"Ha, St. Richard! ha, St. George!" the tremendous voice of the
Lion-king was heard over the loudest roar of the onset. At every sweep
of his blade a severed head flew over the parapet, a spouting trunk
tumbled, bleeding on the flags of the bartizan. The world hath never
seen a warrior equal to that Lion-hearted Plantagenet, as he raged over
the keep, his eyes flashing fire through the bars of his morion,
snorting and chafing with the hot lust of battle. One by one __les en
fans de _Chalus had fallen; there was only one left at last of all the
brave race that had fought round the gallant Count: only one, and but a
boy, a fair-haired boy, a blue-eyed boy! he had been gathering pansies
in the fields but yesterday it was but a few years, and he was a baby
in his mother's arms! What could his puny sword do against the most
redoubled blade in Christendom? and yet Bohemond faced the great
champion of England, and met him foot to foot! Turn away, turn away,
my dear young friends and kind-hearted ladies!
Do not look at that ill-fated poor boy! his blade is crushed into
splinters under the axe of the conqueror, and the poor child is beaten
to his knee! ... "Now, by St. Barbacue of Limoges," said Bertrand de
Gourdon, "the butcher will never strike down yonder lamb ling Hold thy
hand, Sir King, or, by St. Barbacue -"
Swift as thought the veteran archer raised his arblast to his shoulder,
the whizzing bolt fled from the ringing string, and the next moment
crushed quivering into the corselet of Plantagenet.
Twas a luckless shot, Bertrand of Gourdon! Maddened by the pain of the
wound, the brute nature of Richard was aroused: his fiendish appetite
for blood rose to madness, and grinding his teeth, and with a curse too
horrible to mention, the flashing axe of the royal butcher fell down on
the blond ringlets of the child, and the children of Chalus were no
more! ... I just throw this off by way of description, and to show
what might be done if I chose to indulge in this style of composition;
but as in the battles which are described by the kindly chronicler, of
one of whose works this present masterpiece is professedly a
continuation, everything passes off agreeably the people are slain, but
without any unpleasant sensation to the reader; nay, some of the most
savage and bloodstained characters of history, such is the indomitable
good-humor of the great novelist, become amiable, jovial companions,
for whom one has a hearty sympathy so, if you please, we will have this
fighting business at Chalus, and the garrison and honest Bertrand of
Gourdon, disposed of; the former, according to the usage of the good
old times, having been hung up or murdered to a man, and the latter
killed in the manner described by the late Dr. Goldsmith in his
History.
As for the Lion-hearted, we all very well know that the shaft of
Bertrand de Gourdon put an end to the royal hero and that from that
29th of March he never robbed nor murdered any more. And we have
legends in recondite books of the manner of the King's death.
"You must die, my son," said the venerable Walter of Rouen, as
Berengaria was carried shrieking from the King's tent. "Repent, Sir
King, and separate yourself from your children!"
"It is ill jesting with a dying man," replied the King.
"Children have I none, my good lord bishop, to inherit after me."
"Richard of England," said the archbishop, turning up his fine eyes,
"your vices are your children. Ambition is your eldest child, Cruelty
is your second child, Luxury is your third child; and you have
nourished them from your youth up. Separate yourself from these sinful
ones, and prepare your soul, for the hour of departure draweth nigh."
Violent, wicked, sinful, as he might have been, Richard of England met
his death like a Christian man. Peace be to the soul of the brave!
When the news came to King Philip of France, he sternly forbade his
courtiers to rejoice at the death of his enemy. "It is no matter of
joy but of dolor," he said, that the bulwark of Christendom and the
bravest king of Europe is no more."
Meanwhile what has become of Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, whom we left in
the act of rescuing his sovereign by running the Count of Chalus
through the body?
As the good knight stooped down to pick his sword out of the corpse of
his fallen foe, some one coming behind him suddenly thrust a dagger
into his back at a place where his shirt-of-mail was open (for Sir
Wilfrid had armed that morning in a hurry, and it was his breast, not
his back, that he was accustomed ordinarily to protect); and when poor
Wamba came up on the rampart, which he did when the fighting was over,
being such a fool that he could not be got to thrust his head into
danger for glory's sake he found his dear knight with the dagger in his
back lying without life upon the body of the Count de Chalus whom he
had anon slain.
Ah, what a howl poor Wamba set up when he found his master killed! How
he lamented over the corpse of that noble knight and friend! What
mattered it to him that Richard the King was borne wounded to his tent,
and that Bertrand de Gourdon was flayed alive? At another time the
sight of this spectacle might have amused the simple knave; but now all
his thoughts were of his lord: so good, so gentle, so kind, so loyal,
so frank with the great, so tender to the poor, so truthful of speech,
so modest regarding his own merit, so true a gentleman, in a word, that
anybody might, with reason, deplore him.
As Wamba opened the dear knight's corselet, he found a locket round his
neck, in which there was some hair; not flaxen like that of my Lady
Rowena, who was almost as fair as an Albino, but as black, Wamba,
thought, as the locks of the Jewish maiden whom the knight had rescued
in the lists of Templestowe. A bit of Rowena's hair was in Sir
Wilfrid's possession, too; but that was in his purse along with his
seal of arms, and a couple of groats: for the good knight never kept
any money, so generous was he of his largesses when money came in.
Wamba took the purse, and seal, and groats, but he left the locket of
hair, round his master's neck, and when he returned to England never
said a word about the circumstance. After all, how should he know
whose hair it was? It might have been the knight's grandmother's hair
for aught the fool knew; so he kept his counsel when he brought back
the sad news and tokens to the disconsolate widow at Rotherwood.
The poor fellow would never have left the body at all, and indeed sat
by it all night, and until the gray of the morning; when, seeing two
suspicious-looking characters advancing towards him, he fled in dismay,
supposing that they were marauders who were out searching for booty
among the dead bodies; and having not the least courage, he fled from
these, and tumbled down the breach, and never stopped running as fast
as his legs would carry him, until he reached the tent of his late
beloved master.
The news of the knight's d
emise, it appeared, had been known at his
quarters long before; for his servants were gone, and had ridden off on
his horses; his chests were plundered: there was not so much as a
shirt-collar left in his drawers, and the very bed and blankets had
been carried away by these faithful attendants. Who had slain Ivanhoe?
That remains a mystery to the present day; but Roger de Backbite, whose
nose he had pulled for defamation, and who was behind him in the
assault at Chalus, was seen two years afterwards at the court of King
John in an embroidered velvet waistcoat which Rowena could have sworn
she had worked for Ivanhoe, and about which the widow would have made
some little noise, but that but that she was no longer a widow.
That she truly deplored the death of her lord cannot be questioned, for
she ordered the deepest mourning which any milliner in York could
supply, and erected a monument to his memory as big as a minster. But
she was a lady of such fine principles, that she did not allow her
grief to overmaster her; and an opportunity speedily arising for
uniting the two best Saxon families in England, by an alliance between
herself and the gentleman who offered himself to her, Rowena sacrificed
her inclination to remain single, to her sense of duty; and contracted
a second matrimonial engagement.
That Athelstane was the man, I suppose no reader familiar with life,
and novels which are a rescript of life, and are all strictly natural
and edifying, can for a moment doubt. Cardinal Pandulfo tied the knot
for them: and lest there should be any doubt about Ivanhoe's death (for
his body was never sent home after all, nor seen after Wamba ran away
from it), his Eminence procured a Papal decree annulling the former
marriage, so that Rowena became Mrs. Athelstane with a clear
conscience. And who shall be surprised, if she was happier with the
stupid and boozy Thane than with the gentle and melancholy Wilfrid? Did
women never have a predilection for fools, I should like to know; or
fall in love with donkeys, before the time of the amours of Bottom and
Titania? Ah! Mary, had you not preferred an ass to a man, would you
have married Jack Bray, when a Michael Angelo offered? Ah! Fanny,
were you not a woman, would you persist in adoring Tom Hiccups, who
beats you, and comes home tipsy from the Club? Yes, Rowena cared a
hundred times more about tipsy Athelstane than ever she had done for
gentle Ivanhoe, and so great was her infatuation about the former, that
she would sit upon his knee in the presence of all her maidens, and let
him smoke his cigars in the very drawing-room.
This is the epitaph she caused to be written by Father Drono (who
piqued himself upon his Latinity) on the stone commemorating the death
of her late lord:
Die est Guilfribus, belli dum dixit avid us
Cum glad io et lancea, Normania et quoque Francia
Verbera dura da bat per Turcos multum equitabat:
Guilbertum, occidit: atque Vicrosolvma bid it
Deu! nunc sub fossa sunt tanti militis ossa,
Uxor Athelstani est conjux castissima Thani.
And this is the translation which the doggerel knave Wamba made of the
Latin lines:
REQUIESCAT.
"Under the stone you behold,
Buried, and coffined, and cold,
Lieth Sir Wilfrid the Bold.
"Always he marched in advance,
Warring in Flanders and France,
Doughty with sword and with lance.
"Famous in Saracen fight,
Rode in his youth the good knight,
Scattering Paynims in flight.
"Brian the Templar untrue,
Fairly in tourney he slew,
Saw Hierusalem too.
"Now he is buried and gone,
Lying beneath the gray stone:
Where shall you find such a one?
"Long time his widow deplored,
Weeping the fate of her lord,
Sadly cut off by the sword.
"When she was eased of her pain,
Came the good Lord Athelstane,
When her ladyship married again."
Athelstane burst into a loud laugh, when he heard it, at the last line,
but Rowena would have had the fool whipped, had not the Thane
interceded; and to him, she said, she could refuse nothing.
CHAPTER IV.
IVAN HOE REDIVIVUS.
I TRUST nobody will suppose, from the events described in the last
chapter, that our friend Ivanhoe is really dead. Because we have given
him an epitaph or two and a monument, are these any reasons that he
should be really gone out of the world?
No: as in the pantomime, when we see Clown and Pantaloon lay out
Harlequin and cry over him, we are always sure that master Harlequin
will be up at the next minute alert and shining in his glistening coat;
and, after giving a box on the ears to the pair of them, will be taking
a dance with Columbine, or leaping gayly through the clock-face, or
into the three-pair-of-stairs' window: so Sir Wilfrid, the Harlequin of
our Christmas piece, may be run through a little, or may make believe
to be dead, but will assuredly rise up again when he is wanted, and
show himself at the right moment.
The suspicious-looking characters from whom Wamba ran away were no
cut-throats and plunderers, as the poor knave imagined, but no other
than Ivanhoe's friend, the hermit, and a reverend brother of his, who
visited the scene of the late battle in order to see if any Christians
still survived there, whom they might shrive and get ready for heaven,
or to whom they might possibly offer the benefit of their skill as
leeches. Both were prodigiously learned in the healing art; and had
about them those precious elixirs which so often occur in romances, and
with which patients are so miraculously restored. Abruptly dropping
his master's head from his lap as he fled, poor Wamba caused the
knight's pate to fall with rather a heavy thump to the ground, and if
the knave had but stayed a minutes, longer, he would have heard Sir
Wilfrid utter a deep groan. But though the fool heard him not, the
holy hermits did; and to recognize the gallant Wilfrid, to withdraw the
enormous dagger still sticking out of his back, to wash the wound with
a portion of the precious elixir, and to pour a little of it down his
throat, was with the excellent hermits the work of an instant: which
remedies being applied, one of the good men took the knight by the
heels and the other by the head, and bore him daintily from the castle
to their hermitage in a neighboring rock. As for the Count of Chalus,
and the remainder of the slain, the hermits were too much occupied with
Ivanhoe's case to mind them, and did not, it appears, give them any
elixir: so that, if they are really dead, they must stay on the rampart
stark and cold; or if otherwise, when the scene closes upon them as it
does now, they may get up, shake themselves, go to the slips and drink
a pot of porter, or change their stage-clothes and go home to supper.
My dear readers, you may settle the matter among yourselves as you
like. If you wish to kill the characters really off, let t
hem be dead,
and have done with them : but, _entre _nous, I don't believe they are
any more dead than you or I are, and sometimes doubt whether there is a
single syllable of truth in this whole story.
Well, Ivanhoe was taken to the hermits' cell, and there doctored by the
holy fathers for his hurts; which were of such a severe and dangerous
order, that he was under medical treatment for a very considerable
time. When he woke up from his delirium, and asked how long he had
been ill, fancy his astonishment when he heard that he had been in the
fever for six years! He thought the reverend fathers were joking at
first, but their profession forbade them from that sort of levity; and
besides, he could not possibly have got well any sooner, because the
story would have been sadly put out had he appeared earlier. And it
proves how good the fathers were to him, and how very nearly that
scoundrel of a Roger de Backbite's dagger had finished him, that he did
not get well under this great length of time; during the whole of which
the fathers tended him without ever thinking of a fee. I know of a
kind physician in this town who does as much sometimes; but I won't do
him the ill service of mentioning his name here.
Ivanhoe, being now quickly pronounced well, trimmed his beard, which by
this time hung down considerably below his knees, and calling for his
suit of chain-armor, which before had fitted his elegant person as
tight as wax, now put it on, and it bagged and hung so loosely about
him, that even the good friars laughed at his absurd appearance. It
was impossible that he should go about the country in such a garb as
that: the very boys would laugh at him: so the friars gave him one of
their old gowns, in which he disguised himself, and after taking an
affectionate farewell of his friends, set forth on his return to his
native country. As he went along, he learned that Richard was dead,
that John reigned, that Prince Arthur had been poisoned, and was of
course made acquainted with various other facts of public importance
recorded in Pinnock's Catechism and the Historic Page.
But these subjects did not interest him near so much as his own private
affairs; and I can fancy that his legs trembled under him, and his
pilgrim's staff shook with emotion, as at length, after many perils, he
came in sight of his paternal mansion of Rotherwood, and saw once more
the chimneys smoking, the shadows of the oaks over the grass in the
sunset, and the rooks winging over the trees. He heard the supper gong
sounding: he knew his way to the door well enough; he entered the
familiar hall with a benedicite, and without any more words took his
place.
You might, have thought for a moment that the gray friar trembled and
his shrunken check looked deadly pale; but he recovered himself
presently: nor could you see his pallor for the cowl which covered his
face.
A little boy was playing on Athelstane's knee; Rowena smiling and
patting the Saxon Thane fondly on his broad bullhead, filled him a huge
cup of spiced wine from a golden jug. He drained a quart of the
liquor, and, turning round, addressed the friar: "And so, gray frere,
thou saw est good King Richard fall at Chalus by the bolt of that felon
bowman?"
"We did, an it please you. The brothers of our house attended the good
King in his last moments: in truth, he made a Christian ending!
"And didst thou see the archer flayed alive? It must have been rare
sport," roared Athelstane, laughing hugely at the joke.
"How the fellow must have howled!"
"My love!" said Rowena, interposing tenderly, and putting a pretty
white finger on his lip.
"I would have liked to see it too," cried the boy.
"That's my own little Cedric, and so thou shalt. And, friar, didst see