For reasons already known, she is often deprived of her sister’s company; having to content herself with that of her mulatto maid.
A companion who can well sympathise; for Jule, like herself, has a canker at the heart. The “yellow girl” on leaving Mississippi State has also left a lover behind. True, not one who has proved false—far from it. But one who every day, every hour of his life, is in danger of losing it. Jupe she supposes to be still safe, within the recesses of the cypress swamp, but cannot tell how long his security may continue. If taken, she may never see him more, and can only think of his receiving some terrible chastisement. But she is sustained by the reflection, that her Jupiter is a brave fellow, and crafty as courageous; by the hope he will yet get away from that horrid hiding-place, and rejoin her, in a land where the dogs of Dick Darke can no more scent or assail him. Whatever may be the fate of the fugitive, she is sure of his devotion to herself; and this hinders her from despairing.
She is almost as much alarmed about her young mistress whom she sees grieving, day by day evidently sinking under some secret sorrow.
To her it is not much of a secret. She more than guesses at the cause; in truth, knows it, as it is known to that mistress herself. For the wench can read; and made the messenger of that correspondence carried on clandestinely, strange, if, herself a woman, she should not surmise many things beyond what could be gleaned from the superscription on the exchanged epistles.
She has surmised; but, like her mistress, something wide away from the reality. No wonder at her being surprised at what she sees in a Natchez newspaper—brought to the hotel from a boat just arrived at Natchitoches—something concerning Charles Clancy, very different from that suspected of him. She stays not to consider what impression it may produce on the mind of the young lady. Unpleasant no doubt; but a woman’s instinct whispers the maid, it will not be worse than the agony her mistress is now enduring.
Entering the chamber, where the latter is alone, she places the paper in her hands, saying: “Missy Helen, here’s a newspaper from Natchez, brought by a boat just arrived. There’s something in it, I think, will be news to you—sad too.”
Helen Armstrong stretches forth her hand, and takes hold of the sheet. Her fingers tremble, closing upon it; her whole frame, as she searches through its columns.
At the same time her eyes glow, burn, almost blaze, with a wild unnatural light—an expression telling of jealousy roused, rekindled, in a last spurt of desperation. Among the marriage notices she expects to see that of Charles Clancy with a Creole girl, whose name is unknown to her. It will be the latest chapter, climax and culminating point, of his perfidy!
Who could describe the sudden revulsion of thought; what pen depict the horror that sweeps through her soul; or pencil portray the expression of her countenance, as, with eyes glaring aghast, she rests them on a large type heading, in which is the name “Charles Clancy?”
For, the paragraph underneath tells not of his marriage, but his murder!