University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.

Love is the vital principle of religion—it is religion.
It is the devotion that fears not death—which is not won
by life—which cannot be seduced from duty—which is
patient and uncomplaining amid privation. Its existence
becomes merged in that of the object which it
worships, and its first gift is the sacrifice of—self.
There is no love if the heart will not make this sacrifice,
and the heart never truly loves until this sacrifice be made.
Self is that life which we surrender when we gain the
happiness of the blessed. Seldom made in this life, it
is yet the only condition upon which we are secure of
the future. Ah! happy the spirit which is soonest ready
for the sacrifice. To such a spirit, Heaven and Immortality
are one!

The destiny of such a creature as Janet Berkeley
might even now be written. She is secure. There can
be no change in such a character. Time, and fortune,
sickness, the defeat of hope, and the consciousness of
approaching death, could never alter one lofty mood, one
self-devoting impulse of her soul. Surely, though she
seeks the field of terror unaccompanied by human form,
she will not necessarily be alone. The God whose worship
calls only for love, will not be heedless of the safety
of her who toils for the beloved one. He is with her.

Resolute as she was to seek the field of strife, and
fearless as her conduct approved her spirit, she was yet
sufficiently maiden in her reserve, to desire, as much as
possible, to conceal from stranger eyes the object of her
adventure. With a cautious footstep, therefore, she stole
from cover to cover, until she reached the artificial bank,
clustering and crowded with shrubs and vines, which

supported the trees on one side of the spacious avenue.
With a trembling hand she parted the shrubbery before
her, and her eyes took in for an instant the field of battle,
and then, immediately after, shutting out its objects,
closed, as if with a moral comprehension of their own.
She could not be mistaken in the dreadful objects in her
sight. The awful testimonies of the desperate fight
were strewn around her. Her uplifted foot, in the very
first step which she had been about to take from the
bank, hung suspended over the lifeless body of one of
its victims. She turned suddenly and sickeningly away.
She strove, but she could not pass into the avenue at
that point, and she receded through the thicket, and
made her way round to another quarter, in which she
hoped to find an unobstructed passage. There was but
little time for delay, and with this thought a new resolution
brought strength to her frame. Again her hand
parted the copse, making a passage for her person.
This time she dared not look. She did not again permit
herself either to think or look, but resolutely leaping
across the ditch, she stood for a moment, awed and
trembling, but still firm, in the presence of the dead.

She was motionless for several seconds, but her mind
neutralized, in its noble strength of purpose, the otherwise
truly feminine feebleness of her person. She was
about to move forward in her determined task; but, when
she strove to lift her foot, it seemed half fastened to the
ground. She looked down, and her shoe was covered
with clotted blood. She stood in a fast freezing puddle
of what, but an hour before, had been warm life and feeling.
But she did not now give heed to the obstruction
—she was unconscious of this thought. Her mind was
elsewhere, and her eyes sought for another object. The
anxiety of her heart was too intense to make her heedful
of those minor influences, which, at another time,
would have shocked the sensibilities and overthrown all
the strength of her sex. She hurried forward, and her

eyes were busy all around her. The whole length of
the avenue seemed marked by the suffering victims, or
those who had ceased to suffer. Death had been busy
in this quarter, and tory and rebel had equally paid tribute
to the destroyer. A deep moaning, feebly uttered,
but full of pain, came to her ears. It guided her steps.
She followed the one sound only. A wounded man lay
half in the ditch, to which he had crawled as if to be out
of the way of the horses. His head and shoulders were
on the bank—the rest of his body was concealed. A
frightful gash disfigured his face, and the blood-smeared
features were yet pale with the sickness of death. He
stretched out a feeble arm as she approached. He muttered
a single word—

“Water.”

At another time, she would have run with the speed
of charity to bring him the blessed draught for which
he prayed, but now she gave him no heed. There
was nothing in his face which spoke to her heart, and
that moaning sound yet reached her ears at intervals.
She hurried onward, and the pleading wretch sank
back and perished, even as he prayed. She heard his
last gasping groan, but it had no effect upon her feeling.
Her mind was sensible only of the one sound which had
so far guided her footsteps. It seemed, through the medium
of some strange instinct, at once to convey itself to
her soul. She reached the bend in the avenue from
whence it came. On the edge of the ditch, half buried
in the water and the long grass, lay the wounded man.
A single glance informed her. She could not mistake
the uniform.

“Mellichampe,” she cried, in a thrilling voice of terror,
as, with one desperate bound, she rushed forward to
the spot, and, heedless of the thick blood which had died
the grass all around where he lay, sank on her knees
beside him, while her infolding arms were wrapped about
his bosom.

“Ernest—dear Ernest!—speak to me—tell me that
you live—say that you are mine still—that I do not lose
you. Look at me, Ernest—speak to me—speak to me
only once.”

He was in her arms—he breathed—he felt—but he
spoke not, and did not seem conscious. Her heart was
strong, though suffering; and her feeble strength of person,
under its promptings, was employed with an energy
of which she had never before conjectured one half the
possession, to drag him forth from the vines and brambles
which lay thick around his face—the concealing
cover in which he had been studiously placed by the
trusty Witherspoon the moment before his own flight.
From this cover she now strove to lift the form of her
lover, and, though wounding her delicate fingers at every
effort with the thorns, the devoted Janet felt nothing of
their injuries as she laboured with this object. With
great effort she succeeded in drawing him upon the bank,
and his head now rested upon her arms. A writhing
of his person—a choking, half-suppressed groan, attested
the returning consciousness with the increased
pain following this movement, and mixed moans and
menaces fell incoherently from his lips. Even these
signs, though signs of pain to him, and holding forth no
encouragement or hope to her, were yet more grateful
than the unconsciousness in which he lay before. She
spoke to him—the words bursting forth in an intensity
of natural eloquence from her tongue, which could scarce
have failed to arouse him, even from the stupor of overcoming
death itself.

“Speak to me, Mellichampe—dear Ernest, speak to
me Tell me that you live—that you are not hurt to
death. It is Janet—your own Janet that calls upon you.
Look up and see—look up and hear me—it is my arms,
dear Ernest, that hold you now—the bloody men are all
gone.”

And his dim eyes did unclose, and they did look up

with a sweet mournfulness of expression, vacant and
wild, that grew into a smile, almost of pleasure, when
they met the earnest, commiserating glance of hers.
They closed again almost instantly, however, but he
murmured her name at the moment.

“Janet—you?”

“Your own—in life and death, Ernest—ever your
own.”

And she clung to him with a tenacious hold at that
instant, as if determined that death should take no separate
victim. He was again conscious, and spoke,
though feebly:

“I fear me it is death, Janet. I feel it—this pain
cannot long be endured, and my limbs are useless.”

“Speak not thus, Ernest—I know it is not so. Stay
—move not. I will lift you to the house—I will—”

“You!” and he smiled feebly and fondly, as he arrested
the idle speech.

“God of Heaven! have mercy!—what shall I do?—
I may not help him,” and the exclamation burst spontaneously
from her lips, as she found, after repeated efforts,
that her feeble arms were inadequate to the task even of
lifting him from his present painful position to a drier
spot upon the bank. In her bewilderment and anguish,
she could only call his name in a bitter fondness. He
heard her complaints, and seemed to comprehend their
occasion. His lips parted, and, though with pain and a
sensible effort, he strove to speak to her. The words
were faint and inaudible. She bent down her ears, and
at length distinguished what he said. He but named to
her the faithful negro who had once before stood so opportunely
between him and his enemy, and had nearly
suffered a dreadful and ignominious death in consequence
of his fidelity.

“Scip—Scipio—he will come—Scip.”

His eyes closed with the effort, but her face brightened
as she listened to the words. She immediately

laid his head tenderly upon the bank, pressed the pale
unconscious forehead with her lips, and, bounding away
through the thicket, hurried with all the fleetness of a
zealous and devoted spirit to the completion of her task.