what they have promised, they will send some here to behead us at the last, and so we shall pass happily to glory and be ever with the Lord.  But perchance they will forget us, who are but a few among eighty thousand souls, of whom some fifty thousand must thus be killed.  Or their arms may grow weary, or themselves they may fall before ever they reach this house—­and what, my daughters, shall we do then?”