“Stroikes me we’d better clear out of this blasted ’ole; it’s getting ’ot for us, there’s a revolution a-coming too!” said Adams as he turned and shot a stream of tobacco juice through the open window.
“I don’t believe all I hear about the coming revolution,” exclaimed Clensy.
“You don’t, don’t you?” said Biglow. Then he continued: “Would you be surprised to know that the Cacaos insurgents have already had the first skirmish in the mountains with the government soldiers? Bless you, they came down only the other night and robbed the Haytian banks and shot several of the nigger police. No one’s safe here. Men are arrested every day and shot for openly showing their dislike to Gravelot. Duels are being fought in the streets every day in Port-au-Prince. The French chargé de affaires seems to have no power over the mad population, or is indifferent to all that’s going on. Its quite a common thing to hear shots in the night coming from the direction of the hills when the government scouts met the insurgents.”
“Surely things are not as bad as you paint them,” said Clensy. Then he suddenly remembered how he had heard sounds of shooting while in bed, and had thought some one was out by night shooting owls in the mahogany forests near Selle district.
“Not a very rose-tinted account of the present state of affairs here,” thought Clensy as he left his two comrades and strolled back to his lodgings. But Clensy was really more worried about Sestrina than anything else. The idea that her father was an adherent to vaudoux creed had greatly upset him at first. He was quite assured that Sestrina had nothing whatever to do with the vaudoux. And as he thought over it all, he realised that daughters are quite helpless so far as their father’s sins are concerned. “Children can’t rear their parents and subdue their passions and lead them on the better path; things might be better if they could,” he thought to himself as he stood before his looking-glass and brushed his hair. He was making himself look spruce, for he had made up his mind to go that same evening and see if he could meet Sestrina wandering by the palace. He had met her several times by appointment, but she had not turned up at the last appointment. “Old Gravelot must be home, laid up with a shot wound in his shoulder, so he’s out of the way,” he thought, and as he reflected he made up his mind to ask Sestrina if she would elope with him and clear out of Hayti.
“I’ll see her to-night if I have to sneak into the palace,” was his mental reflection as he hastily brushed himself down. It wanted about two hours before sunset, and so he began to wander about. Then he strolled out into the street and started to go through the town so that he could take a walk in the country before it was time to go and haunt the palace grounds in an attempt to meet Sestrina.
“Biglow did not exaggerate about the people here being mad over fetishes and possible revolutions,” he thought as the dark-eyed mulatto maids and handsome creole girls and men stared at him as he passed down the street. “Pretty fine state of affairs,” he thought as he began to ponder over future possibilities, what might happen to Sestrina if a revolution did break out in Hayti. Then he eased his troubled mind by recalling de Cripsny’s words when he, Clensy, had asked him about the matter.
“It might be months and months and den all smooth down again, like it has done before,” the half-caste Frenchman had said. But still, notwithstanding de Cripsny’s sanguine outlook, Clensy noticed that the old characteristic levity and song and brightness of the city’s inhabitants had gone. And even he knew that the insurgents, or Cacaos, as they were called, had become very powerful as they massed together and gathered recruits from the cities as far away as Vera Cruz and the sea ports of the Caribbean Sea. Indeed, no one in Hayti knew exactly which was the potent authority, the Cacaos or the Government, by virtue of the superiority of numbers, for, in Hayti, force of arms inevitably decided all political controversies. Biglow was about the only white man who knew the true state of affairs, and he knew that the insurgents were the most powerful so far as numbers were concerned, also that they had been so well supplied with cash from a secret source that they had been able to purchase several steamers from the American shipowners. Even as Clensy arrived at the top of the slope and gazed seaward, he could see the tips of the mast of the steamer, which was one of many, that had stolen into the harbour loaded up with guns and munition from the United States.
Clensy had arrived into the wooded part of the country, half a mile from the crowds of ugly houses in the valleys below. He quickened his footsteps. His heart was thumping with apprehension as he thought of Sestrina, and wondered if any harm would come to her if a revolution did break out. “Oh, to hold her in my arms, kiss her lips, and feel she was mine for ever! I’d starve, risk anything, do any crime to possess her, body and soul, to gaze in her eyes and touch her sweet flesh with my lips!” And as the young Englishman reflected, the ecstasy of his feelings for Sestrina seemed to overwhelm his senses like a mad frenzy. The thought that he might lose the girl seemed to stun him, as though destiny had given him a tremendous blow on the heart. “Why, I’m as bad as the frenzied vaudoux worshippers,” he muttered as he vaguely realised how strong a factor his passions were in the ecstasy which came when he thought of Sestrina.
“I haven’t always felt like this. Perhaps it’s some peculiar effect through seeing those terrible vaudoux devotees the other night,” he thought as he felt a great wave of passion sweep his better self away, till he wished he was some fanatic so that he might make Sestrina the symbol of his creed and worship the shrine of her loveliness! Clensy’s passion for Sestrina had strangely materialised, changed his old spiritual ideals into sensuous dreams. Beauty, religion and all the soulful wonder over the unknown were no longer visible to him in the mystery of the skies, but were expressed in woman’s eyes, her loosened hair, her red lips and the amorous beauty of her form.