After remaining for some time silent—not knowing what to say—Brandon at length summoned sufficient courage to stammer out his proposal. It was done with some fear and trembling.
He was more himself after he had received the refusal, which he did, in as delicate terms as the young lady could command.
But, delicacy was thrown away upon the spiteful planter, who, stung by the thought of being refused by the daughter of a poor white—he knew the secret of Jerry Rook’s altered circumstances—began upbraiding in terms of opprobrious wrath the woman from whose feet he had just arisen!
The young girl, thus grossly outraged, would have called to her father for protection, but again remembering his words, she remained silent under the infliction, not even making answer to her cowardly insulter.
“Somebody else, I suppose,” said the rejected gentleman, spitefully pronouncing the words. “Some poor ‘trash’ of your own sort has got a hold of you! By—!” the ruffian swore a frightful oath, “if it be so, when I find out who it is, and I don’t care who it is, I’ll make these settlements too hot to hold him! Lena Rook, you’ll rue this refusal!”
Not a word said Lena Rook in reply to this coarse invective. A disdainful curl upon her lip was all the answer she vouchsafed; which stayed there as she stood watching him along the walk, and until he had remounted his horse, and galloped off from the gate.
Her’s were not the only eyes bent upon the disappointed suitor. Jerry Rook, engaged among the pigs and poultry, saw him ride away; and from the spiteful spurring of his horse, and the reckless air with which he rode, the old hunter conjectured the sort of answer that had been given him.
“Durn the girl!” muttered he, as a black shadow swept across his wrinkled brow; “she’s played fool, an’ refused him! Looks as ef she’d sassed him! Never mind, Alf Brandon, I’ll make it all right for you. This chile ain’t a gwine to let that fine plantashin o’ your’s slip through his fingers—not ef he know it. You shall hev the gurl, and she you, ef I hev myself to drag her up to the haltar. So, then, my Lena, lass, when I’ve done here I’m a gwine to read you a lecture.”
If the abrupt departure of Brandon had brought anger into the eyes of Lena Rook, there was yet another pair watching it, that became suffused with joy.
They were the eyes of Pierre Robideau.