feared was likely to come upon
him, he was deserted by the discontented mercenaries on whose protection
he had relied, without using the means necessary to secure their
attachment.

In this deplorable condition the Jew, with his daughter and her wounded
patient, were found by Cedric, as has already been noticed, and soon
afterwards fell into the power of De Bracy and his confederates.
Little notice was at first taken of the horse-litter, and it might have
remained behind but for the curiosity of De Bracy, who looked into it
under the impression that it might contain the object of his enterprise,
for Rowena had not unveiled herself. But De Bracy's astonishment was
considerable, when he discovered that the litter contained a wounded
man, who, conceiving himself to have fallen into the power of Saxon
outlaws, with whom his name might be a protection for himself and his
friends, frankly avowed himself to be Wilfred of Ivanhoe.

The ideas of chivalrous honour, which, amidst his wildness and levity,
never utterly abandoned De Bracy, prohibited him from doing the knight
any injury in his defenceless condition, and equally interdicted his
betraying him to Front-de-Boeuf, who would have had no scruples to put
to death, under any circumstances, the rival claimant of the fief of
Ivanhoe. On the other hand, to liberate a suitor preferred by the Lady
Rowena, as the events of the tournament, and indeed Wilfred's previous
banishment from his father's house, had made matter of notoriety, was
a pitch far above the flight of De Bracy's generosity. A middle
course betwixt good and evil was all which he found himself capable of
adopting, and he commanded two of his own squires to keep close by the
litter, and to suffer no one to approach it. If questioned, they were
directed by their master to say, that the empty litter of the Lady
Rowena was employed to transport one of their comrades who had been
wounded in the scuffle. On arriving at Torquilstone, while the Knight
Templar and the lord of that castle were each intent upon their own
schemes, the one on the Jew's treasure, and the other on his daughter,
De Bracy's squires conveyed Ivanhoe, still under the name of a wounded
comrade, to a distant apartment. This explanation was accordingly
returned by these men to Front-de-Boeuf, when he questioned them why
they did not make for the battlements upon the alarm.

"A wounded companion!" he replied in great wrath and astonishment. "No
wonder