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Updated: May 31, 2025
"By this right arm, I swear, noble youth, that had I been on the spot when Heselrigge, lifted his sword against the breast of Lady Wallace, I would have sheathed my sword in his. It was before then that I saw that matchless woman; and offended with my want of severity in the scrutiny I had made at Ellerslie for its chief. Heselrigge sent me back to Ayr.
"Fool!" cried Heselrigge, driven from his assumed temper by her steady denial. "What? is it easier for these dainty limbs to be hacked to pieces by my soldiers' axes? Is it easier for that fair bosom to be trodden underfoot by my horse's hoofs, and for that beauteous head of thine to decorate my lance? Is all this easier than to tell me where to find a murderer and his gold?"
A fiend-like yell from the slain Heselrigge told him his work was done; and drawing out the sword he took the streaming blade in his hand. "Vengeance is satisfied," cried he; "thus, O God! do I henceforth divide self from my heart!"
They were in discourse, and I overheard them say, that besides Heselrigge himself, nearly two hundred of his garrison had fallen by the hand of Wallace's men in the contention at the castle; that the tidings were sent to Sir Richard Arnulf, the Deputy-governor of Ayr; and he had dispatched a thousand men to surround the Cartland Craigs, spies having given notice that they were Sir William's strongholds, and the orders were, that he must be taken dead or alive; while all his adherents, men and women, should receive no quarter.
"I march at your command no more," replied the veteran, eying him resolutely: "the moment you perpetrated this bloody deed, you became unworthy the name of man; and I should disgrace my own manhood, were I ever again to obey the word of such a monster!" "Villian!" cried the enraged Heselrigge, "you shall die for this!"
With one stroke of his foot he drove the door from its hinges, and rushed into the room. What a sight for the now awakened and guilty Heselrigge! It was the husband of the defenseless woman he had murdered come in the power of justice, with uplifted arm and vengeance in his eyes?
I come, in the midst of their fires, to call you to vengeance. I come in the name of all ye hold dear, of the wives of you bosoms, and the children in their arms, to tell you the poniard of England is unsheathed-innocence and age and infancy fall before it. With this sword, last night, did Heselrigge, the English tyrant of Lanark, break into my house, and murder my wife!"
"I am your servant Dugald," returned the man; "he whom your brave arm saved from the battle-ax of Arthur Heselrigge." "I cannot ask you how you came by that armor; but if you be yet a Scot throw it off and follow me." "Not to Ellerslie, my lord," cried he; "it has been plundered and burned to the ground by the Governor of Lanark."
An aged retainer carried the awful news of the murder to Wallace in his concealment. For long he was overpowered with agony. Then a desperate determination arose in his mind. "The sun must not again rise upon Heselrigge!" was his thought. He called his followers, and told them of the deed. "From this hour," he cried, "may Scotland date her liberty, or Wallace return no more!"
Returning with his treasure through Lanark, he had seen a fellow countryman wounded, and in deadly peril at the hands of a party of English. Telling two of his attendants to carry the injured man to Ellerslie, he had beaten off the English and slain their leader Arthur Heselrigge, nephew of the Governor of Lanark.
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