Rebecca and Rowena

by William Makepeace Thackeray

  "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