I trembled for the result. I trembled for our next interview. In the future I saw darkness and danger. I had but one hope, one joy—the love of Aurore!
I rose from my sleepless couch. I dressed and ate my breakfast hurriedly, mechanically.
That finished, I was at a loss what to do next. Should I return to the plantation, and seek another interview with Eugénie. No—not then. I had not the courage. It would be better, I reflected, to permit some time to pass—a day or two—before going back. Perhaps Mademoiselle would send for me?
Perhaps— At all events, it would be better to allow some days to elapse. Long days they would be to me!
I could not bear the society of any one. I shunned conversation; although I observed, as on the preceding day, that I was the object of scrutiny—the subject of comment among the loungers of the “bar,” and my acquaintances of the billiard-room. To avoid them, I remained inside my room, and endeavoured to kill time by reading.
I soon grew tired of this chamber-life; and upon the third morning I seized my gun, and plunged into the depth of the forest.
I moved amidst the huge pyramidal trunks of the cypresses, whose thick umbellated foliage, meeting overhead, shut out both sun and sky. The very gloom occasioned by their shade was congenial to my thoughts; and I wandered on, my steps guided rather by accident than design.
I did not search for game. I was not thinking of sport. My gun rested idly in the hollow of my arm. The raccoon, which in the more open woods is nocturnal, is here abroad by day. I saw the creature plunging his food into the waters of the bayou, and skulking around the trunks of the cypresses. I saw the opossum gliding along the fallen log, and the red squirrel, like a stream of fire, brushing up the bark of the tall tulip-tree. I saw the large “swamp-hare” leap from her form by the selvage of the cane-brake; and, still more tempting game, the fallow-deer twice bounded before me, roused from its covert in the shady thickets of the pawpaw-trees. The wild turkey, too, in all the glitter of his metallic plumage, crossed my path; and upon the bayou, whose bank I for some time followed, I had ample opportunity of discharging my piece at the blue heron or the egret, the summer duck or the snake-bird, the slender ibis or the stately crane. Even the king of winged creatures, the white-headed eagle, was more than once within range of my gun, screaming his maniac note among the tops of the tall taxodiums.
And still the brown tubes rested idly across my arm; nor did I once think of casting my eye along their sights. No ordinary game could have tempted me to interrupt the current, of my thoughts, that were dwelling upon a theme to me the most interesting in the world—Aurore the quadroon!