“You agree to fly from the palace and come to me at the first sign of danger?” he said.
Sestrina nodded her head vigorously. Then they planned and planned.
“Should anything occur that separates us, I will fly to Honolulu and wait till you come.”
“Why Honolulu, Monsieur Royal?”
“It’s there that my people in England will send my next letters with my money in them. Also, we can easily get a passage on one of the ships for Melbourne in Honolulu.”
And as Clensy spoke on and arranged a meeting spot at the T— Hotel in B— Street, Honolulu, Sestrina’s heart bubbled with joy. In the excitement of it all she quite forgot her father’s troubles, and the danger of the revolution, should there be a rising.
Though Clensy’s plans to fly to Honolulu with Sestrina and go from there to Melbourne might sound foolish to worldly minds, it was the most manly and the safest course to follow. For, as has already been hinted, and as Haytian history shows, the periodical risings in Hayti were conducted with indescribable fury and bloodshed. The element of negro blood in the vast population asserted itself in terrific fury after having been pent up by the laws that compelled restraint for the passions and instinctive love of bloodshedding in the half-caste Haytians. Men, women and children were shot down at sight by the insurgents; nothing was sacred when the war-fever was raging. Whole towns were fired, razed to the ground, and the adherents of the vaudoux creed lit fetish fires in the mountains and indulged in frenzied dancing, debauchery, lust and cannibalism. And so Clensy was wise in advising Sestrina to fly with him or by herself to Honolulu should the revolution break out after all. She was Gravelot’s daughter, and the rebels would probably shoot her at sight.
“Your father, the president, owns several steamers, so you would have little trouble in getting away should I lose sight of you,” he said, as Sestrina and he sat side by side in deep thought.
“Yes, he has,” said Sestrina, and then, in response to Clensy’s query, she told him that the steamers ran between Port-au-Prince and the seaports in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, going as far as Vera Cruz.
“But why worry? There may be no revolution, after all,” he murmured as he tried to soothe Sestrina’s fears. For the girl seemed worried about her father, as she wondered over all what might happen to him if the palace was bombarded.