“Why call her Sestrina? It is a strange name; what made you think of it,” said the woman as she gazed in wonder up at the earnest face of the man.
“Oh, nothing, it’s the name of some one I knew abroad, years ago.”
The man’s voice had become strangely soft and tender. Why did his senses swim as a great sorrow crept over his heart? He tried to calm himself; then gazed in surprise at the child’s eyes. They had suddenly opened wide, had looked straight into his own.
“She has dark eyes,” he stammered as the woman stared. His voice shook. Was it imagination? Why did the child’s gaze and his own meet as though in the surprised light of swift recognition?
The woman crept from the room, softly closing the door behind her.
Royal Clensy stared like one in a dream through the window-pane, apparently gazing out towards the distant seas. “Well, of all the world of women the child reminds me of her—Sestrina!” he muttered. And as he gazed, the pale hands of half-forgotten romance seemed to scrape up and down the window-pane. He threw the lattice wide open. Was it the winds that caressed his brow as the rich scent of the wistaria drifted to his nostrils, coming like the scented odours from orange groves?
“Sestrina, you—after all these years!” he murmured.
Then he sadly smiled as he stared again at the image of the two stars that seemed to stare up from the bowl where the goldfish swam, as, like outblown hair, the leaves of the wistaria touched his face. His mind wandered, went far away. It was not the Channel cliffs by the English seas that he saw; he was gazing on the vast solitude of tropic seas, and knew that the voice that called his name was no foolish sound, no freak of the imagination. He felt the hot tropic wind touch his face. He saw the castaway’s raft as it drifted on—on towards the skylines of infinity. The great blinding sun shone over a phantom day. He saw the silent, huddled form, and the fluttering rags as the hot wind blew, revealing the bleached, whitened skeleton—the relic that had called to him; the call which had roamed, how far across the universe before he heard? He knew the truth. Even the waves seemed to put forth their hands and pluck in sorrow, as they gently tossed against the craft which bore that sad burden of all his soul’s conceptions of the beautiful on the drought-swept depths of the past. It was as though the ocean felt the sorrow of it all, had sent her children, the waves, that they might push the fragile freight of that lone argosy into the deep calm of her bosom for rest.
The vision slowly passed. The castaway’s raft became as shadowy as those whitened bones of old trust, love and simple faith, as it faded away into the great dusk of the starlit tropic seas—with all that had once been the beautiful Sestrina.