“I shall keep that tryst,” he says, in soliloquy, seeming at length to have settled it. “Yes; I’ll meet her under the magnolia. Who can tell what changes may occur in the heart of a woman? In history I had a royal namesake—an English king, with an ugly hump on his shoulders—as he’s said himself, ‘deformed, unfinished, sent into the world scarce half made up,’ so that the ‘dogs barked at him,’ just as this brute of Clancy’s has been doing at me. And this royal Richard, shaped ‘so lamely and unfashionable,’ made court to a woman, whose husband he had just assassinated—more than a woman, a proud queen—and more than wooed, he subdued her. This ought to encourage me; the better that I, Richard Darke, am neither halt, nor hunchbacked. No, nor yet unfashionable, as many a Mississippian girl says, and more than one is ready to swear.
“Proud Helen Armstrong may be, and is; proud as England’s queen herself. For all that, I’ve got something to subdue her—a scheme, cunning as that of my royal namesake. May God, or the Devil, grant me like success!”
At the moment of giving utterance to the profane prayer, he rises to his feet. Then, taking out his watch, consults it.
It is too dark for him to see the dial; but springing open the glass, he gropes against it, feeling for the hands.
“Half-past nine,” he mutters, after making out the time. “Ten is the hour of her assignation. No chance for me to get home before, and then over to Armstrong’s wood-ground. It’s more than two miles from here. What matters my going home? Nor any need changing this dress. She won’t notice the hole in the skirt. If she do, she wouldn’t think of what caused it—above all it’s being a bullet. Well, I must be off! It will never do to keep the young lady waiting. If she don’t feel disappointed at seeing me, bless her! If she do, I shall curse her! What’s passed prepares me for either event. In any case, I shall have satisfaction for the slight she’s put upon me. By God I’ll get that!”
He is moving away, when a thought occurs staying him. He is not quite certain about the exact hour of Helen Armstrong’s tryst, conveyed in her letter to Clancy. In the madness of his mind ever since perusing that epistle, no wonder he should confuse circumstances, and forget dates.
To make sure, he plunges his hand into the pocket, where he deposited both letter and photograph—after holding the latter before the eyes of his dying foeman, and witnessing the fatal effect. With all his diabolical hardihood, he had been awed by this—so as to thrust the papers into his pocket, hastily, carelessly.
They are no longer there!
He searches in his other pockets—in all of them, with like result. He examines his bullet-pouch and gamebag. But finds no letter, no photograph, not a scrap of paper, in any! The stolen epistle, its envelope, the enclosed carte de visite—all are absent.
After ransacking his pockets, turning them inside out, he comes to the conclusion that the precious papers are lost.