Via Crucis: A Romance of the Second CrusadeCrawford, F. Marion (Francis Marion)
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Via Crucis: A Romance of the Second Crusade
Crawford, F. Marion (Francis Marion)
Crusades -- Second, 1147-1149 -- Fiction
His eyes looked up before him, and he saw the holiest city in the
world, like a vision against the pale sky, as the day sank; and his
whole being went out to be there, floating before him in a prayer
learnt long ago. Therein, as when he had been a child in his English
home, he heard the voice of a guardian angel praying with him--praying
for the good against the evil, for the light against the darkness, for
the clean against the unclean, for the good self against the bad; and
his heart made echoes in heaven.
He heard not the sounds that came back from the royal train, the high
talking and glad laughter; for that would have jarred on him and set
his teeth on edge, and he had shut the doors of the body upon himself
to be alone within. It mattered not that young Baldwin was riding by
the Queen, already half in love, and making soft speeches within sight
of the hill whereon Christ died, nor that he took a boy's mischievous
pleasure in interrupting the King's droning litany, recited in verse
and response with the priest at his side; nor that some of the knights
were chattering of what lodging they should find, and the young
squires, in undertones, of black-eyed Jewish girls, and the grooms of
Syrian wine. They were as nothing, all these, as nothing but the
shadows of the world cast by its own ancient evil at the foot of the
Cross, and he only was real and alive, and the Cross only was true and
high in the pure light.
And in this he was not quite dreaming, for the train that rode up from
Acre was not all of those true Crusaders of whom many had been with the
army, both rich and poor, but of whom the rich had stayed behind in
Antioch and the poor had perished miserably by the swords of the
Seljuks or by the wiles of the Greeks, when they had tried to come on
by land; and many of them had been sold into slavery, and not one
reached Jerusalem alive, out of so many thousands. Of the forty or
fifty who were first in sight of the City, scarcely three were in
heartfelt earnest, and they were the Lady Anne of Auch, and Gilbert
Warde, and the King himself. But with the King all faith took a
material shape, which was his own, and the buying of his own salvation
had turned his soul into a place of spiritual usury.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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