“P’r’aps he is one good mans. I somehow tink that he is good mans,” she said, and then she too turned and gazed into the mirror.
After that Sestrina and Claircine talked over the matter till far into the night. Then the negress kissed her mistress’s hand and, opening the small door that led from the chamber, crept into her own room to sleep.
Sestrina retired to bed, feeling very happy in the thought that Claircine had promised to be a friend to her and Clensy.
And Clensy? Immediately he arrived back in his lodgings after leaving Sestrina, he stole away into a vast, solitary dream-world of his own, a world whereon only one other than himself breathed—and that was Sestrina. And as he dreamed by the musical fountains, Sestrina came back to him in shadowy form. She tempted his soul with the magical fruit from the Tree of Knowledge—not the forbidden fruit, but the rosy, wine-scented apples that hung from the phantom branches of beauty and romance. Clensy seemed to come under some mystical spell as he dreamed on. He fancied he could hear and see Sestrina as she stole down some memory on sandalled feet, singing by a murmuring sea-shore, the light of the stars in her eyes, the rose of beauty on her lips. It was not so strange that he should have such wild fancies, for Clensy was a believer in the reincarnation theory and in anything that seemed more hopeful than the dubious possibility of the resurrection of dead bones. He had also come across a book in Acapulco which had greatly impressed him, since it told him that five hundred millions of mortals who dwelt in the wise East, believed in the reincarnation and transmigration of souls. Adams had wondered what on earth our hero was reading about when he had sat up all night dipping into the pages of magic that told the mysteries of old Japan and the ancient Eastern creeds. It was no trouble for Clensy to reverse the mythical significance of Greek sculptural art, such as the god Hypnus with his two children, sleep and death, holding inverted torches in their hands. Clensy felt assured that he had known the oblivion of Lethe’s dark stream, and yet could remember a life across the ages where he had eaten the golden apples of the Hesperides.
“It’s better to think the Fates have honoured me with the immortality of mortality, so that I can at least feel assured of the mortality that dreams immortality, far better than believing in the dubious things people seem to believe in,” he mused.
And as he sat there, indulging in strange metaphysics, hobnobbing with Semiramis and a few Assyrian kings and queens he had known somewhere away in the background of his creed, he dropped his pipe from his listless fingers—crash! on the floor, and the sound rumbled like an avalanche down the corridors of his dreaming mind. The visions vanished. Adams’s solitary eye loomed before him; back came the fetid smells and wretchedness of a present existence, making Clensy shiver as though with cold.
“God forbid that this is the great reality of life, and not the illusive dream!” he muttered, as he silently cursed the dab of that great sponge of reality which had swept across the mirror and had shown him such beautiful dreams.
It was only natural that Clensy’s metaphysical speculations should give him kaleidoscopic glimpses of physical beauty and not glimpses of visionary beauty, which men associate with the heavens. For to believe in the incarnation of the soul is to believe in the immortality of the flesh. Clensy realised this, and often tried to explore the depths of his own mind, but invariably returned to the upper regions with a sigh, convinced that he was his own heaven and hell. “It’s no good, I’m a sinner; the beauty of that which I can see and feel is greater than that which I must imagine.” So he mused in his foolishness, unable to read his own soul. But do not condemn Clensy. He was young; the fires of youth ran molten in his veins. The great alchemist, Sorrow, had not yet knocked at his door, bringing those phials and magic potions that transmute men and women into their older, other selves—sometimes changing them into Angels and sometimes Devils.
CHAPTER VII
“HULLO, boy! how’s the wind blowing?” said the boisterous Bartholomew Biglow when he met Clensy a week after the young Englishman had betrayed Sestrina, through so carelessly brushing the fern and dead leaf from her sarong.