Ivanhoe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (67 page)

“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.”

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 English:—

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 bucklered
^fu
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 tomb?”

“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!”

“And what now avails rant or flattery?” answered Rebecca. “Thou hast made thy choice between causing to be shed the blood of an innocent woman, or of endangering thine own earthly state and earthly hopes. What avails it to reckon together? thy choice is made.”

“No, Rebecca,” said the knight, in a softer tone, and drawing nearer towards her, “my choice is NOT made; nay, mark, it is thine to make the election. If I appear in the lists, I must maintain my name in arms; and if I do so, championed or unchampioned, thou diest by the stake and faggot, for there lives not the knight who hath coped with me in arms on equal issue or on terms of vantage, save Richard Cœur-de-Lion and his minion of Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe, as thou well knowest, is unable to bear his corslet, and Richard is in a foreign prison. If I appear, then thou diest, even although thy charms should instigate some hot-headed youth to enter the lists in thy defence.”

“And what avails repeating this so often?” said Rebecca.

“Much,” replied the Templar; “for thou must learn to look at thy fate on every side.”

“Well, then, turn the tapestry,” said the Jewess, “and let me see the other side.”

“If I appear,” said Bois-Guilbert, “in the fatal lists, thou diest by a slow and cruel death, in pain such as they say is destined to the guilty hereafter. But if I appear not, then am a degraded and dishonoured knight, accused of witchcraft and of communion with infidels: the illustrious name which has grown yet more so under my wearing becomes a hissing and a reproach. I lose fame—I lose honour—I lose the prospect of such greatness as scarce emperors attain to; I sacrifice mighty ambition—I destroy schemes built as high as the mountains with which heathens say their heaven was once nearly scaled;
²
and yet, Rebecca,” he added, throwing himself at her feet, “this greatness will I sacrifice—this fame will I renounce—this power will I forego, even now when it is half within my grasp, if thou wilt say, ‘Bois-Guilbert, I receive thee for my lover.’”

“Think not of such foolishness, Sir Knight,” answered Rebecca, “but hasten to the Regent, the Queen Mother, and to Prince John; they cannot, in honour to the English crown, allow of the proceedings of your Grand Master. So shall you give me protection without sacrifice on your part, or the pretext of requiring any requital from me.”