Chapter XXXIV.
Stirling Castle.
The prisoners who had been taken with Montgomery were lodged behind the town, and the wounded carried into the Abbey of Cambus-Kenneth; but when Edwin came to move that earl himself, he found him too faint with loss of blood to sit a horse to Snawdoun. He therefore ordered a litter; and so conveyed his brave prisoner to that palace of the kings of Scotland in Stirling.
The priests in Wallace's army not only exercised the Levitical but the good Samaritan's functions, and they soon obeyed the young knight's summons to dress the wounds of Montgomery.
Messengers, meanwhile, arrived from Wallace, acquainting his chieftains in Stirling with the surrender of De Warenne's army. Hence no surprise was created in the breast of the wounded earl when he saw his commander enter the palace as the prisoner of the illustrious Scot.
Montgomery held out his hand to the lord warden in silence, and with a flushed cheek.
"Blush not, my noble friend!" cried De Warenne; "these wounds speak more eloquently than a thousand tongues, the gallantry with which you maintained the sword that fate compelled you to surrender. But I, without a scratch, how can I meet the unconquered Edward? And yet it was not for myself I feared: my brave and confiding soldiers were in all my thoughts; for I saw it was not to meet an army I led them, but against a whirlwind, a storm of war, with which no strength that I commanded could contend."
While the English generals thus conversed, Edwin's impatient heart yearned to be again at the side of Wallace; and gladly resigning the charge of his noble prisoner to Sir Alexander Ramsay, as soon as he observed a cessation in the conversation of the two earls, he drew near Montgomery to take his leave.
"Farewell, till we meet again!" said the young earl, pressing his hand; "you have been a young brother rather than an enemy, to me."
"Because," returned Edwin, "I follow the example of my general, who would willingly be the friend of all mankind."