University of Virginia Library

4. CHAPTER IV.

We still continue to report the tradition, though it does not appear
that the subsequent statements of the affair were derived from
any acknowledged witness. It appears that, after the night had
set in, Margaret Cole fled from the barn in which she had been
left by her parents. She was seen, in this proceeding, by her little
brother, a lad of eight years old. Catching him by the arm
as they met, she exclaimed—“Oh, Billy, don't tell, don't tell, if
you love me!” The child kept the secret until her flight was
known, and the alarm which it occasioned awakened his own apprehensions.
He described her as looking and speaking very
wildly; so much so as to frighten him. The hue and cry was
raised, but she was not found for several hours after, and then—
but we must not anticipate.

It appears—and we still take up the legend without being able
to show the authorities—it appears that, as soon as she could
hope for concealment, under cover of the night, she took her way
through unfrequented paths in the forest, running and walking,
toward the store of Wilson Hurst. This person, it appears, kept
his store on the road-side, some four miles from the village of
Orangeburg, the exact spot on which it stood being now only conjectured.
A shed-room, adjoining the store, he occupied as his
chamber. To this shed-room she came a little after midnight,
and tapping beneath the window, she aroused the inmate. He
rose, came to the window, and, without opening it, demanded who
was there. Her voice soon informed him, and the pleading, pitiful,
agonizing tones, broken and incoherent, told him all her painful
story. She related the confession which she had made to her
parents, and implored him at once to take her in, and fulfil those
promises by which he had beguiled her to her ruin. The night
was a cold and cheerless one in February—her chattering teeth
appealed to his humanity, even if her condition had not invoked
his justice. Will it be believed that the wretch refused her?

He seemed to have been under the impression that she was accompanied
by her friends, prepared to take advantage of his confessions;
and, under this persuasion, he denied her asseverations
—told her she was mad—mocked at her pleadings, and finally
withdrew once more, as if to his couch and slumbers.

We may fancy what were the feelings of the unhappy woman.
It is not denied to imagination, however it may be to speech, to
conjecture the terrible despair, the mortal agony swelling in her
soul, as she listened to the cold-blooded and fiendish answer to
her poor heart's broken prayer for justice and commiseration.
What an icy shaft must have gone through her soul, to hearken
to such words of falsehood, mockery and scorn, from those lips
which had once pleaded in her ears with all the artful eloquence
of love—and how she must have cowered to the earth, as if the
mountains themselves were falling upon her as she heard his retiring
footsteps—he going to seek those slumbers which she has
never more to seek or find. That was death—the worst death—
the final death of the last hope in her doomed and desolated heart.
But one groan escaped her—one gasping sigh—the utterance, we
may suppose, of her last hope, as it surrendered up the ghost—
and then, all was silence!