"How came you here, my poor darling Ellen? are friends here?--is that Cameron's voice?" The captain knelt down by him and convulsively pressed his hand, but he could not speak.
"God bless you, Cameron! Take my poor child to her mother--implore her--to--and it is to-night, this very night--she and my boy are happy--and I--and my poor Ellen--" A fearful convulsion choked his voice, but after a little while he tried to speak again--
"My poor child, I have prepared you for this; but I know you must grieve for me. Take my blessing to your brother, tell him to protect--love your mother, darling! she must love you at last--a ring--my left hand--take it to her--oh! how I have loved her--God have mercy on her--on my poor children!" He tried to press his lips again on Ellen's cheek and brow, but the effort was vain--and at the very moment Mrs. Fortescue had stood transfixed by some unknown terror, her husband ceased to breathe.
It was long before Ellen rallied from that terrible scene. Even when the fever which followed subsided, and she had been taken, apparently perfectly restored to health, once more to her mother and brother, its recollection so haunted her, that her many lonely hours became fraught with intense suffering. Her imagination, already only too morbid, dwelt again and again upon the minutest particular of that field of horror; not only her father, but the objects which, when her whole heart was wrapped in him, she seemed not even to have seen. The ghastly heaps of dead, the severed limbs, the mangled trunks, the gleaming faces all fixed in the distorted expressions with which they died--the very hollow groans and louder cry of pain which, as she passed through the field, had fallen on her ear unheeded, returned to the poor child's too early awakened fancy so vividly, that often and often it was only a powerful though almost unconscious effort that prevented the scream of fear. Her father's last words were never forgotten; she would not only continue to love her mother because he had desired her to do so, but because _he had so loved her_, and on her first return home this seemed easier than ever to accomplish. Mrs. Fortescue, tortured by remorse and grief, had somewhat softened toward the child who had received the last breath of her husband; and could Ellen have overcome the reserve and fear which so many years of estrangement had engendered, and given vent to the warmth of her nature, Mrs. Fortescue might have learned to know, and knowing, to love her--but it was then too late.