When he had ridden out of the castle on the island, older by some
months, richer by such gifts as it was no shame for him to take of Duke
Geoffrey and young Henry Plantagenet, he had believed himself wiser,
too, by half a lifetime.
He was confident in his own strength, in his own wisdom, in his own
endurance; he fancied that he had fought against a great temptation,
where he had in truth been chilled and terrified by the haunting vision
of another's evil; he imagined that the little sharp regret, which
stung his heart with longing for the sweetness of a sin that might have
been, was the evil remnant of a passion not wholly quenched, whereas it
was but the craving of a natural vanity that had not been strong enough
to overcome a repugnance which he himself only half understood.
He seemed in his own eyes to have made the sacrifice of his worldly
future for the sake of his knightly ideal; but in truth, to a man
without ambition, the renunciation had been easy and had been made in
acquiescence with his real desires, rather than in opposition to them.
And now he looked upon the city of his hope, and it crumbled to a dusty
ruin under his very hand; he stood on ground made reverent by the march
of history and sanctified by the blood of Christians, and it was but
one great wilderness, of which he himself was the centre. His heart
sank suddenly within him, and his fingers clutched at the breast of his
tunic under his surcoat, as though the pain were bodily and real.
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