Page 365 - A Knight of the White Cross

"Who have fallen?" Gervaise asked.

"Among the principal knights are Thomas Ben, Henry Haler, Thomas
Ploniton, John Vaquelin, Adam Tedbond, Henry Batasbi, and Henry Anlui.

Marmaduke Lumley is dangerously wounded. Of the younger knights,
some fifteen have been killed, and among them your old enemy Rivers. He
died a coward's death, the only one, thank God, of all our langue. When the

fray was thickest Sir John Boswell marked him crouching behind the
parapet. He seized him by the gorget, and hauled him out, but his knees

shook so that he could scarcely walk, and would have slunk back when
released. Sir John raised his mace to slay him as a disgrace to the Order and
our langue, when a ball from one of the Turkish cannon cut him well nigh

in half, so that he fell by the hands of the Turks, and not by the sword of
one of the Order he had disgraced. Fortunately none, save half a dozen

knights of our langue, saw the affair, and you may be sure we shall say
nothing about it; and instead of Rivers' name going down to infamy, it will
appear in the list of those who died in the defence of Rhodes."

"May God assoil his soul!" Gervaise said earnestly. "'Tis strange that one of

gentle blood should have proved a coward. Had he remained at home, and
turned courtier, instead of entering the Order, he might have died honoured,
without any one ever coming to doubt his courage."

"He would have turned out bad whatever he was," Ralph said

contemptuously; "for my part, I never saw a single good quality in him."

Long before Gervaise was out of hospital, the glad tidings that D'Aubusson

would recover, in spite of the prognostications of the leech, spread joy
through the city, and at about the same time that Gervaise left the hospital

the grand master was able to sit up. Two or three days afterwards he sent
for Gervaise.

"I owe my life to you, Sir Gervaise," he said, stretching out his thin, white
hand to him as he entered. "You stood by me nobly till I fell, for, though

unable to stand, I was not unconscious, and saw how you stood above me
and kept the swarming Moslems at bay. No knight throughout the siege has