The sun rose on Wallace and his brave legions as they traversed the once romantic glades of Strathmore; but now the scene was changed. The villages were abandoned, and the land lay around in uncultivated wastes. Sheep, without a shepherd, fled wild from the approach of man; and wolves issued, howling, from the cloisters of depopulated monasteries. The army approached Dumblane; but it was without inhabitant; grass grew in the streets; and the birds which roosted in the desert dwellings flew scared from the windows as the trumpet of Wallace sounded through the town. Loud echoes repeated the summons from its hollow walls; but no other voice was heard, no human face appeared; for the ravening hand of Cressingham had been there! Wallace sighed as he looked around him. “Rather smile,” cried Graham, “that Heaven hath given you the power to say to the tyrants who have done this, ‘Here shall your proud waves be stayed!’”
They proceeded over many a hill and plain, and found that the same withering touch of desolation had burned up and overwhelmed the country. Wallace saw that his troops were faint for want of food; cheering them, he promised that Ormsby should provide them a feast in Perth; and, with reawakened spirits, they took the River Tay at its fords, and were soon before the walls of that well-armed city. But it was governed by a coward, and Ormsby fled to Dundee at the first sight of the Scottish army. His flight might have warranted the garrison to surrender without a blow, but a braver man being his lieutenant, sharp was the conflict before Wallace could compel that officer to abandon the ramparts and to sue for the very terms he had at first rejected.
After the fall of Perth, the young regent made a rapid progress through that part of the country; driving the southron garrisons out of Scone, and all the embattled towns; expelling them from the castles of Kincain, Elcho, Kinfauns, and Doune; and then proceeding to the marine fortresses (those avenues by which the ships of England had poured its legions on the eastern coast), he compelled Dundee, Cupar, Glamis, Montrose, and Aberdeen, all to acknowledge the power of his arms. He seized most of the English ships in those ports, and manning them with Scots, soon cleared the seas of the vessels which had escaped, taking some, and putting others to flight; and one of the latter was the fugitive Ormsby.
This enterprise achieved, Wallace, with a host of prisoners, turned his steps toward the Forth; but ere he left the banks of the Tay and Dee, he detached three thousand men under the command of Lord Ruthven, giving him a commission to range the country from the Carse of Gowrie to remotest Sutherland, and in all that tract reduce every town and castle which had admitted a Southron garrison. Wallace took leave of Lord Ruthven at Huntingtower, and that worthy nobleman, when he assumed, with the government of Perth, this extensive command, said, as he grasped the regent’s hand, “I say not, bravest of Scots, what is my gratitude for thus making me an arm of my country, but deeds will show!”
He then bade a father’s adieu to his son, counseling him to regard Wallace as the light in his path; and, embracing him, they parted.
A rapid march, round by Fifeshire (through which victory followed their steps), brought the conqueror and his troops again within sight of the towers of Stirling. It was on the eve of the day on which he had promised Earl de Warenne should see the English prisoners depart for the borders. No doubt of his arriving at the appointed time was entertained by the Scots or by the Southrons in the castle; the one knew the sacredness of his word, and the other having felt his prowess, would not so far disparage their own as to suppose that any could withstand him by whom they were beaten.
De Warenne, as he stood on the battlements of the keep, beheld from afar the long line of Scottish soldiers as they descended the Ochil Hills. When he pointed it out to De Valence, that nobleman (who, in proportion as he wished to check the arms of Wallace, had flattered himself that it might happen), against the evidence of his eyesight, contradicted the observation of the veteran earl.
“Your sight deceives you,” said he, “it is only the sunbeams playing on the cliffs.”
“Then those cliffs are moving ones,” cried De Warenne, “which, I fear, have ground our countrymen on the coast to powder! We shall find Wallace here by sunset, to show us how he has resented the affront our ill-advised prince cast on his jealous honor.”
“His honor,” returned De Valence, “is like that of his countrymen’s-an enemy alike to his own interest and to that of others. Had it allowed him to accept the crown of Scotland, and so have fought Edward with the concentrating arm of a king; or would he even now offer peace to our sovereign, granting his prerogative as liege lord of the country, all might go well; but as the honor you speak of prevents his using these means of ending the contest, destruction must close his career.”
“And what quarrel,” demanded De Warenne, “can you, my Lord de Valence, have against this nice honor of Sir William Wallace, since you allow it secures the final success of our cause?”
“His honor and himself are hateful to me!” impatiently answered De Valence; “he crosses me in my wishes, public and private; and for the sake of my king and myself, I might almost be tempted-” He turned pale as he spoke, and met the penetrating glance of De Warenne. He paused.
“Tempted to what?” asked De Warenne.
“To a Brutus mode of ridding the state of an enemy.”
“That might be noble in a Roman citizen,” returned De Warenne, “which would be villainous in an English lord, treated as you have been by a generous victor, not the usurper of any country’s liberties, but rather a Brutus in defense of his own. Which man of us all, from the general to the meanest follower in our camps, has he injured?”
Lord Aymer frowned. “Did he not expose me, threaten me with an ignominious death, on the walls of Stirling?”
“But was it before he saw the Earl of Mar, with his hapless family, brought, with halters on their necks, to be suspended from this very tower? Ah! what a tale has the lovely countess told me of that direful scene! What he then did was to check the sanguinary Cressingham from imbruiting his hands in the blood of female and infant innocence.”
“I care not,” cried De Valence, “what are or are not the offenses of this domineering Wallace, but I hate him; and my respect for his advocates cannot but correspond with that feeling.” As he spoke, that he might not be further molested by the arguments of De Warenne, he abruptly turned away, and left the battlements.
Pride would not allow the enraged earl to confess his private reasons for this vehement enmity against the Scottish chief. A conference which he had held the preceding evening with Lord Mar, was the cause of this augmented hatred; and, from that moment, the haughty Southron vowed the destruction of Wallace, by open attack, or secret treachery. Ambition, and the base counterfeit of love, those two master passions in untempered minds, were the springs of this antipathy. The instant in which he knew that the young creature whom at a distance he discerned clinging around the Earl of Mar’s neck in the streets of Stirling, was the same Lady Helen on whose account Lord Soulis had poured on him such undeserved invectives in Bothwell Castle; curious to have a nearer view of one whose transcendent beauty he had often heard celebrated by others, he ordered her to be immediately conveyed to his apartments in the citadel.
On their first interview he was more struck by her personal charms than he had ever been with any woman’s, although few were so noted for gallantry in the English court as himself. He could hardly understand the nature of his feelings while discoursing with her. To all others of her sex he had declared his enamored wishes with as much ease as vivacity, but when he looked on Helen the admiration her loveliness inspired was checked by an indescribable awe. No word of passion escaped his lips; he sought to win her by a deportment consonant with her own dignity of manner, and obeyed all her wishes, excepting when they pointed to any communication with her parents. He feared the wary eyes of the Earl of Mar. But nothing of this reverence of Helen was grounded on any principle within the heart of De Valence. His idea of virtue was so erroneous that he believed, by the short assumption of its semblance, he might so steal on the confidence of his victim as to induce her to forget all the world-nay, heaven itself-in his sophistry and blandishments. To facilitate this end he at first designed to precipitate the condemnation of the earl, that he might be rid of a father’s existence, holding, in dread of his censure, the perhaps otherwise yielding heart of his lovely intended mistress.
The unprincipled and impure can have no idea what virtue or delicacy are other than vestments of disguise or of ornament, to be thrown off at will; and therefore, to reason with such minds is to talk to the winds-to tell a man who is born blind to decide between two colors. In short, a libertine heart is the same in all ages of the world. De Valence, therefore, seeing the anguish of her fears for her father, and hearing the fervor with which she implored for his life, adopted the plan of granting the earl reprieves from day to day; and in spite of the remonstrances of Cressingham, he intended (after having worked upon the terrors of Helen), to grant to her her father’s release, on condition of her yielding herself to be his. He had even meditated that the accomplishment of this device should have taken ............