20 лучших повестей на английском / 20 Best Short Novels

The account of all the battles, storms, and scaladoes in which Sir Wilfrid took part, would only weary the reader; for the dropping off one heathen’s head with an axe must be very like the decapitation of any other unbeliever. Suffice it to say, that wherever this kind of work was to be done, and Sir Wilfrid was in the way, he was the man to perform it. It would astonish you were you to see the account that Wamba kept of his master’s achievements, and of the Bulgarians, Bohemians, Croatians, slain or maimed by his hand. And as, in those days, a reputation for valor had an immense effect upon the soft hearts of women, and even the ugliest man, were he a stout warrior, was looked upon with favor by Beauty: so Ivanhoe, who was by no means ill-favored, though now becoming rather elderly, made conquests over female breasts as well as over Saracens, and had more than one direct offer of marriage made to him by princesses, countesses, and noble ladies possessing both charms and money, which they were anxious to place at the disposal of a champion so renowned. It is related that the Duchess Regent of Kartoffelberg offered him her hand, and the ducal crown of Kartoffelberg, which he had rescued from the unbelieving Prussians; but Ivanhoe evaded the Duchess’s offer, by riding away from her capital secretly at midnight and hiding himself in a convent of Knights Hospitallers[792] on the borders of Poland. And it is a fact that tile Princess Rosalia Seraphina of Pumpernickel, the most lovely woman of her time, became so frantically attached to him, that she followed him on a campaign, and was discovered with his baggage disguised as horse-boy. But no princess, no beauty, no female blandishments had any charms for Ivanhoe: no hermit practised a more austere celibacy. The severity of his morals contrasted so remarkably with the lax and dissolute manner of the young lords and nobles in the courts which he frequented, that these young springgalds would sometimes sneer and call him Monk and Milksop; but his courage in the day of battle was so terrible and admirable, that I promise you the youthful libertines did not sneer then; and the most reckless of them often turned pale when they couched their lances to follow Ivanhoe. Holy Waltheof! it was an awful sight to see him with his pale calm face, his shield upon his breast, his heavy lance before him, charging a squadron of heathen Bohemians, or a regiment of Cossacks! Wherever he saw the enemy, Ivanhoe assaulted him: and when and people remonstrated with him, and said if he attacked such and such a post, breach, castle, or army, he would be slain, ‘And suppose I be?’ he answered, giving them to understand that he would as lief the Battle of Life were over altogether.

While he was thus making war against the Northern infidels news was carried all over Christendom of a catastrophe which had befallen the good cause in the South of Europe, where the Spanish Christians had met with such a defeat and massacre at the hands of the Moors[793] as had never been known in the proudest day of Saladin.

Thursday, the 9th of Shaban, in the 605th year of the Hejira[794], is known all over the West as the amun-al-ark, the year of the battle of Alarcos[795], gained over the Christians by the Moslems of Andaluz, on which fatal day Christendom suffered a defeat so signal, that it was feared the Spanish peninsula would be entirely wrested away from the dominion of the Cross. On that day the Franks lost 150,000 men and 30,000 prisoners. A man-slave sold among the unbelievers for a dirhem; a donkey for the same; a sword, half a dirhem; a horse, five dirhems. Hundreds of thousands of these various sorts of booty were in the possession of the triumphant followers of Yakoob-al-Mansoor[796]. Curses on his head! But he was a brave warrior, and the Christians before him seemed to forget that they were the descendants of the brave Cid[797], the Kanbitoor, as the Moorish hounds (in their jargon) denominated the famous Canpeador.