Then the others
climbed down and slipped their belts under her arms, and she was taken
out in safety and laid upon the pavement of the little court. And then
the Jewish boy went to call his mother from the house of her sister,
where they two had gone to live, for Beatrix had need of a woman.
Gilbert knelt down and laid her head upon Dunstan's coat folded
together, and covered her with his own mantle, gazing into the
unconscious face, small and pale and pitiful, and he remembered how he
had seen it last in Antioch, full of anger and unbelief, so that he had
turned and left what he loved just when evil was at hands and his heart
stood still, and then smote him in his breast, and stood still again,
as the smith's hammer is poised in the air between the strokes.
Beatrix did not move and seemed not to breathe, lying as one dead, and
suddenly Gilbert believed that there was no life left in her. He tried
to speak to Dunstan, but he could make no sound, for his tongue and his
throat were suddenly parched and paralyzed, so that he was dumb in his
grief; but he took the small white hands, with the wrists all cut by
the cords, and folded them upon the breast, and he took his cross-
hilted dagger with its sheath, and laid it between the hands for a
cross, and gently tried to close the half-opened eyes.
Then, when Dunstan saw what his master meant, he touched him on the
shoulder and spoke to him.
"She is not dead," he said.
Gilbert started and looked up at him, and saw that he was in earnest;
but the man's lean face was drawn with anxiety.
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