CHAPTER III.
THE USURER'S BARGAIN.
Cora's father, Gerald Leslie, was the owner of a fine estate upon the banks of a lake about two miles out of New Orleans, and also of a handsome house in that city. It is at this latter residence that we will introduce him to the reader.
Gerald Leslie was in the very prime of life. Scarcely yet forty-five years of age, time had set no mark upon his thick chestnut hair or his handsome face, save a few almost imperceptible wrinkles which the cares of the last year or two had drawn in rigid lines about his well-shaped mouth.
His features were massive and regular; the brow broad and intellectual; the large hazel eyes bright but yet thoughtful; and there was a shade of melancholy in the general expression of the countenance which lent a peculiar charm to the face of Gerald Leslie.
It was the face of one who had suffered. It was the face of one who had found himself a lonely man in the very prime of life; in that hour of all other hours in which a man yearns for the smiles of loving eyes, the warm pressure of friendly hands. It was the face of one who had discovered too late that he had sacrificed the happiness of his life to a mistaken principle.
While the good ship Virginia is sailing away from the dim blue shores of the fading English coast, bearing Mrs. Montresor, her nephew and niece and Cora Leslie to their far Southern home, let us enter the planter's luxuriously furnished study, and watch him as he bends over his desk.
The burning Southern sun is banished from the apartment by means of Venetian shutters; the floor is covered with a cool matting woven from Indian reeds; and the faint plash of a fountain in a small garden at the back of the house is heard through one of the open windows.
It is not a pleasant task which occupies the planter. His brow contracts as he examines the papers, pausing every now and then to jot down two or three figures against a long row of accounts, which look terribly formidable, even to the uninitiated. At last he throws down a heap of documents with a weary sigh, and flinging himself back in his chair, abandons himself to gloomy thought.
"Yes, the truth is out at last," he muttered; "no hope of a settlement in England; no chance of a happy home on the other side of the blue Atlantic with my Cora, my only one. Nothing before me but the weary struggle of a ruined man, with difficulties so gigantic that, struggle as I may, they must close in upon me and crush me at the last. Oh, Philip Treverton, but for the cruel deception you practiced upon me, I should not be in this position."