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The gray-haired bard of Ellerslie, who had ever received the dearest reward of his songs in the smiles of its mistress, did not require persuasion to appear before the gentle lady of Mar, or to recite in her ears the story of the departed loveliness, fairer than poet ever feigned. Helen rose as he and her cousin appeared.
This was the time he had promised Marion he should be returned, and he had yet five long miles to go, before he could reach the glen of Ellerslie; he thought of her being alone-of watching, with an anxious heart, the minutes of his delay. Scotland and its wrongs he now forgot, in the idea of her whose happiness was dearer to him than life.
These duties performed, Wallace turned with the eagerness of friendship and loyalty to see how Bruce fared. The moon shone brightly as his party rode forward. Wallace ascended the steep acclivity on which Roslyn Castle stands. In crossing the drawbridge which divides its rocky peninsula from the main land, he looked around and sighed. The scene reminded him of Ellerslie.
And immediately dispatching spies to the camp at Roslyn, as soon as he was informed of Wallace's disappearance, he judged, from the knowledge of that chief's retentive affections, that whithersoever he intended finally to go, he would first visit Ellerslie, and the tomb of his wife.
Your generous conduct to all that was dearest to me on earth was that night in the garden of Ellerslie witnessed by myself. I was in the tree above your head, and nothing but a conviction that I should embarrass the honor of my wife's protector could at that moment have prevented my springing from my covert and declaring my gratitude on the spot.
With a world of scornful meaning the girl looked at the chair, and the eyes of the woman following the direction of that glance, grew black with confusion. "I think he has been sufficiently appealed to in the name of your patron goddess," she said, icily, "and as for Lord Ellerslie, I rejected his proposal even before I had learned of his relations with the author of that despicable lie.
The nobles, without remonstrance, had surrendered their castles into the hands of the usurper; and the peasantry, following the example of their lords, had allowed their homes to be ravaged without lifting an arm in their defense. Opposition being over, nothing could then threaten her husband from the enemy; and was not the person who had taken him from Ellerslie a friend?
She dismissed her servants to their rest; all, excepting Halbert, the gray-haired harper of Wallace; and he, like herself, was too unaccustomed to the absence of his master to find sleep visit his eyes while Ellerslie was bereft of its joy and its guard. As the night advanced, Lady Wallace sat in the window of her bed-chamber, which looked toward the west.
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