Array Коллектив авторов - 20 лучших повестей на английском / 20 Best Short Novels

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 [781], 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 demise, 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:

And this is the translation which the doggerel knave Wamba made of the Latin lines:

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