He was far from
incurious on the subject; all that he had seen and all that he had heard
at Bethany greatly interested him. But the reserve which ever controlled
him, unless under the influence of great excitement, a reserve which was
the result of pride and not of caution, would probably have checked any
expression of his wishes on this head, even had he not been under the
influence of those feelings which now absorbed him. A human being,
animated by the hope, almost by the conviction, that a celestial
communication is impending over his destiny, moves in a supernal sphere,
which no earthly consideration can enter. The long musings of his voyage
had been succeeded on the part of Tancred, since his arrival in the
Holy Land, by one unbroken and impassioned reverie, heightened, not
disturbed, by frequent and solitary prayer, by habitual fasts, and by
those exciting conferences with Alonza Lara, in which he had struggled
to penetrate the great Asian mystery, reserved however, if indeed ever
expounded, for a longer initiation than had yet been proved by the son
of the English noble.
After a week of solitary preparation, during which he had interchanged
no word, and maintained an abstinence which might have rivalled an old
eremite of Engedi, Tancred had kneeled before that empty sepulchre of
the divine Prince of the house of David, for which his ancestor,
Tancred de Montacute, six hundred years before, had struggled with
those followers of Mahound, who, to the consternation and perplexity of
Christendom, continued to retain it.
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