“To-morrow night! To-morrow! I must write another note and tell Claircine that it means death to Monsieur Royal if she does not deliver it to him.”
And as she sighed, she gazed tearfully towards her casement, little dreaming that her lover’s eyes at that very moment gazed upon her from behind the clusters of flowers of the half-hidden trellis work. As she sighed, Clensy once more inclined his head and listened.
“Oh! kind Père Chaco, I will see him to-morrow and confess all, and then he will pray for his safety, for my beautiful Royal’s soul.”
Sestrina had taken a tiny crucifix from the fold of her robe and, touching it with her lips, had murmured “Royal!”
Clensy’s eyes, as they stared through the scented leaves and crimson blooms, brightened, shone like stars. His impassioned thoughts were expressed on his flushed face. He seemed to lose control over his senses and limbs too—he had leaned forward, and, swaying like something blown by a great wind, he fell through the open casement.
“Royal!”
“Sestrina mine!”
The next second they were in each other’s arms.
Since the propriety of the means which Clensy had taken to meet Sestrina that night can be quibbled over, and with perfect justice too, the exclusion of much which they said and did can remain unrecorded without hurting the feelings of the sensitive, conventional minded. It will suffice to say, that Royal Clensy was a gentleman. The fact that the young Englishman had crawled on all fours, and without announcing his presence, into a maiden’s bedroom at midnight, must not let it be assumed that our hero had a perverted mind. The strange things that heroes and lovers think are often very different from the things that they do—even when the opportunity of doing strange things presents itself. Though Clensy’s love dream was sensuous more than spiritual, he was not a bad type. He had a love of naturalness and a great hatred for the sickening realities of conventional life.
He had long ago spoken to himself and seen through the mighty pretence of civilised communities in the cities, where fat old men and women passed in their robes of splendour through the door of the temple of fame. Metaphorically speaking, he had sickened of seeing the devotees of European vaudoux worship kneel before the sacrificial altars of hot meats, burning wines, and highly-seasoned foods. Even in his own little brief worship at the altars of the terrible European papaloi he had felt indignation when some wealthy British vaudoux chief had caught a maiden of innocence, had lured her into the presence of the gaudy vaudoux temples, and had then sacrificed her strangled body on the bloodthirsty altars of his heathenish deities. Let it be said, on Clensy’s behalf, that he had often gazed on his own white unsoiled hands and felt compassion for the corn-hardened hands of weary men who had been born where the sad, mechanical charity organisation officials loudly knocked the door. Long ago he had realised that the trembling hand that toiled in the mud or brushed the boots of prosperity, might easily be the hand that could pen the perfect poem, or paint the outlines of the sorrowful saints and Madonnas, yes, the visionary creations that haunt the minds of men who are adherents to the great inborn creed, and worship at the sombre, sad altars of the Gospel of Truth and Beauty. Clensy also had the instinctive insight of the artist in his soul, consequently he saw Sestrina as a child who favoured his presence in her chamber because she felt utterly alone, and was one who had perfect trust in him by virtue of her own innocence.