“But every moment of your stay is replete with peril to you! Squads of rebel soldiers pass every now and then to plunder the dying and the dead. And the fog is blowing away, and it is getting clearer and lighter every minute, and if they come this way and discover you, they will capture you immediately.”
“So they will you, Justin, if they discover your rank. And I am resolved to stay and share your fate,” she firmly replied.
“Oh, Britomarte! Britomarte! think of the horrors of the Libby Prison! How could you—a woman—bear them! Reflect and fly, Britomarte! Fly, and save yourself in time!” he urged.
“If I were able to take you up on my shoulders and bear you off from the battle-field, as Aeneas bore his father from burning Troy, I would do so. But as I am not able so to save you, I will stay and share your fate. ‘Horrors of the Libby Prison?’—Oh, Justin! there is nothing in this world so hard to bear as separation from those we love. Nothing, Justin, nothing! I know it, I feel it. I said so, Justin, when you left me to go into the army; and so I disguised myself and followed you to the field. And I say so now, kneeling by your side in this vale of blood. I am now your promised wife, and nothing on earth shall ever part me from your side unless I should be torn by violence away. If you go to Libby, I go to Libby; happier if I share your fate in that foul prison and pest-house than I could be anywhere else on earth.”
“But, Britomarte, for your own sake—for my sake!”
“Justin, my beloved, I abjured my womanhood, disguised myself and followed you to battle; I have been by your side on twenty well fought fields; I have dared what woman never dared before, that I might be ever with you! Justin, Justin, my true love! my husband for time and eternity! never again ask me to leave you!” she exclaimed, her voice and all her frame trembling with emotion.
“I will not! Before heaven, I promise it! I will never ask you, I will never consent to your leaving me!” fervently, earnestly, solemnly replied Justin, closing his hand upon her.
“That is well! Now let us talk calmly together, while we wait for what may happen. And now tell me, Justin, how it was that you recognized me, as you did, from the beginning? I thought I was well disguised, and I am a good actress; with almost a Protean power of changing my face, and with a ventriloquist’s gift of changing my voice!” she said.
“Yes, you were well disguised! wonderfully well! You had sacrificed your luxuriant and beautiful, dark brown tresses, and had put on a skull-cap wig of short, stiff, bristling flaxen hair, and drawn it tight and low over your forehead, making the latter much narrower than nature had formed it. You had shaved off your arched black eyebrows, giving your face the bald look corresponding to the short, stiff hair, and quite altering the expression of your eyes. You had widened your mouth by two deep hidden lines in the corner. Altogether you had made, as you women say, ‘a figure of yourself,’ which was not Britomarte. You had put yourself in the uniform of a United States soldier. And you always carried four or five pebbles in your mouth, to make you speak thickly like a German,” said Justin.
“And yet you recognized me?”