Burlesques William Makepeace Thackeray

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France, 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-ofmail
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