Biglow, only a day or two before, had slapped him on the shoulder and said: “All men go mad once in their lifetime over a woman, but they’re not in love till they stand over a woman’s grave, as I’ve done, and then seen all her beauty shining in the sunlight on the flowers over her.”
It must be admitted that Clensy had stared long and curiously at Biglow when he spoke like that; it was so unexpected from the lips of one who seemed to be the last man who he would have expected to show signs of spiritual sentiment.
The visible world, to Clensy, existed only as a vast garden wherein love could walk and enjoy the physical emotions and ecstatic pangs of the senses. He saw Creation as an almighty impassioned lover, holding the stars in her eyes of night, the oceans kissing her feet of a thousand shores. Sex had become the godhead of his desires. In short, Clensy saw the world, nay, the universe itself, as a vast deification of himself, whereas he was only the tiniest, humblest miniature of creation’s conscious yearning to make the leaf green; his own life no more than a sunbeam’s warmth on a wild flower.
And Sestrina? the maid of southern blood, the light of the tropic suns and stars in her veins? She did not rave when she thought of Clensy, she made no god or goddess of her physical sensations. Neither did her mind conjure up poetical impressions and pictures over high aspirations which were only daubs painted from the fires of a physical passion. No; Sestrina saw Clensy as some wonderful apostle of her own simple faith, the religion which was Père Chaco’s, the Catholic priest, the one who had encouraged the girl’s spiritual dreams since she was a toddling child. It was a pure woman’s faith, and was destined to expand, to grow like a lovely tree on the lonely desert isle—the soul which is in all of us—set in the boundless seas encircled by the dim starlit horizons of mortal imagination.
As Clensy stood on top of the lovely hills and drank in the sombre beauty of the shifting sunlight on the ancient trees, he began to feel strangely calm. “I’m worrying about revolutions like a foolish child; it’s only a rumour; yet, if anything happened to her! Ah, after all, she is only a woman, and so little dreams how deeply men can love, how eternal their faith in woman is.” Ah, Clensy!
As Clensy so reflected, he walked into the shadows of the palms and then started to climb the slope’s side. Though he was well aware of the risk he ran in wandering alone into the solitudes around Port-au-Prince, he walked carelessly onward. All that worried Clensy was how to kill time till dusk fell over Hayti so that he might steal back to the palace precincts and haunt the orange groves in the hope of seeing Sestrina. Gazing around, he discovered that he had already arrived at the lower slopes of the mountains. He could see the tiny spirals of smoke ascending from distant villages that were nestled in the valleys far to the right. The brooding silence of the wooded country calmed his feverish thoughts. His mind became absorbed in the deep philosophy of the whispering trees and the picturesqueness of nature’s lovely talents which were expressed in all the tropical scenery. The cool sea winds, drifting inland, stirred the tops of the leafy trees and the multitudinous patterns that decorated the flower-bespangled carpet of the valleys, the slopes and rolling hills. What lore of the ages were the wise old trees about him whispering? He distinctly heard them sigh the far-away romance of the distant seas. “How beautiful!” he murmured as a faint breath came to his nostrils from the decaying tropical flowers. In the magic of his poetic mood those richly-scented floating wines of creation’s oldest vintage, intoxicated his senses and whispered infinite wisdom to him. The big fiery blossoms, that resembled the blooms of the Australian waratah tree, brightened the gullies and hill-sides as the sun sank behind the western peaks of the mountains. There was grandeur, a majestic kind of beauty in the sight of the mighty mahogany trees that stood to the left of him. But somehow, the sight of it all sickened Clensy’s heart. The scenery lacked the refreshing green of his native hills. Clensy had the artistic eye that loves nature’s brooding handiwork in leaf and flower, and the solid architectural grandeur of gnarled trunks. It was born in him, a strain deeper than his love of sensuous beauty, and, so, was the strain which would survive the mad passions of sanguine youth.
“Ah, there’s no scenery in the world that can outrival the peaceful loveliness of the English woods, the pine-clad hills and the undulating pastures of richest green.” So ran Clensy’s meditations, and as his eyes roamed over the sombre forest pigments, he thought of the wild hedge-rows of his native land, the spring-quickening valleys and the waking primroses, and felt homesick. The sombre mahogany trees and the broad-leafed palms, in which droves of parrots and cockatoos screeched, made no appeal to him. Where was the melodious poetry of the full-throated brown thrush’s song, or the wintry piping of the robin in the apple trees, or the idly flapping crows fading away like the weary dreams of sad men and women into the sunset? The cockatoo’s dismal screech and the discordant cry of the daylight owl have their music too; but ah, what music can outrival the soaring song of the skylark, pouring forth its silvery chain of melody between the billowy green of the fields and the eternal blue of an English sky? And as Royal Clensy stood on the Haytian hills and asked himself these things, he wondered if he would ever see the Old Country again, till he almost forgot the flight of time.
In a moment he had turned about and had begun to retrace his footsteps. “By the time I arrive near the palace it will be dark,” he mused, as he stared towards the west—sunset was flooding the horizon with ethereal pigments of saffron and liquid gold, hues that seemed to be magically reflected in opposite colours of purple, crimson, and orange tinted streaks on the mountain ranges to the east. One distant mountain peak strangely resembled a mighty dark, forest-bearded giant, an Olympian god putting forth promontory-like arms into space, holding great sheafs of golden sunset in its hands. It looked like some tremendous shadowy symbol of the eternity of the past and the dubious hopes of the future, as though it would steal a portion of the dying day’s splendour to cheer the night of gloom when the stars whispered about its rugged, calm, time-wrinkled brow.
As Clensy turned away from that weird, yet strangely beautiful symbolical sight of light on the mountains, he sighed. Then he passed swiftly down the slopes and faded into the shadows of the forest below. In less than half an hour he found himself standing by the spot where he had twice secretly met Sestrina after dark. It was a lovely trysting spot, for it was close to an inland lagoon and was sheltered by feathery palms.
“Hist, monsieur!” whispered a voice in the shadows.