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Updated: May 7, 2025
Only the Lady of the Bernardini and Margherita de Iblin were with Caterina in the loggia, just without the palace, as Elois
Then as if he had not been she turned her gaze from him. "Your Grace," she said proudly, "it is for the last time, your Queen whom you have sworn to uphold and I Margherita, of the most ancient noble house of the de Iblin, who have ever served their Sovereigns with their life we demand our Prince of you; and all Cyprus is with us!"
She looked up dumbly as Rizzo and Fabrici drew near her couch her eyes deep with unspeakable misery. The Lady Margherita, watching near her, was indignant at the intrusion; she rose and stood before the Queen. "My Lords, you forget yourselves Her Majesty hath not summoned you." "There are moments, my Lady of Iblin, when Majesty is but a farce and Power need not do it reverence!"
And one by one, as the chant proceeded, through her strange magnetic power, her listeners saw a knight step forth from the circle and drop to his knees, swearing fealty to the King and the Lord of Iblin, until all were kneeling.
The color flushed her pale face when their cries of loyalty arose, and she turned and took the little Prince of Galilee from her Eccellenza, the Royal Governess the Dama Margherita de Iblin, holding him high, close-pressed to her cheek for all the people to see, with a great glory of mother-love in her shining eyes. They rent the air with their sobs and shouts.
Her sympathetic auditors verily heard the tramp of armies in the wild chant of Margherita when the Emperor had replied with scorn and insult, trampling on the rights of Cyprus; they could have sworn that they saw the Emperor's hosts gathering on the plains as they watched the impetuous motions of all those beckoning maiden hands; and then, advancing in quiet dignity, sure of their right, the old-time knights and barons of Cyprus and Jerusalem, moving to the measure of a quaint, Christian psalm: and so fully had her listeners yielded themselves to her potent spell, that but hearkening to her recital, they quailed and trembled when she told that the enemies of the Lord of Iblin came by night and sought to whisper treachery to his staunch soul, while in tones that scarcely broke the hush, the false words of the tempter reached their consciousness, quivering through them, as if they themselves were guilty of this treachery: "Ye are more in number than the hosts of the Emperor kill him while he sleepeth!
The Lady Margherita the one of all her Cyprian maids of honor who had most warmly won her friendship there was no older nor more noble family in the island than the De Iblin; why had she not thought of her before! "Aye, bid her come hither," she answered, well-pleased; "we will rest together in the heat of the day and she shall tell me many things of Cyprus."
Between these interludes of dramatic rendering, the thread of the story was held in a quick, clear monotone easily followed. The hushed tramp of a great army withdrawing in the night not from fear, but to honor their vows the words of Iblin: "We will not fight our Emperor, for our men are more than his: which having seen, it will now perchance please him to accept our terms of honorable peace."
"He hath more the quality of the Lusignans to whom the De Iblin were ever loyal," she explained to Caterina, "and Carlotta is like her mother.
Dama Margherita de Iblin possessed this gift, though only in moments of deep feeling was she willing to exercise it: but to-night she was strangely moved out of sympathy for the Queen, whose evident anxiety filled her with foreboding and whom she eagerly longed to divert.
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