For one second she looked in my face, her features lighted up with a beam of confiding joy, and then her gaze fell in timid confusion on the ground.
“Take her, dear Howard!” said her father, who had followed us unperceived. “She is the best of daughters, and will make as good a wife.”
Louise sank into my arms. An hour later I was on my way homewards.
At last, then, I was irrevocably pledged, and my bachelorship drew near its close. I felt that I had made a judicious choice. Louise was an excellent girl, sensible, prudent, active, and cheerful—uniting, in short, all the qualities desirable in a backwoodsman’s wife. It was strange enough that all this should only have occurred to me within a few hours. I had been living two months under the same roof with her, and yet the idea of her becoming my wife had never entered my head till the preceding night.
It was four in the afternoon when I reached my plantation, which I was very near passing without recognising it, so great was the change that had taken place since my last visit. The rubbish and tree-trunks that had then encumbered the vicinity of the house had disappeared—the garden had been increased in size, and surrounded by a new and elegant fence—a verandah, under which two negro carpenters were at work, ran along the front and sides of the house. As I walked up from the boat, young Ménou came to meet me. I shook him heartily by the hand, and expressed my gratitude for the trouble he had taken, and my wonder at the astonishing progress the improvements of all kinds had made.
“How have you possibly managed to effect all these miracles?” said I.
“Very easily,” replied Ménou. “You sent us fifteen negroes; my father lent me ten of his. With these, and the twenty-five you had before, we were able to make progress. We are now putting the finishing-stroke to your cotton press, which was fearfully out of order.”
I walked with a thankful heart through the garden, and stepped into the verandah. The rooms that looked out upon it were all fitted up in the most comfortable manner. In the principal bedroom, a negro girl was working at the elegant musquitto curtains. Old Sybille, in a calico gown of the most glaring colours, her face shining with contentment, was brushing away some invisible dust from the furniture in the parlour.
“By the by,” said young Ménou, opening a writing-desk, “here are several letters that have come for you within the last few days, and that amidst my various occupations I have quite forgotten to forward.”
I sat down and opened them. Two were from Richards, the earliest in date, inviting me to go and stay with him again. The more recent one renewed the invitation, and expressed the writer’s surprise at my having become on a sudden so domestic a character. In a postscript he added, as a sort of inducement to me to visit him, that he was daily expecting a friend of his wife’s, the beautiful Emily Warren. Not a syllable, however, about the eight thousand dollars, which surprised me not a little; for Richards was by no means a man to remain silent on a subject affecting his worldly interest, and I fully expected he would have felt and expressed some pique or resentment at my sudden withdrawal of my funds. But, on the contrary, the letter I had given to Ménou, in which I requested Richards to pay over the money in question to the Creole, was not even alluded to.