In less than half an hour Clensy and Sestrina sat in the seclusion of the mahogany trees. He felt happy. He had long since banished all ideas of the vaudoux from his head. If the remotest suspicion over the possibilities of Sestrina being interested in the fetish creeds remained in his head, one glance from her eyes dispelled it. He was in an emotional, poetic mood, and so he made passionate love to the girl beside him. Love is a contagious complaint when the first afflicted is handsome and tenderly persuasive. Could anyone have seen Sestrina and Clensy, as they sat on the dead palm stem that night, it would have been hard to tell which one was in the most advanced stage of the romantic malady. Sestrina’s eyes sparkled like diamonds, and Clensy’s surely rivalled those lovely gems of warm, living light, when he gazed into her face and sighed.
“Ah, you do not mean these nice things you say,” murmured Sestrina.
“’Tis true! I should never be happy again if we were parted,” replied the enraptured Clensy. And then he softly slipped one arm about her waist, and drew her face near to his own, and in the rapture of a strong man’s—But why pry into the secret, insane, but innocent actions of these lovers? No vulgar inquisitiveness stained the purity of their wonderful belief in each other.
“Ah, Sestrina, you are more beautiful than I dreamed, even when I first saw you,” he said in a reflective way, as he thought how the girl’s merry manner at the pianoforte had slightly led his thoughts astray. It was not boldness at all, it was only the boisterous innocence of the girl’s warm heart that made her respond so readily to his impassioned advances. As she sat there, under the mahogany tree, chatting about her pet parrots, the characters in her novels, and confiding little domestic matters to him, he discovered how really innocent and romantic her mind was.
“This beautiful creature a vaudoux worshipper! Oh, traitor to her memory! to have had such dreadful suspicions,” muttered his mental remorse. “You are the loveliest woman on earth!” he exclaimed.
Poor Clensy, there’s no doubt he was feeling badly in love to say such things. But he meant what he said, the same as thousands of men have meant the same strange things. The girl’s personality enchanted him, had appealed to the best that was in him, and so had made him a child again.
“Have you never seen nice girls, like me, Monsieur Royal?” murmured Sestrina, as she gazed in wonder on his face.
“No, I never have, never!” was Clensy’s emphatic reply, as he pressed his advantage. Sestrina had taken a flower from her hair and was fastening it on to the lapel of his coat, and, as she leaned forward, he kissed her brow and touched her shining tresses with his lips.
“But surely there are beautiful girls in Angleterre! I’ve read about them in books,” murmured the pretty Haytian maid as she looked up into Clensy’s face in a wistful way.
“Ah, Sestrina, but the authors of those books, which you say you have read, have never been to Hayti and sat beneath the starlit mahogany trees with you!”