University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.

Margaret Cooper was at length permitted to emerge
from the place of her concealment. The voice of the
lovers were lost, as well as their forms, in the wooded
distance. Dreaming, like children as they were, of life
and happiness, they had wandered off, too happy to fancy
for a moment that the world contained, in its wide vast
bosom, one creature half so wretched as she who hung
above them, brooding, like some wild bird of the cliff, over
the storm which had robbed her of her richest plumage.
She sank back into the woods. She no longer had the
heart to commit the meditated crime. This purpose had
left her mind. It had given place to another, however,
scarcely less criminal. We have seen her, under the first
impression that the stranger whose voice she heard was
Alfred Stevens, turning the muzzle of the pistol from her
breast to the path on which he was approaching. Though
she discovered her error and laid the weapon down, the
sudden suggestion of her mind, at that moment, gave a
new direction to her mood. Why should she not seek to
avenge her wrong? Was he to escape without penalty?
Was she to be a quiescent victim? True she was a woman,
destined it would seem to suffer, perhaps, with a
more than ordinary share of that suffering which falls to
her sex. But she had also a peculiar strength—the strength
of a man in some respects; and in her bosom she now
felt the sudden glow of one of his fiercest passions. Revenge
might be in her power. She might redress her
wrong by her own hand. It was a weapon of death which
she grasped. In her grasp it might be made a weapon of
power. The suggestion seemed to be that of justice only.
It was one that filled her whole soul with a triumphant and
a wild enthusiasm.

“I shall not be stricken down without danger to mine
enemy. For this, this, at least, strength was allotted me.
Let him tremble. In his place of seeming security let
him tremble. I shall pursue his steps. I will find him

out. There shall be a day of retribution! Alfred Stevens,
there is a power within me, which tells me you are no
longer safe!

“And why may I not secure this justice—this vengeance?
Why? Because I am a woman. Ha! We shall
see. If I am a woman, I can be an enemy—and such an
enemy! An enemy not to be appeased, not to be overcome.
War always with my foe—war to the knife—war
to the last!

Such a nature as that of Margaret Cooper needed some
such object to give it the passionate employment without
which it must recoil upon itself and end either in suicide
or madness. She brooded upon this new thought. She
found in it a grateful exercise. From the moment when
she conceived the idea of being the avenger of her own
wrong, her spirit became more elastic—she became less
sensible to the possible opinions upon her condition which
might be entertained by others. She found consolation,
in retreating to this one thought, from all the rest. Of the
difficulties in the way of her design, it was not in her impetuous
character to think. She never once suspected that
the name of Alfred Stevens had been an assumed one. She
never once asked how she was to pursue and hunt him up.
She thought of a male disguise for herself, it is true, but
of the means and modes of travel—in what direction to go,
and after what plan to conduct her pursuit, she had not the
most distant idea.

She addressed herself to her new design, however, in
one respect, with amazing perseverance. It diverted her
from other and more oppressive thoughts. Her pistols
she carried secretly to a very distant wood, where she
concealed them in the hollow of a tree. To this wood she
repaired secretly and daily. Here she selected a tree as
a mark. A small section of the bark, which she tore
away, at a given height, she learned to regard as the breast
of her seducer. This was the object of her aim. Without
any woman fears she began her practice and continued
it, day by day, until, as we are told by one of the chroniclers
of her melancholy story, “she could place a ball
with an accuracy, which, were it universally equalled by
modern duellists, would render duelling much more fatal
than it commonly is.” In secret she procured gunpowder

and lead, by arts so ingenious as to baffle detection. At
midnight when her mother slept she moulded her bullets.
Well might the thoughts and feelings which possessed her
mind, while engaged in this gloomy labour, have endowed
every bullet with a wizard spell to make it do its bidding
truly. Bitter, indeed, were the hours so appropriated;
but they had their consolations. Dark and terrible were
the excited moods in which she retired from her toils to
that slumber which she could not always secure. And
when it did come, what were its images! The tree, the
mark, the weapon, the deep, dim forest, all the scenes and
trials of the day, were renewed in her sleep. A gloomy
wood filled her eyes—a victim dabbled in blood lay before
her; and, more than once, her own fearful cry of vengeance
and exultation awakened her from those dreams of
sleep, which strengthened her in the terrible pursuit of the
object which occasioned them.

Such thoughts and practices, continued with religious
pertinacity, from day to day, necessarily had its effect
upon her appearance as well as her character. Her beauty
assumed a wilder aspect. Her eye shot forth a supernatural
fire. She never smiled. Her mouth was rigid and
compressed as if her heart was busy in an endless conflict.
Her gloom, thus nurtured by solitude and the continual
presence of a brooding imagination of revenge, darkened
into something like ferocity. Her utterance became brief
and quick—her tones sharp, sudden, and piercing. She
had but one thought which never seemed to desert her,
yet of this thought no ear ever had cognizance. It was
of the time when she should exercise the skill which she
had now acquired upon that destroyer of herself, whom
she now felt herself destined to destroy. Of course we
are describing a madness—one of those peculiar forms of
the disease which seems to have its origin in natural and
justifiable suggestions of reason. Not the less a madness
for all that. Succeeding in her practice at one distance,
Margaret Cooper changed it. From one point to another
she constantly varied her practice, until her aim grew certain
at almost any distance within the ordinary influence
of the weapon. To strike her mark at thirty paces, became,
in a little while, quite as easy as to do so at five;
and, secure now of her weapon, her next object—though

there was no cessation of her practice—was how to seek
and where to find the victim.

In this new object she meditated to disguise herself in
the apparel of a man. She actually commenced the making
up of the several garments of one. This was also the
secret labour of the midnight hour, when her feeble-minded
mother slept. She began to feel some of the difficulties
lying in the way of this pursuit, and her mind grew troubled
to consider them, without, however, relaxing in its
determination. That seemed a settled matter. While
she brooded over this new feature of her purpose—as if
fortunately to arrest the mad design—her mother fell seriously
sick, and was for some time in danger. The duty of
attending upon her, put a temporary stop to her thoughts
and exercises; though without having the effect of expelling
them from her mind. But another event, upon her
mother's recovery, tended to produce a considerable alteration
in her thoughts. A new care filled her heart and
rendered her a different being, in several respects. She
was soon to become a mother. The sickness of soul
which oppressed her under this conviction, gave a new
direction to her mood without lessening its bitterness; and,
in proportion as she found her vengeance delayed, so was
the gratification which it promised, a heightened desire in
her mind.

For the humiliating and trying event which was at hand,
Margaret Cooper prepared with a degree of silent firmness
which denoted quite as strongly the resignation of despair
as any other feeling. The child is born. Margaret Cooper
has at length become a mother. She has suffered the
agony, without being able to feel the compensating pride
and pleasure of one. It was the witness of her shame—
could she receive it with any assurances of love? It is
doubtful if she did. For some time after its birth, the
hapless woman seemed to be unconscious, or half-conscious
only, of her charge. A stupor weighed upon her senses.
When she did awaken, and her eyes fell upon the face and
form of the infant with looks of recognition, one long, long
piercing shriek burst from her lips. She closed her eyes
—she turned away from the little unoffending, yet offensive
object with a feeling of horror. Its features were
those of Alfred Stevens. The likeness was indelible; and

this identity drew upon the child a share of that loathing
hatred with which she now remembered the guilty father.

It may very well be supposed that the innocent babe
suffered under these circumstances. The milk which it
drew from the mother's breast, was the milk of bitterness,
and it did not thrive. It imbibed gall instead of nutriment.
Day after day it pined in hopeless misery; and though
the wretched mother strove to supply its wants and soothe
its little sorrows, with a gradually increasing interest which
overcame her first loathing, there was yet that want of
sweetest sympathy which nothing merely physical could
well supply. Debility was succeeded by disease—fever
preyed upon its little frame, which was now reduced to a
skeleton. One short month only had elapsed from its
birth, and it lay, in the silence of exhaustion upon the arm
of its mother. Its eyes, from whence the flickering light
was escaping fast, looked up into hers, as she fancied,
with an expression of reproach. She felt, on the instant,
the pang of the maternal conscience. She forgot the unworthy
father, as she thought of the neglectful mother.
She bent down, and, for the first time, imprinted on its
little lips the maternal kiss. A smile seemed to glimmer
on its tiny features; and, from that moment, Margaret
Cooper resolved to forget her injuries, for the time at least,
in the consideration of her proper duties. But her resolution
came too late. Even while her breast was within
its boneless gums, a change came over the innocent. She
did not heed it. Her eyes and thoughts were elsewhere;
and thus she mused, gazing vacantly upon the wall of her
chamber until her mother entered the room. Mrs. Cooper
gave but a single glance at the infant when she saw that
its little cares were over.

“Oh, Margaret!” she exclaimed, “the child is dead.”

The mother looked down with a start and shudder. A
big tear fell from her eyes upon the cold cheek of the
innocent. She released it to her mother, turned her
face upon the couch, and uttered her thanks to Heaven
that had so decreed it—that had left her again free for
that darker purpose which had so long filled her mind.

“Better so,” she murmured to her mother. “It is at
peace. It will neither know its own nor its mother's griefs.
It is free from that shame for which I must live!”

“But there are other things to live for besides shame,
Margaret,” said the mother.

“There are!” said Margaret solemnly. “There are!
Were there not I should, indeed, be desperate!”

When all the cares of the burial were over, and the
crowd gone, and the cottage of the widow Cooper was
once more abandoned to the cheerlessness and wo within,
Margaret Cooper spoke to her mother in the language of
that will which the latter had not often found courage to
resist.

“Let us leave this place, mother. I cannot, I will not
live here any longer.”

“Why, where would you go?”

“Back to that old farm of which you speak so much,
and from which, in evil hour, you brought me. It was
my childhood's home—would it could receive me as a
child again. At all events let us leave this place. Here,
every thing offends me—every face, every spot. The
eyes of people mock me with their looks of pity, or it
may be of scorn. Let us go. We cannot depart too
soon.”

“But, Margaret—”

“Mother, if I stay here I madden!”

The entreaties of the unhappy girl prevailed. The mother
had not often prevailed in their controversies. The
strong naturally swayed the feebler will. A few days
were devoted to necessary arrangements, and then they
left Charlemont for ever.

“She retired,” says the rude chronicle from which
many of our facts have been borrowed, “to a romantic
little farm in—, there to spend, in seclusion, with
her aged mother, and a few servants, the remainder of her
days.”

With their departure, we also take leave of Charlemont.
We shall meet some of its people hereafter, but our scene,
henceforward will lie in another region, to which our readers
are implored to follow us.