The queen looked at him very gravely, and said, "If you really think there are no such things as fairies and enchantments, for so your words would imply, then everybody in your country must have genius, for they seem to be excellent in everything. Your warriors are so peerlessly brave—all, excepting these Scottish lords who are such favorites with the king! I wonder what he can see in their uncouth faces, or find in their rough indelicate conversation to admire. If it had not been for their besetting my gracious Edward, I am sure he never would have suspected ill of the noble Bruce!"
"Queen Margaret!" cried the Countess of Gloucester, giving her a look of respectful reprehension; "had not the minstrel better retire?"
The queen blushed, and recollected that she was giving too free a vent to her sentiments; but she could not suffer Wallace to withdraw.
"I have yet to ask you," resumed she—"the warriors of Scotland being so resistless, and their minstrels so perfect in their art—whether all the ladies can be so beautiful as the Lady Helen Mar?"
The eagerness with which Wallace grasped at any tidings of her who was so prime an object of his enterprise at once disturbed the composure of his air, and had the penetrating eyes of the countess been then directed toward him, she might have drawn some dangerous conclusions from the start he gave at the mention of her name, and from the heightened color which, in spite of his exertions to suppress all evident emotion, maintained its station on his cheek.
"But, perhaps you have never seen her?" added the queen.
Wallace replied, neither denying nor affirming her question: "I have heard many praise her beauty, but more her virtues."
"Well, I am sorry," continued her majesty, "since you sing so sweetly of female charms, that you have not seen this wonder of Scottish ladies. You have now little chance of that good fortune, for Earl de Valence has taken her abroad, intending to marry her amidst all the state with which my lord has invested him."
"Is it to Guienne he has taken her?" inquired Wallace.
"Yes," replied the queen, rather pleased than offended at the minstrel's ignorance of court ceremony in thus familiarly presuming to put a question to her. She continued to answer: "While so near Scotland he could not win her to forget her native country and her father's danger, who it seems was dying when De Valence carried her away. And, to prevent bloodshed between the earl and Soulis, who is also madly in love with her, my ever-gracious Edward gave the English lord a high post in Guienne, and thither they are gone."