THE next day Clensy, Biglow, and Adams sat whispering together over a table in the small cafÉ chantant near Toujeaur. They all appeared calm enough after their adventure. Adams was the only one who had escaped from the vaudoux temple unscathed. Clensy had a swollen lip and Biglow had got out of the mÊlÉe with nothing more than a large contusion over his left eyebrow. Biglow seemed in high spirits. He was delighted to think that he had been able to save the wretched mulatto girl from being slain on the vaudoux altars.

“What a fine missionary I am!” he said, as, smacking his leg with his hand, he gave a huge smile of approbation over his pleasure in the thought of all he had accomplished. “Nice little kid she was too!” he said as he referred to the maid he had rescued. “She’s as safe as houses now; I’ve placed her in the hands of an aged Haytian woman, a special friend of mine, one whom I can trust.”

“Wasn’t she thankful! and the way she clung to you and kissed you when she came to!” said Clensy, referring to the rescued girl’s hysterical delight when she found herself safe in the jungle, her brow being fanned by Biglow and Clensy when she regained consciousness.

For the moment the three men sat silent. Even Adams’s solitary eye looked dim as they sat there and thought of the mulatto girl’s delight when she, realising the whole position, had clung like a child at Biglow’s breast.

“Do you mean to inform the authorities about it all?” said Clensy.

“No lad, I’ve thought it over, it wouldn’t be much use. You see, Gravelot is in with the fanatics, and he would be sure to deny everything, and possibly turn the tables on us. By now they’ve wrapped their wounds up and buried the dead too.”

“But Gravelot got a shot in the shoulder, I saw him stumble and clap his hand to it; how would he explain that?” said Clensy.

“Oh, he’d say that we waylaid him, shot and robbed him while he was on his way to church, evening Mass, or something, and we’d get shot for that,” replied Biglow as he swallowed a tumbler full of whisky and water.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Clensy feeling much relieved. The fact is, that Clensy was trying to find out what Biglow’s intentions in the matter really were. The young Englishman didn’t want Sestrina’s father arrested by the British officials and shot. He knew that he would be called upon to give evidence in the courts, and that Sestrina would naturally look upon him as one who had helped put her father to death.

Biglow’s capacious mind had swiftly come to the conclusion that it would pay him better to have the president under his thumb than to attempt to claim the reward from the authorities.

“Stroikes me we’d better clear out of this blasted ’ole; it’s getting ’ot for us, there’s a revolution a-coming too!” said Adams as he turned and shot a stream of tobacco juice through the open window.

“I don’t believe all I hear about the coming revolution,” exclaimed Clensy.

“You don’t, don’t you?” said Biglow. Then he continued: “Would you be surprised to know that the Cacaos insurgents have already had the first skirmish in the mountains with the government soldiers? Bless you, they came down only the other night and robbed the Haytian banks and shot several of the nigger police. No one’s safe here. Men are arrested every day and shot for openly showing their dislike to Gravelot. Duels are being fought in the streets every day in Port-au-Prince. The French chargÉ de affaires seems to have no power over the mad population, or is indifferent to all that’s going on. Its quite a common thing to hear shots in the night coming from the direction of the hills when the government scouts met the insurgents.”

“Surely things are not as bad as you paint them,” said Clensy. Then he suddenly remembered how he had heard sounds of shooting while in bed, and had thought some one was out by night shooting owls in the mahogany forests near Selle district.

“Not a very rose-tinted account of the present state of affairs here,” thought Clensy as he left his two comrades and strolled back to his lodgings. But Clensy was really more worried about Sestrina than anything else. The idea that her father was an adherent to vaudoux creed had greatly upset him at first. He was quite assured that Sestrina had nothing whatever to do with the vaudoux. And as he thought over it all, he realised that daughters are quite helpless so far as their father’s sins are concerned. “Children can’t rear their parents and subdue their passions and lead them on the better path; things might be better if they could,” he thought to himself as he stood before his looking-glass and brushed his hair. He was making himself look spruce, for he had made up his mind to go that same evening and see if he could meet Sestrina wandering by the palace. He had met her several times by appointment, but she had not turned up at the last appointment. “Old Gravelot must be home, laid up with a shot wound in his shoulder, so he’s out of the way,” he thought, and as he reflected he made up his mind to ask Sestrina if she would elope with him and clear out of Hayti.

“I’ll see her to-night if I have to sneak into the palace,” was his mental reflection as he hastily brushed himself down. It wanted about two hours before sunset, and so he began to wander about. Then he strolled out into the street and started to go through the town so that he could take a walk in the country before it was time to go and haunt the palace grounds in an attempt to meet Sestrina.

“Biglow did not exaggerate about the people here being mad over fetishes and possible revolutions,” he thought as the dark-eyed mulatto maids and handsome creole girls and men stared at him as he passed down the street. “Pretty fine state of affairs,” he thought as he began to ponder over future possibilities, what might happen to Sestrina if a revolution did break out in Hayti. Then he eased his troubled mind by recalling de Cripsny’s words when he, Clensy, had asked him about the matter.

“It might be months and months and den all smooth down again, like it has done before,” the half-caste Frenchman had said. But still, notwithstanding de Cripsny’s sanguine outlook, Clensy noticed that the old characteristic levity and song and brightness of the city’s inhabitants had gone. And even he knew that the insurgents, or Cacaos, as they were called, had become very powerful as they massed together and gathered recruits from the cities as far away as Vera Cruz and the sea ports of the Caribbean Sea. Indeed, no one in Hayti knew exactly which was the potent authority, the Cacaos or the Government, by virtue of the superiority of numbers, for, in Hayti, force of arms inevitably decided all political controversies. Biglow was about the only white man who knew the true state of affairs, and he knew that the insurgents were the most powerful so far as numbers were concerned, also that they had been so well supplied with cash from a secret source that they had been able to purchase several steamers from the American shipowners. Even as Clensy arrived at the top of the slope and gazed seaward, he could see the tips of the mast of the steamer, which was one of many, that had stolen into the harbour loaded up with guns and munition from the United States.

Clensy had arrived into the wooded part of the country, half a mile from the crowds of ugly houses in the valleys below. He quickened his footsteps. His heart was thumping with apprehension as he thought of Sestrina, and wondered if any harm would come to her if a revolution did break out. “Oh, to hold her in my arms, kiss her lips, and feel she was mine for ever! I’d starve, risk anything, do any crime to possess her, body and soul, to gaze in her eyes and touch her sweet flesh with my lips!” And as the young Englishman reflected, the ecstasy of his feelings for Sestrina seemed to overwhelm his senses like a mad frenzy. The thought that he might lose the girl seemed to stun him, as though destiny had given him a tremendous blow on the heart. “Why, I’m as bad as the frenzied vaudoux worshippers,” he muttered as he vaguely realised how strong a factor his passions were in the ecstasy which came when he thought of Sestrina.

“I haven’t always felt like this. Perhaps it’s some peculiar effect through seeing those terrible vaudoux devotees the other night,” he thought as he felt a great wave of passion sweep his better self away, till he wished he was some fanatic so that he might make Sestrina the symbol of his creed and worship the shrine of her loveliness! Clensy’s passion for Sestrina had strangely materialised, changed his old spiritual ideals into sensuous dreams. Beauty, religion and all the soulful wonder over the unknown were no longer visible to him in the mystery of the skies, but were expressed in woman’s eyes, her loosened hair, her red lips and the amorous beauty of her form.

Biglow, only a day or two before, had slapped him on the shoulder and said: “All men go mad once in their lifetime over a woman, but they’re not in love till they stand over a woman’s grave, as I’ve done, and then seen all her beauty shining in the sunlight on the flowers over her.”

It must be admitted that Clensy had stared long and curiously at Biglow when he spoke like that; it was so unexpected from the lips of one who seemed to be the last man who he would have expected to show signs of spiritual sentiment.

The visible world, to Clensy, existed only as a vast garden wherein love could walk and enjoy the physical emotions and ecstatic pangs of the senses. He saw Creation as an almighty impassioned lover, holding the stars in her eyes of night, the oceans kissing her feet of a thousand shores. Sex had become the godhead of his desires. In short, Clensy saw the world, nay, the universe itself, as a vast deification of himself, whereas he was only the tiniest, humblest miniature of creation’s conscious yearning to make the leaf green; his own life no more than a sunbeam’s warmth on a wild flower.

And Sestrina? the maid of southern blood, the light of the tropic suns and stars in her veins? She did not rave when she thought of Clensy, she made no god or goddess of her physical sensations. Neither did her mind conjure up poetical impressions and pictures over high aspirations which were only daubs painted from the fires of a physical passion. No; Sestrina saw Clensy as some wonderful apostle of her own simple faith, the religion which was PÈre Chaco’s, the Catholic priest, the one who had encouraged the girl’s spiritual dreams since she was a toddling child. It was a pure woman’s faith, and was destined to expand, to grow like a lovely tree on the lonely desert isle—the soul which is in all of us—set in the boundless seas encircled by the dim starlit horizons of mortal imagination.

As Clensy stood on top of the lovely hills and drank in the sombre beauty of the shifting sunlight on the ancient trees, he began to feel strangely calm. “I’m worrying about revolutions like a foolish child; it’s only a rumour; yet, if anything happened to her! Ah, after all, she is only a woman, and so little dreams how deeply men can love, how eternal their faith in woman is.” Ah, Clensy!

As Clensy so reflected, he walked into the shadows of the palms and then started to climb the slope’s side. Though he was well aware of the risk he ran in wandering alone into the solitudes around Port-au-Prince, he walked carelessly onward. All that worried Clensy was how to kill time till dusk fell over Hayti so that he might steal back to the palace precincts and haunt the orange groves in the hope of seeing Sestrina. Gazing around, he discovered that he had already arrived at the lower slopes of the mountains. He could see the tiny spirals of smoke ascending from distant villages that were nestled in the valleys far to the right. The brooding silence of the wooded country calmed his feverish thoughts. His mind became absorbed in the deep philosophy of the whispering trees and the picturesqueness of nature’s lovely talents which were expressed in all the tropical scenery. The cool sea winds, drifting inland, stirred the tops of the leafy trees and the multitudinous patterns that decorated the flower-bespangled carpet of the valleys, the slopes and rolling hills. What lore of the ages were the wise old trees about him whispering? He distinctly heard them sigh the far-away romance of the distant seas. “How beautiful!” he murmured as a faint breath came to his nostrils from the decaying tropical flowers. In the magic of his poetic mood those richly-scented floating wines of creation’s oldest vintage, intoxicated his senses and whispered infinite wisdom to him. The big fiery blossoms, that resembled the blooms of the Australian waratah tree, brightened the gullies and hill-sides as the sun sank behind the western peaks of the mountains. There was grandeur, a majestic kind of beauty in the sight of the mighty mahogany trees that stood to the left of him. But somehow, the sight of it all sickened Clensy’s heart. The scenery lacked the refreshing green of his native hills. Clensy had the artistic eye that loves nature’s brooding handiwork in leaf and flower, and the solid architectural grandeur of gnarled trunks. It was born in him, a strain deeper than his love of sensuous beauty, and, so, was the strain which would survive the mad passions of sanguine youth.

“Ah, there’s no scenery in the world that can outrival the peaceful loveliness of the English woods, the pine-clad hills and the undulating pastures of richest green.” So ran Clensy’s meditations, and as his eyes roamed over the sombre forest pigments, he thought of the wild hedge-rows of his native land, the spring-quickening valleys and the waking primroses, and felt homesick. The sombre mahogany trees and the broad-leafed palms, in which droves of parrots and cockatoos screeched, made no appeal to him. Where was the melodious poetry of the full-throated brown thrush’s song, or the wintry piping of the robin in the apple trees, or the idly flapping crows fading away like the weary dreams of sad men and women into the sunset? The cockatoo’s dismal screech and the discordant cry of the daylight owl have their music too; but ah, what music can outrival the soaring song of the skylark, pouring forth its silvery chain of melody between the billowy green of the fields and the eternal blue of an English sky? And as Royal Clensy stood on the Haytian hills and asked himself these things, he wondered if he would ever see the Old Country again, till he almost forgot the flight of time.

In a moment he had turned about and had begun to retrace his footsteps. “By the time I arrive near the palace it will be dark,” he mused, as he stared towards the west—sunset was flooding the horizon with ethereal pigments of saffron and liquid gold, hues that seemed to be magically reflected in opposite colours of purple, crimson, and orange tinted streaks on the mountain ranges to the east. One distant mountain peak strangely resembled a mighty dark, forest-bearded giant, an Olympian god putting forth promontory-like arms into space, holding great sheafs of golden sunset in its hands. It looked like some tremendous shadowy symbol of the eternity of the past and the dubious hopes of the future, as though it would steal a portion of the dying day’s splendour to cheer the night of gloom when the stars whispered about its rugged, calm, time-wrinkled brow.

As Clensy turned away from that weird, yet strangely beautiful symbolical sight of light on the mountains, he sighed. Then he passed swiftly down the slopes and faded into the shadows of the forest below. In less than half an hour he found himself standing by the spot where he had twice secretly met Sestrina after dark. It was a lovely trysting spot, for it was close to an inland lagoon and was sheltered by feathery palms.

“Hist, monsieur!” whispered a voice in the shadows.

Clensy turned and stared in astonishment.

“Good heavens, you!” he exclaimed, as he looked swiftly this way and that way to see if the dark woman who stood before him was accompanied by her whom he so wished to see. It was old Claircine, Sestrina’s serving maid, who stood before him!

“I been ’ere ebery night, for two nights, hobing to zee yous, monsieur,” whispered the old negress as she hastily took a note from the folds of her rather dilapidated sarong and handed it to Clensy. He ripped the billet doux open in feverish haste and read:

“Oh, Monsieur Royal,

“Unhappy am I. I send Claircine every night to the trysting place hoping that she might find you there, since I cannot come myself. I know not why, but my father is having me watched, and so I have been unable to get out. I write this so that you may understand that Sestrina is always thinking of you. Ah, monsieur, you do not know how deep are the thoughts of a woman who truly loves. And since I am unable to get to you, I would ask you to come to me. I am in the room that is just above the balcony at the back of the palace, by the orange groves where we first met. And, Monsieur Royal, I would have you to know that the grape-vine grows thick on the walls below my chamber’s casement, which is ever open. So, Monsieur Royal, should an enemy wish to climb up the wall and enter my room to slay me, it could be, alas, easily accomplished. Think well, O Monsieur, over this danger of mine, and I will retire late to-morrow night.

Believe me, O Monsieur Royal, to be your

“unhappy Sestrina, till I see you.”

So ran Sestrina’s note. The style had obviously been inspired by French novels. The delicate hint thrown out in that epistle thrilled Clensy. What else could Sestrina mean than to hint that he could, with ease, climb up the grape-vine which grew thickly on the walls below her chamber? In another moment he had taken a small bit of paper from his pocket and had written:

“Beloved Sestrina,—If woman loves deeply, how deep must be the love of man? I will be with you to-morrow night a few moments after dusk. The grape-vine outside your chamber’s window will bear the sweetest thoughts and fruits of love as it brings me to your lips and eyes.

“In haste.

“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!

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:

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.

“She’s reading! How small a chamber, how poorly furnished!” A chill of disappointment struck his heart: he expected to see something so different. Where was the wild confusion of falling tresses? Where the magic of dreaming eyes, and the secret loveliness of a maiden’s deshabille? Ah, Clensy! He had yet to learn that nothing corresponds with a mortal’s conceptions of beauty, that only dreams bring happiness; that beauty like the horizon is to be imagined only, shadowed stars in water, yes, even as the stars are only the reflex of their hidden realities.

And still he stared. “Only the outline of her form under a sheet! Well! I’ll tap the casement and then she’ll turn in her bed, yet—perhaps I’d better—!” He gasped. The mosquito curtains had been swiftly pushed aside! “Heavens, she’s getting out of bed!” He gazed with burning eyes. The supreme moment had arrived. The ecstasy of his imaginings, all that mystery and loveliness which he expected to see, made his brain reel. Just for a second he closed his eyes, yes, one wondrous blink ere his eyelids parted and he gazed again. What had happened! Anguish had wrinkled his brow! He could hardly suppress a cry of horror escaping his lips—two bony, skeleton-like legs had suddenly protruded from beneath the laced edges of the counterpane! The castle of romance, all the loveliness which his imagination had conjured up, fell with a silent crash! The sight of those skinny legs, covered with shrunken flesh, looking like unfilled sausage skins, sent an icy chill to his heart. That awful sight was, to him, like the Egyptian skull of death shown, not before the festivities, but in the presence of empty dishes and wineless goblets.

“Thank God!” he murmured as he stared again—he had peeped through the wrong casement, it was upon the old negress, Claircine, that he had spied. She had leapt from her bed to put the lamp out! Clensy’s ludicrous mistake made him feel sane. The sight of Claircine’s skinny legs waving in space for one second ere they attained the perpendicular, had taught him more about the vanity of human wishes and the briefness of beauty than all the philosophies in existence.

For a moment he felt an abject fool. Then the reaction set in. His imagination began, in feverish haste, to conjure up voluptuous pictures of Sestrina’s beauty, all that she must look like when compared to poor emaciated, shrunken Claircine.

“What an ass I am,” he murmured as he began to creep in haste on his hands and knees towards the next casement. The shutters of that casement were also half opened and conveniently hidden by clusters of flowers and twining vine. Pushing the leaves aside with his hands, he peeped once again. No mistake this time! There on a couch was Sestrina’s reclining form. She was leaning back on the couch’s arm, her hair down, falling in perfect confusion over her half-clad shoulders. The delicate drapery of the couch was disturbed where one of her legs was lifted, the left knee softly couched, inclined over the right leg. The silken brown stocking, barely reaching to the knee, intensified the soft warm flush of beauty and each dimpled curve. She placed her fingers between the laced division of her unbuttoned bodice, and taking forth a tiny scented handkerchief, placed it to her face, which was half hidden by the tangled folds of her tresses, and wept!

The sight of the weeping girl filled Clensy’s heart with sorrow—and shame. He sighed, and then, for all his remorse, stared again. Sestrina had lifted her face, and, placing her hands on either cheek, was staring in tearful thought at the ceiling.

“To-morrow night and he will be here! Ah, how I long to gaze in his eyes, to hear him say those words again.”

Clensy had moved closer to the half-open shutter: his perfidious ears drank in every word that escaped Sestrina’s lips. She sighed. He saw her lips tremble as she breathed some rapturous thought. “What was she saying to herself?” Clensy leaned forward; the boards beneath his feet creaked! His figure stiffened as he stood alert, breathless in suspense. Had she heard that creak? He breathed a sigh of relief.

Sestrina must have thought it was a night bird fluttering in the boughs of the mahogany tree just beyond her window. She had arisen from her couch. Her eyes sparkled as though in the delight of some sudden happy idea. She moved towards the mirror, and, tossing her ringlets into greater confusion, gazed upon her image. One glossy ringlet strayed from its companions and curled serpentwise down over the billowy softness of her bosom, which was revealed through her unlaced bodice.

Clensy stared at her figure just as a mad sculptor might stare on his masterpiece. The charm of her deshabille, the mystery of her fluttering lingerie as the orange and lemon scented zephyrs floated through the open casement, intoxicated his senses. He stood spellbound, his eyes drinking in the delicate harmony of each outline. His soul was thrilled with the beauty and mystery of all that was left to his imagination, all that was suggested, since he could only see her pretty sandalled feet, a glimpse of the arms’ whiteness and the loveliness revealed between the luxuriance of her falling tresses. “God, how beautiful!” he murmured.

A deep feeling of reverence for the girl crept into his sinful heart. There was something so innocent about her pose, and her every action. She had opened a tiny sandalwood box, and taking therefrom a small powder-puff had softly dabbed it on a pimple that looked as though a ladybird had flown through the open casement and had settled on the warm whiteness of her bosom. Certainly a peculiar impression to get on Clensy’s mind, but it was just like him!

“Why does she weep? I had thought to see her happy,” murmured Clensy as Sestrina placed the powder-puff on the toilet, and then gazed in the mirror on her own tearful eyes.

Clensy did not know that there had been misery in the palace for the last three days. First of all, Sestrina and Claircine and Gravelot’s valet, Zelong, had sat up all night talking about the rumours of a revolution. And then the President had arrived home at midnight in a fainting condition, a bullet wound in his shoulder. He had fallen down in the hall. His eyes had no longer looked cruel.

“Forgive me, Sestrina,” he had murmured as Claircine, Sestrina, and Zelong had helped carry him into his chamber.

When Sestrina had found herself alone with her parent, she had wished to send for a doctor. But, no, Gravelot would not hear of such a thing. And so, Sestrina carefully bathed and bound the shot-wound which had been inflicted by Biglow’s revolver. That same night the President had confessed to his daughter that he had been under the vile spell of the vaudoux worship.

Sestrina tried to soothe her father as he wept. His sobered senses made him realise the wickedness and cruelty of the papaloi and their fetish rites.

“Thank God, Sestrina, that you were strong enough to resist and keep true to your old PÈre Chaco,” he cried, as he thought of all that would have happened to the girl had she responded to his wishes and attended the vaudoux temples.

Then the President had told Sestrina of his fears, how the Cacaos were rising in great force. Sestrina was astonished when her father informed her that the palace might be stormed by the rebels if they once got into the town. Then he had said: “Sestrina, if anything happens to me, you must fly from the palace and seek safety on one of the Government steamers and so get away from Hayti as soon as possible. The insurgents would surely shoot all who are related to me.” And when the President, continuing, said, “You must not leave the palace on any account, for I have received information that several Cacaos chiefs are on watch to get my body dead or alive,” Sestrina had felt terribly upset. Consequently she had written to Clensy and begged him to come to her, and at the same time had kept her true reasons for taking this bold course to herself. It was not till Claircine had gone off with the note in hopes to see Clensy and give it him, that Sestrina, woman-like, had reflected on the matter and realised how dangerous it would be for Clensy, a white man, to be seen stealthily approaching the palace after dark.

“Mon Dieu! the sentinels will think he is an assassin, will think he is some Cacaos chief waiting in ambush to slay my father. O, mon Dieu! he will be shot, and all through me! It is I who have told him to come and climb the grape-vine to-morrow night!”

And as she sat there on the couch in her chamber, she once more bowed her head and wept bitterly.

“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.

Sestrina gazed into his eyes a moment, then turned her face away. Ah, how beautiful she looked as she stood there clasped in Clensy’s arms, wiping the tears from her eyes with the tiny flower-decorated handkerchief. For she had wept afresh in her delight at the sudden presence of her handsome lover.

Clensy bade her sit down on the couch. And there, as Clensy held her hand, while the fireflies danced about the wine-scented flowers of the open casement and the Haytian nightingale sang in the palms, Sestrina took delicate sniffs from her salt-bottle and slowly told him all that troubled her.

When Clensy heard of her father’s fears over a possible revolution, he could hardly believe his ears. Though he was acquainted with all that rumour told about the mysterious Cacaos in the Black Mountains, he had not really seriously reflected over the matter, but had put it all down to the ignorant babblings of the negro population. It all sounded so different to him, coming from Sestrina’s lips. “Revolution! Palace bombarded! Incredible!” And as the girl spoke on and he reflected deeply and began to see things in their serious, possibly true perspective, his first thought was over Sestrina’s safety. The ardency of his affection for Sestrina swiftly inspired him with thoughts as to the best and happiest way to get out of the difficulty.

“Sestrina, if the palace is attacked by the rebels, you might get killed.”

“I know, Monsieur Royal.”

“And, knowing this, Sestrina dearest, I beg of you to consent to fly with me from this cursed hole at the first opportunity. I’ve got plenty of money, and we can get married somewhere and somehow. Will you do this, Sestrina?”

President Gravelot’s daughter gazed at the flushed face of the young Englishman like a wondering child—with wide-open eyes. Then she blushed deeply. She had realised something of the import of what he had suddenly asked of her.

“Do you mean that I be your wife?” she whispered as she gazed intently into his eyes. Then she smiled, and placing her arms round his neck, kissed him softly on the cheek. Then she softly released her clasp and slid gently to the floor, fell on her knees before Clensy so that he could kiss the flowers in her hair. It was an old Haytian custom, and exactly according to fashion when a maid was willing to accept one as a husband.

Clensy sat perfectly silent. Boundless happiness had left him speechless for the moment.

“Way in Australia; how beautiful!” whispered Sestrina when Clensy had told her that he had wealthy relatives in Melbourne, and it was there that he would take her.

“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.

It was at this moment that the little door that divided Sestrina’s chamber from the next apartment opened and revealed Claircine’s ebony-hued, smiling face. In her dusky hand she held a silver salver, whereon was a small decanter of light Haytian wine. Claircine had, and with commendable discreetness, kept in the background till that moment. She had heard voices, and had immediately jumped out of bed and, placing her eye to the keyhole, had seen Clensy and her mistress sitting on the settee, their faces turned one toward the other as they kissed and embraced.

“Mon Dieu, si aoe ma eperdi suka,” she had cried in the creole tongue as she lifted her hands to the ceiling in horror—and then peeped again.

“Ah, Claircine, is he not handsome?” whispered Sestrina as she and the negress stood trembling by the open casement through which Clensy a moment before had taken his undignified departure.

“You have now heard for yourself what he thinks of you and of your kind face and nice figure,” said Sestrina, referring to Clensy’s wicked flattery when he looked the negress straight in the eyes a few moments before.

“Ah, si ver du pero, ma seque,” murmured the old negress as she placed her dusky hand above her throbbing heart, little dreaming how Clensy had been shocked at the sight of her skinny legs an hour before!

Sestrina’s heart fluttered as she leaned over the balcony’s railing and watched her lover slowly descend, step by step, down the thick stems of the grape-vine. “Mon Dieu,” she wailed as she noticed that the moonrise was sending waves of pale light over the distant mountain ranges and far down into the valleys by the palace grounds, “he will be seen!” But her fears were needless. She saw Clensy’s form hasten across the yam patch far beyond the palace grounds. The next moment he had disappeared into the depths, under the great mahogany trees.

The next day Clensy suddenly walked into Biglow’s lodgings, near the market-place at Selle. Adams was sitting by the window that opened on to the veranda, tugging his side-whiskers. His face wore a serious expression, and was as red as boiled beetroot.

“Where yer been to?” he said in a husky voice as he stared up at Clensy.

Clensy made no reply, but simply looked round the room and wondered why Biglow was so busy packing his old carpet bag.

“Going to move again?” he said, as Biglow looked up, gave him a friendly glance and then continued to ram pipes, thread and coloured shirts into the bag.

Biglow suddenly ceased from packing, and, standing erect, said:

“If you hang about here after Sestrina much more, you’ll get shot. Savvy?”

“I’ll hang about who I like, Mr. Bartholomew Biglow,” replied Clensy, with considerable warmth. He was rather sensitive about any remarks that referred to Sestrina, for Adams and Biglow had chaffed him a good deal of late over his infatuation for Gravelot’s daughter.

“So! so! good lad; don’t be angry. Sestrina’s worth a hundred maids and shots in the back. Got beautiful eyes too. Reminds me of Queen Vaekehu, of the Marquesas, my first wife,” said Biglow.

“Your queen wasn’t a patch on Sestrina. Never seed a girl wif such beautiful eyes and lovely bust,” chimed in Adams, who at the same time gave Clensy a friendly wink.

“Don’t be silly,” said Clensy as he calmed down; then he added, “Why are you packing up?”

“Because it’s a-coming, a blasted revolution, blazes and murder, and thet’s ’zakley what Biggy here means,” said Adams.

Clensy’s heart thumped like a muffled drum.

“Look you here,” said Biglow, as he regarded the young Englishman with his large serious-looking eyes. “It’s coming along any moment now; the Cacaos are only awaiting the signal to blaze this town to the ground and shoot every one who happens to get in the way. Savvy?”

The expression on Biglow’s face told Clensy that he meant what he said.

“Can it be possible, in these enlightened times, too?”

“It can!” said Biglow quietly, as he stared at our hero for a moment as though in some hesitation; then he leaned forward and said: “I’ve been doing a bit of gun-running for both sides, the legal authorities and the rebels too, and you’ve been seen with me, and that means that they would shoot you at sight to settle their doubts—if they had any!”

“Thank you, Mr. Bartholomew Biglow,” said Clensy.

Then the big man looked half sorrowfully at Clensy and said:

“Perhaps I ought to have warned you that I was dangerous company. Anyhow, our only chance of safety is getting away from here by steamer if a rising does take place.”

“I’ll see you both again later,” replied Clensy, and before the two men could look round he had vanished.

It was still daylight when Clensy arrived back at his apartments. He had made up his mind to go straight to the palace and warn Sestrina of her danger, and, if possible, get her to fly with him from the palace without further delay. Just as he was getting ready to leave his rooms and go out, his landlady, a creole woman, tapped at his door.

“Some one like to zee yous, Anglesman,” she said.

Poking his head out of the doorway, Clensy found himself face to face with Claircine. The old negress looked very excited as she handed him a note. In a moment Clensy had torn the envelope open and read:

“Oh, Monsieur Royal,

“Do not attempt to come to the palace to see me. They have placed sentinels in the grounds as well as at the gates. Something dreadful is going to happen, I’m sure. My father told me this morning that should I have to fly from here I must get on one of the Government steamers and go to the South American States. If I do that I may never see you again. Oh, ’tis dreadful, Monsieur Royal. Advise me as to what is best for me to do. Claircine will wait about till she sees you and can slip this note into the hands that I love.

“In haste,

“Sestrina.

“P.S. If you would like to see PÈre Chaco, the priest, he lives in that small wooden house near the groves of pomegranates, where we stood when you gave me your photograph and I gave you mine.”

“Wait a minute, Claircine,” said Clensy as soon as he had read Sestrina’s letter. Then he rushed back into his room and penned the following reply:

“My Darling Sestrina,

“I write in haste. I would risk coming to the palace, but I know you would not wish it. Your father’s advice is the best. By all means get on one of the steamers if trouble comes. Do not fear that you will lose sight of me or I of you. I will seek the steamers and find out which one you are on. Now, Sestrina, remember that I am yours, heart and soul. And remember, dearest, that in the event of my losing sight of you, you must make your way to Honolulu and wait for me at the T— Hotel in B— Street, or I will wait for you should I get there first. Once there together, we can do all that you agreed to do when I saw you last. Should all go well, I will come to the palace at the first opportunity and climb the grape-vine. Claircine can easily bring me a note from you to say when the sentinels have been removed. Remember, Sestrina, that I love you with all my heart and soul.

“Yours ever and ever,

“Royal.”

Handing Claircine the foregoing note, Clensy bade her hasten back to her mistress.

“Ah, monsieur!” wailed the old negress as she looked into his eyes in a sorrowful way, and then added: “Madamsele weeps, and loves you well, dat she does.” The next moment the old negress had disappeared under the flamboyant trees that grew in front of Clensy’s lodgings.

That same night Clensy was suddenly awakened by a crash. He leapt from his bed and hastened out on to the veranda. Notwithstanding all that he had heard about the insurgents, he was surprised to hear the sounds of heavy cannonading somewhere away in the hills—the Cacaos and Government soldiery had met! The streets were alive with frightened, babbling negroes and mulattoes, running about as though they were demented. Children and women ran in and out the small wooden houses wringing their hands and wailing in a weird, dismal manner. As Clensy stared out into the night he saw a great blaze of reddish light up the hills in the direction of La Coupe. The rebels were firing the villages along the slopes and in the valleys! “Good God!” was all that Clensy could say to express his consternation. In a moment he was dressed and out in the streets. “I’ll risk it!” he muttered. The next moment he was hurrying off in the direction of the palace. But as he got to the outskirts of the town he found that he was too late. Hundreds of Government soldiers were already entrenched along the main roads outside the town. They would allow none to pass. Seeing some Haytians hurrying along, Clensy asked them what was happening.

“Revolution! War! We must fly or be killed!” they cried.

“Is the palace in the hands of the Government or the rebels?” he asked, a great fear clutching at his heart.

“In the hands of the Government and the rebels too,” shouted some one.

Then Clensy gathered that many of the Government soldiers who had been brought to the palace had gone over to the side of the Cacaos. Seeing that he could do nothing, that he was utterly helpless to help Sestrina or even find out anything about her, Clensy took to his heels and made his way to the small wooden house on the outskirts of the town where Sestrina had told him PÈre Chaco, the Catholic, dwelt. In less than ten minutes he stood in front of the small wooden building that had a small cross on top of it. He knocked at the door. It was immediately opened by a grey-bearded, serious-looking old man. The face before Clensy was expressive, very melancholy looking, the eyes deep set and clear, the brow high and intellectual.

“Well, my son, and what would you wish of me?”

“I am a friend of Sestrina’s, President Gravelot’s daughter. What can be done about her?” said Clensy, immediately going into the matter.

“A true friend?” said the father.

“Yes, her life is all to me,” said Clensy.

The old priest scanned him steadily with his deep-set, earnest eyes, and then said, “Um!” Then the aged priest told Clensy that his call had already been too prolonged, for he, the priest, had just been about to go off and visit the British Consul to ask about Sestrina and get help in case her life should be in danger.

“Thank God for that!” exclaimed Clensy. Then the priest laid his wrinkled hand on Clensy’s shoulder, and told him to have faith, and possibly all would be well. The next moment PÈre Chaco had hurried away, and Clensy was hastening back to the town to see Biglow and Adams.

“Thank heaven you’re here!” exclaimed the young Englishman as he entered Biglow’s lodgings and found him standing by his old carpet bag, all packed ready for immediate removal. “Well, it’s come!” exclaimed Clensy.

“Yes, and Adams and I and you had better be going!” said Biglow.

“I can’t go. I must hear if Sestrina’s safe first. I’d go mad if anything happened to her,” said Clensy, as he almost lost control of himself.

“Don’t worry about Sestrina, bless yer, she’s on board the Catholot, a Government steamer, that’s outbound for Vera Cruz,” said Biglow.

Clensy’s relief at hearing this information may be imagined.

“Sestrina safe. I’ll see her again!” he cried out as Adams walked in and said he wasn’t going to walk any longer about a place where “myderers” kept firing revolvers and strangling people.

“You’re quite sure Sestrina’s safe?” said Clensy as he looked steadily in the gun-runner’s eyes.

“Safe as houses, and her old man, the president, had the top of his head blown off, and De Cripsny’s got his left ear blown away.”

“No!” exclaimed Clensy in a horrified voice.

“Well, he’s Sestrina’s father to you, but I don’t look upon him in that light,” said Biglow when he noticed the note of sorrow in Clensy’s voice on hearing that the president had been shot. “He won’t be a party to killing any more children at the vaudoux altars in the mountains, will he?” said Biglow.

“No, he won’t,” replied Clensy in a very quiet voice.

Then Biglow began to inform our hero that directly the first shots had been fired by the Government scouts in the hills behind Port-au-Prince, the officials of the British and French consulates had immediately set out for the presidential palace to warn the president and take charge of Sestrina. It appeared that when they arrived at the palace the president, who had foolishly ventured out to plead to the soldiers who had shown signs of going over to the insurgents, had been shot by one in the crowd.

Sestrina, who still remained ignorant of her father’s death, had been immediately disguised in a servant’s robe, and hurried out of the palace by a back entrance. She had then been at once escorted down to Cap Hatien, and then taken in a boat out to the steamer Catholot which lay in the middle of the harbour.

“Must get out to the Catholot, whatever happens,” said Clensy. Biglow could hear his comrade’s eagerness trembling in his voice. “I’ve got eight pounds, and I’ll give you the lot if you can get me out to the Catholot,” said Clensy.

“Keep yer money, lad. It’s my fault that you’re in this scrape, and I’ve got enough money to get you out of the fix which I’ve got you in,” said Biglow, as he gripped Clensy’s hand, and promised to do all he could to bring Clensy and Sestrina together again, and get them safely away from Hayti.

That same day Biglow kept his word, for he managed to hire a boat and take Clensy out to the Catholot himself.

The Catholot was a steamer of about two thousand tons.

As Biglow rowed alongside, the funnel was smoking heavily.

“She’s getting up steam, ready to sail at a moment’s notice,” said Clensy, his heart heavy to think that Sestrina might leave Hayti without him. “I’m going to sail with her, if it can possibly be done,” was his determined thought as he arrived on the Catholot’s deck.

One of the sailors, urged by a liberal tip from Clensy, led them down the steamer’s alley-way that led aft, and, after making several inquiries, pointed out Sestrina’s cabin.

Directly Sestrina saw Clensy’s face looking over the shoulders of the other passengers, she rushed forward and threw her arms around him. The girl nearly broke down at that meeting.

Biglow stood aside, a kind look in his serious eyes as he gazed on the scene, affected by the refugee girl’s grief.

“You will come with me, won’t you?” she reiterated, when they told her not to fear, that they would keep in touch with her.

“If it can possibly be managed, I’m coming on this steamer as a passenger,” said Clensy, when Sestrina, Biglow and he stood in a quiet spot by the engine room, out of earshot of the excited refugees who crowded the deck and cabins.

For a long time Clensy and Sestrina stood whispering together. Clensy had never realised till that moment what the girl’s life meant to him.

“I reckon we’d better be making a move and try and see the skipper,” said Biglow, who had begun to get impatient, for he saw that the lovers were likely to stand there making plans and whispering till it was too late.

Clensy tore himself away from the girl.

Sestrina’s depressed spirits had wonderfully revived when Clensy and Biglow left her to seek the Catholot’s skipper, and to try and negotiate for berths as deck passengers.

When Clensy and Biglow at last found the skipper, and asked for passages, they were sadly disappointed at finding that the authorities at Port-au-Prince had given orders that no more passengers were to be taken without permits being produced. Why such an order should have been given out was a mystery. However, the skipper only shook his head to all Biglow’s persuasions. “I’ve had strict orders from the officials, and not another soul comes aboard. I should probably get shot were I to take you fellows: how do I know who you are?” So spake the skipper. And Biglow, after assuring the skipper that he wouldn’t like to see him shot or mutilated in any way through swerving from his duty, told Clensy to follow him.

“Never mind the girl now, she’s all right; I’ll manage everything.”

“Thank you,” exclaimed Clensy, who felt humbled through the uncertainty of things, and his fear of losing Sestrina.

In a few moments they had reached the gangway.

“Make haste, no time to lose,” said Biglow, as he walked down the gangway and re-entered their boat.

“He’s got some good scheme up his sleeve,” thought Clensy, as he obsequiously followed his lusty comrade.

Immediately they had re-embarked and had rowed the boat out of earshot, Biglow said, “We’ll stow away on her to-night! see?”

Clensy, at hearing the gun-runner say that, was considerably cheered up. He had already told Sestrina not to despair. He had said, “Don’t you worry, dearest, I’ll follow on by another steamer if I cannot get on this boat.” Then he had taken Sestrina aside, and had told her to make her way to Honolulu just as they had planned. “Go straight to this address,” he had said, as he wrote down fullest particulars. “I’ll come to Honolulu and wait there till you come if you are delayed in any way, trust me, dear.” And, as he spoke, Sestrina had looked into his eyes and knew that he meant what he said.

Before Clensy left the Catholot he told Sestrina to expect to see him on board again that same night.

The Catholot was supposed to sail next morning, so Clensy naturally presumed that he could, at any rate, row out to her and see Sestrina once more before she sailed.

That same night, Biglow, Clensy and Adams packed their few goods and got all ready to clear out of Hayti. They had decided to take a boat from L— and row out to the Catholot after dark, get on board by some excuse and then stow away.

That night, without delay, they hired the boat.

“If one can stow away three can, eh, lad?” said Biglow, as they pulled at the oars and got round by the bend of the harbour near S—.

In a few moments they had turned the point where they got a good view of the harbour.

“Done! She’s sailed!” said Biglow in a mighty voice.

He nearly upset the boat as he stood up and stared over the waters of the starlit harbour.

It was true enough, the Catholot had sailed. Sestrina had gone from Hayti!

“We’ll all be mydered, sure!” wailed Adams, as he leaned back on his portmanteau—an old red handkerchief—and groaned.

“It’s the fear of the blockade that made her sail to-day instead of to-morrow. Hear that?” said Biglow.

And as the three of them listened they could distinctly hear the distant booms of the guns and furious cannonade. It was evident that the insurgents were already besieging Cap Hatien, as in the south the Government soldiers were attacking Jacmel, JÉrÉme and Les Cayes.

Biglow swore terrifically when he realised their position. Clensy and Adams placed themselves unreservedly in his hands. They knew that if there was a way of getting out of Hayti, Biglow would find that way. And so he did! for, in less than twenty-four hours after finding that the Catholot had sailed, Biglow, Adams and Clensy found themselves on board a Government steamer outbound for South America. The reason they did get away so easily was because Biglow, through his gun-running exploits, was well in with the American Consul. He knew so much about the financial side of the gun-running business, that in the event of the Government overthrowing the insurgents and still retaining power, it would turn out more convenient for the officials to get a man like Biglow as far away from Hayti as possible.

“This is hell enough, without being worried out of my mind like this,” muttered Clensy as he stood by the bulwark side of the S.S. Prince, staring out to sea. The fact is, there was a terrible crush on the steamer which he and Biglow found themselves aboard. There were about two hundred refugees on board, mostly high-class Haytians who could afford to seek safety from the terrors of their war-stricken province. The weather was terrifically hot, too, and Clensy had to sleep in a stuffy cabin with ten refugees. Consequently, after the first night of unspeakable misery, he slept on deck. His whole thoughts were centred on Sestrina.

“She’ll know it wasn’t my fault,” he mused, as he thought of the girl’s disappointment when the Catholot sailed before her time, thus making him unable to keep his promise to see her again.

“Don’t you worry, lad,” said Biglow, who had suddenly walked up to Clensy’s side. “We’ll find the girl!”

“But we don’t really know where she’s gone to,” said Clensy, as he realised how the Government steamers sailed away from Hayti and gave a false report as to the port they were really bound for.

“I’m sorry, lad, to have placed you in this pickle; it’s all my doings,” said Biglow, as he stood by Clensy’s side and stared across the starlit tropic seas. There was a tender, wistful note in the big man’s voice as he spoke to Clensy.

“You couldn’t help it. Sestrina would have had to fly from the palace if you had been ten thousand miles from Hayti when the revolution broke out,” said Clensy in a mournful voice.

“Perhaps you’re right, lad; anyway, I’ll stick to you.”

“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.

As Clensy soliloquised over his mad metaphysics, he saw a tawny Hawaiian lift a gun to his shoulder, and prepared to aim at the very bird which had inspired him with such mad ideas. “Don’t shoot, for heaven’s sake,” he shouted, as he leaned out of the window and threw the Hawaiian a coin. “Thank God I’ve saved it,” he muttered, as the aged, dilapidated cockatoo looked sideways from its leafy perch, and muttered its deepest gratitude ere it took its flight. “Perhaps it’s some dismal thought of Sestrina’s reincarnated, now a cockatoo, hovering by my window to let me know the truth why she cannot come? Ah, it’s madness to encourage such fancies. Who would believe me were I to tell how I remember the harvest girls singing as they sat with sickle in hand by their golden sheaves in the cornfields of ancient Assyria? Why did the scent from the big dish of overripe yellow oranges in the drawing-room of my home in England send my thoughts adrift, make me go to sea—in search of what? They said I was a fool—had romantic notions. What are romantic notions? And why do millions of sensible and great-minded men and women kneel in true devotion before the shadowy altar of that Heaven which no living mortal since the birth of Time ever saw except in dreams.”

Crash! Some one had banged at Clensy’s door and had swept his peculiar imaginings and metaphysical speculations to the winds, which are the only elements that know how to deal with such wild fancies.

The next moment Samuel Bilbao’s huge personality and figure stood in our hero’s apartments.

“Well, how are things going along?” said Clensy, as he swiftly released his hand from the mighty grip of his comrade’s painful clasp.

Then Bilbao sat down and informed Clensy that trouble was brewing in one of the South American republics, and that he was wanted. “It’s something better than gun-running; there’s a wealthy president’s daughter waiting to be abducted, whipped off into another state against her will, so that she can marry the rival president’s only begotten son. There’s plenty of money in the game, too.” So spake our worthy friend Samuel Bilbao, giving out hints but leaving Clensy’s brain in the usual maze as to what the big man had on his mind.

“Do you mean that you are leaving Honolulu?” said Clensy.

“Yes, lad, keep your heart up, I must go,” said Bilbao. Nor was he leaving Clensy unduly, for he had stopped religiously with our hero in Honolulu for eight months, and eight months in a place like Honolulu was dead against the grain of a man like Samuel Bilbao.

“Eight months waiting in this hole of a place!” sighed Clensy. “I wish to heaven I’d never seen Port-au-Prince.”

“Cheer up, lad, as sure as God made little apples you’ll see the girl again some day,” said Bilbao. “If a girl with canny eyes like that Sestrina’s got loves a fellow she’ll find some means of letting him know what’s become of her, I know!”

“But supposing she is dead,” said Clensy in a pathetic, mournful voice.

“Being dead makes no difference, lad, the dead are the only folk who are living as they walk before us,” said Bilbao, in a soft, earnest, almost religious voice!

“Well, you of all men on earth!” thought Clensy, as he stared at the gun-runner’s flushed face and the large, grey, expressive eyes.

And as Samuel Bilbao spoke on, his voice became as tender as a girl’s, a troubled something wrinkling his fine brow. Then he laid his hand on Clensy’s shoulder, and said: “Lad, the girl I loved has been dead fifteen years, and it was only the other night she stood beside me. ‘Don’t drink that,’ she said, as she knocked the goblet full of rum from my hand, smashing it to atoms at my feet! And all the traders and shellbacks in the grog-shanty at Murrumbee Creek stared like blasted lunatics as I took her hand and laid my head on her shoulders and then looked into the eyes—of nothing! So the blind fools said!”

As Bilbao ceased, Clensy gazed in wonder on the expressive face before him. He hardly recognised the great blustering, boisterous Samuel Bilbao in the face of that superstitious, yet intellectual looking sunburnt man of the seas.

“Yes, lad, dead women don’t forget,” said Bilbao softly, as he sat there in Royal Clensy’s room in Honolulu, and the stars crept over the blue skies to the east of Mount PepÉ.

Years afterwards every word Bilbao had uttered that night came back and lingered in Clensy’s memory, coming like echoes from the songs of the long dead nightingales that had once sung in the mahogany forests by the presidential palace in Hayti when he was a boy.