Perhaps a man with Ivanhoe's high principles would never bring himself
to acknowledge this fact; but others did for him. He grew thin, and
pined away as much as if he had been in a fever under the scorching sun
of Ascalon. He had no appetite for his meals; he slept ill, though he
was yawning all day. The jangling of the doctors and friars whom
Rowena brought together did not in the least enliven him, and he would
sometimes give proofs of somnolency during their disputes, greatly to
the consternation of his lady. He hunted a good deal, and, I very much
fear, as Rowena rightly remarked, that he might have an excuse for being
absent from home. He began to like wine, too, who had been as sober as a
hermit; and when he came back from Athelstane's (whither he would
repair not unfrequently), the unsteadiness of his gait and the unnatural
brilliancy of his eye were remarked by his lady: who, you may be sure,
was sitting up for him. As for Athelstane, he swore by St. Wullstan that
he was glad to have escaped a marriage with such a pattern of propriety;
and honest Cedric the Saxon (who had been very speedily driven out of
his daughter-in-law's castle) vowed by St. Waltheof that his son had
bought a dear bargain.
So Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe became almost as tired of England as his royal
master Richard was, (who always quitted the country when he had squeezed
from his loyal nobles, commons, clergy, and Jews, all the money which he
could get,) and when the lion-hearted Prince began to make war against
the French King, in Normandy and Guienne, Sir Wilfrid pined like a true
servant to be in company of the good champion, alongside of whom he
had shivered so many lances, and dealt such woundy blows of sword and
battle-axe on the plains of Jaffa or the breaches of Acre.
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