Ivanhoe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Walter Scott

  “Brother ben Samuel,” said Isaac, “my soul is disquieted, and I wot not why. This charge of necromancy is right often used for cloaking evil practices on our people.”

  “Be of good comfort, brother,” said the physician; “thou canst deal with the Nazarenes as one possessing the mammon of unrighteousness, and canst therefore purchase immunity at their hands: it rules the savage minds of those ungodly men, even as the signet of the mighty Solomon was said to command the evil genii.2 But what poor wretch comes hither upon his crutches, desiring, as I think, some speech of me? Friend,” continued the physician, addressing Higg, the son of Snell, “I refuse thee not the aid of mine art, but I relieve not with one asperfr those who beg for alms upon the highway. Out upon thee! Hast thou the palsy in thy legs? then let thy hands work for thy livelihood; for, albeit thou be’t unfit for a speedy post, or for a careful shepherd, or for the warfare, or for the service of a hasty master, yet there be occupations—How now, brother?” said he, interrupting his harangue to look towards Isaac, who had but glanced at the scroll which Higg offered, when, uttering a deep groan, he fell from his mule like a dying man, and lay for a minute insensible.

  The Rabbi now dismounted in great alarm, and hastily applied the remedies which his art suggested for the recovery of his companion. He had even taken from his pocket a cupping apparatus, and was about to proceed to phlebotomy,fs when the object of his anxious solicitude suddenly revived; but it was to dash his cap from his head, and to throw dust on his grey hairs. The physician was at first inclined to ascribe this sudden and violent emotion to the effects of insanity; and, adhering to his original purpose, began once again to handle his implements. But Isaac soon convinced him of his error.

  “Child of my sorrow,” he said, “well shouldst thou be called Benoni,3 instead of Rebecca! Why should thy death bring down my grey hairs to the grave, till, in the bitterness of my heart, I curse God and die!”

  “Brother,” said the Rabbi, in great surprise, “art thou a father in Israel, and dost thou utter words like unto these? I trust that the child of thy house yet liveth?”

  “She liveth,” answered Isaac; “but it is as Daniel, who was called Belteshazzar, even when within the den of the lions. She is captive unto those men of Belial, and they will wreak their cruelty upon her, sparing neither for her youth nor her comely favour. O! she was as a crown of green palms to my grey locks; and she must wither in a night, like the gourd of Jonah!4 Child of my love!—child of my old age!—oh, Rebecca, daughter of Rachael! the darkness of the shadow of death hath encompassed thee.”

  “Yet read the scroll,” said the Rabbi; “peradventure it may be that we may yet find out a way of deliverance.”

  “Do thou read, brother,” answered Isaac, “for mine eyes are as a fountain of water.”

  The physician read, but in their native language, the following words:—

  “To Isaac, the son of Adonikam, whom the Gentiles call Isaac of York, peace and the blessing of the promise be multiplied unto thee! My father, I am as one doomed to die for that which my soul knoweth not, even for the crime of witchcraft. My father, if a strong man can be found to do battle for my cause with sword and spear, according to the custom of the Nazarenes, and that within the lists of Templestowe, on the third day from this time, peradventure our father’s God will give him strength to defend the innocent, and her who hath none to help her. But if this may not be, let the virgins of our people mourn for me as for one cast off, and for the hart that is stricken by the hunter, and for the flower which is cut down by the scythe of the mower. Wherefore look now what thou doest, and whether there be any rescue. One Nazarene warrior might indeed bear arms in my behalf, even Wilfred, son of Cedric, whom the Gentiles call Ivanhoe. But he may not yet endure the weight of his armour. Nevertheless, send the tidings unto him, my father; for he hath favour among the strong men of his people, and as he was our companion in the house of bondage, he may find some one to do battle for my sake. And say unto him—even unto him—even unto Wilfred, the son of Cedric, that if Rebecca live, or if Rebecca die, she liveth or dieth wholly free of the guilt she is charged withal. And if it be the will of God that thou shalt be deprived of thy daughter, do not thou tarry, old man, in this land of bloodshed and cruelty; but betake thyself to Cordova, where thy brother liveth in safety, under the shadow of the throne, even of the throne of Boabdil the Saracen;5 for less cruel are the cruelties of the Moors unto the race of Jacob than the cruelties of the Nazarenes of England.”

  Isaac listened with tolerable composure while Ben Samuel [Israel] read the letter, and then again resumed the gestures and exclamations of Oriental sorrow, tearing his garments, besprinkling his head with dust, and ejaculating, “My daughter! my daughter! flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bone!”

  “Yet,” said the Rabbi, “take courage, for this grief availeth nothing. Gird up thy loins, and seek out this Wilfred, the son of Cedric. It may be he will help thee with counsel or with strength; for the youth hath favour in the eyes of Richard, called of the Nazarenes Coeur-de-Lion, and the tidings that he hath returned are constant in the land. It may be that he may obtain his letter, and his signet, commanding these men of blood, who take their name from the Temple to the dishonour thereof, that they proceed not in their purposed wickedness.”

  “I will seek him out,” said Isaac, “for he is a good youth, and hath compassion for the exile of Jacob. But he cannot bear his armour, and what other Christian shall do battle for the oppressed of Zion?”

  “Nay, but,” said the Rabbi, “thou speakest as one that knoweth not the Gentiles. With gold shalt thou buy their valour, even as with gold thou buyest thine own safety. Be of good courage, and do thou set forward to find out this Wilfred of Ivanhoe. I will also up and be doing, for great sin it were to leave thee in thy calamity. I will hie me to the city of York, where many warriors and strong men are assembled, and doubt not I will find among them some one who will do battle for thy daughter; for gold is their god, and for riches will they pawn their lives as well as their lands. Thou wilt fulfil, my brother, such promise as I may make unto them in thy name?”

  “Assuredly, brother,” said Isaac, “and Heaven be praised that raised me up a comforter in my misery! Howbeit, grant them not their full demand at once, for thou shalt find it the quality of this accursed people that they will ask pounds, and peradventure accept of ounces. Nevertheless, be it as thou willest, for I am distracted in this thing, and what would my gold avail me if the child of my love should perish!”

  “Farewell,” said the physician, “and may it be to thee as thy heart desireth.”

  They embraced accordingly, and departed on their several roads. The crippled peasant remained for some time looking after them.

  “These dog Jews!” said he; “to take no more notice of a free guild-brother than if I were a bond slave or a Turk, or a circumcised Hebrew like themselves! They might have flung me a mancus ft or two, however. I was not obliged to bring their unhallowed scrawls, and run the risk of being bewitched, as more folks than one told me. And what care I for the bit of gold that the wench gave me, if I am to come to harm from the priest next Easter at confession, and be obliged to give him twice as much to make it up with him, and be called the Jew’s flying post all my life, as it may hap, into the bargain? I think I was bewitched in earnest when I was beside that girl! But it was always so with Jew or Gentile, whosoever came near her: none could stay when she had an errand to go; and still, whenever I think of her, I would give shop and tools to save her life.”

  CHAPTER XXXIX

  O maid, unrelenting and cold as thou art,

  My bosom is proud as thine own.

  SEWARD 1

  It was in the twilight of the day when her trial, if it could be called such, had taken place, that a low knock was heard at the door of Rebecca’s prison-chamber. It disturbed not the inmate, who was then engaged in the evening prayer recommended by her religion, and which concluded with a hymn we have ventured thus to translate into Engl
ish:—

  When Israel, of the Lord beloved,

  Out of the land of bondage came,

  Her fathers’ God before her moved,

  An awful guide, in smoke and flame.

  By day, along the astonish’d lands

  The cloudy pillar glided slow;

  By night, Arabia’s crimson’d sands

  Return’d the fiery column’s glow.

  There rose the choral hymn of praise,

  And trump and timbrel answer’d keen,

  And Zion’s daughters pour’d their lays,

  With priest’s and warrior’s voice between.

  No portents now our foes amaze,

  Forsaken Israel wanders lone;

  Our fathers would not know THY ways,

  And THOU hast left them to their own.

  But, present still, though now unseen,

  When brightly shines the prosperous day,

  Be thoughts of THEE a cloudy screen

  To temper the deceitful ray.

  And oh, when stoops on Judah’s path

  In shade and storm the frequent night,

  Be THOU, long-suffering, slow to wrath,

  A burning and a shining light!

  Our harps we left by Babel’s streams,

  The tyrant’s jest, the Gentile’s scorn;

  No censer round our altar beams,

  And mute our timbrel, trump, and horn.

  But THOU hast said, the blood of goat,

  The flesh of rams, I will not prize;

  A contrite heart, an humble thought,

  Are Mine accepted sacrifice.

  When the sounds of Rebecca’s devotional hymn had died away in silence, the low knock at the door was again renewed. “Enter,” she said, “if thou art a friend; and if a foe, I have no the means of refusing thy entrance.”

  “I am,” said Brian de Bois-Guilbert, entering the apartment “friend or foe, Rebecca, as the event of this interview shall make me.”

  Alarmed at the sight of this man, whose licentious passion she considered as the root of her misfortunes, Rebecca drew backward with a cautious and alarmed, yet not a timorous, demeanour into the farthest corner of the apartment, as if determined to retreat as far as she could, but to stand her ground when retreat became no longer possible. She drew herself into an attitude not of defiance, but of resolution, as one that would avoid provoking assault, yet was resolute to repel it, being offered, to the utmost of her power.

  “You have no reason to fear me, Rebecca,” said the Templar; “or, if I must so qualify my speech, you have at least now no reason to fear me.”

  “I fear you not, Sir Knight,” replied Rebecca, although her short-drawn breath seemed to belie the heroism of her accents; “my trust is strong, and I fear thee not.”

  “You have no cause,” answered Bois-Guilbert, gravely; “my former frantic attempts you have not now to dread. Within your call are guards over whom I have no authority. They are designed to conduct you to death, Rebecca, yet would not suffer you to be insulted by any one, even by me, were my frenzy—for frenzy it is—to urge me so far.”

  “May Heaven be praised!” said the Jewess; “death is the least of my apprehensions in this den of evil.”

  “Ay,” replied the Templar, “the idea of death is easily received by the courageous mind, when the road to it is sudden and open. A thrust with a lance, a stroke with a sword, were to me little; to you, a spring from a dizzy battlement, a stroke with a sharp poniard, has no terrors, compared with what either thinks disgrace. Mark me—I say this—perhaps mine own sentiments of honour are not less fantastic, Rebecca, than thine are; but we know alike how to die for them.”

  “Unhappy man,” said the Jewess; “and art thou condemned to expose thy life for principles of which thy sober judgment does not acknowledge the solidity? Surely this is a parting with your treasure for that which is not bread. But deem not so of me. Thy resolution may fluctuate on the wild and changeful billows of human opinion; but mine is anchored on the Rock of Ages.”

  “Silence, maiden,” answered the Templar; “such discourse now avails but little. Thou art condemned to die not a sudden and easy death, such as misery chooses and despair welcomes, but a slow, wretched, protracted course of torture, suited to what the diabolical bigotry of these men calls thy crime.”

  “And to whom—if such my fate—to whom do I owe this?” said Rebecca; “surely only to him who, for a most selfish and brutal cause, dragged me hither, and who now, for some unknown purpose of his own, strives to exaggerate the wretched fate to which he exposed me.”

  “Think not,” said the Templar, “that I have so exposed thee; I would have buckleredfu thee against such danger with my own bosom, as freely as ever I exposed it to the shafts which had otherwise reached thy life.”

  “Had thy purpose been the honourable protection of the innocent,” said Rebecca, “I had thanked thee for thy care; as it is, thou hast claimed merit for it so often that I tell thee life is worth nothing to me, preserved at the price which thou wouldst exact for it.”

  “Truce with thine upbraidings, Rebecca,” said the Templar; “I have my own cause of grief, and brook not that thy reproaches should add to it.”

  “What is thy purpose, then, Sir Knight?” said the Jewess; “speak it briefly. If thou hast aught to do save to witness the misery thou hast caused, let me know it; and then, if so it please you, leave me to myself. The step between time and eternity is short but terrible, and I have few moments to prepare for it.”

  “I perceive, Rebecca,” said Bois-Guilbert, “that thou dost continue to burden me with the charge of distresses which most fain would I have prevented.”

  “Sir Knight,” said Rebecca, “I would avoid reproaches; but what is more certain than that I owe my death to thine unbridled passion?”

  “You err—you err,” said the Templar, hastily, “if you impute what I could neither foresee nor prevent to my purpose or agency. Could I guess the unexpected arrival of yon dotard, whom some flashes of frantic valour, and the praises yielded by fools to the stupid self-torments of an ascetic, have raised for the present above his own merits, above common sense, above me, and above the hundreds of our order who think and feel as men free from such silly and fantastic prejudices as are the grounds of his opinions and actions?”

  “Yet,” said Rebecca, “you sate a judge upon me; innocent—most innocent—as you knew me to be, you concurred in my condemnation; and, if I aright understood, are yourself to appear in arms to assert my guilt, and assure my punishment.”

  “Thy patience, maiden,” replied the Templar. “No race knows so well as thine own tribes how to submit to the time, and so to trim their bark as to make advantage even of an adverse wind.”

  “Lamented be the hour,” said Rebecca, “that has taught such art to the house of Israel! but adversity bends the heart as fire bends the stubborn steel, and those who are no longer their own governors, and the denizens of their own free independent state, must crouch before strangers. It is our curse, Sir Knight, deserved, doubtless, by our own misdeeds and those of our fathers; but you—you who boast your freedom as your birthright, how much deeper is your disgrace when you stoop to soothe the prejudices of others, and that against your own conviction?”

  “Your words are bitter, Rebecca,” said Bois-Guilbert, pacing the apartment with impatience, “but I came not hither to bandy reproaches with you. Know that Bois-Guilbert yields not to created man, although circumstances may for a time induce him to alter his plan. His will is the mountain stream, which may indeed be turned for a little space aside by the rock, but fails not to find its course to the ocean. That scroll which warned thee to demand a champion, from whom couldst thou think it came, if not from Bois-Guilbert? In whom else couldst thou have excited such interest?”

  “A brief respite from instant death,” said Rebecca, “which will little avail me. Was this all thou couldst do for one on whose head thou hast heaped sorrow, and whom thou hast brought near even to the verge of the tom
b?”

  “No, maiden,” said Bois-Guilbert, “this was not all that I purposed. Had it not been for the accursed interference of yon fanatical dotard, and the fool of Goodalricke, who, being a Templar, affects to think and judge according to the ordinary rules of humanity, the office of the champion defender had devolved, not on a preceptor, but on a companion of the order. Then I myself—such was my purpose—had, on the sounding of the trumpet, appeared in the lists as thy champion, disguised indeed in the fashion of a roving knight, who seeks adventures to prove his shield and spear; and then, let Beaumanoir have chosen not one but two or three of the brethren here assembled, I had not doubted to cast them out of the saddle with my single lance. Thus, Rebecca, should thine innocence have been avouched, and to thine own gratitude would I have trusted for the reward of my victory.”

  “This, Sir Knight,” said Rebecca, “is but idle boasting—a brag of what you would have done had you not found it convenient to do otherwise. You received my glove, and my champion, if a creature so desolate can find one, must encounter your lance in the lists; yet you would assume the air of my friend and protector!”

  “Thy friend and protector,” said the Templar, gravely, “I will yet be; but mark at what risk, or rather at what certainty, of dishonour; and then blame me not if I make my stipulations before I offer up all that I have hitherto held dear, to save the life of a Jewish maiden.”

  “Speak,” said Rebecca; “I understand thee not.”

  “Well, then,” said Bois-Guilbert, “I will speak as freely as ever did doting penitent to his ghostly father, when placed in the tricky confessional. Rebecca, if I appear not in these lists I lose fame and rank—lose that which is the breath of my nostrils, the esteem, I mean, in which I am held by my brethren, and the hopes I have of succeeding to that mighty authority which is now wielded by the bigoted dotard Lucas de Beaumanoir, but of which I should make a far different use. Such is my certain doom, except I appear in arms against thy cause. Accursed be he of Goodalricke, who baited this trap for me! and doubly accursed Albert de Malvoisin, who withheld me from the resolution I had formed of hurling back the glove at the face of the superstitious and superannuated fool who listened to a charge so absurd, and against a creature so high in mind and so lovely in form as thou art!”