Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/234

Rh envy in his thoughts for that one greatness which nature gave to her and had denied to him.

At the far end of the vault a fitful ruddy light was gleaming; it came from a fire made of brushwood and the boughs of the maritime pine. Where the fire burned the passage opened out into a wider vault, divided into two or three arched chambers—natural caverns widened and heightened by art, and roughly made, by benches, and skins, and stands of arms, and beds of osiers covered with soldiers' rugs, into a camp-semblance of habitation. A rude place, yet not comfortless, and with a wild beauty of its own, as the flame flashed on the many colours of the riven stone, and the stalactites that hung above broke in the glow into a diamond brilliance. A place that had been once the subterranean way of a great castle, which had long crumbled down to dust upon the cliffs above; then the nest of roving pirates; lastly, the refuge of proscribed revolutionists, of men who suffered for liberty of speech, and were content to perish under the deathly chillness of their country's deepest night, so that through them the dawn might break for others later on. The sea-den was still as a grave, and well-nigh as lonely: only by the pine-logs sat a boy of sixteen or so, with his fair curls turning to a red gold in their dancing flames, and his