Tancred could not bring himself to desert the only being perhaps in
England, excepting himself, whose heart was at Jerusalem; and that
being a woman! There seemed something about it unknightly, unkind and
cowardly, almost base. Lady Bertie was a heroine worthy of ancient
Christendom rather than of enlightened Europe. In the old days, truly
the good old days, when the magnetic power of Western Asia on the Gothic
races had been more puissant, her noble yet delicate spirit might have
been found beneath the walls of Ascalon or by the purple waters of
Tyre. When Tancred first met her, she was dreaming of Palestine amid her
frequent sadness; he could not, utterly void of all self-conceit as
he was, be insensible to the fact that his sympathy, founded on such
a divine congeniality, had often chased the cloud from her brow and
lightened the burthen of her drooping spirit. If she were sad before,
what would she be now, deprived of the society of the only being to whom
she could unfold the spiritual mysteries of her romantic soul? Was such
a character to be left alone in this world of slang and scrip; of coarse
motives and coarser words? Then, too, she was so intelligent and so
gentle; the only person who understood him, and never grated for an
instant on his high ideal.
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