Ivanhoe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (45 page)

“If such prove the case,” said his master, “my religious orders are soon
taken—Pax vobiscum.
I trust I shall remember the password. Noble Athelstane, farewell; and farewell, my poor boy, whose heart might make amends for a weaker head; I will save you, or return and die with you. The royal blood of our Saxon kings shall not be spilt while mine beats in my veins; nor shall one hair fall from the head of the kind knave who risked himself for his master, if Cedric’s peril can prevent it. Farewell.”

“Farewell, noble Cedric,” said Athelstane; “remember, it is the true part of a friar to accept refreshment, if you are offered any.”

“Farewell, uncle,” added Wamba; “and remember Pax
vobiscum.”

Thus exhorted, Cedric sallied forth upon his expedition; and it was not long ere he had occasion to try the force of that spell which his Jester had recommended as omnipotent. In a low-arched and dusky passage, by which he endeavoured to work his way to the hall of the castle, he was interrupted by a female form.

“Pax vobiscum!”
said the pseudo friar, and was endeavouring to hurry past, when a soft voice replied, “Et
vobis; quœso,
domine
reverendissime, pro misericordia vestra.”
^dg

“I am somewhat deaf,” replied Cedric, in good Saxon, and at the same time muttered to himself, “A curse on the fool and his
Pax vobiscum!
I have lost my javelin at the first cast.”

It was, however, no unusual thing for a priest of those days to be deaf of his Latin ear, and this the person who now addressed Cedric knew full well.

“I pray you of dear love, reverend father,” she replied in his own language, “that you will deign to visit with your ghostly comfort a wounded prisoner of this castle, and have such compassion upon him and us as thy holy office teaches. Never shall good deed so highly advantage thy convent.”

“Daughter,” answered Cedric, much embarrassed, “my time in this castle will not permit me to exercise the duties of mine office. I must presently forth: there is life and death upon my speed.”

“Yet, father, let me entreat you by the vow you have taken on you,” replied the suppliant, “not to leave the oppressed and endangered without counsel or succour.”

“May the fiend fly away with me, and leave me in Ifrin
^dh
with the souls of Odin and of Thor!” answered Cedric, impatiently, and would probably have proceeded in the same tone of total departure from his spiritual character, when the colloquy was interrupted by the harsh voice of Urfried, the old crone of the turret.

“How, minion,” said she to the female speaker, “is this the manner in which you requite the kindness which permitted thee to leave thy prison-cell yonder? Puttest thou the reverend man to use ungracious language to free himself from the importunities of a Jewess?”

“A Jewess!” said Cedric, availing himself of the information to get clear of their interruption. “Let me pass, woman! stop me not at your peril. I am fresh from my holy office, and would avoid pollution.”

“Come this way, father,” said the old hag, “thou art a stranger in this castle, and canst not leave it without a guide. Come hither, for I would speak with thee. And you, daughter of an accursed race, go to the sick man’s chamber, and tend him until my return; and woe betide you if you again quit it without my permission!”

Rebecca retreated. Her importunities had prevailed upon Urfried to suffer her to quit the turret, and Urfried had employed her services where she herself would most gladly have paid them, by the bedside of the wounded Ivanhoe. With an understanding awake to their dangerous situation, and prompt to avail herself of each means of safety which occurred, Rebecca had hoped something from the presence of a man of religion, who, she learned from Urfried, had penetrated into this godless castle. She watched the return of the supposed ecclesiastic, with the purpose of addressing him, and interesting him in favour of the prisoners; with what imperfect success the reader has been just acquainted.

When Urfried had with clamours and menaces driven Rebecca back to the apartment from which she had sallied, she proceeded to conduct the unwilling Cedric into a small apartment, the door of which she heedfully secured. Then fetching from a cupboard a stoup of wine and two flagons, she placed them on the table, and said in a tone rather asserting a fact than asking a question, “Thou art Saxon, father. Deny it not,” she continued, observing that Cedric hastened not to reply; “the sounds of my native language are sweet to mine ears, though seldom heard save from the tongues of the wretched and degraded serfs on whom the proud Normans impose the meanest drudgery of this dwelling. Thou art a Saxon, father—a Saxon, and, save as thou art a servant of God, a freeman. Thine accents are sweet in mine ear.”

“Do not Saxon priests visit this castle, then?” replied Cedric; “it were, methinks, their duty to comfort the outcast and oppressed children of the soil.”

“They come not; or if they come, they better love to revel at the boards of their conquerors,” answered Urfried, “than to hear the groans of their countrymen; so, at least, report speaks of them, of myself I can say little. This castle, for ten years, has opened to no priest save the debauched Norman chaplain who partook the nightly revels of Front-de-Bœuf, and he has been long gone to render an account of his stewardship.
^di
But thou art a Saxon—a Saxon priest, and I have one question to ask of thee.”

“I am a Saxon,” answered Cedric, “but unworthy, surely, of the name of priest. Let me begone on my way. I swear I will return, or send one of our fathers more worthy to hear your confession.”

“Stay yet a while,” said Urfried; “the accents of the voice which thou hearest now will soon be choked with the cold earth, and I would not descend to it like the beast I have lived. But wine must give me strength to tell the horrors of my tale.” She poured out a cup, and drank it with a frightful avidity, which seemed desirous of draining the last drop in the goblet. “It stupifies,” she said, looking upwards as she finished her draught, “but it cannot cheer. Partake it, father, if you would hear my tale without sinking down upon the pavement.” Cedric would have avoided pledging her in this ominous conviviality, but the sign which she made to him expressed impatience and despair. He complied with her request, and answered her challenge in a large wine-cup; she then proceeded with her story, as if appeased by his complaisance.

“I was not born,” she said, “father, the wretch that thou now seest me. I was free, was happy, was honoured, loved, and was beloved. I am now a slave, miserable and degraded, the sport of my masters’ passions while I had yet beauty, the object of their contempt, scorn, and hatred, since it has passed away. Dost thou wonder, father, that I should hate mankind, and, above all, the race that has wrought this change in me? Can the wrinkled decrepit hag before thee, whose wrath must vent itself in impotent curses, forget she was once the daughter of the noble thane of Torquilstone, before whose frown a thousand vassals trembled.”

“Thou the daughter of Torquil Wolfganger!” said Cedric, receding as he spoke; “thou—thou—the daughter of that noble Saxon, my father’s friend and companion in arms!”

“Thy father’s friend!” echoed Urfried; “then Cedric called the Saxon stands before me, for the noble Hereward of Rotherwood had but one son, whose name is well known among his countrymen. But if thou art Cedric of Rotherwood, why this religious dress? Hast thou too despaired of saving thy country, and sought refuge from oppression in the shade of the convent?”

“It matters not who I am,” said Cedric; “proceed, unhappy woman, with thy tale of horror and guilt! Guilt there must be; there is guilt even in thy living to tell it.”

“There is—there is,” answered the wretched woman, “deep, black, damning guilt—guilt that lies like a load at my breast—guilt that all the penitential fires of hereafter cannot cleanse. Yes, in these halls, stained with the noble and pure blood of my father and my brethren—in these very halls, to have lived the paramour of their murderer, the slave at once and the partaker of his pleasures, was to render every breath which I drew of vital air a crime and a curse.”

“Wretched woman!” exclaimed Cedric. “And while the friends of thy father—while each true Saxon heart, as it breathed a requiem for his soul, and those of his valiant sons, forgot not in their prayers the murdered Ulrica—while all mourned and honoured the dead, thou hast lived to merit our hate and execration—lived to unite thyself with the vile tyrant who murdered thy nearest and dearest, who shed the blood of infancy rather than a male of the noble house of Torquil Wolfganger should survive—with him hast thou lived to unite thyself, and in the bands of lawless love!”

“In lawless bands, indeed, but not in those of love!” answered the hag; “love will sooner visit the regions of eternal doom than those unhallowed vaults. No; with that at least I cannot reproach myself: hatred to Front-de-Bœuf and his race governed my soul most deeply, even in the hour of his guilty endearments.”

“You hated him, and yet you lived,” replied Cedric; “wretch! was there no poniard—no knife—no bodkin!
^dj
Well was it for thee, since thou didst prize such an existence, that the secrets of a Norman castle are like those of the grave. For had I but dreamed of the daughter of Torquil living in foul communion with the murderer of her father, the sword of a true Saxon had found thee out even in the arms of thy paramour!”

“Wouldst thou indeed have done this justice to the name of Torquil?” said Ulrica, for we may now lay aside her assumed name of Urfried; “thou art then the true Saxon report speaks thee! for even within these accursed walls, where, as thou well sayest, guilt shrouds itself in inscrutable mystery—even there has the name of Cedric been sounded; and I, wretched and degraded, have rejoiced to think that there yet breathed an avenger of our unhappy nation. I also have had my hours of vengeance. I have fomented the quarrels of our foes, and heated drunken revelry into murderous broil. I have seen their blood flow—I have heard their dying groans! Look on me, Cedric; are there not still left on this foul and faded face some traces of the features of Torquil?”

“Ask me not of them, Ulrica,” replied Cedric, in a tone of grief mixed with abhorrence; “these traces form such a resemblance as arises from the grave of the dead when a fiend has animated the lifeless corpse.”

“Be it so,” answered Ulrica; “yet wore these fiendish features the mask of a spirit of light when they were able to set at variance the elder Front-de-Bœuf and his son Reginald! The darkness of hell should hide what followed; but revenge must lift the veil, and darkly intimate what it would raise the dead to speak aloud. Long had the smouldering fire of discord glowed between the tyrant father and his savage son; long had I nursed, in secret, the unnatural hatred; it blazed forth in an hour of drunken wassail, and at his own board fell my oppressor by the hand of his own son: such are the secrets these vaults conceal! Rend asunder, ye accursed arches,” she added, looking up towardsthe roof, “and bury in your fall all who are conscious of the hideous mystery!”

“And thou, creature of guilt and misery,” said Cedric, “what became thy lot on the death of thy ravisher?”

“Guess it, but ask it not. Here—here I dwelt, till age, premature age, has stamped its ghastly features on my countenance—scorned and insulted where I was once obeyed, and compelled to bound the revenge which had once such ample scope to the efforts of petty malice of a discontented menial, or the vain or unheeded curses of an impotent hag; condemned to hear from my lonely turret the sounds of revelry in which I once partook, or the shrieks and groans of new victims of oppression.”

“Ulrica,” said Cedric, “with a heart which still, I fear, regrets the lost reward of thy crimes, as much as the deeds by which thou didst acquire that meed, how didst thou dare to address thee to one who wears this robe? Consider, unhappy woman, what could the sainted Edward himself do for thee, were he here in bodily presence? The royal Confessor was endowed by Heaven with power to cleanse the ulcers of the body; but only God Himself can cure the leprosy of the soul.”

“Yet, turn not from me, stern prophet of wrath,” she exclaimed, “but tell me, if thou canst, in what shall terminate these new and awful feelings that burst on my solitude. Why do deeds, long since done, rise before me in new and irresistible horrors? What fate is prepared beyond the grave for her to whom God has assigned on earth a lot of such unspeakable wretchedness? Better had I turn to Woden, Hertha, and Zernebock, to Mista, and to Skogula, the gods of our yet unbaptized ancestors, than endure the dreadful anticipations which have of late haunted my waking and my sleeping hours!”

“I am no priest,” said Cedric, turning with disgust from this miserable picture of guilt, wretchedness, and despair—“I am no priest, though I wear a priest’s garment.”

“Priest or layman,” answered Ulrica, “thou art the first I have seen for twenty years by whom God was feared or man regarded; and dost thou bid me despair?”

“I bid thee repent,” said Cedric. “Seek to prayer and penance, and mayest thou find acceptance! But I cannot, I will not, longer abide with thee.”

“Stay yet a moment!” said Ulrica; “leave me not now, son of my father’s friend, lest the demon who has governed my life should tempt me to avenge myself of thy hard-hearted scorn. Thinkest thou, if Front-de-Bœuf found Cedric the Saxon in his castle, in such a disguise, that thy life would be a long one? Already his eye has been upon thee like a falcon on his prey.”