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.