Lady Mar,
well satisfied that Helen and Wallace had never met, and clinging to
the vague words of Murray, that he had sent to give her liberty, called
forth every art of the tiringroom to embellish her still fine person.
Lady Ruthven, with the respectable eagerness of a chaste matron, in
prospect of seeing the man who had so often been the preserver of her
brother, and who had so lately delivered her husband from a loathsome
dungeon, was the first who joined the earl in the great gallery. Lady
Mar soon after entered like Juno, in all her plumage of majesty and
beauty.
But the trumpet of Wallace had sounded in the gates before the
trembling Helen could leave her apartment. It was the herald of his
approach, and she sunk breathless into a seat. She was now going to
see for the first time the man for whose woes she had so often wept;
the man who had incurred them all for objects dear to her. He whom she
had mourned as one stricken in sorrows, and feared for, as an outlaw
doomed to suffering and to death, was now to appear before her, not in
the garb of woe, which excuses the sympathy its wearer excites, but
arrayed as a conqueror, as the champion of Scotland, giving laws to her
oppressors, and entering in triumph, over fields of their slain!
Awful as this picture was to the timidity of her gentle nature, it
alone did not occasion that inexpressible sensation which seemed to
check the pulses of her heart.
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