20 лучших повестей на английском / 20 Best Short Novels

‘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[782]

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 Ivanhoe redivivus

[783]

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[784] 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 them 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.