Clensy stood still and gazed intently up at the half-open casement: he could see no light. “Perhaps she’s asleep? Or maybe she hasn’t retired yet?” And, as he reflected, he lit a cigarette, carefully hiding the gleam of the lighted match in the closed hollows of his hands. Already his romantic imagination had begun to picture Sestrina in her chamber. He began to feel nervous.
“Perhaps I should first throw a pebble, give her some warning,” he thought as he puffed away at his cigarette and wondered what Sestrina would think to see him appear at her chamber-casement without due warning. “Pish! what does it matter? She is a sensible Haytian girl, not a namby-pamby European girl,” he muttered as he tried to find an excuse for his own meditations.
Clensy’s adoration for materialised beauty, the inherent greed of his love of the sensuous—which he imagined was spiritual love—had made him secretly aspire to see something different to the shadowy, divine loveliness that the pure poetic imagination pictures when dreaming over the charms of the woman loved. He aspired to see something which would correspond with all that his physical senses felt, not the visionary form that feeds the imagination eternally with increasing hope and beauty, making the Fates whisper into the lover’s ears:
“She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss.
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”
And so Clensy was bound to be disillusioned. True enough, it was a brief disillusionment, but it came like a hint that would reveal the briefness of sensuous beauty: and that’s all. It did not give him a hint, one prophetic glimpse of the terrible drama, the unspeakable irony of human things, the vision of the truth which his eyes were to see, when, with wisdom and sorrow in his soul, he goes out of the last page of this story.
As Clensy stood there in the shadows of the bamboos his eyes brightened over his thoughts. Yet he still hesitated. He had been reared in polite society; he was the son of a gentleman and had ever lifted his hat when he passed a lady. And now—where was his spirit of chivalry?
“Men have done worse when they have truly loved a beautiful woman. And this is Hayti, not England! Hayti!”; and thinking in this wise, he thought of Sestrina sitting in the seclusion of her chamber and scattered his qualms to the winds. “Hayti, land of romance and song, and Sestrina,” murmured his ardent thoughts as he put forth his hands and began to climb up the thick runners of the grape-vine! The thought of what he might see when he reached the balcony and peeped into Sestrina’s chamber intoxicated his senses.
As he slowly climbed, he seemed to drift into a subconscious state. How carefully he climbed. Hand over hand he stealthily ascended, one false step and the spheres would roll askew! He suddenly stopped and breathed a sigh of relief. He had reached the jutting floor of the balcony. With his right hand he gripped the thick stem of the grape-vine, then, throwing his head back, he put forth his disengaged hand and grasped the outer support post of the railings. The next minute he had twisted his body back—for one moment he hung suspended in space, the next moment he had clutched the vine-clad railings, and had pulled himself up—he was standing on the balcony! His form was hidden in the deep shadows of the overhanging mahogany tree’s branches. For a moment he groped about in trembling indecision. It was then that he noticed the glimmer of light stealing through the clusters of flowers that grew about a casement to the right of him. “Her chamber!” He hesitated. In that supreme moment his grosser thoughts vanished. He felt as one might feel if about to fix the eye at a telescope tube that would reveal the ethereal landscapes and roaming angels of another world. The next moment he had boldly fixed his eye to a chink in the half-open shutter.
He stood in perfect safety, for the clusters of flowers and hanging vine completely hid him. “In bed!” was his mental ejaculation. He saw the bunched counterpane, its crimson lace fringe all crumpled. The outline of the lone occupant was distinctly visible through the misty mosquito curtains that draped the bed, hanging tent-like from the four high brass-nobbed posts.