Helen renewed her supplications; and Wallace (aware that should he withhold her attendance, his implacable adversary, however he might spare her personal injury, would not forbear wounding her to the soul by tearing her from him) gave an unwilling consent to what might seem a submission on his part to an authority he had shed his blood to oppose.
Helen renewed her supplications; and Wallace (aware that should he withhold her attendance, his implacable adversary, however he might spare her personal injury, would not forbear wounding her to the soul by tearing her from him) gave an unwilling consent to what might seem a submission on his part to an authority he had shed his blood to oppose.
"But not in these garments," said he; "she must be habited as becomes her sex and her own delicacy."
Anticipating this propriety, Gloucester had imparted the circumstance to his countess, and she had sent a casket, which the earl himself now brought in from the passage. Helen retired to the inner cell, and hastily arranging herself in the first suit that presented itself, reappeared in female apparel, and wrapped in a long veil. As Gloucester took her hand to lead her forth, Wallace clasped the other in his.
"Remember, my Helen," cried he, "that on no terms but untrammeled freedom of soul, will your Wallace accept of life. This will not be granted by the man to whom you go; then speak and act in his presence as if I were already beyond the skies."
Had this faithful friend, now his almost adoring wife, left his side with more sanguine hopes, how grievously would they have been blasted!
After an absence of two hours, she returned to the dungeon of Wallace: and as her trembling form was clasped in his arms, she exclaimed, in a passion of tears:
"Here will I live, here will I die! They may sever my soul from my body, but never again part me from this dear bosom!"
"Never, never, my Helen!" said he, reading her conference with the king in the wild terror of its effects. Her senses seemed fearfully disordered. While she clung to him, and muttered sentences of an incoherency that shook him to the soul, he cast a look of such expressive inquiry upon Gloucester, that the earl could only answer by hastily putting his hand on his face to hide his emotion. At last the tears she shed appeared to relieve the excess of her agonies, and she gradually sunk into an awful calm. Then rising from her husband's arms, she seated herself on his stony couch, and said in a firm voice, "Earl, I can now bear to hear you repeat the last decision of the King of England."
Though not absolutely present at the interview between his sovereign and Lady Helen, from the anteroom Gloucester had heard all that passed, and now he briefly confessed to Wallace, that he had too truly appreciated the pretended conciliation of the king. Edward's proposals to Helen were as artfully couched as deceptive in their design. Their issue was to make Wallace his slave, or to hold him his victim. In his conference with her, he addressed the vanity of an ambitious woman; then, all the affections of a devoted heart: he enforced his arguments with persuasions to allure, and threats to compel obedience. In the last he called up every image to appall the soul of Helen; but, steadfast in the principles of her lord, while ready to sink under the menaced horrors of his fate, she summoned all her strength to give utterance to her last reply.