Thoughts such as these left him no peace; yet, after reading her letter over and over again, he fancied he could detect in it some faint promise for the future.
All hope of finding his unknown mistress was not yet lost; this enigmatic ring that she promised him, and that was to announce the most passionately longed-for of events, constituted in itself a kind of correspondence. Besides, since an arrangement was to be made by which the child should at any time be able to find its father, it was evident that his fate and existence must continue to interest the mother, and the thought that the invisible stranger would be watching over his fortunes took hold of his imagination and afforded him some consolation.
But a fresh grief awaited him; orders were given for his regiment to go into garrison in a small town of the north of France, and Léon, forced to accompany his men, was plunged anew into the depths of despair. He felt that in leaving Paris he lost all chance of discovering traces of her he sought, and that, once buried in the distant provinces, he might easily be forgotten; even the message he was awaiting with such impatience would perhaps never reach him there. Still he had no alternative but to leave, and residence in the little town, with no society and no resource but solitary country walks, did not contribute greatly to relieve Léon's melancholy mood.
[V]
Whilst Léon, brooding in dull exile over his troubles, was mentally calculating the hours that must elapse before the expected message could be despatched, his unknown friend, also in seclusion, but in a charming estate situated on the road from Tours to Bordeaux, was freely indulging in those joyful anticipations that her audacity, coupled with her warm, eager blood, had warranted. In the independent position in which she now found herself everything was new, and everything seemed pleasant.
Born in Martinique, and reared amongst a slave population, the youthful Elinor at sixteen had never known any restraint but that of her parents' indulgent rule; she had never felt the salutary yoke of the hard and fast laws of society. But at this period of her life her beauty, which had begun to make some stir in the place, aroused the admiration of M. de Roselis, the richest settler in the island. He came forward to ask for her hand, and his wealth so dazzled her ambitious relatives that it was granted immediately.
He was a man of some forty years, with a handsome face but a character as odious as it was contemptible. He had been the overseer of the property he now owned, and had spent his life there, and the habit of command had developed in him all those vices which invariably spring from isolation and unlimited power. Suspicious and violent, unprincipled and unscrupulous, his vanity, flattered by the possession of the handsomest girl in the colony, soon effaced in him any sentiment for her except that of a mean jealousy, which he indulged with the inflexibility of his imperious temper.
Elinor, shut up amongst her Negresses, over whom she had no control—many of them being, indeed, her own rivals—had now to endure the vilest treatment. Her proud and sensitive heart was filled with a deep-rooted resentment, and she visited on all men the hatred and contempt which were merited by the only one whom she had opportunity of judging.
Her parents died of grief at having thus sacrificed their only child, and shortly after her husband, worn out by a manner of life whose pleasures he had thoroughly exhausted, began to make preparations to remove to France. He had already arranged for the purchase of an estate in that country, when he was suddenly overtaken by death in the midst of a debauch.