ting together as much as he could, and as the mule's sack would hold, he loaded his beast, and then hastened to obey his master's call, and helped him to remove the bachelor from under the mule; then putting him on her back he gave him the torch, and Don Quixote bade him follow the track of his companions, and beg pardon of them on his part for the wrong which he could not help doing them.
And said Sancho, "If by chance these gentlemen should want to know who was the hero that served them so, your worship may tell them that he is the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, otherwise called the Knight of the Rueful Countenance."[1]
The bachelor then took his departure. I forgot to mention that before he did so he said to Don Quixote, "Remember that you stand excommunicated for having laid violent hands on a holy thing, juxta illud, si quis, suadente diabolo."
"I do not understand that Latin," answered Don Quixote, "but I know well I did not lay hands, only on this pike; besides, I did not think I was committing an assault upon priests or things of the Church, which, like a Catholic and faithful Christian as I am, I respect and revere, but upon phantoms and spectres of the other world; but even so, I remember how it fared with Cid Ruy Diaz when he broke the chair of the ambassador of that king before his Holiness the Pope who excommunicated him for the same; and yet the good Roderick of Bivar bore himself that day like a very noble and valiant knight."[2]
On hearing this the bachelor took his departure, as has been said, without making any reply; and Don Quixote asked Sancho what had induced him to call him the "Knight of the Rueful Countenance" more than at any other time.
"I will tell you," answered Sancho; "it was because I have been looking at you for some time by the light of the torch
- ↑ It has been frequently objected that figura does not mean the face or countenance, but the whole figure; but no matter what dictionaries may say, it is plain from what follows that Sancho applies the word here to his master's face, made haggard by short commons and loss of teeth, and uses it as synonymous with cara; and that Don Quixote himself never could have contemplated painting a full-length on his shield, but merely a face. As a matter of fact, however, the dictionaries do not support the objection. The two best, that of the Academy and of Vicente Salvá, explain figura as the "external form of a body," and add that it is commonly used for the face alone, por solo el rostro.
- ↑ Referring to the apocryphal legend which forms the subject of the ballad, "A concilio dentro en Roma." Among Lockhart's ballads there is a lively version of it.
