A Child's History of England.50

'Knave [man without honor]!' said King Richard. 'What have I done to thee [you] that thou [you] shouldest [should] take my life?'

'What hast thou [have you] done to me?' replied the young man. 'With thine [yours] own hands thou hast killed my father and my two brothers. Myself thou wouldest [would] have hanged. Let me die now, by any torture that thou wilt [will]. My comfort is, that no torture can save Thee. Thou too must die; and, through me, the world is quit of thee!'

be quit of sth: no longer have to suffer or be involved with sth bad

Again the King looked at the young man steadily. Again the young man looked steadily at him. Perhaps some remembrance of his generous enemy Saladin, who was not a Christian, came into the mind of the dying King.

'Youth!' he said, 'I forgive thee. Go unhurt!' Then, turning to the chief officer who had been riding in his company when he received the wound, King Richard said:

'Take off his chains, give him a hundred shillings, and let him depart.'

He sunk down on his couch, and a dark mist seemed in his weakened eyes to fill the tent wherein he had so often rested, and he died. His age was forty-two; he had reigned ten years. His last command was not obeyed; for the chief officer flayed [剥皮] Bertrand de Gourdon alive, and hanged him.

There is an old tune yet known - a sorrowful air will sometimes outlive many generations of strong men, and even last longer than battle-axes with twenty pounds of steel in the head - by which this King is said to have been discovered in his captivity. Blondel, a favourite Minstrel [a singer or musician in the Middle Ages] of King Richard, as the story relates, faithfully seeking his Royal master, went singing it outside the gloomy walls of many foreign fortresses and prisons; until at last he heard it echoed from within a dungeon, and knew the voice, and cried out in ecstasy, 'O Richard, O my King!' You may believe it, if you like; it would be easy to believe worse things. Richard was himself a Minstrel and a Poet. If he had not been a Prince too, he might have been a better man perhaps, and might have gone out of the world with less bloodshed and waste of life to answer for.

六级/考研单词: torture, quit, generous, wound, depart, sofa, mist, tent, seldom, reign, obey, tune, sorrow, gloom, echo, poet, princess