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The flame-light danced in many a flash and splash over the smooth surface of the face of the inland pond. Indeed it reflected like a glass at present, for no wind fretted it, neither did a drop of rain fall. Intense, watchful silence held that hour. The squash of men's feet in the mud, the soft swirl of the water, the cry of voices alone disturbed the night. "God be praised!
The tall doors were wide open now: no lamps were lit, but a big log fire blazed on the hearth, and through the empurpled evening air the house streamed with flame-light, flinging a ruddy glow over leafless acacia and misty turf.
Just then one of the cannibals looked up to see a tall and stately figure wrapped in a white garment which, as the flame-light flickered on it, seemed now to advance from the dense background of shadow, and now to recede into it.
A little pause, while the shifting flame-light makes small pictures of us on the deep-bodied teapot's sides, and throws shadowy profiles of us on the wall. "Mother said, too, that I was to try and not say any of my unlucky things!" I remark, presently.
Soon taking fire, and continuing to be a scene of capture and recapture, by the flame-light; while Battalion Margraf-Karl stood with invincible stubbornness, pouring death from it; not to be compulsed by the raging tide of Austrian grenadiers; not by "six Austrian battalions," by "eight," or by never so many.
He could not have leave his men; he was fettered there where his squadron was camped. He went as far as he could from the flame-light into the shadow, and thrust himself among the tethered horses.
Smoky flame-light overspread the sky, and flashed through the open doorway of the hut. He sprang from his bed and found himself up to his knees in water. Had the sea overflowed the land? He waded out of the hut, and the water rose to his middle. He looked round him by the lurid light of the eruption.
Out through the blackness of the night the flame-light quivered in long, bright streams over the endless lines of ever-advancing waves, but revealed to the watchers no ship, no boat, no tokens even of wreck, only the ceaseless reaching upward of the beckoning white hands; and the wind bore no sound, save at intervals the dull distant boom of the cannon.