“Yours,
“Royal.”
Claircine curtsied, then greedily grabbed the coin.
“Go immediately and give this note to your mistress.”
“Dat I will, monsieur!”
No sooner was the kind old negress out of sight, than Clensy began to reflect. “What an ass I am! Why on earth didn’t I say that I would go to-night and climb the grape-vine?” And as he mused and thought over Sestrina’s letter, he resolved to go to the palace that very night. “By Jove! what a chance, only a grape-vine to climb and then—Sestrina’s eyes and arms.”
Night lay over the palm-clad hills around Port-au-Prince. Clensy had already reached the palace grounds. He had escaped the vigilant eyes of two big negroes, who did sentry duty at the palace gates, by climbing over the stone walls in the rear of the palace. “Thank heaven the moon isn’t up yet,” Clensy thought as he slipped into the shade of the bamboos and looked up at the sky.
The tropic twilight and the ethereal, pulsing gleams of a thousand thousand stars gave sufficient light for Clensy’s requirements that night. For a moment he stood perfectly still. Being assured that no one was about, he crept stealthily forward, pushing the tall ferns and scrub apart with his hands, very softly, so that his advance made no rustle. Slipping noiselessly under the orange groves he felt more at his ease. He was now familiar with the surroundings. He was at the spot where he had first met and walked with Sestrina after his first engagement as pianist at the presidential ball.
“How romantic, I’m like the hero of a romantic novel, blest if I’m not,” he thought as he peered cautiously through the thickets of bamboos and spied the balcony that fronted the chamber wherein Sestrina slept.
Creeping close to the wall he spied the thick stems of the grape-vine that soared to the vine-covered casement. To Clensy’s romantic soul it was indeed the magic casement that opened on the green foams of leafy, wind-stirred palms and perilous seas of romance. Even as he watched and listened Clensy heard the palms sigh some whispering melody that came in from the ocean. The fireflies were dancing like miniature constellations of stars in leafy glooms. A strange bird began to sing, somewhere up in the mahogany tree hard by. “Too-willow, too-willow it-te-willowy lan-lone, wee-it!” it went, ere it burst forth into a merry tinkling song, as though it had suddenly got wind of all that was happening!