Charlemont; Or, The Pride of the Village Part 46

"No! I will say no more. You know enough already. I tell you, I believe Alfred Stevens to be a hypocrite and a villain. Is not that enough? What is it to you whether he is so or not? What is it to me, at least? You do not suppose that it is anything to me? Why should you? What should he be? I tell you he is nothing to me--nothing--nothing--nothing! Villain or hypocrite, or what not--he is no more to me than the earth on which I tread. Let me hear no more about him, I pray you. I would not hear his name! Are there not villains enough in the world, that you should think and speak of one only?"

With these vehement words she left the room, and hurried to her chamber.

She stopped suddenly before the mirror.

"And is it thus!" she exclaimed--"and I am--"

The mother by this time had followed her into the room.

"What is the meaning of this, Margaret?--tell me!" cried the old woman in the wildest agitation.

"What should it be, mother? Look at me!--in my eyes--do they not tell you? Can you not read?"

"I see nothing--I do not understand you, Margaret."

"Indeed! but you shall understand me! I thought my face would tell you without my words. _I_ see it there, legible enough, to myself. Look again!--spare me if you can--spare your own ears the necessity of hearing me speak!"

"You terrify me, Margaret--I fear you are out of your mind.

"No! no! that need not be your fear; nor, were it true, would it be a fear of mine. It might be something to hope--to pray for. It might bring relief. Hear me, since you will not see. You ask me why I believe Stevens to be a villain. I KNOW it."

"Ha! how know it!"

"How! How should I know it? Well, I see that I must speak. Listen then.

You bade me seek and make a conquest of him, did you not? Do not deny it, mother--you did."

"Well, if I did?"

"I succeeded! Without trying, I succeeded! He declared to me his love--he did!--he promised to marry me. He was to have married me yesterday--to have met me in church and married me. John Cross was to have performed the ceremony. Well! you saw me there--you saw me in white--the dress of a bride!--Did he come? Did you see him there? Did you see the ceremony performed?"

"No, surely not--you know without asking."

"I know without asking!--surely I do!--but look you, mother--do you think that conquests are to be made, hearts won, loves confessed, pledges given, marriage-day fixed--do these things take place, as matters of pure form? Is there no sensation--no agitation--no beating and violence about the heart--in the blood--in the brain! I tell you there is--a blinding violence, a wild, stormy, sensation--fondness, forgetfulness, madness! I say, madness! madness! madness!"

"Oh, my daughter, what can all this mean? Speak calmly, be deliberate!"

"Calm! deliberate! What a monster if I could be! But I am not mad now.

I will tell you what it means. It means that, in taking captive Alfred Stevens--in winning a lover--securing that pious young man--there was some difficulty, some peril. Would you believe it?--there were some privileges which he claimed. He took me in his arms. Ha! ha! He held me panting to his breast. His mouth filled mine with kisses--"

"No more, do not say more, my child!"

"Ay, more! more! much more! I tell you--then came blindness and madness, and I was dishonored--made a woman before I was made a wife! Ruined, lost, abused, despised, abandoned! Ha! ha! ha! no marriage ceremony.

Though I went to the church. No bridegroom there, though he promised to come. Preacher, church, bride, all present, yet no wedding. Ha! ha! ha!

How do I know!--Good reason for it, good reason--Ha! ha!--ah!"

The paroxysm, terminated in a convulsion. The unhappy girl fell to the floor as if stricken in the forehead. The blood gushed from her mouth and nostrils, and she lay insensible in the presence of the terrified and miserable mother.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

THE FATES FIND THE DAGGER AND THE BOWL.

For a long time she lay without showing any signs of life. Her pa.s.sions rebelled against the restraint which her mind had endeavored to put upon them. Their concentrated force breaking all bonds, so suddenly, was like the terrific outburst of the boiling lava from the gorges of the frozen mountain. Believing her dead, the mother rushed headlong into the highway, rending the village with her screams. She was for the time a perfect madwoman. The neighbors gathered to her a.s.sistance. That much-abused woman, the widow Thackeray, was the first to come. Never was woman's tenderness more remarkable than hers--never was woman's watch by the bed of sickness and suffering--that watch which woman alone knows so well how to keep--more rigidly maintained than by her! From the first hour of that agony under which Margaret Cooper fell to earth insensible, to the last moment in which her recovery was doubtful, that widow Thackeray--whose pa.s.sion for a husband had been described by Mrs. Cooper as so very decided and evident--maintained her place by the sick bed of the stricken girl with all the affection of a mother. Widow Thackeray was a woman who could laugh merrily, but she could shed tears with equal readiness. These were equally the signs of prompt feeling and nice susceptibility; and the proud Margaret, and her invidious mother, were both humbled by that spontaneous kindness for which, hitherto, they had given the possessor so very little credit, and to which they were now equally so greatly indebted.

Medical attendance was promptly secured. Charlemont had a very clever physician of the old school. He combined as was requisite in the forest region of our country, the distinct offices of the surgeon and mediciner. He was tolerably skilful in both departments. He found his patient in a condition of considerable peril. She had broken a blood-vessel; and the nicest care and closest attendance were necessary to her preservation. It will not need that we should go through the long and weary details which followed to her final cure. Enough, that she did recover. But for weeks her chance was doubtful. She lay for that s.p.a.ce of time, equally in the arms of life and death. For a long period, she herself was unconscious of her situation.

When she came to know, the skill of her attendants derived very little aid from her consciousness. Her mind was unfavorable to her cure; and this, by the way, is a very important particular in the fortunes of the sick. To despond, to have a weariness of life, to forbear hope as well as exertion, is, a hundred to one, to determine against the skill of the physician. Margaret Cooper felt a willingness to die. She felt her overthrow in the keenest pangs of its shame; and, unhappily, the mother, in her madness, had declared it.

The story of her fall--of the triumph of the serpent--was now the village property, and of course put an end to all further doubts on the score of the piety of Brother Stevens; though, by way of qualification of his offence, old Hinkley insisted that it was the fault of the poor damsel.

"She," he said, "had tempted him--had thrown herself in his way--had been brazen," and all that, of which so much is commonly said in all similar cases. We, who know the character of the parties, and have traced events from the beginning, very well know how little of this is true. Poor Margaret was a victim before she was well aware of those pa.s.sions which made her so. She was the victim not of l.u.s.t but of ambition. Never was woman more unsophisticated--less moved by unworthy and sinister design. She had her weaknesses--her pride, her vanity; and her pa.s.sions, which were tremendous, worked upon through these, very soon effected her undoing. But, for deliberate purpose of evil--of any evil of which her own intellect was conscious--the angels were not more innocent.

But mere innocence of evil design, in any one particular condition, is not enough for security. We are not only to forbear evil; virtue requires that we should be exercised for the purposes of good. She lacked the moral strength which such exercises, constantly pursued, would have a.s.sured her. She was a creature of impulse only, not of reflection. Besides, she was ignorant of her particular weaknesses. She was weak where she thought herself strong. This is always the error of a person having a very decided will. The will is constantly mistaken for the power. She could not humble herself, and in her own personal capacities--capacities which had never before been subjected to any ordeal-trial--she relied for the force which was to sustain her in every situation. Fancy a confident country-girl--supreme in her own district over the Hobs and Hinnies thereabouts--in conflict with the adroit man of the world, and you have the whole history of Margaret Cooper, and the secret of her misfortune. Let the girl have what natural talent you please, and the case is by no means altered. She must fall if she seeks or permits the conflict. She can only escape by flight. It is in consideration of this human weakness, that we pray G.o.d, nightly, not to suffer us to be exposed to temptation.

When the personal resources of her own experience and mind failed Margaret Cooper, as at some time or other they must fail all who trust only in them, she had no further reliance. She had never learned to draw equal strength and consolation from the sweet counsels of the sacred volume. Regarding the wild raving and the senseless insanity, which are but too frequently the language of the vulgar preacher, as gross ignorance and debasing folly, she committed the unhappy error of confounding the preacher with his cause. She had never been taught to make an habitual reference to religion; and her own experience of life, had never forced upon her those sage reflections which would have shown her that TRUE religion is the very all of life, and without it life has nothing. The humility of the psalmist, which was the real source of all the strength allotted to the monarch minstrel, was an unread lesson with her; and never having been tutored to refer to G.o.d, and relying upon her own proud mind and daring imagination, what wonder that these frail reeds should pierce her side while giving way beneath her.

It was this very confidence in her own strength--this fearlessness of danger (and we repeat the lesson here, emphatically, by way of warning)--a confidence which the possession of a quick and powerful mind naturally enough inspires--that effected her undoing. It was not by the force of her affections that she fell. THE AFFECTIONS ARE NOT APT TO BE STRONG IN A WOMAN WHOSE MIND LEADS HER OUT FROM HER s.e.x!

The seducer triumphed through the medium of her vanity. Her feeling of self-a.s.surance had been thus active from childhood, and conspicuous in all her sports and employments. SHE HAD NEVER BEEN A CHILD HERSELF. SHE LED ALWAYS IN THE PASTIMES OF HER PLAYMATES, MANY OF WHOM WERE OLDER THAN HERSELF.

She had no fears when others trembled; and, if she did not, at any time, so far transcend the bounds of filial duty as to defy the counsels of her parents, it was certainly no less true that she never sought for, and seldom seemed to need them. IT IS DANGEROUS WHEN THE WOMAN, THROUGH SHEER CONFIDENCE IN HER OWN STRENGTH, VENTURES UPON THE VERGE OF THE MORAL PRECIPICE. THEY VERY EXPERIMENTAL, WHERE THE Pa.s.sIONS ARE CONCERNED, PROVES HER TO BE LOST.

Margaret Cooper, confident in her own footsteps, soon learned to despise every sort of guardians.h.i.+p. The vanity of her mother had not only counselled and stimulated her own, but was of that gross and silly order, as to make itself offensive to the judgment of the girl herself.

This had the effect of losing her all the authority of a parent; and we have already seen, in the few instances where this authority took the shape of counsel, that its tendency was to evil rather than to good.

The arts of Alfred Stevens had, in reality, been very few. It was only necessary that he should read the character of his victim. This, as an experienced worldling--experienced in such a volume--he was soon very able to do. He saw enough to discover, that, while Margaret Cooper was endowed by nature with an extraordinary measure of intellect, she was really weak because of its possession. In due proportion to the degree of exercise to which she subjected her mere mind--making that busy and restless--was the neglect of her sensibilities--those nice ANTENNAE OF THE HEART.

"Whose instant touches, slightest pause,"

teach the approach of the smallest forms of danger, however inoffensive their shapes, however un.o.btrusive their advance. When the sensibilities are neglected and suffered to fall into disrepute, they grow idle first, and finally obtuse! even as the limb which you forbear to exercise loses its muscle, and withers into worthlessness.

When Alfred Stevens discovered this condition, his plan was simple enough. He had only to stimulate her mind into bolder exercise--to conduct it to topics of the utmost hardihood--to inspire that sort of moral recklessness which some people call courage--which delights to sport along the edge of the precipice, and to summon audacious spirits from the great yawning gulfs which lie below. This practice is always pursued at the expense of those guardian feelings which keep watch over the virtues of the tender heart.

The a.n.a.lysis of subjects commonly forbidden to the s.e.x, necessarily tends to make dull those habitual sentinels over the female conduct.

These sentinels are instincts rather than principles. Education can take them away, but does not often confer them. When, through the arts of Alfred Stevens, Margaret Cooper was led to discuss, perhaps to despise, those nice and seemingly purposeless barriers which society--having the experience of ages for its authority--has wisely set up between the s.e.xes--she had already taken a large stride toward pa.s.sing them. But of this, which a judicious education would have taught her, she was wholly ignorant. Her mind was too bold to be scrupulous; too adventurous to be watchful; and if, at any moment, a pause in her progress permitted her to think of the probable danger to her s.e.x of such adventurous freedom, she certainly never apprehended it in her own case. Such restraints she conceived to be essential only for the protection of THE WEAK among her s.e.x. Her vanity led her to believe that she was strong; and the approaches of the sapper were conducted with too much caution, with a progress too stealthy and insensible, to startle the ear or attract the eye of the un.o.bservant, yet keen-eyed guardian of her citadel. An eagle perched upon a rock, with wing outspread for flight, and an eye fixed upon the rolling clouds through which it means to dart, is thus heedless of the coiled serpent which lies beneath its feet.

The bold eye of Margaret Cooper was thus heedless. Gazing upon the sun, she saw not the serpent at her feet. It was not because she slept: never was eye brighter, more far-stretching; never was mind more busy, more active, than that of the victim at the very moment when she fell. It was because she watched the remote, not the near--the region in which there was no enemy, nothing but glory--and neglected that post which is always in danger. Her error is that of the general who expends his army upon some distant province, leaving his chief city to the a.s.sault and sack of the invader.

We have dwelt somewhat longer upon the moral causes which, in our story, have produced such cruel results, than the mere story itself demands; but no story is perfectly moral unless the author, with a wholesome commentary, directs the attention of the reader to the true weaknesses of his hero, to the point where his character fails; to the causes of this failure, and the modes in which it may be repaired or prevented.

In this way alone may the details of life and society be properly welded together into consistent doctrine, so that instruction may keep pace with delight, and the heart and mind be informed without being conscious of any of those tasks which accompany the lessons of experience.