The Daughters of Danaus | Page 7

sunrise were ordinary occurrences in the
family, and in summer, bathing in the river was a favourite amusement.
"I thought I recognised your footsteps," said Hadria, as the two figures
appeared at the mouth of the tunnel, the low rays of the sun lighting
them up, for a moment, as they turned the sharp bend of the narrow
path, before entering the shadow.
A quantity of brown dead leaves were strewn upon the floor of the
rock-passage, blown in by the wind from the pathway at each end, or
perhaps through the opening in the middle of the tunnel that looked out
upon the rushing river.
A willow-tree had found footing in the crevice of the rock just outside,
and its branches, thinly decked with pale yellow leaves, dipped into the
water just in front of the opening. When the wind blew off the river it
would sweep the leaves of the willow into the tunnel.
"Let's make a bonfire," suggested Ernest.
They collected the withered harvest of the winds upon the cavern floor,
in a big brown heap, and then Ernest struck a match and set light to it.
Algitha, in a large black cloak, stood over it with a hazel stick--like a
wand--stirring and heaping on the fuel, as the mass began to smoulder
and to send forth a thick white smoke that gradually filled the cavern,
curling up into the rocky roof and swirling round and out by the
square-cut mouth, to be caught there by the slight wind and illumined
by the sun, which poured down upon the soft coils of the smoke, in so

strange a fashion, as to call forth a cry of wonder from the onlookers.
Standing in the interval of open pathway between the two
rock-passages, and looking back at the fire lit cavern, with its black
shadows and flickering flame-colours, Hadria was bewildered by what
appeared to her a veritable magic vision, beautiful beyond anything that
she had ever met in dream. She stood still to watch, with a real
momentary doubt as to whether she were awake.
The figures, stooping over the burning heap, moved occasionally across
the darkness, looking like a witch and her familiar spirit, who were
conjuring, by uncanny arts, a vision of life, on the strange, white,
clean-cut patch of smoke that was defined by the sunlit entrance to the
tunnel. The witch stirred, and her familiar added fuel, while behind
them the smoke, rising and curdling, formed the mysterious
background of light: opaque, and yet in a state of incessant movement,
as of some white raging fire, thinner and more deadly than any ordinary
earthly element, that seemed to sicken and flicker in the blast of a
furnace, and then rushed upwards, and coiled and rolled across the
tunnel's mouth. Presently, as a puff of wind swept away part of the
smoke, a miraculous tinge of rosy colour appeared, changing, as one
caught it, into gold, and presently to a milky blue, then liquid green,
and a thousand intermediate tints corresponding to the altering density
of the smoke--and then! Hadria caught her breath--the blue and the red
and the gold melted and moved and formed, under the incantation, into
a marvellous vision of distant lands, purple mountains, fair white cities,
and wide kingdoms, so many, so great, that the imagination staggered
at the vastness revealed, and offered, as it seemed, to him who could
grasp and perceive it. Among those blue deeps and faint innumerable
mountain-tops, caught through a soft mist that continually moved and
lifted, thinned and thickened, with changing tints, all the secrets, all the
hopes, all the powers and splendours, of life lay hidden; and the beauty
of the vision was as the essence of poetry and of music--of all that is
lovely in the world of art, and in the world of the emotions. The
question that had been debated so hotly and so often, as to the relation
of the good and the beautiful, art and ethics, seemed to be answered by
this bewildering revelation of sunlit smoke, playing across the face of a
purple-tinted rock, and a few feet of grass-edged pathway.

"Come and see what visions you have conjured up, O witch!" cried
Hadria.
Algitha gave a startled exclamation, as the smoke thinned and revealed
that bewildering glimpse of distant lands, half seen, as through the
atmosphere of a dream. An exquisite city, with slender towers and
temples, flashed, for a moment, through the mist curtain.
"If life is like that," she said at length, drawing a long breath, "nothing
on this earth ought to persuade us to forego it; no one has the right to
hold one back from its possession."
"No one," said Hadria; "but everyone will try!"
"Let them try," returned Algitha defiantly.
CHAPTER III.
Ernest and