The Daughters of Danaus Part 2

Hadria had been among the most hopeful of the party, and had pointed to the loftier visions, and the more impersonal aims. Circ.u.mstance must give way, compromise was wrong; we had but a short time in this world, and mere details and prejudices must not be allowed to interfere with one's right to live to the utmost of one's scope. But it was easier to state a law than to obey it; easier to inspire others with faith than to hold fast to it oneself.

The time for taking matters in one's own hands had scarcely come. A girl was so helpless, so tied by custom. One could engage, so far, only in guerilla warfare with the enemy, who lurked everywhere in ambush, ready to hara.s.s the wayfarers with incessant petty attack. But life _must_ have something more to offer than this--life with its myriad interests, dramas, mysteries, arts, poetries, delights!

By the river, where it had worn for itself a narrow ravine, with steep rocky sides or "clints," as they were called, several short tunnels or pa.s.sages had been cut in places where the rock projected as far as the bank of the river, which was followed in its windings by a narrow footway, leading to the farmstead of Craw Gill.

In one part, a series of such tunnels, with intervals of open pathway, occurred in picturesque fashion, causing a singular effect of light and shade.

As Hadria stood admiring the glow of the now fully-risen sun, upon the wall of rock that rose beyond the opening of the tunnel which she had just pa.s.sed through, she heard footsteps advancing along the riverside path, and guessed that Algitha and Ernest had come to fetch her, or to join in any absurd project that she might have in view. Although Algitha was two-and-twenty, and Hadria only a year younger, they were still guilty at times of wild escapades, with the connivance of their brothers. Walks or rides at sunrise were ordinary occurrences in the family, and in summer, bathing in the river was a favourite amus.e.m.e.nt.

"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 quant.i.ty of brown dead leaves were strewn upon the floor of the rock-pa.s.sage, 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 ma.s.s 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-pa.s.sages, 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 gra.s.s-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 his two sisters walked homeward along the banks of the river, and thence up by a winding path to the top of the cliffs. It was mild weather, and they decided to pause in the little temple of cla.s.sic design, which some ancient owner of the Drumgarran estate, touched with a desire for the exquisiteness of Greek outline, had built on a promontory of the rocks, among rounded ma.s.ses of wild foliage; a spot that commanded one of the most beautiful reaches of the river. The scene had something of cla.s.sic perfection and serenity.

"I admit," said Ernest in response to some remark of one of his sisters, "I admit that I should not like to stay here during all the best years of my life, without prospect of widening my experience; only as a matter of fact, the world is somewhat different from anything that you imagine, and by no means would you find it all beer and skittles. Your smoke and sun-vision is not to be trusted."

"But think of the pride and joy of being able to speak in that tone of experience!" exclaimed Hadria mockingly.

"One has to pay for experience," said Ernest, shaking his head and ignoring her taunt.

"I think one has to pay more heavily for _in_experience," she said.

"Not if one never comes in contact with the world. Girls are protected from the realities of life so long as they remain at home, and that is worth something after all."

Algitha snorted. "I don't know what you are pleased to call realities, my dear Ernest, but I can a.s.sure you there are plenty of unpleasant facts, in this protected life of ours."

"n.o.body can expect to escape unpleasant facts," said Ernest.

"Then for heaven's sake, let us purchase with them something worth having!" Hadria cried.

"Hear, hear!" a.s.sented Algitha.

"Unpleasant facts being a foregone conclusion," Hadria added, "the point to aim at obviously is _interesting_ facts--and plenty of them."

Ernest flicked a pebble off the parapet of the bal.u.s.trade of the little temple, and watched it fall, with a silent splash, into the river.

"I never met girls before, who wanted to come out of their cotton-wool,"

he observed. "I thought girls loved cotton-wool. They always seem to."

"Girls _seem_ an astonishing number of things that they are not,"

said Hadria, "especially to men. A poor benighted man might as well try to get on to confidential terms with the Sphinx, as to learn the real thoughts and wishes of a girl."

"You two are exceptional, you see," said Ernest.

"Oh, _everybody's_ exceptional, if you only knew it!" exclaimed his sister. "Girls;" she went on to a.s.sert, "are stuffed with certain stereotyped sentiments from their infancy, and when that painful process is completed, intelligent philosophers come and smile upon the victims, and point to them as proofs of the intentions of Nature regarding our s.e.x, admirable examples of the unvarying instincts of the feminine creature. In fact," Hadria added with a laugh, "it's as if the trainer of that troop of performing poodles that we saw, the other day, at Ballochcoil, were to a.s.sure the spectators that the amiable animals were inspired, from birth, by a heaven-implanted yearning to jump through hoops, and walk about on their hind legs----"

"But there _are_ such things as natural instincts," said Ernest.

"There _are_ such things as acquired tricks," returned Hadria.

A loud shout, accompanied by the barking of several dogs, announced the approach of the two younger boys. Boys and dogs had been taking their morning bath in the river.

"You have broken in upon a most interesting discourse," said Ernest.

"Hadria was really coming out."

This led to a general uproar.

When peace was restored, the conversation went on in desultory fashion.

Ernest and Hadria fell apart into a more serious talk. These two had always been "chums," from the time when they used to play at building houses of bricks on the nursery floor. There was deep and true affection between them.

The day broke into splendour, and the warm rays, rounding the edge of the eastward rock, poured straight into the little temple. Below and around on the cliff-sides, the rich foliage of holly and dwarf oak, ivy, and rowan with its burning berries, was transformed into a ma.s.s of warm colour and shining surfaces.

"What always bewilders me," Hadria said, bending over the bal.u.s.trade among the ivy, "is the enormous gulf between what _might be_ and what _is_ in human life. Look at the world--life's most sumptuous stage--and look at life! The one, splendid, exquisite, varied, generous, rich beyond description; the other, poor, thin, dull, monotonous, n.i.g.g.ard, distressful--is that necessary?"

"But all lives are not like that," objected Fred.

"I speak only from my own narrow experience," said Hadria.

"Oh, she is thinking, as usual, of that unfortunate Mrs. Gordon!" cried Ernest.

"Of her, and the rest of the average, typical sort of people that I know," Hadria admitted. "I wish to heaven I had a wider knowledge to speak from."