“Thank you,” replied Clensy. He wanted a genuine comrade. Adams wasn’t worth his salt. He had got mixed up with the crew of the steamer. In fact, he had got so drunk and uninteresting that Biglow and Clensy decided to have no more to do with him: and they, and the hidden voice behind these pages, were more than thankful to see the old reprobate Adams go out of the story altogether.
“As sure as my name’s Samuel Bilbao, you’ll see the girl again, lad. I’m one who believes in everything that no one else believes in,” said Biglow suddenly.
“Samuel Bilbao! Is that your real name?” said Clensy in an astonished voice.
The fact is, that Samuel Bilbao was notorious from Fiji to Terra del Fuego as one of the last of the wild, flamboyant traders who had hunted the blackbirders down in the South Seas slaving days of ten years before. Yes, it was Samuel Bilbao who stood beside Clensy; Bilbao who ran the blockade in the Haytian revolution of three years before; Bilbao who led the Marquesans in the great tribal battle at Taiohae; Bilbao who helped the Tahitian chiefs when they fought the French in 18—, and smashed a well-equipped garrison to smithereens. Yes, such things had been accomplished by that worthy in the splendour of his prime.
When Clensy discovered that he was on the high seas with Samuel Bilbao as his right hand, he blessed the fates. “Things could be worse,” he thought.
Samuel Bilbao, to give him his proper name, was the life of the Prince. The Haytian ladies on board tried hard to blush as he sang his rollicking songs, extemporising words in their own language as his versatile brain took in the degrees of temperament and the moral lassitude of the female company he sang to. He infused life and laughter into the hearts of the most woebegone refugees as he danced and made the Prince’s deck like a moonlit ball-room as they steamed along under the stars. Yes, Samuel Bilbao was the best comrade Clensy could have found under the circumstances.
It seemed like the memory of some feverish dream when Clensy, one month after flying from Hayti, sat in the Rio Grande café at M— and thought of all that he and Bilbao had gone through in their search for Sestrina. “And all for nothing! Sestrina might have been swallowed up by an earthquake for all we’ve heard to the contrary,” Clensy muttered, as he looked through the open window on to the palm groves that faced the veranda. “Thank heaven I’ve got enough money to take the next boat that sails for Honolulu,” he thought, as he counted out his notes and gold. He had only the day before received a generous remittance from England by cable. And, as he reflected and mused on, he murmured: “There’s still a good chance that we’ve missed her; there’s several ways of getting to Hawaii. She might have got on a schooner that sailed from the lower Californian seaboard harbours.” And as Clensy mused on and thought over all the possibilities, he became very hopeful.
Samuel Bilbao had kept his promise, had not deserted our hero, for that romantic worthy was just up the grove roaring forth a rollicking sea chanty in the De La Plaza grog-saloon. Even as Clensy listened he could hear the loud clapping and stumping and guttural cries of the delighted Mexicans and Spanish hidalgos. Bilbao had managed to cheer Clensy up many times during his fits of depression. For Royal Clensy had become a different man since he had left Hayti. His love for Sestrina and the uncertainty of the girl’s fate had strangely humbled him, had made him look out on life with wiser and sadder eyes. Just as drink and debauchery changes a man and debases his character, Clensy’s mind had been elevated and made sympathetic and thoughtful through sorrow.
When Clensy at last arrived at Honolulu and still no news of Sestrina, it wanted all the hilarity and flamboyant song of Bilbao’s cheerful personality to bring a ghost of a smile to our hero’s lips. Not once did the young Englishman’s faith in Sestrina waver. He was convinced that if Sestrina never turned up at Honolulu it was because she was either dead or very ill. As the weeks passed his hopes of seeing Sestrina again faded, but his desire for her presence increased. His imagination began to clothe his memory of her in all the beauty and the mystery which men of his temperament imagine a good woman possesses. His romantic passion for the girl transmuted his memory of her till her eyes sparkled as far-off stars shining on the horizon of his imagination. She became the unattainable, the mystery and spiritual wonder of the great undiscovered lands that must ever lie beyond the skylines of mortal dreams, filling human hearts with passionate longing and yearning for far-off divine things. All that was beautiful in sounds lingered in Clensy’s memory of Sestrina’s voice; her songs resolved into a dream, and became the unheard music of his own soul, till he seemed to hear the dim murmurings of the shells on the shores of the ocean that divides romance from reality. The sorrow and uncertainty of their parting became his calvary of anguish and the heart-crying creed which nourished a dim yearning hope of some future. He vaguely realised that, though he might never see Sestrina again, she had brought him boundless wealth; that he could kneel at the altar of his great faith in her love and get as near the realisation of his best ideals as man can get when he imagines the world holds things that will correspond with his soul’s conceptions of the beautiful. He knew well enough that his mind had got into that morbid state which worldly men term foolish and sentimental. But the happiness that his sentiment brought him and his knowledge of the little happiness he would get from such dreams as worldly men indulged in, inspired him with that wisdom which enables men to reign as king over their imagination.
Through reading the musty volumes which he discovered in his apartments in Honolulu, as he waited through weary months for Sestrina, he began to get quite philosophical. His outlook on life became cynical, yet was softened with the old sympathy of his earlier and happier days. “I was a fool to ever fall in love and get unhappy like this. I thought I was so wise, too!” The wisest men who ever lived are only little children crying in the dark for light as they throw pebbles into their little ponds of dreams and imagine they are sounding the depths of infinity, of human nature and the mystery of life and death. Men know nothing! The present is a chimera, the past a remembrance of it, and the dim future the uncertainty that is the soul of religion. Why, even that bedraggled old cockatoo on the palm outside my window might easily be some reincarnation of a dead disillusioned philosopher. Its dismal discordant cry sounds as though it curses the memory of some far-off day when its mad intellect soared above the yearnings of its digestive apparatus, when it fell into the abyss of its own thoughts and broke the backs of its faiths one by one.