"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 place the very night in which Wallace's first appearance before Stirling had called its garrison to arms.
Impelled by vengeance against the man who had driven him from Dumbarton and from Ayr, and irritated at being delayed in the moment when his passion was to seize its object, De Valence thought to end all by a coup de main—and rushing out of the gates, was taken prisoner. Such was the situation of things, when Wallace first became master of the place.