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 stateagainst 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 findsomemeans 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,youof 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.
PART II
PART II
PART II