The dying eyes looked eagerly at Neville as the latter read the words; but when he replied, "Yes, I will tell her, and give her hack her book enriched with such a sacred recollection," a look of infinite content rested on the pallid face.
"I bless God I ever met her," faltered the failing voice. "Tell her," it continued with a final effort, "Tell her—we shall meet again—where they neither marry—nor are given in marriage—but are as the angels of God in heaven!" And with a smile of ineffable peace the happy spirit departed from the carnage of earth's battles to the everlasting peace of the skies.
Tears of pity fell fast from the eyes of the tender-hearted Katharine as she listened to the touching narration. As soon as she could sufficiently command her feelings she wrote a sympathetic letter to the now doubly-bereaved widow of the stately Melton Hall, amid the broad ancestral acres of Berkshire. She enclosed therewith the jewelled cross, which had been committed to her keeping; but the blood-stained hymn-book she placed in her little cabinet, beside the Prayer-Book with its leaves of rosemary for remembrance and pansies for thoughts.
The fellow-officers of Captain Villiers erected over the grave in which their comrade was buried, beneath the walls of the humble Methodist Church, a marble slab commemorating his valour and his heroic death. With the lapse of five-and-sixty years, however, its brief inscription has become well nigh illegible through the weathering of the elements, and the grave has become indistinguishable from the mouldering mounds on every side around it. But beneath the funeral hatchment of his father, on the chancel walls of Melton-Mowbray Church, is a marble shield charged with a cross enguled and a wyvern volant; and a record of the untimely death of the hope and last scion of the house on the banks of the far-off Niagara.
CHAPTER XX
CLOSING SCENES OF THE WAR.
We return now to retrace the fortunes of the war of which the culminating acts, at least in Upper Canada, had now taken place. After the fatal fight of Lundy's Lane, as we have seen, the American force retreated precipitately on Fort Erie, of which they retained possession, and, working night and day, formed an entrenched camp for their protection, strengthening a line of abattis along the front. The victorious British columns closely followed, and for three weeks the camp and fort occupied by the American army were closely besieged by a force only two-thirds as numerous. Two American armed vessels, which supported the fort on the lake side, were very cleverly captured in a night attack by Captain Dobbs, of the Royal Navy, by means of boats conveyed by sheer force of human muscles twenty miles across the country in the rear of the American lines, from the Niagara to Lake Erie.
The British forces also threw up strong entrenchments and planted batteries; and the two armies lay watching each other like couchant lions, waiting the opportunity to make the fatal spring. The guns on the batteries were kept double shotted, and through the long nights dark lanterns were kept burning, and linstocks ready for firing lay beside every gun. Ever and anon a live shell screamed through the air, one of which penetrating an American magazine, caused it to explode with fearful violence.
On the 14th of August, after a vigorous bombardment, a night attack, in three columns, was made upon the fort. At two o'clock in the morning, the columns moved out of the trenches, with the utmost silence, bearing scaling ladders, and crept stealthily over the plain toward the apparently slumbering fort. Dark clouds hung low, and the only sounds heard were the melancholy cry of the loon and the measured dash of the waves upon the shore. At length the American picket discovered the approach of the British columns and gave the alarm. The bugles rang shrill in the ear of night. Every embrasure of the seemingly sleeping fort flashed forth its tongue of flame, revealing the position of the assailants, and the gloom settled heavier than ever, deepened still further by the sulphureous clouds of smoke from the cannon. The British van hacked with their swords at the abattis, and tried, by wading through a marsh, to enter the curtain of the fore by a flank movement. Rent and torn by a fire of canister and grape, five times the assailing columns were hurled back, and five times, undaunted, they returned to the charge.
At length the wall was reached, the ladders were planted, and Lieutenant-Colonel Drummond, with a hundred men of the Royal Artillery, gained a footing in a bastion. The parole by which they recognized each other in the dark was "steel"—an omen of the desperate means used to insure their victory. With pike and bayonet they rushed upon the garrison. Their comrades swarmed up the scaling ladders and filled the bastion. Suddenly the ground heaved and trembled as with the throes of an earthquake. There came a burst of thunder sound; a volcano of fire and timber; stones and living men were hurled two hundred feet in the air; and the night settled down on the scene of chaos. The British columns, utterly demoralized by this appalling disaster, fell back precipitately on their entrenchments, leaving the mangled bodies of two hundred of their comrades, among them the gallant leader, Lieutenant-Colonel Drummond, in the fatal fosse and bastion.