“I am what I am! I cannot change myself. To attempt to control one’s nature is as ridiculous and as hopeless as to attempt to revise and reform the work of God Himself, and all that is written on that strange manuscript—the human heart!”
Clensy fell into a fatalistic mood. He lit his pipe, and pitching his tobacco pouch across the room, murmured, “I’m done for! Royal Clensy of yesterday, Mr. _No. 1_ of myself died of a passionate spasm before the palace gates at Port-au-Prince on October 14th, 18—, was ruthlessly slain by the magic of a Haytian maid’s eyes. Alas! what is man but a wandering bundle of dreams and vague desires? A scarecrow of himself wrapt in old rags, standing in the lonely field of his imagination, his thoughts fluttering like starving crows about his fleshly skeleton. Where’s the corn and the oil that maketh glad the heart of man?—It exists only in the golden sheaves of dreams, and the sickle that ever reaps is the wide sweep of our hopes being borne back into the dust, scattered by each inevitable disillusionment.”
Ah, Clensy, you had indeed got into a sadly morbid state.
As the young Englishman continued to reflect over the careless, inconsequential splendour of his life up to the time when he met Sestrina, he realised that his passion for the girl was as deep as his own interest in himself, and, knowing this, he saw the brighter side of his strange reflections and was cheered up. “I shall be happy even though I fail, so long as Sestrina loves me,” he thought. Then he turned over on his rickety bed and joined Bartholomew Biglow and Adams in the calm, deep bass measure of their respective snores.
AFTER Sestrina had taken her sudden departure from the infatuated Clensy, she ran down the pathway by the fuchsia trees so that she might enter her home unobserved. She did not fear meeting a stray servant who might be abroad in the cool of the night, but she knew that her father had been absent from the Presidential ball since six o’clock. His absence was an ominous sign for Sestrina—when her parent returned from his mysterious nocturnal visits into the mountains he usually behaved like a frenzied maniac.
“I do hope I shall not see father to-night,” she thought, as she entered the little doorway by the wine vaults, and then peered in fright down the corridor. She was no longer the gay, inconsequential Sestrina whom Clensy had parted from a few moments before. The Englishman had dispelled all the heart-aching fear that had worried Sestrina’s mind for the last few weeks. Clensy little dreamed of the skeleton in the cupboard of the Haytian girl’s home, how it haunted her soul with a fearful wonder and terror when it roamed about before her eyes! Even as she peered along the silent corridor she gave a startled jump that made her shadow leap down the whole length of the white wall. A sigh of relief escaped her lips—it was only the shuffling footsteps of the old negro, Charoco; he was putting out the lights in the large rooms from which the festival guests had lately departed. The next moment Sestrina had slipped down the corridor, and had run across the large drawing-room where she had to pass through ere she could reach her chamber.